Showing posts with label indignation addiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label indignation addiction. Show all posts

Friday, October 01, 2021

Seeking solutions - not sanctimony

Today's theme is seeking solutions - technological, social, personal - in a pragmatic spirit that seems all-too lost, these days. One Place where you find that spirit flowing as vigorously as ever is the X-Prize Foundation led by Peter Diamandis.

The theme of the latest XPrize challenge seeks methods of agricultural carbon sequestrationWhat if there is an efficient way to capture carbon from the air and safely store it for 1000 years or more?

What if the cost of capturing the carbon is near zero - with no new technology needed?

What if the cost of storing (sequestering) the carbon is low?

What if the cost will go down as EV transportation ramps up?

What if this can be done on a massive scale promptly and globally?


And - preemptively countering the tech-hating prudes who denounce every technological contribution to problem-solving - what if this can be done morally to not encourage more carbon being added to the air?


Now I am a big supporter of X-Prize and have participated in several endeavors. In this case I’m a bit skeptical, but...

... here's a food-from-air system that uses solar energy panels to make electricity to react carbon dioxide from the air produces food for microbes grown in a bioreactor. The protein the microbes produce is then treated to remove nucleic acids and then dried to produce a powder suitable for consumption by humans and animals. 

Of course we are still hoping for the sweet spot from algae farms that would combine over-fertilized agricultural runoff and bio waste with CO2 from major sources like cement plants, with sunlight to do much the same thing. Now do this along the south-facing sides of tall buildings, so cities can feed themselves, and you have a sci fi optimist's trifecta.

== Carbon capture vs. Geo-Engineering... vs puritanism and denialism? ==

What’s the Least Bad Way to Cool the Planet?  Yes it's controversial, as it should be. But many of those who oppose even researching or talking about ‘geo-engineering’ seem almost as fanatical as the Earth-killers of the Denialist Cult. Puritans vehemently denounce any talk of “palliative remedies” will distract from our need to cut carbon!


Which is simply false. Oh, we must develop sustainables and conservation as our primary and relentlessly determined goal! I have been in that fight ever since helping run the Clean Air Car Race in 1970 and later writing EARTH. Find me anyone you know with a longer track record. Still, we must also have backups to help bridge a time of spreading deserts, flooding cities, malaria and possible starvation. We are a people capable of many things, in parallel! And to that end I lent some help to this effort, led by Pro. David Keith, to study the tradeoffs now, before panic sets in.


Keith is a professor of applied physics and of public policy at Harvard, where he led the development of the university’s solar engineering research program. He founded a company doing big things in carbon capture. He is also a co-host of the podcast “Energy vs Climate”. 


Consulting a bit for that effort, I spoke up for a version of geoengineering that seems the most ‘natural’ and least likely to have bad side effects… and one that I portrayed in my 1990 novel EARTH - ocean fertilization. Not the crude way performed in a few experiments so far, dropping iron dust into fast currents… though those experiments did seem to have only positive effects, spurring increased fish abundance, but apparently removing only a little carbon. 


In EARTH I describe instead fertilizing some of the vast stretches of ocean that are deserts, virtually void of macroscopic life, doing it exactly the same way that nature does, off the rich fisheries of Labrador and Chile and South Africa — by stirring bottom mud to send nutrients into fast currents. (Only fast ones, for reasons I’ll explain in comments.)


Just keep an open mind, okay? We're going to need a lot of solutions, both long term and temporary, in parallel. That is, if we can ever overcome the insanity of many neighbors who reflexively hate all the solution-creating castes.


 == And more solutions... ==

And now we see... a 3D-printed neighborhood using robotic automation. Located in Rancho Mirage, California in Coachella Valley, the community will feature 15 homes on a 5-acre parcel of land. The homes will feature solar panels, weather-resistant materials and minimally invasive environmental impacts for eco-friendly homeowners. One hopes.


Okay this is interesting and … what’s the catch?  Apparently extracting geothermal energy from a region reduces geological stresses, like earthquake activity.Caltech researchers have discovered that the operations related to geothermal energy production at Coso over the last 30 years have de-stressed the region, making the area less prone to earthquakes. These findings could indicate ways to systematically de-stress high-risk earthquake regions, while simultaneously building clean energy infrastructure.” 


