The Rally for Sanity: Really?

Unless you've been willfully ignoring mass media, you've heard about Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity". I went. I never do such things. I've been to some political events before, but all when I was in college and all when I stumbled on things going on in NYC. Mostly they turned me off. Rallying never seemed to make much of a difference. So I'm going to attempt to explain a bit about why I did go to this, and give some impressions of what I saw.

When I told people I was going, I was asked a number of questions about the motives of the rally: "Isn't it just a concert and a show?" "Isn't it just the same old liberal media/MSM folks doing something to copy Glen Beck?" "Isn't this just to make Jon Stewart richer?" "Isn't this just a proxy rally for the Democrats?" "Isn't this just a big reaction to the tea party?" "Isn't this just an anti-fox news rally?" The answer to all of these is the same. Maybe so. There's no way for me to know what the real motivations are. But I didn't go for any of those reasons, though some of them are appealing and others are quite unappealing to me. I went for one simple reason. The political discourse in this country is broken. There is no real dialogue. There is a series of monologues. Even if it was only on the surface, the stated reason for this event was to try and counter that with some sanity, reason and thoughtfulness. And if it was going to be just a bit like that, it seemed worth supporting. Throw in that my wife really wanted to go, too, and that we have friends in the DC area we could hook up with, and we had enough motivation to make it.

There were some other questions I was commonly asked: "Isn't this rally every bit as extreme but on the other side [than the tea party]?" "You always complain about big money interfering in politics, and isn't this just that and not even trying to hide it?" "You say you're an independent, but you're going to a democratic rally - why?" "What good is it to gather around paid celebrities when it comes to politics?" How extreme, how democratic (versus independent) and how celebrity focused the rally was were things I didn't think I could judge without seeing it. And, even if it turned out to be all three, that idea of a calmer kind of discourse was appealing enough for me to get over it. And I liked that they were not trying to hide who was sponsoring the event, why and with what biases. I wish every political event was so obvious about where the money comes from. I'm for transparency above all things. Comedy Central simply must be shocked at how much success they've gotten from Jon Stewart. It's not like he had such a stellar track record previous to The Daily Show. It's my opinion that the content really does come from him and his crew if only because his success was his own formula and no executive would ever mess with a cash cow once it started delivering the milk.

The stuff on stage was OK. Not incredibly inspiring and not all that political - at least not directly. Having the Mythbuster guys was a nod to science, I'd guess. A bit of a lame one, but I'll take it. Stewart and Colbert were very funny, as they usually are. But if you've seen their act before it was nothing shocking. Stewart did his best to be heartfelt and did better than usual at it, but kept it brief and mercifully un-hokey. The one thing that really did it for me was Tony Bennett singing America the Beautiful. That was awesome. And I have to say that it was nice that it ended promptly as promised.

The interesting bits for me were in the crowd. First of all, everyone was so polite. There were a LOT of people there. And I saw nor heard any squabbling or mean words. Maybe every rally of like minded people is like that. But I've been to other big events (concerts, etc.) and never seen a crowd behave so well. Of course there were signs. Most were about issues, and most of those simply urged people to participate in politics and remain civil. The second highest concentration went for comedy. Some were more directly political. Of the political ones, most were anti tea party pundit. I say tea party pundit and not tea party because most were concerned with Palin, O'Donnell and other tea party celebrities. I saw only one sign that mentioned the tea party without pointing directly at those personalities. The only other political signs were supporting Obama and most of those were the ones with the Obama campaign image and the byline "probably not trying to destroy America". Overall, I thought the crowd was living up to the billing. Everyone was being engaged, topical yet civil. There was no one I saw that seemed to be "extreme" in any way save perhaps their willingness to go the extra mile for a cool Halloween costume - there were quite a few very realistic zombies roaming the crowd.

I was disappointed not to see any right leaning or conservative voices being overtly represented. There were some signs pointing out overspending and one saying that "to reduce spending one ought to look at the biggest parts of the budgets". That was about as conservative as it got. I knew it would be a socially liberal crowd, which is fine with me. And I was handed and subsequently wore a Panned Parenthood sticker supporting better access to birth control. And there were other represenatives of various social causes roaming the crowds to hand out materials. But I had hoped there would be more at least overtly centerist participation. But maybe that's a symptom of people like myself with a libertarian streak also not being the type to carry signs. Judging by the number of folks who were my age and older, which while not the majority were absolutely 40% of the people I saw by my reckoning, there may have been a lot of people thinking the same things. But there's no way to tell.

