Red-Teaming & Rhetoric (and Arguments Like that on Abortion)

Apropos of little — for a long time it was and apparently remains conventional for US forces in war-games, at least of the table-top varieties, to be the Blue Team and the opponents the Red Team. So there's the handy expression and concept, "red-teaming it": for working out strategies from the point of view of one's opponent(s). Sort of "walk a mile in his shoes," but maybe while heavily armed. 

We asked students to do something similar when writing argument papers in Rhet 101, when they got to the "Refutation" part of the argument and needed to respond to "obvious objections." Well, "obvious to whom?" and "how obvious?" (you don't want to raise objections that are just silly — or are pretty powerful, but easily overlooked).

More Americans need more experience "red-teaming" (also reading more literature and "mindful" game-playing) and working through the logic of situations, including logic using premises we don't share, even premises we abhor.

For one thing, we'd get fewer references to "senseless violence" when the mayhem is probably evil but is, if anything, too logical. The leadership of your rebel army wants peace talks with the Imperial government, and your subgroup doesn't? Some "naked infants spitted upon pikes" from a nursery for the kids of government officials will stop those talks. Fast. And invite reprisals that will keep the war going strong for months to come. You believe that human beings are essentially a human soul, that each soul is of infinite value, and that your job as an agent of the Inquisition of Holy Mother Church is to save souls by any means necessary? Then effective means up to an including the destruction of the world — mere  finite matter — can be justified, and the torture of a heretic arguably an act of love. 

We'd also get "logical" being used less as a kind of Vulcan compliment word and get it back to a neutral meaning. «All men are green; Socrates was a man; therefore Socrates was green» — is logical but you can safely bet untrue. 

Being able to "red-team" an argument is even more important when we're not talking about enemies but just opponents on some political issues who might be our allies on others. It's a way to learn (to use another old expression) "where they're coming from" and understand the logic of their arguments — even when they might not understand the logic because, like most of us, most of the time, they haven't worked through "where they're coming from" and how the hell they got to where they are, taking positions that look obvious to them and — in bad cases — just "senseless" to you.

So let's get to an argument where we need such thinking 'cause currently it keeps going around in circles, when it doesn't "spiral out of control." Abortion.

Consider some descendants of an Inquisitor and of a rebel willing to make good on a government terror threat — the line on spitted infants is from that " mirror of all Christian kings" (II.Cho.6), Shakespeare's Henry V — and how they might be arguing.

One, and it might be either, sees humans as essentially a soul, with a human soul entering matter at the moment a human child is conceived. So a human zygote — a fertilized human egg — is essentially a soul to be saved or damned, a soul of infinite value, and as yet unbaptized and unborn the first time, let alone "born again." (I'm conflating some belief systems here, but "'good enough' is good enough.") To kill intentionally that zygote, embryo, fetus, and, eventually, soon-to-be-born child is murder to start with plus, far worse, damning an innocent soul perhaps to limbo or, perhaps, "the easiest room in hell," as the estimable Rev. Mr. Michael Wigglesworth puts it in his "Day of Doom" (see lines 345-60, or don't; even if you agree with the theology, it's a really, really, really awful poem). 

The other can cite the doctrine of the sovereignty of free people over their bodies and the right of women not to have to go through a pregnancy they don't want. And go on to cite how enforced pregnancy has fit into the history of men keeping women unfree. 

Now the pro-choice person here can say s/he doesn't believe in souls, and the anti-abortion person can argue s/he accepts the history but that the emphatically finite Earthly rights of pregnant women are outweighed by the right to life — not just physical life, but a chance at "life eternal." 

And the figurative "game" — the argument — doesn't really even get started. In a minimum of two games, there are two winners in their own terms, and nothing has gotten settled.

"Red-teaming" the abortion argument is important to show both logical, hence "extreme," sides how serious and seriously dangerous the abortion argument is. 

Many pro-choice people might just say, and will say if pressed, "Well, we don't believe in souls and ensoulment and all that." Now red-team it. If humans are just meat, what then? If there's no problem killing a zygote or embryo or even a fetus, when does the problem enter in? It's a leap into the absurd to believe in a God and a God moreover who cares — in the midst of a massive universe — cares about human beings, period; but in that objective view of things it's just an assertion contrary to fact (as in, probably, "a lie") that the human species, as meat, has any significant value, let alone any individual human being. 