Well well. Makes sense, but again, the catch? Not just California. We should use the magma under Yellowstone to power the nation! Lest we get a bad ‘burp” (see my novel Existence) or something much worse.  Oh, and these geothermal plants also could locally source rare earths.


And while I'm offering click bait... a Caltech Professor analyzed the Hindenburg disaster and offered – for a NOVA episode – a highly plausible and well worked-out theory for how it happened.


Paul Shoemaker’s newly released book interviews many futurists and managerial types, with an eye toward guiding principles that can help make capitalism positive-sum. Take a look at: Taking Charge of Change: How Rebuilders Solve Hard Problems.


== Revisiting SARS-Cov-2 origins ==


I can’t count the number of folks – including likely some of you reading this now – who hammered on me for saying, half a year or so ago, that acknowledged gain-of-function research into increased virulence of SARS-type coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV)… which had had lab slip-ups in the past… might have played a role in the sudden emergence of Covid19 in the very same city. Might… have. All I asserted was that it could not yet be ruled out. “Paranoia!” came the common (and rather mob-like) rejoinder, along with “shame on you for spreading hateful propaganda without any basis!”


Well, as it happens, there’s plenty of basis. And this article dispassionately delineates the pros and cons in an eye-opening way… e.g. how the original letter proclaiming an ‘obvious wet market source” was orchestrated by the very fellow who financed WIV’s gain-of-function research. If you want an eye-opening tour of the actual scientific situation and what’s known, start here.


Sure, that then opens a minefield of diplomatic and scientific ramifications that would have been much simpler, had we been able to shrug off dark possibilities as "paranoid." I'm not afraid of minefields, just cautious. It's called the Future?


== Suddenly Sanctimony Addiction is In The News! ==


Professor James Kimmel (Yale) recently got press attention for pushing the notion that: “your brain on grievance looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.” He has developed role play interventions for healing from victimization and controlling revenge cravings. 


Of course this is related to my own longstanding argument that it is a huge mistake to call all 'addiction' evil, as a reflex. These reinforcement mechanisms had good evolutionary reasons… e.g. becoming “addicted to love” or to our kids or to the sublime pleasure of developing and applying a skill. The fact that such triggers can be hijacked by later means, from alcohol and drugs to video games, just redoubles our need to study the underlying reason we developed such triggers, in the first place.  And, as Dr. Kimmel so cogently points out, the most destructive such 'hijacking' is grudge-sanctimony — because it causes us to lash out, drive off allies, ignore opportunities for negotiation and generally turn positive sum situations into zero… or even negative sum… ones.


Here’s my TED talk on “The addictive plague of getting mad as hell."  ...And the much earlier - more detailed - background paper I once presented at the Centers for Drugs and Addiction: Addicted to Self-Righteousness?

And yes, this applies even if your ‘side’ in politics or culture wars happens to be right! The rightness of the cause is arguably orthogonal to the deepness of this addiction to the sick-sweet pleasures of sanctimony and grievance and rage. Indeed, many of those on the side of enlightenment and progress are (alas) so stoked on these reinforcement rage chemicals that they become counter-productive the the very cause we share.


Monday, January 07, 2013

Getting the lead out: a quirky tale of saving the world

This somewhat autobiographical missive was sparked by recent research that confirms something long suspected -- our civilization dodged a bullet a while back. A bullet made of lead. We dodged it thanks to science, open argument, and the power of dramatically-conveyed evidence...

... plus a fascinating coincidence in which I played a minor-but-interesting role.

== A root cause of violence? ==

Lead has long been rumored as a major culprit of individual and societal downfall - even in the collapse of the Roman Empire. Starting in the 1960s we found that remediation of houses that had lead-based paint correlated with improved IQ tests for children in poor neighborhoods.

A connection with violent crime now seems to be statistically proved.  The elimination of lead-based octane enhancers from gasoline in the United States just may have been the most dramatically cost effective step taken to improve the lives of Americans, and then people around the world.

Lead_CrimeA couple of snippets from a fascinating article, America's Real Criminal Element, Lead"...if you add a lag time of 23 years, lead emissions from automobiles explain 90 percent of the variation in violent crime in America."  and "If childhood lead exposure really did produce criminal behavior in adults, you'd expect that in states where consumption of leaded gasoline declined slowly, crime would decline slowly too. Conversely, in states where it declined quickly, crime would decline quickly." And that's exactly what the data showed.

