I Am Back (Blogging, That Is)

After a lapse of a month I have decided to resume blogging.

Even though it's been unrewarding, at times—when I look at the statistics on my readership—still, I guess I am egotistical enough to believe that I have something to say and something that's worth sharing with anyone who cares to read.

At the age of 70, I have acquired some views of life and of humanity. Mainly one tinged with sadness. I think anyone who is intelligent, educated, liberal—and maybe I need to add "disaffected," which I am but which might not be a necessary consequence of any of the other traits mentioned—has to feel much as I do.

Here is one concise statement, my summing up (hey, how is that for arrogance, summing it all up in just a few words!?!) of what's wrong with humanity and what might be, ultimately, the one trait that might just do Mankind in: Man is capable of believing that which is not true (and of course that probably, or even obviously, has the corollary of denying that which is true).

There is a discipline that you never hear about these days. It was big in, say, the 1930s, and it's called General Semantics. I was introduced to it at the age of 17.

A guy by the name of Count Alfred Korzybski is credited with founding General Semantics. A man named S. I. Hayakawa, generally labeled a linguist (he was also at one time a US Senator and also, infamously, the President of the University of California, Berkeley who called in troops to combat student protesters in the era of student protests of the Viet Nam War and more, in the 1960s), also was a writer on the subject as was a man named Stuart Chase, basically a journalist.

To try to sum up General Semantics: The word is not the thing and the map is not the territory. We tend to feel that if you can put a name to something, that somehow means that the thing exists. This enables us to throw around words that don't have a referent—that is, they don't name anything that exists in the real world. It's this belief in the non-existent that is my subject here.

Now, today and in the West, most people would not believe in dragons, unicorns, mermaids, trolls, leprechauns—etc., etc. The list could go on and on.

Then there are some marginal categories where today some people, maybe a minority, do believe: UFOs, ghosts. Maybe Satan, maybe angels (we're getting a little less marginal here, I'd guess).

And the paranormal. And miracles. And maybe God. (As you can see, I've been going from minority beliefs to beliefs which are more and more common but which some few are skeptical of.)

I think many ideas, about Nature, about human society, etc., are widely held but are incorrect. Many ideas have some natural-selection value such that believing them may get their believers killed. An extreme but obvious case would be a person who thinks he can jump off the roof and not be killed—maybe because he thinks he can fly; we label that insanity. Maybe the sad story of Jonestown in Guyana, where religious leader Jim Jones persuaded nearly all his followers to commit suicide by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid. Some less extreme cases would be where someone attempts something very dangerous and gets himself killed. (Think the annual "Darwin Awards.")

Probably more incorrect ideas harm another human than harm the holder of the belief himself. As an example, in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1693, it was believed that some members of the community were witches, and those "witches" had to be executed. At other times and places, witches, "heretics," homosexuals, etc., were burned at the stake, boiled in oil, or otherwise gotten rid of.

One egregious example would be the Inquisition, which probably executed thousands (forgive me for not turning up statistics here). Or take any case of genocide--the Holocaust, Rwanda, Kosovo, or any other--which killed people because they belonged to a hated group whose members were basically deemed undesirable and not deserving to live.

Is not all of this because some people hold incorrect ideas?

We may well doom our planet by means of war; pollution; global warming; other destruction of land, resources, etc.

We have evolved our ability to manipulate our planet by building great buildings and dams. We have waged wars which have destroyed, devastated, and laid waste large areas. We have built nuclear power plants which then have had accidents (Chernobyl, Fukushima) and made sizeable areas uninhabitable.

So we have become smart, smart enough to erect these edifices. But are we smart enough?

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein

We Must Take a Very Hard Look at Nuclear Power

After two weeks of the continuing saga of a dangerous situation at Japan's Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power station, and just after things began to look a tad more optimistic, today there is a sobering new development, that there may have been a breach of the reactor core with much greater release of radiation than anyone thought.

So I feel it's time to comment on nuclear power. In an era when we hear, ad nauseam, about "reducing America's dependence on foreign oil," and when we also have grown less tolerant of the problems with burning fossil fuels like coal to generate electricity, nuclear power has, to some minds, been a power source that should not be overlooked.

However, a lot of people are afraid of nuclear power. The world has seen some chilling instances of what can happen to atomic power plants, in Chernobyl and Three Mile Island (Pennsylvania).

At one point it was argued that a standardized reactor design, such as they use in France, would simplify the design of new nuclear reactors and thus make them safer. So to speak, we would be building a "perfected" nuclear plant.

However, even barring earthquakes—and how foolish does it now seem to build nuclear plants in an earthquake-prone country like Japan?—there will always be mechanical failures and operator errors.

To draw an analogy from flying: We've got very good and well-tested planes, these days. Occasionally a plane still crashes, because of some unforeseen equipment problem, pilot error, or both.

I recently revisited the story of what happened at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979. That plant had three lines of defense in the form of pumps for cooling water. Yet the operators did not believe the alarms that were going off—warning lights and sirens that signaled a loss of reactor cooling. Even worse and more incredible, they shut off the third line of backup pumps. (I wonder if anyone knows why they did that.)

So, you can build the most fail-safe, fool-proof, and idiot-proof reactor possible. You can train your operators to death. Yet there is no guarantee that they will do the right thing at all times. Human beings are always going to be the wild card, and human beings are fallible.

So you can reduce the statistical odds that something terrible will happen, but you can't get those odds down to zero. And the consequences of what can go wrong with a nuclear plant are very, very bad because radiation is very nasty stuff. It might be time to conclude that we don't want to take the risks.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein