Shared Reality

Dear Group,

I offer a snippet from Doug Muder's Weekly Sift from last Monday, December 10, entitled "Making Truth Matter" For those of you who have not yet signed up for Mr. Muder's Weekly Sift, I encourage you to do so in the left hand column of the article linked above. I guarantee more thought and reason in one of his his posts than you will find in 99% of the emails you receive, that is, if your emails are anything like mine.

The next four paragraphs from Muder's December 10 post express my primary fear over where Trump and the Republicans are taking us. Increasingly, I am convinced our attitudes and values are shaped by what we share, read, and watch, material we mostly passively absorb from TV, radio, magazines, newspaper and people with whom we interact each day. Insofar as 1/3 of the American populace lives in a non-self-critical, non-self-checking media bubble, we are headed for trouble.

"This week's featured post is "Why All the Bush Nostalgia?" In the end, I [Muder] find that what I'm nostalgic for is a shared reality that is accepted by both major parties and forms the playing field for our political contests. Now 1/3 of the country lives in its own reality and is virtually unreachable.

"The David Roberts interview...plays a key role in that post. [click here for the full transcript of the interview of David Roberts by Chris Hayes] Near the end of that conversation, Chris Hayes sums up: The problem isn’t with conservatives as individuals — Roberts has just said that they’re not dumb — but with the social processes of the conservative community.

Remember: Everyone’s got confirmation bias. Everyone does motivated reasoning. We’re all doing that. But in the divorce, one side got the actual institutions that do a pretty good job of producing knowledge, and the other side didn’t get any of it. That’s the key here. … The institutional universe of developed rigorous processes of attempting to get at the truth, the entirety of that, more or less, ended on the left side in the epistemic divorce.

"By “institutional universe” he means the scientific community, academia, and mainstream journalism.

As I read the above extended quote I kept hearing a characterization of universities by a Bonner County Commissioner as "liberal playgrounds". That man, Glen Bailey, lost his seat to a further far right wing ideologue, a "cowboy pastor" and Redoubter in the Idaho primary election last May.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry