REALITY IS SOCIALLY CONSERVATIVE

Once upon a time it was the tradition that the presidential campaign really didn't begin in earnest until the final out of the election year World Series was recorded.  Theodore White told us as much in The Making of the President 1960, which became the first of a series of such first drafts of history.  Bill Mazeroski and the Pirates walked off victorious on October 13, the same day Nikita Khrushchev banged his shoe.  (White: 294.)  There had already been at least one of the famous debates that Nixon won on radio while Kennedy won in style on television.  (Two harbingers of things to come?)

It wasn't until Thanksgiving of 1971 that a candidate declared that early.  George McGovern went down, but that hasn't deterred a lot of hopefuls who would like to make Four No Trump.  Bandwidth, also, is cheap, and thus we get a national news network devoting multiple hours to some sort of forum on Democrat environmental policies.  Note: long before Thanksgiving of 2019, long before the first pitch of the 2019 World Series, long before we have an idea who will have the pennants.

I had other things to do, but if you make your living by punditry, you have to pay attention, and if you're Rush Limbaugh, you have the opportunity to show your faith in Intelligent Design. He has long been of the view that humans are not capable of destroying their world, because the world is On Loan From Godddd.

The earth, the universe, the solar system, the planets, whatever. If your view of that is that it’s some random, haphazard, accidental thing that’s just really, really fragile? Well, then, you can be easily coerced into believing that one or two slight changes could destroy it, if it’s just an accident, if it’s just a coincidence.  It’s just, like, some Big Bang.  I mean, if it’s really fragile… You notice one of the foundational aspects of selling climate change is that the earth is fragile, that the ecosystem and the climate are fragile, barely being held in place.

What we are seeing is the "somebody made that watch" argument, but, interestingly, from a pundit who is quite willing to bet on emergence in matters secular.  In fact, with a simple word substitution, Professor Munger's explanation of secular emergence works just as well with Mr Limbaugh.  "What I find surprising is that the very people in Western society who are most likely to take the “prudential preservation” position on [cultural traditions and moral systems are exactly the same folks who are most willing to throw away the [natural structures such as species and ecosystems] from the past. If a political group encounters a [species or ecosystem] they find inconvenient, their solution is to tear the whole thing down and start over."

I've had more opportunity to stand up for institutional emergence, but I also remember enough about stochastic processes with serial correlation to call for an intervention for Mr Limbaugh.  Evolution is mutation plus selection plus adaptation, and those random changes that are robust compared with their competitors survive.  Mr Limbaugh sort of gets it and more seriously doesn't.

There are far greater forces arrayed against this planet that we don’t even understand that it has survived, and yet we’re told that too much people are gonna destroy the planet, that (sigh) eating the wrong food, that cows farting are going to destroy the planet? It is so intellectually obscene and insecure that it baffles me how anybody can believe it.  If you believe in the God of Creation, then everything’s here for a reason, and it’s all intertwined in a complexity we cannot possibly understand.

Our earth seems perfectly suited to us because those variants to us that might have existed weren't as well adapted to the conditions that are present here.  And yes, it's going to be hard for humans to do things to change those conditions in a life-altering way.  Let alone that we might be one solar flare or rogue asteroid or volcanic eruption away from extinction.  At the same time, it's probably not prudent to use the atmosphere as a sink for combustion products, even if the era of temperature measurement coincides with the end of the Little Ice Age.

My deeper fear, though, is that it's likely to be something as small as bubble-wrapping our kids that will turn out badly.  Note how quickly peanut allergies and chemical sensitivities have emerged, particularly among the spawn of the well-to-do?  I wonder if Mr Limbaugh has ever heard of hormesis. (He has heard about the return of leprosy, which is something I though had been consigned to the Parables, and he has urged Our President to point out that California cities are "Detroit and Baltimore with palm trees.") Reflect, also, on how in several centuries of vaccination, that part of the population with immune systems less robust against the various contagious diseases has benefited relative to their neighbors with more robust immune systems.  I hate to contemplate an outbreak of smallpox or measles or any antibiotic-resistant bacteria.