To which the pro-choice person can say, "Well, I believe in human value; I feel the value of the child in my arms; I sense it when I talk to people" and, with that confession of faith — that absurd leap of faith if you know humans and our history — there may be a reduction of contempt for one's opponent who starts with another leap of faith; and reductions of contempt are frequently useful.

And for the anti-abortion person to be "pro human life," with human value and dignity — that person must think through the situations of individual women forced to have babies they don't want, and the history of women kept in subjugation. 

And where do we go from there?

And then, I suggest, from there we think through what happens if that damn Red Team and our fine and pure Blue Team press our points to a philosophically pure, radically, essentially, totally-pure pure conclusion. What should be done with people who'd continue the millennia-long persecution of women — who'd enslave women to the making of babies? What should be done with murderers of infants and souls? 

Shall we, say, fight to the death? Or exhaustion of resources? 

There is precedent.

Let he who is without sin, she who is most rigorous, cast the first molotov cocktail.

There are lots of precedents.

My own suggestion is for backing off: agree that maybe literal fighting has never been such a great idea, and a really bad one given the current range and availability of weapons. My own suggestion is for pragmatic, messy, political thinking: sometimes in the manner of Machiavelli, sometimes in the manner of the compassionate, practical saint or holy fool. 

Eventually, we can get a "technological quick fix" for the abortion issue. Our fairly near descendants can declare a human embryo a person under the law from implantation on — and remove the embryo to storage and, in another "eventually," the womb of a woman who wants a baby. Or, eventually, an artificial womb. Such actions would be too expensive to be done frequently, so we should do what we should be doing anyway — the Church gets the nature part of "Natural Law" wrong here — and coming up with really effective contraception: i.e., implants or whatever so that women and girls, men and boys are sterile until they desire children. Until then: working full-tilt on a male contraceptive, on making contraception readily available, and, starting, say, ten years ago, inventive and shameless "Wrap that Willy!" campaigns to encourage condom use.

The logically and morally rigorous probably can't go along, but the rest of us can do fairly well seeing things from the points of view of others. And since we probably can't exterminate our opponents and damn well shouldn't try; since even as we wouldn't like to be silenced, we shouldn't even try to silence others ... Well, we can muddle through on our disagreements, and agree and cooperate where we can. 

As I said, it's messy, but necessary for that social life, civilization experiment thing.  

More in Heaven and Earth ...: Hamlet and Theories (7 April 2013)

From an AP cosmology story, much repeated, March 2013:

            “The universe is described amazingly well by a simple model,” 

said Charles Lawrence, the lead Planck scientist for NASA […].  ***

            “We [may soon] understand the very early universe […] 

better than we understand the bottom of our oceans” […]. ***

             Two of [… the] theorists […] said before the announcement 

that they were sort of hoping that their inflation theory 

would not be bolstered. [...] because taking inflation 

a step further leads to [... an] infinite number of universes.

        
          In "The Graveyard Scene" in Hamlet (5.1), Prince Hamlet asks the Gravedigger, "How long will a man lie i' th' earth ere he rot?" and is told that if the man isn’t already rotten, for they have many syphilitic and otherwise corrupted corpses "now-a-days that will scarce hold the laying in," a corpse will last "some eight year or nine year," with the Gravedigger adding, "A tanner will last you nine year." Hamlet asks, "Why he," a tanner, "more than another?", and the Gravedigger replies, "Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade that a' [= he] will keep out water a great while, and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body" (152-62 [lineation may vary]).

         Now if you're preparing for a quiz on Hamlet, you should note that Hamlet's exchange with the Gravedigger is preceded by our learning that Hamlet is thirty years old — so he is, so to speak, a grad student at Wittenberg U. (1.2.112-14), not some callow youth — and that the dialog here gets in water imagery (a motif in this play) and hits on some important themes about the corruption of the flesh and hints about the possible corruption of mothers. That Hamlet can joke about death and corruption and let pass a word like "whoreson" indicates that he's in a much better mental state than we've seen him in earlier, soliloquizing at length and depressingly on life and death and corruption and his mother. Ah, there's nothing like getting away from the ol' castle for a bit of sea air and fighting pirates and bumping off a couple of school chums to chase away that nasty manic-depression!

