Hard reality

I've long believed that everybody, as part of their education, should be required to take an introductory class in engineering or some similar subject which would drive home the fact that there is a "solid", objective, immutable reality out there which is totally unaffected by human feelings and beliefs about it.  Far too many people fail to grasp this point.  They judge scientific findings or medical advice not by the evidence supporting them, but by how they feel about them or by what ideological slant they associate with the people announcing them.

Reality doesn't work like that.  For example, evolution happened.  It doesn't matter if some people find this depressing or feel that it makes life seem pointless.  It doesn't matter what holy books or traditional beliefs say.  It doesn't matter if it has disturbing implications for morality or society.  Evolution happened.  The real-world evidence from anatomy and from the fossil record, and above all from molecular biology, says so.  That's the only thing that's relevant to establishing whether the theory of evolution is true.

Physics describes how the universe actually works.  Mysticism, religion, "spirituality", and the various other forms of vague gobbledygook do not.  Airplanes designed according to human knowledge of physics actually fly.  Space probes launched along trajectories based on human knowledge of physics actually reach the target planet at the time and velocity intended.  Huge, complex electrical power generation and transmission systems built according to human knowledge of physics actually deliver electricity exactly as they are meant to do.  None of the fake "other ways of knowing" gives us such clear, verifiable, measurable results in the real world.

This has become a serious practical problem for our country's response to the covid-19 pandemic because much of the right wing has decided that precautions such as masks, social distancing, and lockdowns are markers of political tribal identity.  To them, adhering to such practices is not a pragmatic effort to minimize danger, but evidence of one's membership in the secular left.  Such delusions come naturally to the religion-dominated mind.  After generations of being taught to disregard or deny evidence in order to reject the theory of evolution, and instead interpret the theory as an ideological assault on religion, it was easy to apply the same response pattern to anthropogenic global warming, and then to anything else that came along.  The end result is a mental state insulated from the real world, in which every new assertion is judged not by whether the evidence supports it, but by whether it is being asserted by "our side" or by the Godless libtards.

The problem is that reality is unaffected by such attitudes.  The pandemic does not care whether somebody believes it's a hoax or not.  The laws of physics that govern the trajectory of infectious micro-droplets when somebody coughs do not care why the person isn't wearing a mask.  Amidst a group of people, the virus does not care whether the gathering is a church service or a BLM rally or a Trump rally.  It simply spreads to new hosts more or less easily depending on whether certain objective conditions are met, as impersonally as a magnet jumps toward a bar of iron if you bring it close enough.

When human behavior is based on beliefs which conflict with objective reality, there are consequences:

Compared with Americans, Europeans tend to be somewhat better educated -- but far more importantly, most European societies lack a large sub-population of highly-religious people equivalent to our fundamentalists, and are more culturally predisposed to respect science and expertise.

The difference is not just one of conflicting values or opinions.  It's about accepting or rejecting reality.  And sooner or later, it becomes a matter of life and death.