Why Donald Drumpf Suddenly Decided to Talk About the Environment
“Brazen” might as well be the official motto of the Trump Administration. Even so, it’s hard to top the most ecologically unsound President in modern American history giving a speech on Monday touting his environmental record while standing in the East Room of the White House beside David Bernhardt, the former oil lobbyist who is the Interior Secretary, and Andrew Wheeler, the former coal lobbyist who is the administrator of the E.P.A.—both of whom have been trying to gut America’s environmental laws. Oh, and on the day when a rainfall described by local authorities as “historic” managed to flood the White House basement.
By now, we are used to Trump’s big-lie technique. Even by that standard, however, the claim that “we are working harder than many previous Administrations, maybe almost all of them,” on environmental protection will be believed by exactly no one for whom words have not yet lost their common-sense meaning... (continues)
Bill McKibben, NYer
Hopefully Schopenhauer is right and with a little luck maybe we will be entering the third stage. "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident."
ReplyDeleteI don't know if Schopenhauer actually said that...
Deletehttps://www.metabunk.org/attribution-of-schopenhauers-three-stages-of-truth.t897/
but I'm pretty sure there are counterexamples, of truths that have never been widely accepted. But I do hope the truth of climate change will be accepted in time to matter, if that window of opportunity has not already closed.
Thanks for checking on that. It was interesting reading the comments and to see the quote in German - Der Wahrheit ist allerzeit nur ein kurzes Siegesfest beschieden, zwischen den beiden langen ZeitrÄaumen, wo sie als Paradox verdammt und als Trivial gering geschÄatzt wird. There were a couple of translations that were similar but not identical, but the article gives a link to an article by Jeffrey Shallit, "Science, Pseudoscience, and the Three Stages of Truth." He mentions William James and his quote may be closer in meaning to the truth and to Trump's claim of credit for environmental protection. In 1907, the renowned philosopher and psychologist William James (1842–1910) put
Deleteforward a similar observation in support of his theory of pragmatism:
I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages
of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then
it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so
important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it. [19, p.
198]