Read this fascinating look into how science can be used to rescue us from devastating errors, then contemplate whether those now waging relentless war on science are dangerously life-threatening to your kids.

== Strange angles to a weighty matter ==

Okay so here is my first of three interesting addenda you won't find in the article:  Leaded gas is still sold in some countries.  These include Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, Algeria, Yemen and Myanmar,  Holy mackaral, just look at that list and tell me there aren't alarm bells.

lead-poisoning chartSecond addendum: this is almost certainly not the only case where some environmental factor may have debilitated or hampered millions of humans into being or behaving less than they could be.  Beyond malnutrition, poor sanitation and general poverty, I mean.  Or even the lobotomizing effects of TV, video games and Twitter. Take the parasitical paramecium Toxoplasma gondii which is endemic in many populations around the globe, entering human brains and - according to strong studies - systematically altering the behavior of tens or hundreds of millions on this planet.  Suppose we find even more such mind-altering infections?  Would that be good news, allowing us to use simple medical techniques and thus eliminate harmful behavior biases that cynics always assumed to be inherent in human nature?  Should this perhaps be made a really, really top priority for research?

I'll get to my third addendum - the personal one, describing my own role - in a moment.  First though...

== How we got the lead out ==

car-exhaustBy 1970, some far-seeing types had begun pushing for regulation or legislation to curb this horrific poison  pouring from the tail pipes of millions of automobiles. But they got nowhere, foiled by The Ethyl Corporation (TEC), which successfully pioneered obfuscate-and-delay tactics identical to those later applied by the tobacco industry and then by the Climate Denialist Cult.  Using some of the same public relations firms and "think tanks."

That year, opinion polls showed a majority of Americans opposed to changes that might (according to scare-mongering by TEC)  cause everyone's car engines to erode or explode, if we were all forced to use abominably inferior unleaded gas.  That, in turn, would destroy the economy, all because a bunch of pointy-headed scientists, doctors and public health officials were spreading chicken-little panic about a "purely hypothetical and overblown danger." That was the situation in August 1970.

And yet, by 1972, the situation was transformed! In less than two years' time, with rapidly changing public attitudes, the EPA launched an initiative to phase out leaded gasoline. What led to the plummet in support for lead?  Could a simple demonstration have been responsible?

Let's get to that final addendum.  This one is a personal anecdote. For you see, I was an eyewitness and participant in an event of some historic significance, though it has only been in the last few years that I came to realize just how important it was.

Many of us thought we were participating in something like a great big science fair.  Little more.  But we helped to change the world.

== The Clean Air Car Race of 1970 ==

Do smoking cars cause CACR?

hybridIn July and August, 1970, while an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology, I served as a member of the coordinating committee for the Clean Air Car Race, which pitted 44 student-built vehicles against each other in many categories (electric, propane, natural gas, hybrid....) for a rally-race from MIT across the continent to Caltech. There were some truly amazing innovations.  No, not the electric cars, which were way, way not ready for prime time! But several of the very first hybrid gas-electric vehicles participated, including one from the University of Toronto that we all voted "grooviest car" because it had regenerative braking and several other features now standard on your Prius.  It required a full-time co-driver, in those days, way back when putting a computer in a car was the stuff of science fiction.  But it worked and got real attention.

There was also a truck propelled by a Lear Jet turbine engine that scored well on exhaust quality, but got a zero in the noise pollution part of the competition, leaving a trail of seared underpasses and shattered toll booths across the nation. (It also parked outside my room at Caltech for a week, after the rally, while the drivers gave ear-splitting demos to the press, ouch!)

CleanAirCarRaceDouble





And yes, here I am, among the cars and drivers and officials of the 1970 CACR, posing for a full-page center spread in LIFE Magazine below the dome at MIT.  I'm the fellow with all that black hair and no tie, standing in the front row at the far left, looking like I actually know what I'm doing there.

Surprised by the prominent national coverage?  That's nothing!  We were mentioned every day during the race by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News. Much of America tracked our progress. It was one year after the Apollo 11 landing, so folks were expecting good things from science. And we delivered! Though perhaps not precisely in the way that we imagined.

