What in Reintarnation. . .?

Hello. The column I was planning to write today has been supplanted by another, based upon reader reaction to a story and poll I linked to on the weekend. It involves the possibility of reincarnation.

I know. Most of you reading this don’t believe in it. But one-fifth of you think it is true or has at least a 50-50 likelihood of being true — and you are a cynical, skeptical, secular posse. Move outward to the realm of Average Gullible American, and the percentage rises to nearly a third. Polls show that there are more than three times as many solid believers in reincarnation in The U.S. than there are atheists and agnostics — solid non-believers in God.

On a purely anecdotal level, two of my closest friends, both of whom know more about the subject than I do, do suspect that something currently beyond our comprehension, something with a seemingly paranormal, metaphysical component, might be going on.

Both of these friends are journalists. Neither is credulous nor easily taken in. The first is Tom the Butcher, who wrote an intriguing book about a psychiatrist named Ian Stevenson, whose career largely involved investigating the possibility of reincarnation through interviews with children who seem to remember past lives. Tom went to Lebanon and India with Stevenson, witnessed his interviews, and remained, if not entirely convinced, impressed and openminded enough to, you know, spend a year writing a book about it. A 25th anniversary edition of the book, Old Souls, is coming out in June; Tom has written the Afterword, and he grapples for the first time with what he personally believes. It turns out he’s still intrigued, bedeviled, and … ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

The second friend is Caitlin Gibson, who just wrote this riveting story in The Washington Post about children with strange tales of having been other people. This story has garnered more than 4,000 Comments. That’s more comments than for any story I’ve ever written, I believe. It’s why I am writing this column, now!

The Comments to Caitlin’s story were overwhelmingly favorable and open to belief, chock full of personal anecdotes that seem to support the thesis, at least on the surface. Caitlin isn’t sure what to think about the possibility of past lives but she told me she is certain that the people she spoke to were not lying.

My frequent columnist partner Gina Barreca was so taken with the concept of reincarnation that she once proposed that we consult a famous blind “telephone psychic” who could tell us if she and I knew each other in past lives. Gina had suspected that she (Gina) would wind up looking silly in the column. We called, and she did. But the point is, Gina kinda buys the idea. And Gina is a smart cookie, and ordinarily as much of a Cynic as Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek philosopher for whom the term was invented.

Reincarnation is an ancient belief that has developed a very modern fascination. There are 22 books on the Amazon page that you get when you search for “reincarnation.” And then you notice there are 75 more pages behind it, just as full as that one. Do the math, if you dare.

So. I am going to dare to spend the rest of this intro attempting to “prove” through math and science and common sense that this this is all bushwah. Please do not accuse me of cultural insensitivity (ahem, again), because roughly half of the people in countries where reincarnation is a matter of faith do not buy into it.

My thesis stems from a case I have made twice before, in contending there is no basis to believe in God. Belief in God is not quite the same as belief in reincarnation, which could, conceivably, exist as a still-mystical physical, pantheistical, casuistical system of some sort requiring no deity, just some sort of undetectable wrinkle in the space-time continuum allowing the migration of “souls,” should there be such an entity. Still, the underlying argument is similar, so that’s where we are going now.

There are many ways that deep thinkers have gone about analyzing the history of human progress. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud analyzed the march of humanity as a march of snowballing neuroses, because our persistent caveman genes linger in us, filled with the instinctive savagery and greed that were essential to survive in primitive times but have had to be stifled by the need to civilize and coexist in communities for the common weal but to individual anguish.

There were plenty other march-of-progress theories. At the turn of the 19th-20th century, American sociologist and economist Thorstein Veblen coined the term “technological determinism,” meaning that advances in technology do not merely accompany but actually determine the development of the social structure and cultural values.

Lots of other theories. Here’s mine. I doubt I’m the first to expound it or something like it, but I am likely the most obnoxious in prosecuting and defending it.

