rare commodity: science & faith

a couple of thoughts on Jimmy Carter

Jimmy Carter was an imperfect but deeply humble human. My comments from late February 2023 when he entered hospice discuss a number of his accomplishments, often forgotten, so I won’t repeat myself.

I, like so many Americans, didn’t appreciate Carter’s true dedication or accomplishment forty-five years ago. The former president’s speeches often made us cringe as he urged, sometimes chastised, us to change our views, our behaviors, our trajectory as a nation. That he sought to bring us into shared responsibility for governance meant he did not have all of the answers. We were not entirely comfortable with our role in this post-Watergate world, one fraught with profound dangers he admitted existed. The result was he did not strike most as a towering figure in the White House but someone perhaps in over his head.

We interpreted Carter’s character as weak, preferring to assume strength meant he would bring certainty in every way, though we were emerging for a period of certainty that mean lies, attacks on adversaries, and intrigue (at best). In retrospect, Jimmy Carter was anything other than weak, proven by his success becoming a submariner, perhaps the most grueling of military pursuits. But, I think the contrast between the 39th president and where we citizens are moving is fascinating.

Carter was a man of science as one could never otherwise have become a nuclear submariner under the ultimate safety-conscious dictatorial “father of the nuclear navy” Hyman Rickover. Americans unfamiliar with the military, especially the navy, are ignorant of the meticulous, rigorous safety standards the supremely powerful Rickover enacted for the nascent nuclear-powered submarine fleet. This Eastern European immigrant cultivated a community built by and on science rather than hopes and prayers. Rickover chose an elite corps of engineers not merely grounded in the emerging field of nuclear science but with the intellectual agility he could train to address the on-going dangers of accepting too much risk, lack of precision, lack of rigor and a host of other problems a submarine crew could encounter from a range of adversaries foreign and domestic. Rickover mercilessly drove the Navy to do nuclear submarines right, not to cut corners in personnel, equipment, or training. Rickover personally selected each and every officer who molded in this “silent service” between the late 1940s and early 1980s. He selected the personnel best able to meet his incredibly tough standards to serve within a system of nuclear propulsion. Rickover refused to endanger either the platform or the men (there were, of course, no women on submarines during this era) we were increasingly deploying across the globe as part of the emerging “nuclear triad”.

Jimmy Carter made the cut, though a man born in on a farm without electricity in Georgia. His keen intellect was a force to reckon with in the words of anyone who ever served with him. His submarine experience entailed rational, measured, binary right and wrong choices work before he left the Navy as a Lieutenant in the early 1950s. Science, as I have hammered repeatedly in other columns, is about evidenced-based, rigorous trial and error. If better data appears, a scientist revises his or her working hypothesis rather than simply changing one’s tune because it’s Monday around noon.

The bulk of Carter’s subsequent life, however, was amid a murkier, less clear cut world. He first became a Georgia political figure in the 1960s as the civil rights movement was splitting the country. Many of his neighbors and certainly millions of other Americans recoiled when the Supreme Court issued the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case as appropriate. Carter supported desegregation from the 1950s forward, to ensure that equal justice under the law had teeth rather than perpetuating the unconscionable fiction of “separate but equal” under Pleesey v Ferguson in 1896. By all indications, Carter genuinely believed these were demonstrably right and wrong issues as he likely saw the appropriate or definitely inappropriate choices with this new energy source as he served as a Lieutenant at the Atomic Energy Commission.

Other Americans believed these were fundamentally wrong decisions by our government, often perpetrated by a central government in Washington opposing the history of racial relations in this country.

There was no single force to arbitrate this disagreement as is true for so much in life. Today there is no arbitrator on a number of things, either.

Carter’s “Born Again” admission fascinated many when he won election in 1976 yet by his reelection thrashing merely four years later, the country rejected Carter’s positions—based on evidence, commitment, and repeated study—as too soft, too naive, not Christian enough, and too concerned with things like human rights rather than hard core power. Oddly, it was Carter’s direct words to ask Americans to consider evidence about his proposals that seemed most to undermine him because he never portrayed himself as omnipotent. Throughout his four years in office, he came to us as if in dialogue, much as we say we want from our political figures, yet we rejected him and his approach, philosophy, and ethos in 1980. Articulating his positions apparently was not his greatest strength but they are clear now, decades later.