If I had to give the rally a grade based on it's stated purposes, it would be a B+. The crowd may get an A. But the content gets a B-. I give the crowd a bit more weight because a rally really ought to be about what happens in the crowd as near as I can tell. I would have liked to see more intellectual meat on the stage, and less clips from news media. I was happy I went. Partially because it was a good time all in, including seeing friends, getting time with the wife away from home and taking advantage of rewards programs I fatten through so much travel for work. But it was also good to have gone to see that there are many people who seem to want to take the volume level in politics down a few notches. And it was very heartening that so many seemed to support a scientific worldview - I wore a tee shirt with Einstein on it in a faux Che silhouette and the byline "viva la relativity" and it got a huge number of positive comments and thumbs up from the crowd. So while I didn't get anything but good entertainment from what was on stage, I did feel I got something worthwhile from the other people there.

three little words

Perhaps the simplest and most profound statement of my understanding of Nietzsche's contribution to human thought is expressed in a letter to his sister in 1865. Nietzsche writes "Every true faith accomplishes what the person who has the faith hopes to find in it; but faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth." In this quote, there is the nature of faith, its relation to truth and the relationship of humanity, faith and truth; all three cast in Nietzsche's unique viewpoint. Faith finds its origins in humanity's desires. The truth, something external to humanity, is unaffected by the faiths of people. And though it is in the individual and collective minds of thinkers that these things reside, they are affected by the concepts as much as the concepts are affected by them.

The first notion, that faith is a purely human thing, may be the most revolutionary idea of the three. That truth was out of human hands may have been easily accepted by many in Nietzsche's day, just as many think truth is out of human hands today. That is what the rising tide of religious fervor would have you believe - all liberal and conservative, extremist and moderate forms of it. Truth is divine only, the swallow would fall from the sky were it not for the will of god. Or in the more moderate form: only god knows for sure. But faith is always portrayed as a gift. We are granted faith from above. This gift is one of a benevolent abundance of gifts in the religious view. It is faith that allows us to know god; it is requirement to know god. Faith is also seen as a gift bestowed from father to son, mother to daughter, generation to generation. The faith and ways of our forebears being part of the pantheon of tradition that we are all to revere without question. So for Nietzsche to say that faith is something wholly of the mind, something that is sourced from the individual, is very revolutionary. Of course, here in this quote, he only speaks of "true faith". That is a real living idea which animates people's actions; it is not the stories and ideas of a culture as "a faith" is sometimes used to name. We can take this "true faith" to mean something like the opposite of Sartre's "bad faith". For Nietzsche, a "true faith", faith that would motivate people to believe and act in some specific way, is always personal - even if it is appropriated from one's father. It takes a great act of personal will to have this kind of faith. People would be presented opportunities to break their faith daily, and so there is immense effort required to preserve faith. Even stranger, many do break their faith regularly and then twist their minds, even their memories, to somehow bring the world, their memory of the world and their faith into alignment again. So much energy is spent defending this faith, faith battered on by the world like cliffs of salt battered by ocean waves.

What are these waves? They are the ever present pressures of the senses telling us what the world around has to offer. And this stream of data, this font of potential in-formation, is the only source, the only possible root from which one can grow, objective truth. I think in this day anyone who utters "objective truth" gets a chill. It seems like a shadow or a myth. Postmodernism has banished it. "You can't know anything, knowledge is merely opinion" quips Tim Minchin via his characiture of our silly age, who labels herself Storm. And there is this feeling among people that all perspectives are of equal weight. That one idea is just as good as another. Worst of all, there is this notion that science and philosophy support this multi-truthed view. The notion is this: truth is dead. Its death contributes to the resurrection of god, the latest religious revivals. After all, if there is no truth to be had in science, if the efforts of math and physics have ended with a thud, if no answers are coming; why not turn to god and religion where all answers are right there for you on the page? But there are those nagging waves. The senses and their evidence. The data of what happens around us. There is the ever present reality we all share and the rules we know to govern it. The persistence of the light lit from electricity generated kilometers away, made to work by applying principles that work every time. And as long as religious fanatics broadcast themselves on youtube, they will reveal the deep irony of living in a world where our knowledge of our shared reality, our access to objective truth, will always mock their faiths in things we cannot see and cannot burn for fuel and cannot use to make light to read by or videos in which to opine.

Finally, there is the notion of how interconnected are truth, faith and humanity. Humanity needs truth. Humanity needs faith. It may be found that these things, our symbolic representations of our world and our fidelity to them, are our defining traits. It is already known that we are distinguished from other primates by our ability to learn what we are shown as we are shown. Even if something odd or off is completely evident in the things we are shown, we will take them in as given. And it is thought this is an adaptation to allow us to receive wisdom without having to fully grasp it. How can you tell the 3 year old that stepping on the green rocks is bad because the moss is slippery and you will fall? Instead the three year olds that have survived have been those who simply do not step on the rocks that grandma does not step on - simply because grandma did not do it and for no other reason. And that unquestioning acceptance is amazingly efficient at transmitting crucial information about how to traverse rivers. It is shockingly bad at allowing us to learn truth in a world that changes so fast that the generation born today will hardly have any experience in common with the generation born just 10 years before them - and so on into the future unless we commit some horrible act of war that resets the pace of change. If we cannot learn to reject the faith of our upbringing as new data demands it, if we cannot learn to change our thoughts about the world as it's presented to us as we find ever more clever ways to see, then we are advancing without hope and developing skills no one will wield. So where can we place faith, faith we so desperately need to have, such that it does not destroy our ability to see? From what kind of source can we extract truth that would not be corrupted by the instrument we use to learn it? How can we live, in faith, and with truth, as humanity? Of course, Nietzsche would say we must overcome our humanity. For now, I am too timid to guess what that may mean.