As I see it, there is one certain measure of the civilizing of humankind. It is the slow but steady dismantling of presumptions of magic to explain the world. It’s an inexorable pull downward, away from superstition and toward science and reason.

Twenty-five years ago, I drew this chart with the help of Founding Chatwoman Liz Kelly. You may have seen it once before:

The X axis is the March of Time. The Y axis is the presumption of magic and the occult to explain the world. The plummeting black line traces the steady decline of superstition and woo-woo reasoning. It’s steady.

In the beginning, of course, everything was mythology and the paranormal was accepted as truth. This was childish, and born of fear, because the world was scary and mysterious, and people wanted to feel as though they had a basic idea of how things worked so they could affect the outcome of their lives. If you think you kind of understand the nature of a hostile world, you feel less like a poor soul buffeted by chance alone — you feel marginally better. Hence, you sacrificed virgins to appease the pissed-off Gods. Diseases were caused by evil belly-dwelling goblins who could be reliably placated if you set fire to a goose.

People took comfort in simpleminded stories, tailored to fit their primitive times. The sun was dragged across the sky by a chariot. A solar eclipse occurred when celestial dragons devoured that sun. Sneezing gives Satan a moment to enter the body and do his dirty work on the soul, which resides in the liver. So. stifle that sneeze, or if you can’t, hope that someone nearby urges Almighty God to bless you.

And so forth.

Gradually, things began to change as intelligent people made actual discoveries, and lo!, things started to make better sense. The takeover by science and logic was relentless and unstoppable. Like stupid tin soldiers with popgun rifles, these myths began to fall, one by one, and then in a cascade. Not once during this steady process of enlightenment did the primacy of the occult reestablish itself, even for a day. Not once did people discover in a slap-to-the-forehead moment that, wait, it turns out that viruses are a myth, that diarrhea is, as previously suspected, caused by an incontinent dyspeptic frog living in your intestines. Not once did we decide the Mayans were right all along, that rain is not caused by colliding disparate air temperatures, but by the Chaac, the God who peed on us.

It took forever for some of these superstitious, retrograde myths to fall — it wasn’t until the 18th century that we got rid of the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings — but fall it did. (It fell from a pinnacle of unutterable stupidity — in some nation-states, kings were thought to have the God-given power to cure disease by touching the afflicted.)

From time to time we have tried to reinstitute mysticism as a life hack or a great secret of life, but they have all failed. Claims of ESP have routinely fallen apart under scientific scrutiny. Astrology, soothsaying, or the so-called psychic arts — none of them has ever produced a single verifiable truth, instead becoming a recognized, universally derided field of kooks and charlatans soaking the ditzy rich. Consider Rasputin. Consider Nostradamus. Consider the spoon benders.

Consider the ancient “science” of alchemists, who believed they could spin lead into gold through the use of an occult “Philosopher’s Stone.” Eventually, the science of chemistry gave the lie to that; it is instructive that the top alchemist of the 16th century, a man nicknamed Paracelsus, was born with the aptonymic name “Theophrastus Bombastus.”

Next up: Reincarnation. This myth will take a while to fall.

The problem with this one is that it relies entirely on a presumption of magic; there isn’t even any phony pseudoscientific underpinning in there. There is no way to reconcile the laws of physics, and relativity, and physiology with the notion of a “soul” that can hopscotch from from one body to another. Also, somehow, there must be an invisible warehouse of these soul-y things, somewhere out beyond Neptune perhaps, waiting for the right person to die. You cannot believe in reincarnation without presuming a mechanism requiring preternatural intervention: Magic and superstition. The applied science of woo-woo.

It’s easy to understand why we would WANT to believe this — that desire is, and has always been, the key to the persistence of a lot of nonsense. It’s understandable and forgivable. It’s comforting to believe that we will, in a way, live forever. It allows you to be unafraid of death. How powerful a tonic is that? It’s better than a bottle of 1925 Dr. Good tonic!

