The Razor’s Edge

We all know about Occam’s Razor. I recently learned that Christopher Hitchens coined his own epistemological rule that has come to be known as “Hitchens’ Razor”.  Per Hitchens’ Razor, what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.  If you say that the moon is made of Gribble without any evidence of the existence of Gribble on the moon, I do not need to dig up counter-evidence to dismiss your claim.  By contrast, if you show me a handful of Gribble brought back to earth by one of the Apollo missions and demonstrate an unbroken chain of custody, or if you show that light reflected from the moon occupies a slice of the spectrum associated exclusively with Gribble, the burden is on me to produce counter-evidence.[1]

I have missed reading Hitchens’ common-sense writing since he died in 2011, but I miss him now more than ever.  How do you think these statements would survive scrutiny under Hitchens’ Razor?:

• The Democratic party, helped by Hillary Clinton, is running a pedophile ring out of a Washington, DC pizza parlor;

• Hillary Clinton and Bigfoot are the same because, you know, have you ever seen them in the same room together? and,

• The November election was stolen.

I have not written about the events of January 6 because I do not have anything to add to the already-robust public discourse.[2]  There is no evidence of voter fraud.  Terrorism is bad.  The people who stormed the Capitol and attempted to subvert the democratic process did it because of beliefs that would crumple before Hitchens’ Razor.  The country is more polarized than it has been since the (first) civil war.  Coastal liberal elites and Flyover Country residents inhabit two separate and parallel echo chambers.  Even Mitch McConnell has had some lucid moments – and that is end-of-days material. 

The problem is – we can’t just call bullshit and go home.  If we want a country, we need to heal the polarization, and to do that, we need to engage.  One of the few places where liberal coastal elites and flyover country types mix is the mobile home park business.  Our core competence is clean, safe and affordable housing, but maybe political goodwill could be a positive externality.

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And now – back to the regular programming.

I called Mike, the manager at my park in northern New York a couple of weeks ago.  We chatted for a while and then he asked me, innocently, “Have you heard any news about the election?”  This was shortly after the first of the year.  The claims of voting fraud had already been dismissed by the courts and the votes had been certified, but the official House count had not yet been made.  I thought that, maybe, he was referring to the Georgia Senate runoffs.  I stuttered and said, “Uh – which election?” 

“The presidential election.”

“Biden won.”

“I know Biden won, but have you heard anything?”

“It’s over.”

There was a bit of a catch, and a pause.

“Oh.  OK.”

I found that strange but did not think about it again until some days after January 6.  I have known for a while that Mike supports Trump, and that he spends a fair amount of time on-line.  I never thought much of either fact – that part of New York is represented in the House by Elise Stefanik, a hard-core Trump acolyte, and Mike is a digital native.   Plenty of mobile home park tenants and suppliers support the soon-to-be-former administration.[3]  During the fall, a transporter disquissed to me about the need for a border wall while he backed a home onto a set of concrete piers, and a salesman at a parts supplier walked back her statements about foreign manufacturers after she learned I supported Biden.  But once the shit went off on January 6, I realized that Mike follows the wackos who supported the insurrection on social media.  He didn’t go down to DC to participate, but that’s the crowd he hangs with, and that’s where he gets his news.  His political views would never stand up to the harsh light of Hitchens’ Razor.

But here’s the thing.  Mike is not just a good guy.  He is a great guy, and he has plenty of common sense.  He was too busy to discuss the events in DC on January 6 because he was dealing with an emergency.  Four homes had lost power because of a busted ground wire.  He had called the utility company, gotten a shut-off, re-run the wires from the transformer to the boxes, and gotten an exemption to the requirement that the wires be run underground until spring before I even knew what was going on.[4]  Two days later, the problem spread to two other homes, and he repeated the process, between 8:00 PM and 4:00 AM on a bitterly cold night.  He advertises vacant homes on his own Facebook page, bargains with suppliers, and regularly tells me things like, “I’m trying to save you money”, or, “If you don’t get paid, nobody gets paid”.  In his personal life he co-parents two small children with an ex-girlfriend who does not always pull her own weight, and he has advocated that I take it easy on tenants who have fallen behind on rent because of bona fide bad luck. That is above and beyond what I have learned to expect from pretty much anyone.  His political views are, well, bullshit, but he is a mensch.

In a recent Atlantic post, Caitlin Flanagan described the mob that invaded the Capitol as “deadbeat dads, YouPorn enthusiasts, slow students, and MMA fans”.[5]    When I read that to a young progressive recently, the young progressive said, “That’s classist”.  I said, “It gets worse”, and continued to read: “After a few wrong turns, they…pulled into the swamp with bellies full of beer and Sausage McMuffins, maybe a little high on Adderall, ready to get it done.”  That’s not just classist – that is ableist. Would she poke fun at people with polydactyly, microcephalia, or missing limbs? Ms. Flanagan’s description is not just deeply insulting; it is also wrong.  The scary thing about the MAGA movement is that many members are not wackos, at least not in regular life.  Plenty of them are red-state soccer moms and small business owners who will help you change a tire, bring your child to choir practice and then, with a straight face, tell you that water is dry.  And there are a lot of them.  Like the Alps in the poem by Basil Bunting, they are here, they are as much citizens as we coastal elite types, and they won’t go away even if we close our eyes, say “lalalalalala” and think about kale salad and sensible maternity-leave policies:

There are the Alps. What is there to say about them?
They don’t make sense. Fatal glaciers, crags cranks climb,
jumbled boulder and weed, pasture and boulder, scree,
et l’on entend, maybe, le refrain joyeux et leger.
Who knows what the ice will have scraped on the rock it is smoothing?

There they are, you will have to go a long way round
if you want to avoid them.
It takes some getting used to. There are the Alps,
fools! Sit down and wait for them to crumble!

Name-calling won’t move mountains.

I do not think that Mike ever met a Democrat before he met me.  Some of the trolls he follows on social media think that we poison wells, kidnap Republican children, control the media and finance industries and insert microchips into dollar bills that are then used to beam thoughts into peoples’ minds.  I rarely discuss politics with him, because neither of us needs that headache.  On the rare occasions that we do discuss politics, I stick to facts and policy and avoid ad hominem and character-based attacks.  He has plenty of common sense outside the political realm.  With luck, I will show him that reasonable people can disagree about policy issues, and that differences are better solved by discussion, engagement, and participation in the democratic process than by trolling, berating the Lügenpresse, and political violence.

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[1] Hitchens also said that the four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and politics.  Not relevant to the current discourse, but certainly worthy of note.

[2] When the Soviet Union fell, people asked, “What will Yakov Smirnoff do for a living now?”    The people at cnn.com will have to find another source of copy once Trump is out of the big house. 

[3] Of course the exception proves the rule.  A stripper who lives in my park in central New York had a Biden-Harris lawn sign in her lot last fall.  Because of that, I will always have a soft spot for her.

[4] The exemption was granted because the boss at the utility company had dated Mike’s sister in high school.  My response to that news was, “Infrastructure in this park is shit – I hope your sister was promiscuous”. 

[5] Like “champagne, lobster, anal sex and politics”, that phrase gains rhetorical force from the cognitive dissonance it causes by lumping unlike things together.  Asia Carrera, after all, is a member of Mensa, scored over 1440 on the SAT, and received a full academic scholarship to Rutgers. I went to fancy private schools and voted for Bernie twice, but I follow boxing and love to watch a good MMA fight.