In his article, Christ or Chaos: There is No Third Choice, Jack Kerwick gives the following example:
Hannah Arendt, a German-Jewish 20th century philosopher whose family had to flee Nazi Germany, attended the trial in Jerusalem of Adolph Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust. Expecting to witness a monster, she was shocked to discover that while Eichmann’s actions were monstrous, he exhibited no “particularity of wickedness, pathology” or even “ideological conviction [.]”
What Eichmann did display, she wrote, is “a curious, but quite authentic, inability to think.” He was incapable of, or at least unwilling to, think beyond “clichés,” “stock phrases,” and “conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct,” i.e. the bumper sticker slogans, hashtags, and memes of his day.
Arendt knew that what was true of Eichmann is no less true of untold numbers of human -beings. It was this realization that there is an inseparable connection between the ability (the willingness) to think and moral goodness:
This inability to think beyond “clichés”, “stock phrases” and “conventional standardized codes of expression and conduct” is the exact malady that the many Democrats and much of the left-wing suffer from. AOC, for example, a former bartender turned freshman congresswoman, has attempted to launch herself into the spotlight time after time with her non-sensical, never thought out solutions to what she perceives as problems in America. Her famous Green New Deal has become so much a part of the Democrat Party that every Democrat running for president embraced it in some form, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tried to blackmail Republicans into including parts of it into one of the Coronavirus Stimulus Bills. Yet no one can explain how you power a modern country of over 330 million citizens on wind and solar power alone when there are places and times where the wind will not blow and the sun will not shine for days on end. Nor can they explain how that same modern society will truly travel on “fast trains” for which no tracks exist, across the country instead of travel by air. And how do you cross the oceans on trains? The Green New Deal, even without its early ban on methane farting cattle, would plunge this country back into the 19th century. But like Eichmann, Democrats don’t think for themselves, they only parrot back the latest Party line.
Kerwick states that in her realization of Eichmann’s shortcoming, Arendt recognized the connection between the ability or the willingness to think and moral goodness. But how can thinking be linked to morality, you ask? It is simple. Those who never question, who never think, also never consider the harm done to others by the dogmatic adherence to the popular codes of conduct, the current, crisis du jour. The country, thanks to fracking, is now energy independent and an exporter of gas. But many still tout the false warning that fracking causes gas to leach into the water table so that you can light the water from your kitchen faucet on fire. The same leftists want to do away with all fossil fuels and replace them with “renewable energy,” ignoring the fact that the components that make up the renewable energy wind turbines and solar panels require rare earth minerals which are not renewable, kill off many bird species, cause health problems in those living near turbines, will be a nightmare to dispose of as they begin to fail, and are not sufficient for the energy needs of this country to begin with. But this must be done, the left insists, because their computer models warn of disaster if we do not take immediate action. AOC, for example, warned that the world would end in 12 years without the Green New Deal, though she later scoffed that she had only been giving an example.
But let’s think about those models. Note that I used the word “think.” So far, none of them have been accurate in their predictions. The earth’s actual temperatures have been scarcely warmer than at times in the past, tornadoes and hurricanes have actually been less severe and less frequent than in the past, and animals who were predicted to disappear (these species are important whereas avian species killed by so-called renewable energy sources are not) have in fact multiplied rather than disappeared – the polar bear and a kind of seal in Antarctica serve as examples. Many historical rises and dips in temperature, often following volcanic action, have occurred throughout history, and their highs and lows bear little difference from what we are seeing now. Many scientists have come to question the “settled science” of climate change as the product of human actions, but they are ignored as other scientists fight for government grants to produce more models to prove the climate change theory. And those who are not moved by monetary considerations simply do not think. They choose to just accept, as Eichmann accepted, the current code of conduct, wrong though it might be.
Some of the first studies on Climate Change came from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, from non-peer reviewed articles often by graduate students. And, because they have a fancy name, we believe them, right? Just like we believed the World Health Organization when they assured us that the Chinese said the Wuhan Virus could not be transmitted from person to person. Just like we believed the Washington State Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (the Chris Murray) model which first predicted 2.2 million COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. and has now continued to lower that number so that it now rests at about 60,000 – fewer than the number of deaths attributed to the regular flu in 2018. My brother-in-law, a computer specialist who worked in the Silicon Valley on Defense Department Contracts, all very hush hush, always quoted the old saw, “Garbage in, garbage out.” If the information that you input into a computer is flawed, the result it gives you will be flawed as well. The computer models used both to calculate the effect of fossil fuels on climate change and to calculate the number of Wuhan Virus (COVID-19) deaths obviously had some incorrect data fed into them. We need to remember to think rather than to blindly accept what is fed to us by the media or those who create and enrich themselves from their “models.”
To do away with fossil fuels as the Democrats wish to do, will remove the ability to cook and to keep warm from millions of people in third world countries, leading to countless deaths. In America, it will increase the cost of automobiles and of energy to heat and light our homes beyond the means of many Americans and increase the time of travel across the country considerably. The burden imposed by these draconian measures will be morally repugnant as those proposing and implementing them will think only of their pet ideas and not of the actual cost to human life. They won’t be thinking, either because they can’t or because they won’t.
Likewise, to leave the country locked down much longer will also demonstrate a lack of moral goodness as many families are without work, without food, without hope. Far better to ask those who are elderly and sick to remain secluded and let the younger, healthy Americans go back to work. Keep washing hands. Keep social distancing. Limit the number of people in a store at any given time if needed. Require the wearing of masks or kerchiefs to cover nose and mouth in public. But open the economy back up. Governor Abbott of Texas is talking about doing exactly that and President Trump has wanted to do that for some time. Perhaps Dr. Fauci and Dr. Brix are too tied to those oh so incorrect models. The Health Department in New York state has remarked upon the strange decrease in deaths from pneumonia this winter. Since pneumonia and COVID-19 share many of the same symptoms, no doubt some of New York’s COVID-19 deaths are actually pneumonia deaths. We now know that the CDC’s requirements for calling a death a COVID-19 death are so broad that as one columnist put it, you could have stage 4 lung cancer and be shot through the heart, but if they thought you might also have had COVID-19, your death is recorded as a COVID-19 death. I think we have some Eichmanns running the CDC, people who are unable or unwilling to think! Thank goodness we have a President who is also a businessman and who is willing to think. Let us hope that he thinks of a way to reopen the economy soon. It is the morally good thing to do.