Anyway, look at the chart again. Note the unimpeded direction of the black line through time, and consider Euclid. His great treatise, Elements, forms the basis of his Method of Exhaustion, propounded by him and later echoed by Archimedes. It postulates how if you take a polygon and keep increasing its number of sides, it will slowly but eventually transform into something indistinguishable from a circle of the same volume, but never quite gets there.

This formed a basis of calculus. To grossly oversimplify: If, as one number approaches another, steadily, even if it never quite reaches it, that final almost-number is meaningful, and may be relied on mathematically.

So the question is: Where, mathematically, are we almost certain to wind up on the chart? At point A, … or point B?

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You can ask if this is all pseudo-intellectual sophistry. It’s a fair question. The answer is yes, probably. I am an ignoramus, and a serial doubter, and get paid to be provocative. But I believe it is a lot more sensible and realistic than the alternative explanation, which the non-skeptics non-helpfully proffer: “There so much more about life that we don’t know, realms we can’t understand.”

True enough. Sold. But that answer is disingenuous and circular, the way the church dismisses apparent challenges to truths that seem to contradict church dogma: “It’s a divine mystery.” No it isn’t. There is nothing divine about it.

There are many things yet to learn about life, and many of them, when revealed, will astound us. But they will be learned through science, not woo-woo. And they will be consistent with logic. Because they always have been.

Finally, you will ask (and you have), “Well, what explains the known phenomena that seem to point toward migrating souls?”

I don’t know, but I do know that this is one of my least favorite sentences in the world, commonly uttered by the ignoranti: “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

Really? Then you are a dope. Approximately 7 quadrillion individual events occur in the United States every day. If none of them ever intersected in a seemingly creepy or awe-inducing moment, well, THAT, my friends, would be nail-down evidence of the existence of God. Because it would take an overarching sentience to assure that that statistically impossible lack of coincidence could occur.

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Okay, on to the light stuff: today’s Gene Pool Gene Polls:

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Poll 2 is based on this old short video by the Onion. It may be the single most daring bit of humor I’ve ever seen. People react viscerally, one way or the other.

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And now to my nitpick of the day. My favorite dumb phrase arises in today’s The Daily Beast: “Where McCarthy distributed upwards of $400,000 to some of those members last year, Johnson has given many of them just a fraction of that.”

Beasties: That is meaningless. 99/100ths is a fraction. If you insist on being imprecise and elliptical, at least do it right. At least say a small fraction.

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Behold. We are now entering the real-time portion of The Gene Pool, where you ask questions and observations and I respond to them in real time. You send your stuff to the Make Fun of Trump Ugly Orange Button, here:

Today’s offerings, so far, mostly address Reincarnation and, of course, Hitler’s penis. If you are reading this in real time, please remember to regularly update the page, to get the most recent Questions and Observations.

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Q: This isn't about modern-day hypocrisy, but rather, the day I really learned what hypocrisy is. 

There was a girl in my fifth grade class who, according to the nun who taught us, couldn't do anything right. The sister was always on her case. When we returned from April vacation, we were told that she had died, that she "accidentally" drank some bleach. Did this ten year old girl commit suicide? We thought so. Kids aren't dumb. We all knew that you do not drink bleach.

"She was a saint," is what were heard all that day in the classroom. The nun who taught us, taught us hypocrisy and taught us well.

A:  Whoa.  Very heavy.  It reminds me of my grandmother’s funeral.  It was in a synagogue, and the rabbi thundered on – shouting to the heavens – about how Bessie Shorr was “a good woman, a deeply pious woman…” 

The rabbi had never met my grandma, who may well have been a good woman.  But Bessie Shorr never went to synagogue, happily cooked pork for dinner, and didn’t believe in God.  I was about 16 at her funeral, old enough to be appalled by the rabbi’s hypocrisy.  If I ever was going to adopt religion, that squelched it right there.