         But let's assume you're not going to be quizzed on Hamlet any time soon and let me get to the "your" in the Gravedigger's phrases, "your water" and "your whoreson dead body." Just what it means, or doesn't mean, will be important when I finally get around to my topic.

         (Hey, if your whorechild typical journalist nowadays can habitually shoot to hell the opening three paragraphs of just about any news story by devoting them to "human" and "local interest" bullsh*t, then I can enlighten and entertain you recycling bits and pieces of my Shakespeare study guides.)

         Basically, when the Gravediggers refers to "your whoreson dead body," the "your whoreson" could be replaced by the article "a"; the phrase is a kind of vulgar place-holder with all the meaning and lack of meaning of, say, "your dumb-ass" in "your dumb-ass sprocket wrench" in the mouth of a stereotyped New Jersey mechanic in an old comedy routine.

         And "your water" just means "water," although if you want to hear an undertone suggesting urine, go ahead: the company Clown played the Gravedigger, and the Clown is supposed to be a little foul-mouthed.

         Anyway, keep in mind the meaning and nonmeaning of "your" when you consider Hamlet's more earnest colloquy with Horatio on ghosts and Hamlet's "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy" (1.5.166-67).

         Horatio's philosophy is mostly a fashionable Renaissance Stoicism in the reformed Roman tradition: as Horatio melodramatically says of himself — he's gesturing at suicide here — "I am more an antique Roman than a Dane" (5.2.330). This means that Horatio is like Mr. Spock in Star Trek: a rational being, by our standards unemotional, anti-emotional, and detached: but not totally detached; Mr. Spock is loyal, and good Stoics should practice rational brotherly love. More relevant here, Stoicism holds that the universe is determined and, most relevantly, the universe makes sense, and a sense humans can figure out and, rationally, live by.

         Now, I firmly believe that our universe is a universe: one thing, governed by laws that do make sense. I believe in one universe, at least for us — multiple or infinite universes would only reinforce my point; I believe in one universe, that makes sense, and which humans can have some success in figuring out and must attempt to figure out.

         This I believe (though not in ghosts).

         I am certain, however, that the human species is vanishingly small compared to the size of the universe and our history only a moment in the history of the universe. Given our radically limited perspective and experience, we are as a species necessarily parochial in our knowledge.

         Necessarily, there are more things in that universe than we can know with any degree of confidence, and just short of necessarily there are far more and far, far different things than can be dreamt of by even the most profound philosophers.

         Physicists may eventually work out a Grand Unified Theory of the physical universe and work from there to a Theory of Everything — everything in terms of physics; however, we're not going to get certainty with some general, philosophical Theory of Everything.

         "Pretty bloody obvious," you may say. I'll answer that I was taught early on in grad school that "The first duty of a critic" — literary critic in this case — "is to state the obvious"; and I've learned since that it's the duty of social critics to keep harping on the obvious and sensible until a few additional people eventually get it.

         So, then, a pronouncement: Yea, verily, no theory is complete, except in an ironic and paradoxical sense this theory of no theory being complete, and this unfortunate fact of existence has important ethical and political implications.

         Most centrally, it means that political Grand Theories of Everything —"totalizing theories," "metanarratives" — are always suspect.

         Does that mean we shouldn't use such theories?

         Nope.

         Does that mean a radical skepticism where you doubt everything, or a radical relativism where you say, "Everyone is entitled to their opinion" (sic on the "their") — and all opinions are just opinion and equal? Does it mean comfortable acquiescence in paradox and contradiction?

         Nope, and nope, and not that either.

         If you act in the world, you make decisions, and you make them on the basis of some sort of ethics, though for some nasty people an ethical system not much beyond "Hurray for me, and piss on you all." If you live in the world, you theorize the world, and there's much to be said for developing a philosophy of life and a way of life and not just some sort of life-style; there's much to be said for at least occasional commitment.

         If you act in the world, you should think about the world, and you should be very, very uncomfortable with contradictions and paradoxes and find "cognitive dissonance" not just uncomfortable but downright painful.

         There are situations in which you must act as if you were confident of the rightness and justice of your actions; it's just that you should never, ever come to believe in your own rightness and righteousness. There are situations in which you must commit yourself to actions you know are problematic.

         I for one am not an absolute pacifist, which means I believe there are situations where the least bad thing one can do involves minimally the threat of killing, wounding, and maiming people, and a willingness to carry out the threat. What you may not do is say that such killing (etc.) or even just destruction of property is a good thing. You must keep in mind something Oliver Cromwell said and should have kept in mind more himself: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ," Cromwell, wrote the Church of Scotland, "think it possible that you may be mistaken" (3 Aug. 1650).