== Okay, then what was world-changing? ==

So what does all of this have to do with getting the lead out of gas?  Simple. There were three cars participating in CACR whose sole "clean air" attribute was that they ran on unleaded gas.  Deliberately kept in stock condition, these performed perfectly and made it to Pasadena without a glitch... which is more than could be said for the entry subsidized by the The Ethyl Corporation.

Remember all that press coverage?  These results got lots of play. Moreover, while we students were enthralled by things like hybrid-electrics (and CACR 1970 definitely helped push those ideas into research labs at Toyota and Honda and Wayne State etc, leading eventually to your Prius), it turns out that the most historically significant thing we accomplished was effected by the least romantic or innovative vehicles in the race!  Those three boring old internal combustion cars that made it across the country on unleaded gas... without any explosions. Not even any excess engine wear.  They still went vroom in Pasadena, and then were driven all the way back east again...

51wMygi0+FL... and the public noticed. Poll numbers shifted. Scare tactics about "panic-mongers destroying the economy" withered. Within 18 months the EPA had enough support to start acting to reduce lead poisoning, which soon resulted in far lower parts-per-million in the blood of children. And 20 years later, when a new generation of boys entered their "high crime age" something amazing happened.  They did a whole lot less crime.

Am I claiming credit for the sharp decline of violence in the United States of America, and later around the world?  Nonsense. I wasn't the chairman or prime mover of the Clean Air Car Race and anyway, there were thousands of scientists , engineers, doctors and activists at the forefront of the struggle against lead poisoning, folks who made the real difference.

Still, to have been  a participant and witness -- and to realize, decades later, that a very public blow was struck, a clear demonstration that might have accelerated progress by a year or two or more, affecting many lives? Well, that's priceless.

It also teaches a lesson.  Good things happen because of human effort.  But sometimes in twisty ways that aren't obvious at the time.  We were jazzed and excited (rightfully) by the hybrids. But all we accomplished was to interest some companies and labs who then needed thirty years to actually deliver them.

Meanwhile, we ignored or barely tolerated unromantic vehicles that cruised placidly amid the tech-dazzler jalopies. But that placid cruising was what most significantly and rapidly changed our world.

Ah well.  Story finished.  Except to suggest that we should all learn the basic lesson.  That progress will always be blocked by fools who emphasize short-sighted greed and play upon the prejudices of the gullible. By now their suite of tricks is well-known and perfected. But so should be our quiver of responses. Sometimes, the ongoing War on Science can best be stymied with symbols and imagery that are simple, clear... and utterly true.

Only now, on a related topic, a bit of lagniappe...

== A plague of psychopaths? ==

JEFFERSONRIFLEJust because overall statistical rates of violence have plummeted, that is poor comfort when tragedies such as Aurora or Newtown erupt, sending shock and despair through communities and terrifying the innocent, everywhere. As fresh calls arise for measures to reduce gun-related devastation, let me again suggest that sensible approaches to gun control will only happen if advocates study the needs and fears of moderate gun owners and then tailor proposals with those concerns in mind.

But let's agree that weapons aren't the core problem. (Nor will filling our schools with armed guards provide a solution.) Indeed, much has been said recently about the fact that mass-shooting calamities are rooted in desperate problems of mental disease and our inability to grapple with needed changes. We all need to start by doing what we can, locally, to see to it that those isolated "loners" out there get shown less harshness and more kindness -- more reason to feel connected -- during formative years. A final end to bullying won't make this go away. But if we haven't reached out, we can never say we weren't in part to blame.

Still... that only illustrates one end of a spectrum in which - it appears - civilization is being harmed by socipoaths at all levels, including the political and economic elite.

I've spoken elsewhere of the worst addictive problem in the world today - a plague of self-doped self-righteous indignation that is so rooted in brain chemistry that I gave a talk about it at the National Institute for Drugs and Addiction. Strong evidence suggests that much of our current "culture war" --  thwarting the American genius for can-do negotiation and pragmatic solutions -- is amplified by this modern curse that prompts us to rage instead of negotiate.