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TIMELY TIP: If you’re reading this on an email: JUST CLICK ON THE HEADLINE IN THE EMAIL AND IT WILL DELIVER YOU TO THE FULL COLUMN ONLINE. If you are reading the Gene Pool in real time, keep refreshing the screen to see the new questions and answers that appear as I regularly update the post.

If you like what you are reading, please consider upgrading your subscription to “paid.” If you don’t like what your are reading, please consider upgrading your subscription to “paid.” That way I will become your employee, and you can order me around or even fire me if I don’t shape up.

Q: Reincarnation? It's a maybe, at best. And, if it exists, is it date/time specific? That is, could the deceased come back as someone, born during the life time of their former self? And, if he/she met their former self, what then? Would they recognize him/her? And if they did, what then? The possibilities are endless, and scary. What say you? – Roger Dalrymple

A: Me say this is a funny question..  There is a Netflix comedy with Paul Rudd called Living With Yourself, and it deals with this issue through cloning.    Alas, sad to say I believe the current misinformed theory of reincarnation is that the donated sperm  soul must leap from the dead to the fetus.

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Q: Speaking of Hitler’s dick and music, I saw this last week and when you linked to that old sketch I thought you’d like to know Hitler’s dick continues to be great fodder for comedy. 

–Jose Cabrera

A: This is truly excellent. 

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Q: OK, I admit I'm a Boomer, so maybe that's why I don't get this that appeared in the Post's print edition on Saturday, 5/4/2024 (Tech Friend, A14), referencing a device called the "OctoBuddy, a suction cup sticker that lets you adhere your phone to some surfaces...": "I stick my phone to hotel mirrors to check out my outfit." Isn't that what the mirror is for? Have I been using mirrors wrong all this time? Who cares what Siri thinks,  wouldn't you be dressing for real, live people to check out your outfit? – Tom Logan - Sterling,  Va

A: This made me laugh. Indeed, that is what mirrors are for.

Q: This might be the closest thing to a perfect joke: 

“They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.”  

–Sean Clinchy

A: This gives me an idea for a perfect Weekend Gene Pool challenge.  Look for it this weekend. 

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Q: Those numbers to call if you have a gambling problem are phonies. I once called asking if I should split eights and they hung up on me. - D. Sachs

A: I am really hoping you did this.

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Q: Is there anything you don’t like about Rachel?

Yes, there is a big thing.  Sometimes, if I am shopping, I will call her and ask, say, “do we have any onions?”  and she will say “Yes,” and so I won’t buy onions and when I come home I discover Rachel, who still in her heart lives like an impoverished college student, was referring to one withered bulb from October, 2023 in the back of the fridge. That’s about it, though.  She is the almost perfect woman.   

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Q: I have not heard the word "grunted" in reference to defecation in a very long time, and saying that little "angel" clock had been "grunted out" really shows the maximum measure of your disdain. And it made me guffaw. I will direct my  attention to the task set before me in re horribleness, but once again you've set the bar so very high on adjectival usage. – Lynne Larkin

A: I briefly considered “squeezed out” but grunted is a funnier word. 

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Q: Ms. Gibson’s reincarnation story was fascinating. I’m skeptical of stuff like this, but there are things yet undiscovered that are just beyond our understanding. The nature of the soul is interesting. So who knows? I’ve experienced some things where I felt it could not be chance, that some larger force was at play. But I also think we just get lucky. Or unlucky. Your readers are largely skeptics. Ask us a question where some woo-woo unexplained thing happened, or the stars aligned (good or bad - it’s not just good). The stories will be interesting, and I bet you get a lot of them. 

A: You sent this before the Gene Pool went online today. So, consider it done.