         Cromwell was a good Puritan, who followed a Way and had a philosophy, theology, and theories about politics and very effective theories about the organizing and applying of military force to resolve political issues. He would have done well, though, "think it possible that" he might have been "mistaken" when, say, ordering the massacre of Drogheda in 1649, part of Cromwell's brutal (re)conquest of Ireland.

         In my teaching Eric Hoffer's 1951 study of fanaticism, The True Believer — with a touch or two of Søren Kierkegaard's 1843 Fear and Trembling — I used a thought experiment I called, "The Grand Inquisitor." Fyodor Dostoevsky had his version in The  Brother's Karamazov, and Steven Pinker uses a similar argument in The Better Angels of Our Nature, but this was my version, and I have priority on Pinker here and can claim to have offered a pedagogical "homage" to Dostoevsky.

         I asked the class to consider a nice Jewish girl in the hands of the Grand Inquisitor in the Year of His Lord 1500-something, having her breasts torn off by the Inquisitor's torturers (a detail I did not make up); or they could picture less sentimentally an energetic and persuasive male heretic — converso or Christian — being racked. I asked the class to judge the Inquisitor.

         And after a moment, I noted that if the Inquisitor's theology was correct, souls were of infinite value and the loss of one soul to the Devil would be an infinite loss. I also reminded them of Hoffer's observation that coercion can be effective; people converted by force can be quite devout, at least in part because the faith forced upon us had better be true, or we were cowards and traitors to our faith to succumb to force.

         To get technical, and mathematical, the salvation of a soul could be well bought at the price of the destruction of the material universe: the material universe is finite. Certainly, the salvation of a soul is worth the wrecking of a body or two: for eternal bliss one would do well to exchange a few minutes or hours or weeks of worldly torment. So torturing the girl could be an act of Christian love.

         Torturing the heretic can also be an act of Christian love, and it would certainly be (in an Inquisitor's view) a necessary and sound act of religious policy: heresy endangers many souls and heretics must be converted or, minimally, silenced and, where practicable, silenced in a way — to apply a formulation from the 1561 play Gorboduc — "As may be both due vengeance to themselves, / And wholesome terror to posterity" (5.3.91-92).

         If you throw in Kierkegaard, the Grand Inquisitor gets nicely problematic: there is the possibility he's a Knight of Faith, and, as such still dangerous but not despicable. Knights of Faith are very rare, however — as Kierkegaard was well aware — and it is way more likely that inquisitors were fanatics and therefore dangerous and, especially in Eric Hoffer's interpretation, highly despicable.

         A Grand Inquisitor thought experiment demonstrates the problem of any system that sets up a knowable and achievable good of infinite value. Actually achieving an "end" of infinite value would justify any means. Transcendent immortal souls, especially those separable from the body, are clearly such good things. But you don't need souls or God for a transcendent Good; eutopia will do. Pinker makes this anti-utopian argument, and it's one of the few clichéd parts of Better Angels. I'm a member in good standing of the Society for Utopian Studies, and I'll put the matter like this. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, Oscar Wilde said, "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing." Wilde said that in 1891. After the utopian disasters of the 20^th century, including experiments calling themselves "socialist," it is better to say that our mental maps must always include a eutopia like Sir Thomas More's Utopia: a thought experiment of a Good Place — not a perfect place but a good one — an imaginary place that can provide a Norm, standards, which we can use to judge the existing places: possible futures by which we can judge the present and get ideas for improvement. But if a mental map of the world without eutopias is incomplete, maps giving routes to utopia — singular — are disastrous to navigate by.

         A single, uncomplicated, total, and totalizing theory of the world can lead to paranoid and/or totalitarian horrors.

         This side of the abstruse math of the basic forces of the universe, there is little hope for Grand Unified Theories of anything. Indeed, in physics and math it's been clear since the early 20^th c. that their systems can be unified, coherent, powerful, and beautiful, but not totally certain nor complete. As a practical matter, in the world of everyday human scale and experience, theories and whole world-views are inevitable, necessary, and usually useful; it's just that sooner or later, and often sooner rather than later, they run into problems.

