The Epistemology of Panic

I have a friend whom I have always considered sane. He’s a decent, useful member of society. He has a reasonable, practical mind in most respects. He can solve problems. He has religious beliefs, but has never struck me as a zealot. Nevertheless, my friend now believes that we are on the cusp of the biblical “end times”. He cites, as evidence, the words of a vague collection of Christian scholars he does not know. He accepts their authority not on the basis of their past reliability, but merely on the personal resonance of their claims.

At the same time, my friend shrugs off impending calamities for which there is good evidence. He believes that God can destroy America, but scoffs at the idea that anyone or anything else can. Climate and energy emergencies are as unreal to him as his religious apocalypse is to me. He clings to words and symbols, like “freedom” and the flag. It does not seem to register that in a universe at the whim of a vengeful deity the kind of freedom he imagines would be impossible. It does not seem to matter that the flag doesn’t have a place in scripture. Indeed, the world that I see as a collision of natural forces acting in a painful but still orderly way, he sees as a collection of emotional loci without any threads to connect them. I watch, in horror and fascination, what I can only describe as the functional collapse of a human mind.

I have long had a gnawing apprehension that faith has very dangerous potentials. If one begins to believe things undemonstrated by experience, it erodes the very basis of one’s understanding. It begins by ignoring the empirical world, and ends by denying it. I see this everywhere I turn now. It is not the sole province of the religious. It is abundantly clear that most economists, politicians and business people do not believe the physical world puts any limit of expansion. They believe we can grow the population and the economy at a few percent per annum forever, provided only that we balance the numbers correctly. That human ingenuity has no bounds. That we will solve all problems as needed, again, if we just manage to keep our organizational ducks in a row. If these beliefs are any better than scriptural dogmas, I challenge anyone to show me how.