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Q: Hypocrisy — A regular member of our golf group brought a guest with whom I played in the same foursome. Along the way, I asked the guest what he did for a living. Without hesitation, he said he was in the medical field. I further inquired as to which part of the medical field. He replied that he worked for a medical device manufacturer. Which one, I asked. When I didn’t quite recognize the manufacturer’s name, I asked him to repeat it. What I heard was J-E-W-E-L. When I finally realized.that he worked for Juul, I asked him why he considered Juul to be a medical device company when it was clearly a vaping device filling the opportunity created by tobacco’s bad reputation. His answer was immediate. Juul is/was designed as a smoking-cessation solution. Period. I said I guess that’s why they have all those fruit-flavored versions targeting tweens and teens. (My guess is that Juul prepped its employees to take the high road to make them feel better.)

A: Yep, that qualifies as hypocrisy.  And dishonest. A perfecta.

Q:  SNL did a great parody ad for the sports betting apps that calls out the hypocrisy.  

A: This is just perfect.

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Q: Gas stations that sell beer and then post signs saying don't drink and drive.  –   Gary Bowman 

A: Yep, the grandaddy of all modern hypocrisies.

Q: Aptonym is plain as day, right here. 

A: Excellent, and horrifying at the same time.  Nice work finding this.

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Q: I totally agree with your take on magic…but then I remember the Pythagorean theorem and I have to wonder if some Big Dude out there is just dicking around with us. — Jon Ketzner

A: With me, it’s the total eclipse of the Sun, meaning the moon and sun were placed EXACTLY the right distance apart to achieve it.

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Q: Your chart is bad math. It assumes the function is monotonic -- that it always decreases, never increases. I also think that's historically suspect. It may generally decrease over time, but it has almost certainly gone up occasionally (as when the religious revivals of the 19th century were in part a rebound from enlightenment rationalism). Also, it assumes that the end point it is approaching is zero, but nothing in math requires that a steadily declining function be declining towards zero. (Google "1/x+1"). There will always be some unknowns about how the universe works, however framed. "Are we headed to point A or point B?" We're heading towards somewhere in the middle, where we've always been.

A: I believe your example of the religious revivals is not parallel or indicative of a denial of science in favor of preposterous superstition.

The rest I don’t quite follow but will concede owing to my ignorance and your erudition. But I know who FDR defeated in 1944, and you don’t.

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Q:  Not sure if this counts as hypocrisy, but years ago I worked at an employee-owned company that had a buyout offer.  The longer an employee was at the company, the more shares they had, so the more they would benefit short term from a sale.  Senior management would benefit the most, so they pushed HR to encourage everybody to approve the sale.  HR became their cheerleaders, constantly talking up how it would benefit everybody.  The sale went through, most of us got modest chunks of cash, and then about as soon as we were absorbed nearly the entire HR team got axed because they were now redundant.

A: It’s not hypocrisy, its betrayal.   A step below hypocrisy. 

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Q: These are not examples of serious hypocrisy; just a couple of folks who didn't follow their own advice:

1) My parents had a friend who was an investment advisor; he died in his 70s or 80s without having made a will despite being a father and grandfather. 

2) While in the hospital for minor surgery, my mother conversed with a fellow patient who was recovering from a fall. He told her he was a safety expert and had tripped over his own untied shoelace.

Diana Oertel, San Francisco

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A: I knew a clock expert — Nat Litman, the man who taught me how to fix antique clocks — who had more than 40 clocks on the walls in his house. Almost all the wall space were clocks. None of them worked. He said he couldn’t spare the time, as it were, to fix them or even wind them.

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Q: This should settle the reincarnation question. https://www.gocomics.com/agnes/2024/05/05

– Roy Ashley

A: Indeed, it does.

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Q: I wouldn’t mind if people used TL;GU Too long; gave up. At least they would be starting out with good intentions, then thwarted by the verboseness (verbosity? Ah just say length) 

A: Agreed.  Alas, I find no such acronym online. Let’s start googleyupping it, people.