         A joke from the former Soviet empire has it that "Everything Marx told us about communism was a lie; unfortunately everything he told us about capitalism was true." Allowing for the hyperbole of joking, the point is well taken. There is more in heaven and earth and practical economics than dreamt of in the philosophies of old Marxists or the works of aging neocons and neoliberals.

         There is much to be said in both classical physics and military theory for equating speed with mass. In the US wars against the Iraqi military under Saddam Hussein, "speed kills" worked for tactics, and the war-wonks' "Revolution in Military Affairs", American style, was highly effective in the First (1990-91) and Second (2003) Iraq Wars. Effective, that is to say, in formal war, against the Iraqi military; to put the matter mildly, the theories haven't worked out so well from, say, 2005 on, with the Iraqi insurrection.

         Similar arguments can be made about US warfare in Vietnam, and God knows that's where I'm coming from. The accusations of "military madness"and "the illogic of war" have their points, but what I recall most is guys in power confident about their theories.

         It was a complicated world out there, Horatio, just here on Earth in the Danish Empire of the Dark Ages or in Renaissance Europe. It was more complicated world for Donald Rumsfeld or Robert McNamara, and remains so for economists and politicians and social critics. "Your philosophy" just won't cover it all, and you — we, all of us — need to be open in deriving our philosophies and for modifying them. Indeed, we can even learn now and then from our opponents: we may think them vicious, evil, and stupid, and they may be vicious, evil, and stupid; but our enemies just may, occasionally, have some good ideas.


         And Hamlet, I'll allow you this bit of insight from a royal rationalist from a happier play. As Duke Theseus says in A Midsummer Night's Dream, with multiple ironies he doesn't understand, "shaping fantasies" can sometimes "apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends" (5.1.5-6). Still, outside of make-believe Denmark, Horatio's first hypothesis is correct: ghosts are just people's "fantasy" (Ham. 1.1.23). You were and are right, though, Hamlet — basically, more right than you and Shakespeare could know: even without supernatural ghoulies and ghosties and mythical beasties, there are far, far more things in a vast and incredibly ancient universe than can be dreamed of in any mode of human thought; there are far more things about mere human society than any theory will entirely comprehend.

COSMOS: Tyson, Bruno, and Despair (31 March 2014)

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            I'm writing this blog post pretty much while viewing the third installment of the new iteration of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, this time with Neil deGrasse Tyson as our guide on this "Spacetime Odyssey" (30 March 2014).

            I was a devoted watcher of and listener to the Sagan version, and so far I have enjoyed greatly the Tyson program and, I hope, I've learned from it.

            Still, I'll complain this far (excluding using a buggy whip with a buggy with horses to illustrate movement faster than the speed of sound, which I'll trust PETA to cover).

            Tyson presents Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) as a great martyr to science for his standing up for his belief in an infinite universe and standing up to the Inquisition and getting burned for it. Two things: first, Bruno was burned more for his heresy of pantheism — which got Baruch Spinoza in trouble later — than for his cosmology, and, second, he was, personally, something of an asshole: an unpleasant person who could have stayed out of Italy and (probably) out of the flames. The Inquisition was despicable because it tortured and killed people for all sorts of reasons, not just because one of them was the usefully radical thinker Giordano Bruno. (Galileo was a different story: he was naïve enough to go to Rome to speak Truth to Power, but sensible enough to shut up when Power showed him the horrible things they'd do to him if he didn't shut up.)

            Also I am definitely prejudiced against Isaac Newton after listening to Neal Stephenson's BAROQUE CYCLE novels, but even allowing for that I'll throw in that Tyson is soft on Newton and, so far in the series, unfair to Newton's opponent on the invention of "the Calculus," Gottfried Leibniz. Stephenson's fictional villain aside, Tyson understates just how weird some of Newton's ideas were. Newton's dedication to alchemy was a bit much moving into the 18^th century, and the guy was an oddball among exegetes of the Biblical Book of Revelation, and there's an impressively high bar for weirdness among people obsessed with Revelation.

            Far more important, Tyson usefully takes on Creationists, but, like most people arguing for scientific cosmology and world-view, Cosmos argues past the God-folks' major concern — and, therefore, argues a bit in bad faith.

