Angina Monologue 2

You never know what will get His Majesty monologuing over breakfast.

This time, it was a brief back page story about Los Alamos being hit with a 38 million dollar fine over a leaking waste drum at WIPP.

One of the surest signs you are watching a theatrical production is when the level of heat in the argument is out of all proportion to the actual importance of the issue being argued over. It means the issue nominally being argued over is not the actual issue being argued over, which is certainly a form of theater. Or perhaps the issue nominally being argued over has acquired a deep symbolic significance that is the real thing being argued over.

I’m not sure there’s a meaningful distinction, but that’s not central to His Majesty’s point.

We have here a single steel drum beneath half a mile of rock and salt beds that popped open because some cretin packed it with organic kitty litter instead of clay kitty litter. The resulting radioactive leak was easily detected by the sensitive instrumentation in the area, before it posed any credible threat to anyone, anywhere — nor is it likely it would have posed much threat even if it had been completely ignored. As an industrial accident, it was objectively insignificant. It isn’t even in the same league as real industrial disasters, or even past incidents within the nuclear industry. The problem was found, was “voluntarily” reported by Los Alamos, and corrective measures were put into place. One would say the feedback loop functioned just fine, if one was actually interested in the feedback loop.

No, really. His Majesty actually did that quote thing with his fingers. His point being that nothing was voluntary about the reporting; LANL was expected to do it and complied.

I am reminded of a story I was told about a hunter who accidentally shot a whooping crane in the Rio Grande Valley north of Taos. He had honestly mistaken it for legitimate game, and he was foolish enough to think that lack of malice and complete transparency would turn aside any really bad consequences. $10,000 and two years in jail later, he was more enlightened.

There have been no self-reports of the slaying of endangered species by any hunters in New Mexico in the years since.

Los Alamos hasn’t that luxury.

And, yes, I inserted a helpful link to an example not voiced in His Majesty’s original monologue. I’m going to do that from time to time, because the reader cannot be expected to know what was in His Majesty’s mind the way I can.

Part of the furor is from the unintelligentsia who really believe there is a credible, even deadly, danger from even the smallest leaks of radioactivity. Many of these people are meanwhile happily drinking, smoking, and whoring.

His Majesty has a blunt and acid tongue when he gets going.

… Actually, pretty much all the time.

His Majesty is correct, though, that most people are extremely bad at gauging relative risks, let alone making any reasonable cost/benefit analysis. It’s also well-documented that when a risk is random or not a matter of one’s individual choice, it is enormously overestimated. Skydiving may be a billion times more dangerous than storage of nuclear waste at WIPP, but it’s your choice to skydive and everyone thinks he is immortal so long as he is calling the shots.

But those driving the conversation know better. They have to know better. For them, the real argument isn’t over a leaking waste drum at WIPP, or even whether Los Alamos responded adequately to the problem. Nor is it over whether there is any real danger from occasional small leaks of radiation from WIPP while it is actively receiving waste drums. The real argument is over whether we should have any nuclear power plants. Efforts to improve the safety of the nuclear cycle only get in the way of that argument.

Thus the level of vitriol in some of the press reactions to the Los Alamos findings. They aren’t angry because Los Alamos goofed up and had to fix its procedures; they’re angry because Los Alamos fixed its procedures. In their minds, the correct response would have been to acknowledge that the procedures can never be perfected (true, but unimportant from a strict engineering perspective) and abandon nuclear power.

But that’s an argument that will never be settled. Too many people will never be comfortable with anything having to do with nuclear power. Too many other people see no alternative that does not result in heavier non-nuclear environmental damage or widespread human impoverishment.

The problem that arises is that any process for improving the safety of nuclear power becomes a battleground for debating the safety of nuclear power. The two conversations speak past each other. You can’t productively sit down and figure out how to make a technology safer and better when half the people at the table have a vested interest in proving that the technology cannot be made safer and better.

In effect, you’re trying to discuss utilities management with a group that believe that the way to reduce the environmental damage of sewage is to sew everyone’s anuses shut.

This sounded like the end of a thought, and His Majesty paused to take a long sip of coffee. (I believe I have mentioned before that His Majesty is not a member.)

But I had a feeling he was just getting warmed up.

This is wonderfully illustrative, Lord Vader. I don’t actually care much about WIPP; I do not plan to be here in 10,000 years to see whether it ever leaks or not, and I’ve already suffered enough radiation-induced mutations that a few more do not worry me.

