Theocracy Watch
How “1+2+3+4+… = -1/12” and “1x1=2” Explain Everything
Or at least much of how civilization seems to be going in reverse
Ramanujan on the left is the genius (in case the caption is too subtle). He’s the one famous for “1+2+3+4+…= -1/12”. That’s actual math, unintuitive though it be. We’ll elaborate in a sec.
Terrence Howard on the right is the crackpot, an actor who for about a decade now has been doing the rounds peddling a nuttiness of all nuttinesses called Terryology, a purported compendium of alternative STEM knowledge (I kid you not), which includes the “1x1=2” thingy, which is pseudomath for idiots, suckers and tricks … same diff.
A New Science to replace the blinkered Mainstream one … “The Science”, as its deniers like the Flat Earthers put it.
(What is it with all these loons, hucksters and charlatans who use “mainstream” as a pejorative? As if the fringe {Press/Media, Scientists, Financiers, Educators, Politicians …} are somehow automatically an upgrade.)
Maybe Howard’s is the greatest act of comedic performance art since Andy Kaufman. I doubt it.
Kaufman wasn’t dangerous. Howard is feeding the broader science-denier movement that is eroding the intellectual foundation of our civilization, in no small part responsible for the rise of all things illiberal in world and US politics, at both ends of the horseshoe.
Shame on those who have given this crackpottery a platform, like Joe Rogan, The View and, most of all, the Oxford Union.
In contrast, Srinivasa Ramanujan is widely acclaimed as one of the greatest mathematical minds of all time. An intuitive genius comparable to Mozart in the sense that he simply saw formulae and solutions in his head and wrote them down.
The “1+2+3+4+… = -1/12” equation relies on advanced summation methods. I’m not a mathematician so I won’t try to explain the full proof. Wikipedia is your friend, for those interested in that level of detail. For us civilians, it turns on the fact that infinity, so infinite series, can’t be treated like ordinary numbers, and so normal arithmetic operations like addition, subtraction and multiplication (as well as the ‘=’ sign) have special meanings.
In the spirit of the asterisk (see below), it’s worth noting that not all eminent mathematicians agree with -1/12. Euler, for one (see WP article linked above), father of “The Most Beautiful Equation”:
Okay, you may say, so far so good, if a tad geeky … but exactly how does this explain everything, per your title above?
Thanks for asking.
“Everything” in our present context means full stacks of ideas, from the highest, most complex levels of political economy — its abstract principles and specific architectures, methods and policies, including both the domestic and international aspects — down through their underlying supporting disciplines like finance, psychology, sociology, law, language, ethics, etc… through the physical sciences, math and logic all the way to epistemology.
How we know … “K”, in the vernacular.
The difference between any old belief, no matter how strongly held and subjectively experienced (even collectively), and Justified True Belief, which is the academic definition of K.
Liberty-centric democratic republics striving to be Tranquil Unions at scale require a shared epistemology, even when pluralistic and allowing individuals and groups to pursue highly diverse (at the limit antagonistic) non-shared ideas of The Good (= axiologies). At minimum you have to have some shared means of determining whether an idea/belief is true and justified or bad/false and arbitrary when making Law.
Argue all you want over taste/axiology/value … subjective beliefs … if you like wasting your time … but there’s no arguing over things that settle in the math/logic->physics->chemistry->biology->anthropology stack of K. Like 1x1=1 not 2. Or water is a molecule of two hydrogens and one oxygen. Or the earth is a globe.
(Maybe, to violate Occam’s Razor, it will be helpful to the reader to make the shorthand “K*”, to emphasize the crucial aspect of the scientific method that there is always the falsifiability requirement … but, no, Terryology does not qualify as exercising the asterisk when it comes to “1x1=1”.)