Today increasing number of American reject all that offered Carter opportunity as we have traditionally said it would for any woman from Mobile or a guy from Duluth: rigorous public education in conjunction with the ability to articulate effectively our views while responding to the views of others without attacking them as if space aliens from planet Zwtahcr.

Americans today see no reason for logic, civics, and science, preferring not to test hypotheses but hear stories conjured up by “influencers” (whatever that is: I am so old I have no idea) or skeptics who proclaim causal effects about things they know not. In most cases, the skeptics of science appear to have no clue either how science works or why its ability or failure to replicated results of testing matters. Few Americans have a clue how government actually works. They reject health data as a dastardly plot to implant biochips on Bill Gates’ behalf. I imagine towards the end of his life this lunacu must have utterly shocked the engineer Carter.

Even further from the evidence-based experiences that formed the former president, however, is the growing preference for self-selecting our facts in education and life. Carter’s namesake foundation at Emory University in Atlanta is one of most respected centers anywhere for advancing health and political access in countries unaccustomed to working in this manner, often in “Third World”. Whether focusing on parasites in west Africa or election fraud in Venezuela, the Carter Center operates off the facts in those places much as Carter himself gracefully, if sadly, exited the White House in 1981 following his loss to Ronald Reagan. He did not pretend the 1980 election outcome was inaccurate any more than disputing that child and maternal mortality undermine the future of any society. These realities are just that—true, demonstrable, and replicable instances upon which decisions must be taken. Instead, so much contemporary public policy discussion in the United States hinges on creating a different narrative on the ground by accusing the opposition of misstatements, counterfactuals, and every other obfuscation possible. Carter must have found this extraordinarily difficult to stomach.

This may be why he turned during his final years into building homes under the auspices of Habitat for Humanity or teaching the parables as lessons in his beloved church in Plains, Georgia. In the physical exertion of constructing a home, Carter and his soulmate Roslyn left an indelible mark on the lives of those who saw the commitment for something beyond himself or his wife/family. Teaching Sunday school was also a measure of raising awareness of lessons for future behavior rather than a recipe for rewriting facts on the ground today.

Jimmy Carter’s century of life parallelel countless changes in society, technology, and our overall world. That is the course of human history which, by all indications, Carter embraced as positive. But his determination to use evidence, science, measured trial and error was a strength eroding in our current political context based on personalities, denying facts, and sweeping all blame aside.

It’s always seductive to look for mono-causal explanations when actions create consequences that are almost invariably much more complicated than any single answer can provide. I am thus leery of overstating the role that serving as a nuclear submariner played in Carter’s persona but it strikes me that the discipline and rigor that Rickover’s navy demanded, when coupled with a life-long faith, left him the most respected political figure in our life time.

As noted earlier, Jimmy Carter was imperfect but he was also genuinely a man who understood that actions create consequences, of vast and minor import. We are increasingly operating at our own peril as we abandon the science and methods of testing in our world in favor of merely advancing our own narratives. That won’t end well.

I welcome your thoughts on President Carter, on science, on the role of education in our twenty-first century world, now a quarter of the way through this century. Perhaps no interrelationships exist between education and our future, though you’ll need walk me through that one! In any case, I welcome your thoughts as part of any reflection of the former president, of our nation on the cusp of another administration, and on the eve of New Year’s Eve 2024.

I appreciate your time spent here today. I welcome any and all thoughts. I especially thank the subscribers who support this work.

Be well and be safe. FIN

Fred Schultz, “Jimmy Carter, 39th President and Submariner, Dies at 100”, USNINews.com, 29 December 2024, retrieved at https://news.usni.org/2024/12/29/jimmy-carter-39th-u-s-president-and-submariner-dies-at-100

Cynthia Watson, “Public Servant Extraordinaire”, 19 February 2023