Yes, the Indignation Addiction Plague is bad.  But sociopathy is another aspect: one that probably does just as much harm. Have a look at an interesting (even though overly partisan) perspective on psychological factors plaguing the high end of the socio-economic spectrum: Psychopaths holding America hostage?

"Dr. Dale Archer, a psychiatrist and frequent guest on "FoxNews.com Live" of all places writes, "Physically, studies have shown that the brain chemistry is different in powerful politicians, leading to sensation seeking and risky behavior. They have lower levels of the brain chemical monoamine oxidase-A, which means they have higher highs when they engage in risky behavior and that they get bored much more easily than the norm." 

Another excerpt: "Psychopaths often appear normal, even charming. Underneath, they lack conscience and empathy, making them manipulative, volatile and often (but by no means always) criminal. The psychologist Kevin Dutton in his book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, notes society, and especially Wall Street, admires and rewards many of the qualities of psychopaths - fearlessness, emotional sterility, supreme confidence, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, refusal to take responsibility, narcissism and delusions of grandeur. Who could argue that those characteristics virtually defined the Wall Street crowd responsible for blowing up the world's economy in 2008? In fact, a recent study showed psychopaths were four times more common among business leaders than among the general population." (Babiak P, Neumann CS, Hare RD. Corporate psychopathy: Talking the walk. Behav Sci Law. 2010 Mar-Apr;28(2):174-93.)

== A path to sanity ==

So, what can we conclude? Despite the fact that the lower and middle classes have languished economically, without growth in prosperity for 20 years, there appears to be less danger than ever of dissolving into chaotic, spasmodic violence from below, of the kind that lead poisoning once fostered.  That bullet is being dodged. If the lower castes get violent, it will be with cause, as in 1789 France, not out of inchoate, poison-induced rage.

OpenLetterAddictionWe are in danger, however, from other forms of mental illness. That plague of indignation, tearing through our middle class politics, causing neighbors to despise each other over abstract issues and to disdain experts like scientists.  Plus a tsunami of psychopathy where it is most dangerous, in the top layers where any self-serving machination or risky behavior can be rationalized away, the manner that such things always were, back in feudal times.  By proclaiming (without cause or evidence or justification) that "My kind of folks are inherently superior."

The stakes are high.  But remember this.  Our scientific enlightenment is the great exception to the rank/repeated stupidity of feudal oligarchies that ran 99% of human cultures.  We are capable of detecting and noticing and even dodging some of the bullets that struck down other societies. We've proved this can happen. So let's ignore the cynics of both left and right, and let's believe we can do it again. And again. Dodging bullets and gradually making larger the fraction of children who grow up healthy, un-poisoned, with sane and knowledge-filled and vigorously curious-empathic brains...

...until our grandkids -- vastly saner and smarter than we neanderthals can now imagine -- are ready to take over.


David Brin
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Friday, September 30, 2005

Suspicion of Authority -- a prevalent meme

I am on an elite advisory board having to do with nanotechnology. In that discussion I engaged in a review of some topics many of you have heard before, summarizing a lot of ideas more compactly. Anyway, it should be archived and available - so I'll post it here before returning to the essay on gerrymandering. 
                                                       ---    ----   ---

One question rose: "Are nation-states really the right object of focus? Or is it is more likely to be a multi-national mega-company or a small group of hyper-rich individuals?"

Sometimes it makes sense to generalize a little, before getting back to specifics.

What are we talking about here? Will you bear with me through a riff that may seem a bit lectury. It really will become relevant to the topic at hand.

Each of us in this group was raised in a culture that’s featured a weird propaganda program Nearly every novel and Hollywood film has promoted Suspicion of Authority (SOA). Often two subsidiary messages accompany SOA. These are:

   -- Tolerance of Diversity (TOD) and

   -- Personal Harmless Eccentricity (PHE).

Often, in a movie, the protagonist will bond with the audience in the 1st five minutes by:

   (1) exhibiting some quirky eccentricity to establish individualism, and

   (2) having a run-in with some dislikable authority figure (often over the eccentricity.)

And if you want to establish viewer dislike of an authority figure, by all means let him perform some act of intolerance commensurate with the comeuppance you plan him to receive later on. If the intolerance was verbal, he may “learn a lesson.” If he kicks a dog, sucka gonna die. (See my essay: Our Favorite Cliche: The Idiot Plot.)

