To the editor:
Reading the latest missive from our frequent conservative letter writer caused me to think of the Dutch astronomer Tycho Brahe. Tycho was the first European astronomer to correctly ascertain the orbits of the known planets. But, famously he was so wedded to the view that the Earth was the center of the universe that he constructed a reality in which those planets and the sun somehow still orbited the Earth. The math never quite worked out, but he could never shake his view that the Earth was the center of the universe. When Tycho died, his understudy Johanes Kepler, in reviewing Tycho’s data, quickly realized that the sun was the center of a solar system and all the planets including Earth revolve around the sun, a model we all accept today as true. Which is to say that sometimes even incredibly intelligent people who are so sure they are right are blinded by their surety.
Now I am not saying that our frequent letter writing conservative neighbor is as intelligent as Tycho or Kepler, none of us are, they were both brilliant minds. But, he does correctly identify some of the more egregious problems in our society. Like Tycho constructing a fabricated world that defies the actual data though, his answer is always Trump. There is another theory called Dunning-Kreuger in which people overestimate their own knowledge on a subject. It has been shown that less knowledgeable people are often more certain of their correctness than more knowledgeable people. It is also entirely provable that liberal people are generally more educated than conservatives in the U.S. I am not saying this to demean him, rather to point out the folly of people who are so sure of themselves despite ample evidence to the contrary. But, if we were to take his advice, we should also ask him to take his own advice. For example, he suggests that if you do not like Trump you should consider moving to Canada. Perhaps if he so hates liberal policy he should consider a move to a deep red state, or even a deeply conservative country like Russia. Why remain in Massachusetts, a state founded on the very principle of sharing the common good, a commonwealth? And today it is a state with “liberal” policies that produce outcomes ranking it among the highest in education, health and wealth among other things. I’m sure folks in the deep south would welcome a Yankee immigrant. After all, immigrants are the foundation of this country, no?
He also berates “lefties” for being brainwashed by the mainstream media, yet he forgot to mention Fox News. Indeed it takes quite a myopic worldview to not see the hypocrisy of those statements. Lest we forget the past, our Founding Fathers were radicals. There was no left or right at the time, but they surely were progressives. Yet they constructed a system whereby outcomes are produced by measured debate and sometimes fractious consensus building, not seeking to remove those we disagree with or silence their voices but embrace dissent and form a whole from the disparate. Indeed most of his arguments contain a tiny grain of truth. But if the answer to every problem is liberal wrong, Trump right, one might be making Tycho’s fatal mistake. Let’s hope our conservative neighbor does not share Tycho’s self-penned epitaph, “He lived as a sage and died as a fool.”
Sean Sullivan
Village Street
