A disclaimer: my back has been hurting horribly for the past two days (maybe I'm not made for all those daily handstands and cartwheels after all), so I’ve literally done nothing but read, watch Great Courses lectures, and generally sit on my ass unable to do much else but contemplate uncomfortable notions for hours on end. Since this topic is unavoidably important to me, I will only ask forgiveness for my long-windedness, not my defense. If I cannot take my precious vacation time to overthink a thinkpiece on one of my favorite subjects what else will make 15 years of college loan debt for a degree in English feel worth it?
Last Monday, Stephen Colbert got his audience back, and then some. All thanks to Jon Stewart. We all know how highly Stephen regards his friend and mentor, so of course, Jon had to be his first guest back on The Late Show. As proof of this, Stephen didn't even feel he had to introduce the man; he just said his name and the fully-vaccinated and thankful folks in the audience went wild. We at home were also thrilled to see things getting back to a semblance of the Beforetimes in New York's TV land, and what better way to do so than to indulge in some witty banter between two of our favorite talk show hosts?
What ensued was a clip that went viral like no other in recent Late Show history. That's because Stephen hasn't said or done anything remotely controversial in recent Late Show history. We were OK with that--loved him for that--for always doling out the jabs against the Cheeto in Chief for the past four years. For many of us, it was the only balm for our frustrated souls as we sat by weeping into our tea every morning that T**** was still president and the pandemic was ravaging the normalcy of our lives.
Jon is no stranger to The Late Show. He's appeared a handful of times since he's gone into semi-retirement from hosting The Daily Show in 2015. He's even one of Stephen's executive producers. He's generally served as icing on Stephen's anti-T**** cake. He's been spending a lot of time wth his family on his New Jersey farm, shifting toward a healthy plant-based diet under his vegan wife's tutelage, and pleading before Congress to pass compensation bills on behalf of New York's 9/11 first responders. He even wrote and directed a movie, the achingly awkward Irresistible (2020) starring his old friend Steve Carell. As one of the few who have actually seen that cringe factory of a film, I feel it served as a forewarning about Jon's psyche in some small way. Therefore, I am not entirely surprised that he went off on an "unhinged rant" about the coronavirus lab-leak theory.
If you took the jokes he just made and copy/pasted them into an episode of The Daily Show somewhere in the vicinity of I don't know, 2009, when the SARS outbreak was a thing, they would fit perfectly. These are the exact types of jokes he's always done, and no one would have thought he was a crazy cuckoo bird. But these are the "post" pandemic times, and everyone is touchy as hell.
As a Millenial Emeritus, I remember very clearly the last episode of TDS that Jon hosted, and how he left us with his most precious of paradigms to take into the future. He very clearly espoused inoculating ourselves against bullshit, in all its variants.
Bullshit... is everywhere... There is very little that you will encounter in life that has not been in some ways infused with bullshit. Not all of it bad. Your general day-to-day organic free-range bullshit is often necessary. Or at the very least, innocuous. Oh, what a beautiful baby! I'm sure it will grow into that head! That kind of bullshit in many ways provides important social contract fertilizer. It keeps people from making each other cry all day.
But then there's the more pernicious bullshit, your premeditated, institutional bullshit designed to obscure and distract. Designed by whom? The Bullshitocracy. It comes in three basic flavors. One: making bad things sound like good things. Organic all-natural cupcakes. Because factory-made sugar oatmeal balls doesn't sell. Patriot Act, because "Are-you-scared-enough-to-let-me-look-at-all-your-phone-records Act" doesn't sell. So whenever something is titled freedom, fairness, family, health, America, take a good long sniff. Chances are, it's been manufactured in a facility that may contain traces of bullshit.
Number two, the second way: hiding the bad things under mountains of bullshit. Complexity. You know, I would love to download Drizzy's latest Meek Mill dis. (Everyone promised me that that made sense). But I'm not really interested right now in reading Tolstoy's iTunes agreement, so I'll just click "agree" even if it grants Apple prima noctae with my spouse. Here's another one: simply put, banks shouldn't be able to bet your pension money on red. Bullshitly put, it's hey, this: Dodd-Frank. Hey, a handful of billionaires can't buy our elections, right? Of course not, they can only pour unlimited anonymous cash into a 501-C4 if 50% is the voted to issue education, otherwise, they'd have to 506-C6 it or funnel is openly through a non-campaign coordinating Super PAC with a quarter--I think they're asleep now, we can sneak out.
And finally, it's the bullshit of infinite possibility. These bullshitters cover their unwillingness to act under the guise of unending inquiry. We can't do anything because we don't yet know everything. We cannot take action on climate change until everyone in the world agrees gay marriage vaccines won't cause our children to marry goats who are going to come for our guns. Until then, I say, teach the controversy.