The alternative is to live in an Alito/Rome society of competing non-negotiables and irreconcilable absolutes … dogmas … abortion is or is not evil; gender is or isn’t binary; borders should or shouldn’t be open as a matter of justice; war is or isn’t always bad; majorities should or shouldn’t have the right to turn their lists of sins into laws that apply to the minorities, and so on.
Just ‘cuz (we say so).
Never-ending strife and decohesion, fighting at the ballot box, in the courts and ultimately in the streets. Or worse, Orwellian totalitarian extermination of the basic freedoms of thought, conscience and expression. Think North Korea.
Going all the way back to the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, our tradition has an almost unbroken history of the struggle between supernaturalist/faith and naturalist/reason epistemology.
Even in the darkest medieval centuries of the theocratic wrangling between emperors and kings versus popes in Western Europe, there were thinkers and voices of reason, keeping the flame of our classical Greco-Roman heritage alive, culminating in the Founders of the USA, all of whom picked pen names from the pantheon of antiquity while they needed anonymity to swerve King George’s gibbet.
No Aquinas or Augustine, let alone an Innocent, Gregory or Benedict or Francis.
Let’s be clear: many of the greatest minds down the millennia have been supernaturalists. How much that was sincere belief or go-along-to-get-along compromise/taquiyyah with the endoxa of their context, Meslier-like, we’ll never know. For every Pierre Bayle there was a René Descartes. For every Spinoza, a Leibniz.
The USA as a state, though, was founded principally by men who ranged from full on atheists to Deists. Their personal (en)doxa notwithstanding, to a man they believed that faith/fides/religio was a private matter that should be kept out of “Civil policy”.
Madison and Jefferson articulated it best during the Commonwealth of Virginia’s debate over whether or not to establish a state religion:
Because experience witnesseth that ecclesiastical establishments, instead of maintaining the purity and efficacy of Religion, have had a contrary operation.
Our Founders aspired for the republic they created to be one where doubt, the bane of dogma, is embraced, in order to stimulate curiosity, invention and innovation, where the scientific revolution could lead to the industrial, then on to the technological. In a word: progress.
They would have delighted in a citizenry educated enough to understand why “-1/12” is worth pondering and “1x1=2” is not. They would be disappointed by the present actuality of the trend that Pew reported on last November, namely the decline in Americans’ opinions of science. While this is mostly concentrated in the less educated (see data below), and is reflected in the blue and red party profiles as a consequence, the problem is “intersectional”: traditionally blue cohorts like youngs and non-whites are more anti-science than more traditionally red ones like olds and whites, even if the GOP registers the bigger drop, all dimensions aggregated.
Note that this all means the two bases (the heels of the horseshoe) are also the most anti-science, anti-K*. In very different ways, of course. The red heel grounds its epistemology largely on the fundamentalist Christianities’ faith-trumps-reason paradigm. The blue heel increasingly grounds its stack on social constructivism/constructionism and its/their bedfellow critical theory, which, like theologies, deny STEM the final word when it comes to K*.
The stack that denies biology on matters of race, sex and gender; that denies math on matters of economy; that denies even the fundaments of evidence and logic as means for determining truth, when those lead to conclusions in conflict with their dogmas (e.g. capitalism is doomed to collapse on itself, to be replaced inexorably by socialism … as if); that denies the very notion of objectivity as a “dichotomist male epistemological construct”; that argues math (!) is inherently racist (as opposed to the profession/guild of mathematicians, and how it perpetuates itself, I hasten to add).
Tell it to Ramanujan’s ghost. Or the Indians more generally. Or the Chinese.
Here’s the bottom line: we’re losing the core intellectual ability of Discernment as a collective, as a nation, as a polity. When we encounter the two headlines, “Ramanujan says 1+2+3+4+… = -1/12” and “Terry Howard says 1x1=2”, and can’t instantly have a Kahneman System 1 assessment that the former is worth further investigation and the latter can be dismissed out of hand, with a chuckle, we’re in big trouble.
That sort of thing leads step by step to drinking bleach to fight viral infections.