            Tyson and Cosmos beautifully demonstrate how scientific thought has, so to speak, moved human beings from the center of the universe. To start with we have moved from the center, in terms of the physical structure of the cosmos as we usually think of it. After that, we have been decentered in terms of time. What scientific cosmography, cosmology, and — to warp a word's meaning a bit — scientific "history-ography" has done is show us that the traditional idea of human centrality is a natural enough illusion, but an illusion.

            And here I'll quote one version of several of my quotations of Robert Ardrey on what Tyson et al. don't get into with the human implications of that illusion.

         In African Genesis (1961), Robert Ardrey recounts a theory from the early 1940s: The Illusion of Central Position. According to the theory, this illusion "is the birthright of every human baby." A baby boy enters the world and "Bright objects appear for his amusement, bottles and breasts for his comfort. His groping consciousness finds no reason at all to doubt the world's consecration to his needs and purposes. His Illusion of Central Position is perfect" (African Genesis 144; ch. 6). With maturity, however, the illusion is undercut and the child and then the man comes to a truer perception of his place in the scheme of things.

Nonetheless the theory grants that should a man ever attain a state of total maturity — ever come to see himself, in other words, in perfect mathematical relationship to the tide of tumultuous life which has risen upon the earth and in which we represent but a single swell; and furthermore come to see our earth as but one opportunity for life among uncounted millions in our galaxy alone, and our galaxy as but one statistical improbability, nothing more, in the silent mathematics of all things—should a man, in sum, ever achieve the final, total, truthful Disillusionment of Central Position, then in all likelihood he would no longer keep going but would simply lie down, wherever he happened to be, and with a long-drawn sigh return to the oblivion from which he came. (145; ch. 6)

And we can add today that our universe may be only one among several or many or an infinite number of universes, and that whether our universe peters out through entropy or reduces to nothingness in The Big Crunch, our universe is doomed; so even if a human being gained galactic glory, that, too, would be, in terms of the Big Picture, fleeting.

            Now when I'm operating in scientific or scholarly mode, I am a good materialist (though recognizing that nowadays even the concept of "matter" is problematic), and I accept a universe of, in Carl Sagan's words, "billions upon billions of stars" and galaxies; and I would like every human being on Earth to accept that universe. But that mode of scientific thought is responsibly realistic only when the "hard" sciences are combined with the "softer" ones dealing with human beings as such, and with philosophy.

            Human beings need myths of human significance, or Buddhist techniques of embracing nothingness, or instruction in a bracing philosophy like atheistic Existentialism that starts with human insignificance, moves into despair such as Ardrey describes, and then tries to carry on. What we don't need, what is acting in bad faith, is expanding the universe infinitely beyond human scale and then failing to deal with the human implications of such ultimately philosophical moves.

            There are theistic Existentialisms and other philosophies where one takes a leap into the absurd and says God exists and functions and for some mysterious reason cares about the physical universe and maybe consciousness down to the minute and trivial level of human beings. Such beliefs are respectable, I think, so long as one robustly admits the leap of faith there, and insists on its absurdity. What annoys me is ignoring the problem or — what Tyson is not guilty of but some are — what annoys me is people holding in contempt a leap into absurd faith in God while asserting the downright lie that we humans, in terms of The Big Picture, are somehow important or that human life has value beyond that which we have chosen, egotistically and arbitrarily — and necessarily — to assign it.

            Carl Sagan is one of my heroes, and I strongly respect Neil deGrasse Tyson, Seth Macfarland, and the other people responsible for the new Cosmos. But I hope someone on local access or in a very small niche market gets out a money-losing, unpopular show on Cosmos and Chaos and the Human Implications of a Rigorous Materialism.

            Nowadays to assert the literal truth of creation myths such as the two in the Biblical Book of Genesis is to lie and to lie ignorantly and arrogantly. To accept the Cosmos concept of the universe as, to put it gently, unproblematic for human worth and dignity, is also to lie.

            I'm a life member of the American Civil Liberties Union and condemn the Roman Catholic Church for their condemnation of Giordano Bruno and prosecution of Galileo Galilei; to punish people for beliefs and speech is to do evil. This much, though: in Bruno even more than Galileo, the Church sensed danger, and, that far, in the long term — for secular Humanists as well as for religious folk — they sensed correctly. 

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ADDENDUM, 1 Jan. 2018: Tyson does get into human smallness, but in a cheerful, upbeat way <http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2018/01/01/neil-degrasse-tyson-brings-astrophysics-down-to-earth>.