Now the good news is this: bullshitters have gotten pretty lazy, and their work is easily detected, and looking for it is kinda a pleasant way to pass the time, like an "I Spy" of bullshit. So I say to you tonight, friends, the best defense against bullshit is vigilance. So if you smell something, say something.
We--the Jon Stewart Daily Show progressives--all wanted to believe that we dutifully took all this advice to heart and carried it with us ever since. We tried so very hard to walk in Jon's footsteps by following John Oliver, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Hassan Minhaj, and Stephen Colbert and listening to his disciples' arguments every night. And they are doing good work, don't get me wrong. But apparently, there is still something missing.
As an Elder Statesmillenial, I remember the concept of the Lysine Contingency. Humans are prone to all kinds of logical fallacies. They are baked into our psychological DNA. But they can be overcome as long as we're provided the necessary amino acids. Like the dinosaurs that left Isla Nublar behind, we're in danger of dying from lack of essential nutrients. Apropos of everything, the fallacy that most applies here is known as the Genetic Fallacy: basing the truth claim of an argument on the origin of its claims or premises.
To be clear, Jon never said he believed the conspiracy theory that the Wuhan Institute of Virology created the virus as some Chinese bio-weapon, just that perhaps the virus accidentally escaped from the lab, which has been raised again recently in the news as a possibility that requires more investigation. This whole controversy Jon broached with Stephen on stage is not even really about the lab leak theory. Ultimately, it’s a lesson in avoiding genetic fallacy.
For years, we’ve been dismissing everything that comes out of T****’s mouth because he’s THE WORST but the logic we use to dismiss him and champion what’s being said by someone we trust implicitly is one and the same. So when Jon brought up a theory that most people in the media have roundly dismissed in the last year, he pointed out a possible flaw in our thinking. Everyone’s minds were BLOWN that Jon—the great almighty liberal late night king—would even give an ounce of credence to this theory.
All week, I’ve been wrestling with this myself, because I had to confront the fact that I am guilty of falling into the trap of genetic fallacies all the time because I hold up so many heroes and write off so many morons. Jon could be totally insane(!) on this one, but I want to believe there’s something to what he’s saying because I think he’s the best. My not wanting to believe the lab leak theory because it was floated by T**** and wanting to believe Jon just because he's JON has made my mind collapse. And rightly so.
The "shtick" Jon performed was not a bit, as so many fans have tried to reconcile in their understandably confused minds. We've seen Jon do bits. Recall his extended impressions of Glenn Beck--those were of a very different nature. Jon was not pulling a Colbert Report-style routine where he's putting on a conservative pundit mask. He's not that great an actor. He meant what he said. I believe from the bottom of my soul that Jon believes in the wonders of science, but anyone who has studied history knows the Promethean fire has its caveats.
I just happen to be reading a fuck-ton about Richard Feynman lately (who knew?). And he, even he, had a dark night of the soul over his involvement with grand scientific progress. He was one of an elite group of physicists and mathematicians who gathered in the desert at Los Alamos to develop the atomic bomb. He attests that everyone who worked on it believed in their heart they had to crack the secret of the atom before the Nazis did. It was going to be the apex of scientific achievements and they had to get there first. Any day they could have been slammed with the news that Hitler had The Bomb. It was a fate that could not come to pass, for the sake of the entire human race.
J. Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita after the Trinity test succeeded: "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." He knew long before the test that the general public, which had been glorifying science's patriotic efforts up until that summer morning of 1945, would soon recognize that it had been all too easy to produce atomic weapons. It was a Faustian bargain from the beginning, but fear clouded everyone's judgment. The genetic fallacy lives here as well. Coming from the Nazis, The Bomb was evil. Coming from American scientists, The Bomb was freedom.
"For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," as our dear Hamlet so elegantly put it.
After the war, Feynman would tell a story about leaving the desert and sitting in a restaurant in New York City:
My first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it anymore, but I felt it very strongly then... I looked out at the buildings and I began to think about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was--from here to 34th street--all those buildings, all smashed. I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I'd think "They're CRAZY, they just don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's useless."
But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost thirty years now. So I've been wrong about it being useless building bridges, and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead.
Science is the most important quest in human history. Quests are fraught with perils and false and confining blind alleys, unexpected discoveries and sky-high accomplishments. But it is not a monolith and it is not above questioning. The entire foundation of science is questioning.
Feynman said this at a Caltech commencement address in 1974:
We've learned from experience that the truth will out...The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool...
I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
Whether Jon Stewart is right or wrong about this one stupid thing, at least he came in and shook up the room with a wild idea, challenging us to be intellectually honest about where our information is coming from and how we choose to evaluate its truth. The one thing he forgot to mention on his last day on TDS was how easily we can bullshit ourselves. He continues to be the deceptive Fool of King Lear origin, speaking truth to power on this great stage of fools. And *that* is what I feel has been missing from the discourse for a long time now. I am still counting the days until he returns to television. Our bullshit detectors need some recalibrating.
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