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Q: Gene, I am in a situation similar to yours when you had your dog euthanized before moving away. My husband and I have made the decision to euthanize our 18-year-old cat this weekend even though she seems relatively healthy and happy at the moment. I have had cats all my life and have had them euthanized, but have never before chosen the date in advance (there are reasons, similar to yours). It seems so cold-blooded, even though I honestly think it's for the best. Any words of wisdom? --Cat Lady

A:  It depends, Cat Lady.  Yes, I was moving and felt the Augie the Dog – 13 and suffering terribly from fleas, which at the time were untreatable – 1) had a poor quality of life and 2) would have been tormented by having to adapt to a new home in an unfamiliar place.   I’m not in favor of euthanizing an otherwise healthy and relatively happy pet.  Do my conditions resemble yourn?

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Q: Gene, Recently came across your "curry canceling" blogpost after seeing the old violin subway video and ending up down a rabbit hole of follow-up articles and other works. I think you're one of those classically funny "treasonously liberal" types whose humor I really enjoy and all of that comes through in this writing. You're totally self-aware and self-deprecating on your status at the company, being pushed out simply for being old, tendering your resignation letter and not receiving any meaningful response at all are all real and hilarious and George Costanza-esque.

 I understand choosing not to engage with the supportive mob with equally questionable motives, or the major corporate entity more than happy to throw you and your pensioned column under the bus in favor of a younger, browner, transgressive author at the mobs request. I just have to ask what's your reasoning in not reacting to the originators of your personal "canceling?" 

The type of person most worthy of criticism is exactly the one you could lay into here with all your wit and charm. The people who deliberately took one section of your article out of context, one where you even said you went out of your way to mock every cultural flavor you've come across, make yourself the fool of the article, and include every great achievement Indians have contributed to the world. I often find myself wonder if this initial serious praising signals weakness to the crowd, or adds more seriousness to the otherwise joking nature of the following sentence, but it always seems to be a common theme when canceling occurs. After taking a joke seriously, removing it from all context, then labeling it's author a virulent racist, using the magic of the internet to offload all your internalized bullying onto a singular figure, it's hard to have sympathy for someone being called "stinky" as a child. Who the fuck cares? Why would Stinky still care? Why should the author, the internet or anyone else care, unless you've made yourself out to be a perfectly innocent victim? To truly think you're in the right, well, you'd have to be a curry-huffing, street-defecating, aerosolized lead-poisoned, low-caste shit-skin! Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. — Ryan

A:  Thanks for your thoughts, and support.  I disagree with many of your thoughts. 

First off, this is the “curry canceling post” to which you refer, which I wrote in The Gene Pool a couple of months after it began.   For those readers who might be relatively new to The Gene Pool, or who never read it, I’d urge you to, if only because it is one of the most soul-baring, shit-eating things I ever wrote.  I was proud of it. 

The simple answer to your question is that I spent 30 years being treated with courtesy and respect and trust by The Post, even when I was doing things that made them nervous.  It is hard for me to imagine a better employer, anywhere.  I was paid well and I believe I was deeply appreciated.  I had ALMOST complete intellectual freedom.   The fact that I feel I was treated shabbily, and without gratitude, in my last six months is just a thing that happened, with a new administration.  I am not going to befoul the memory of those many fine years by leaving and then savaging the paper I still love.  Also, I hate whiners.  I vowed never to be one.  

When I was 20 and told my parents I was going to be a journalist, my father counseled me to work for the federal government instead, where there is job protection.  You cannot be fired unfairly, he said. He was a child of the Depression.   I laughed and said 1) I will never be fired, and; 2) If I ever WAS fired I would never fight it, because who the hell wants to work for bosses who didn’t want him, because they are ordered to? 

I never changed my view on that.   So.

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This is Gene. I am calling us down. Thanks so much for a spirited discussion. PLEASE keep sending in questions and observations, which I will ponder and answer on Thursday. Send them to:

Aand, as I said before, if you like what you are reading, please consider upgrading your subscription to “paid.” If you don’t like what your are reading, please consider upgrading your subscription to “paid.” That way I will become your employee, and you can order me around or even fire me if I don’t shape up.

On to Thursday.

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