But this is of a kind with the celebrated observation that faculty arguments are so bitter precisely because so little is at stake. This is incorrect. If the arguments were actually over what the arguments were nominally over, it would be true, but the argument is really a proxy for a cosmic clash of worldviews, and to people whose whole lives are built around articulation of worldviews, it is as if they were arguing over how to deal with a space station the size of a small moon that had just come out of hyperspace next to their pitiful little planet.

I wish His Majesty would stop alluding to that unfortunate incident. It was all Tarkin’s fault, after all. The man was insane.

You see the same thing in your church. Arguments about whether women can wear pants to church are objectively about as low-stakes as any argument could conceivably be, particularly since there is not actually any rule about how to dress in church. Yet the “Wear Your Pants to Church and Take Pictures for the New York Times” movement succeeded in creating a small furor. This is because the real argument is not over whether your church has, or should have, a dress code, or what that dress code should be. It is over whether unwritten customs should carry any weight in your church. Except, not really; every human institution has its unwritten customs and they always and obviously carry considerable weight. The real argument is over whether Boyd K. Packer should be taken more seriously than, say, Kaimi Wenger on what those unwritten customs are or should be. It’s really about the nature of ecclesiastical authority in your church.

I was dumbfounded. I really had no idea that His Majesty followed the Mormon blogosphere. I am beginning to believe that there is very little I take an interest in that he does not also take an interest in, if only to keep tabs on what I’m up to. Or perhaps I’m just growing paranoid.

 But, of course, this is obvious to any informed observer. I’m not saying anything new here.

The debate over women and the priesthood seems to at least have the merit of being fairly honest about what the stakes are. But this is mere appearance. At present, new leadership are chosen by the old leadership, who are all male and almost all true believing Mormons, who naturally look for new leaders who are also male and true believing Mormons. Kate Kelly wishes for the new leadership to include females, but what is less obvious (but nonetheless clear to the discerning Sith) is that she wishes for the new leadership to include persons, male or female, who are not true believing Mormons. This is not as risible as it sounds. One need but look at the traditional mainline liberal Protestant sects — if you can still locate them — to see that it has actually been put into practice in the past.

Except that even this is not the true stakes. Kate Kelly is, by all accounts, intelligent and educated. She must know that taking her case to the wider public, by which she means readers the New York Times, actually hurts her cause. Your church will doubtless dig in its heels and hold tight to its practices, rather than do anything to suggest its practices come any way but by revelation, and of course God does not rule by popular vote. (Take that any way you like.) The real stakes are Kate Kelly’s self-image, which is that of a crusader on the right side of history.

I almost chuckled at the irony of the last phrase, but my vocorder doesn’t actually accommodate laughter very well (it comes out sounding like I am the victim of my own Force-choke) and, in any case, one does not interrupt His Majesty.

There is no higher stakes for anyone with as healthy a self-regard as Ms. Kelly obviously possesses. That is to say, there is no higher stakes for almost anyone with an IQ above room temperature.  Call me cynical, but I believe even Mother Theresa was largely driven by the need to uphold a particular self-image.

Why, yes. Yes, I do call His Majesty cynical.

This naturally raises the question of whether any public dialog can be more than a particularly tawdry kind of public theater.

No. Your thoughts betray you, Lord Vader, but the answer to your question is No. No public dialog can be anything but theater.

The real questions are whether private dialog is any better; and, if so, whether this means that transparency is one of the most overrated of civic virtues. And whether is is possible, or even necessary, to resolve public issues through public dialog in spite of its inherently theatrical nature. I’ll leave  you to ruminate on these questions; it’s time for me to go feed the kittens, after which I intend to make good use of the hot tub. I do believe I overdid the exercise room at the senior center yesterday.

Three feral kittens placed with us for foster care by the local animal shelter. Hitler was fond of his dog, after all. But I think His Majesty also gets a kick out of socializing them. It is vaguely reminiscent of turning a very young Jedi.

His Majesty has never been married, or at least not to my knowledge. So perhaps the obvious illustration of His Majesty’s theme, namely, a couple arguing over new upholstery who are really arguing over their sex life, should not be expected to have occurred to him.

I think the element which is missing from His Majesty’s monologue is love. His Majesty doesn’t comprehend love. Love allows marriages to work in spite of the human tendency towards theater. Call me a romantic if you like, but I’m actually thinking of that form of love we call charity, which is the pure love of Christ. Charity casteth out fear, including the fears that drive theatrics, in marriage and elsewhere. Charity is essential for any kind of genuine honesty.

I sometimes think His Majesty is what I would be if I had never had the experience of knowing God.