Foundations of thought

Maybe it is because I am a scientist type personality that I find the following discussion so discouraging.  The recent installment of the culture wars brought another striking example of how lost we as a nation must be. 

President Biden's Supreme Court nominee was confronted with the question of what was a "woman" according to her understanding.  At the risk of being dismissed by many, I am taking a few quotes from a Fox News report.  I don't follow Fox at all, but when I googled the exchange between Judge Jackson and Senator Marsha Blackburn, a Fox report popped up first, so being lazy, I just copied the following.  

"Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden's Supreme Court nominee, said she was unable to define what a woman is."

"Jackson told Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., that she was unable to answer the question because she is "not a biologist."

"It is a simple question. What is a woman?"  said Blackburn.

Now, most people just see this as political grandstanding by the Republicans, or they see it as a pathetic example of spineless liberals who don't want people to hear what they really think.

To me, that is not what struck me.  First, the roughly 8 billion of us that are alive today all got here through the womb of a woman.  The very first things we experience as a human being is our mother's womb. Then virtually everyone of us were nurtured by a woman. Yet here at the confirmation hearing, soon to be appointed Supreme Court Justice Jackson (who happens to be a woman), couldn't answer the question because she couldn't tell the truth.  If she have given the scientific answer, she would have offended the left and if she gave an answer that played to political correctness, she would have looked like a fool to the average citizen.

Now, in politics this kind of nonsense has been going on since the beginning of mankind's time on earth.  What bothers me is what has been bothering me for a long time.  And that is that in our modern times, I wonder how can any child growing up in this culture can have any sense of reality.  Both the right and left push total nonsense from a scientifically based perspective.  Then, the young are getting inundated with social media which is like being hit by a tidal wave of "information". Although you can get great information online, you have to have some way of eliminating the mountain of trash to find the nuggets of fact.  

So, to me if our "leaders" such as Justice Jackson (and she is just indicative of leadership in America), who is entrusted with sorting through the most complex social/legal questions of our country, cannot define "woman," for whatever reasons, how are people with less talent or our children, going to have any foundational beliefs to make sense of the world. (Try raising a child while telling them that the one thing they know, that they were born to a woman, isn't true.) And even if they have some foundation to build on, what are the chances that it is built on any actual facts and reason.  

I know I am expressing this badly, but having spent my life sorting though intellectual trash, my own lack of objectivity and complexities of something as simple as science, I am just left wondering what our elites are offering us for a future. We are flooded already with information, but when I look are our society it feels like we are sinking in to a new dark age, where the enemies are those who are the real truth tellers Eeverybody claims they are saying the truth. Just ask President Putin if he is telling the truth). Justice Jackson could not tell the truth without being crucified by either the left or the right.

The irony of Supreme Court Judge lying and claiming ignorance on such a fundamentally easy question is just crazy when you think of the incredibly important responsibility she has just been given.

This is a bit tongue in cheek, but were we better off and closer to reality when Walter Conkright told us what was "true" five days a week?