I raise this here because it is important for us to recognize the cultural roots of our worry. Not only do these three themes -- Suspicion of Authority, Tolerance of Diversity, and Personal Harmless Eccentricity -- express Western/Enlightenment/American/Frontier/Californian value sets. They are also rooted in the Scientific Pragmatism that has been a successful guiding principle for a century -- also called “modernism.”

Suspicion of Authority is not, in itself, completely wise. Many people in our society take the SOA message and use it as an excuse to dive into cycles of addictive self-righteous indignation, often focusing extreme “suspicion of authority” toward on one side of an insipid, ill-defined and fundamentally unhelpful metaphor... the 300 year old French “left-right political axis.”

For more on Indignation addiction, see my article: Open Letter to Researchers of Addiction, Brain Chemistry and Social Psychology.

This simple-minded version of Suspicion of Authority tends to be blinkered and myopic. Such people tend to minimize or ignore the dangers posed by the authority figures on THEIR side.

That’s the immature version of SOA -- which is fueling the so-called “Culture War.”

At its more mature end, Suspicion of Authority is simply an expression of the fundamental lesson of the Liberal Enlightenment -- that we are master self-deceivers. We fool ourselves - as Nobel laureate Richard Feynman said - all-too easily. Therefore, truth and decency cannot be delivered by hierarchically-empowered kings or priests, who have proved they can rationalize doing anything they want and calling it the Greater Good.

Instead, the Liberal Enlightenment says that both truth and good behavior can only come from markets of interaction, in which free players are empowered to hold each other accountable through criticism --  CITOKATE .

Forgive me. CITOKATE is my acronym for  Criticism Is The Only Known Antidote To Error.

Elsewhere I talk about the four biggest “accountability arenas” -- Markets, Democracy, Science and Courts -- each of which handle the process of reciprocal accountability very differently.... but with similar underlying processes. (See: Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competitiveness for Society's Benefit.)

In fact, the SOA is a very important part of how these four arenas work. It empowers players to resent established centers of orthodoxy, giving many of them the balls to jump in the arena as challengers.

Can you see that this supplies a contextual framework for what we’ve been discussing?

What the previous discussion shows is that, in general, each of us fears seeing technological breakthroughs monopolized by some set of elites. The difference between a liberal and a conservative is often over WHICH elites you fear trying to become Big Brother. The irony is that both sides are often right!

Naturally, we feel less threatened by “the United States” developing such powers first, in part because it is home to most of us and partly because of Pax Americana’s (until recently) above average record as a fairly benign imperium, by historical standards.

Also (until recently), the principal modus for error-prevention (or palliation) in the US was open criticism. How many of those other elites instead base their methodology on secretive central control?

The prospect of others taking a leap in this massively empowering technological area naturally seems worrisome. Not only other nation states, but other elites, such as unaccountable multinationals, criminal gangs, terror groups, mad billionaires, mad scientists.... etc.

Having laid that out, let me ask this; is our fear best expressed in specific terms, e,g, about China, India or Rupert Murdoch getting disruptive technologies and taking over? Or might it be better to look at it the other way.

* What fundamental cultural tools should be in place, in order to assure that is DOES NOT MATTER who gets a disruptive technology first?

Implicit throughout our discussion has been some degree of fealty toward the basic assumptions of the liberal enlightenment. That competition, reciprocal accountability, openness, skepticism, criticism (error detection) and flattened access hierarchies, are all good things.

We can see from history that the rate of grievous ERROR in a society is inversely proportional to the presence of these traits... even though every one of them runs counter to human nature and the self-interests of leaders.

The question is this. Can openness and reciprocal accountability prevent terrible mistakes and abuse of nanotechnology? Ray Kurzweil thinks so. I agree, provisionally. In contrast, many thinkers, ranging from Francis Fukuyama and Bill Joy to the Unabomber and Michael Crichton and Margaret Atwood believe our only hope is to reject and repress whole areas of endeavor.

The Fermi Paradox seems to be saying that SOME kind of worrisome mistake may wipe away  intelligent life forms. Is this it? Nano stuff? Is Crichton right?

Hell, I am loyal to the Enlightenment.