Economic Atheism
I only found this after writing the blog, so I guess I got upstaged by a highly imaginative 6 year old.
I’ve also never made any secret of the fact that I’m horrible at math. “Pfft.” You think, waving your hand at your monitor. “I’m so much worse at math than Truman is.” No, sorry, you’re wrong. I can provide evidence to the contrary. I can produce witnesses to the nonstop tirade of rage and despair that was my so-called “education” in mathematics during elementary, middle, and high school. I achieved something of a mythical status in the Salem-Keizer School District – “Have you heard of Truman Capps?” Teachers would whisper to one another over vodka-spiked coffee in the crumbling, asbestos laced teachers lounges of my former hometown. “He doesn’t get anything! Cross multiplication, dividing fractions, the metric system… Not a damn thing! He tries hard, but nothing can get through that thick hair of his!” At the beginning of each year, my math teacher would sit down with me and explain that he or she wasn’t giving up on me, and that by the end of the year I would be an expert at whatever institutionalized crap they were trying to cram down my throat. Of course, the teacher would explain, I was going to have to meet them halfway – I’d need to do my homework, be willing to stay late, and possibly sacrifice one of my parents to the Math Gods (I’m sorry, Dad, but if it ever came to that you would’ve been my choice). Every year I would solemnly agree, and within two months the teacher in question would be tacitly avoiding me when I came in after school looking for help, and at the end of the year, respectful of the fact that they had truly encountered the village idiot of math, they’d mark down a B on my report card out of concern for my GPA and shunt me off to the next unlucky educator.
This continued until my sophomore year of high school, when I took Geometry. Most people had said that Geometry was going to be easy, much in the same way that most people said that I was going to have no trouble finding a girlfriend in college. At the beginning of the year, Mr. Brown guaranteed all of us that if we tried as hard as possible every day, we would at least get a B in his class. This was a relief to me, especially as the year wore on and Geometry taught me to mistrust everything Sesame Street had ever taught me about the very nature of shapes themselves. A month before the end of the school year, with the final exam looming, I received a progress report showing that I had a solid C in the class. I brought this up to Mr. Brown, who said, “Well, just study really hard for the final, I guess.” I pointed out that I’d been studying hard for every test that I’d gotten a D on, and he said, “I don’t know what to tell you, Truman.”
It was at that point that I gave up entirely on ever learning math. Shortly thereafter, I contacted a girl in another one of Mr. Brown’s Geometry classes who happened to be really good at math, and because they took the final before my class did she was kind enough to copy down all of her answers on a separate piece of paper and give them to me. So yes, I cheated like crazy, and if Mr. Brown found anything amiss about one of his worst students getting a 94% after a long history of Cs and Ds, he sure as hell didn’t say anything about it. Next year, our school’s new math curriculum made it possible to coast through my final required year of math with a mid range B, and ever since then I’ve been free of the stuff. Journalism majors at the University of Oregon are not required to take math classes, which is the closest an atheist will ever come to acknowledging a miracle. However, they do require Journalism majors to take economics.
And before we go any further, allow me to say this about economics: Fuck that shit.
Economics is an academic Trojan horse. Outwardly, it appears to be an interesting study of the nature of consumerism and the pursuit of total market efficiency – the sort of thing that’s right up the alley of a guy who watches The History Channel in his spare time. So yeah, I invited this Trojan horse into my schedule for spring term, partially because I had to in order to graduate, but also because I figured this would be something kind of nifty to learn about. But within a week, that Trojan horse burst open and suddenly math was, for the first time in a year and a half, all up in my Kool-Aid. As we speak, the mathematical Odysseus is beating my face in with the very concept of long division, and it really, really hurts.
I understand the ideas of supply and demand just fine. I understand that a drop in price creates a surge of demand, which will, as a result, bump prices up again, so I definitely understand the economy better than Hilary Clinton and John McCain, but then they had to throw in all these freaking equations! My book is tossing out equations like they’re going out of style, monstrous equations the size of skyscrapers with grizzly bears for arms! You’ve got to subtract this from this, and then multiply it by that, and then subtract it from another thing, and then divide it by the second thing you subtracted it from, and then, just for the hell of it, you multiply it by 100! And at that point you’re only half done, because you’ve got to do something similar to another set of numbers and then, when you’ve forced these numbers to jump through hoops and do unspeakable things to one another, you take each equation’s bastard child and start grinding them together until, after a few years, you might potentially have a number that corresponds to one of the multiple answers on the test. However, when I attempt to do these equations, the results that my calculator vomits out are a near incomprehensible jumble of integers and decimal points; a numeric “Garden of Earthly Delights”, if you will.
I like to live my life pretending that I’m smarter than just about everybody else on Earth, but when I’m reduced to intellectual rubble by a class that frat boy business majors are excelling at, I can no longer sign my name as “Truman Capps, Certified Genius” in good conscience. This is all too familiar a replay of the 11 years I spent struggling with math in my pre-college education. It will not stand, and I have taken the proper measures for my own well-being:
I no longer believe in math.*
*Since economics spurred this, it goes without saying that I don’t believe in the economy anymore either. I now consider trade, banks, inflation, and all other day-to-day elements of what you know as an “economy” to be the work of a pack of particularly bookish witches.
One of the many reasons I don’t believe in God is because I can’t verify His existence. How different from that is math? In my textbooks are equations so grand that they doubtless have their own ZIP codes, equations that, when performed, magically produce the correct answer like some sort of incredibly boring Rube Goldberg machine. I’ve tried my very hardest, but I can’t reproduce these results on my own; from a scientific perspective, as far as I’m concerned math is a mere theory.* It just doesn’t make sense to me. Take Algebra for instance: A + B = C – it’s all well and good until you remember that you can’t add letters! Don’t try to argue, I’m the expert here (I was almost an English major). You can just as soon add one letter to another as you can add North Dakota to cheese. I just don’t see the point in adopting a form of study based around the teachings of a civilization that ceremonially ripped the brains out of their dead by way of the nose.
*If every school system in the South has decided that Evolution, something I believe in, is a mere theory, then I can do the same about math, something everyone else believes in.
This will no doubt come across as blasphemy to math majors, economists, and the entire student body at MIT. I’m sorry it had to be this way, but math kind of brought this on itself, after all. I’m sure that you can provide plenty of evidence indicating that math does, in fact, exist, and perhaps even provide evidence indicating that science fiction or marching bands do not exist. However, like most theological debates, that would do little more than entrench us deeper in our respective beliefs. As I see it, it takes a remarkable amount of faith to believe that numbers fuse together and split apart in the creation of new numbers – likewise, it takes a lot of faith (and ego) to spontaneously adopt the notion that a quarter of all educational curriculum is hocus pocus while the monetary doings of our country are witchcraft.
You have your cockeyed beliefs, and I have mine. Let’s stop quibbling about math and agree that chemistry is an outright joke.
Truman Capps wants all his potential employers to know that 10th grade was the only time he ever cheated on a test. Seriously.