David McElroy

I remember the night of the first moon landing well. I was a little boy and I remember the flickering black and white images coming back to Earth. I couldn’t see much, but I was excited that we had reached the moon. It wasn’t quite “Star Trek,” but I was convinced we’d all be traveling in space pretty soon.

After the great achievement of reaching the moon, not much else happened. Oh, there were a few more moon shots — including the disaster of Apollo 13 — but the excitement was gone. There wasn’t a real goal anymore, at least not one that could be articulated and that was feasible. NASA hemmed and hawed about its value as politicians kept changing their minds about the agency’s mission. The Apollo program was canceled in favor of the space shuttle, which was conceived as a lower-cost craft by virtue of its being reusable. The “low cost” part didn’t work out so well.

Decades later, the space shuttle program has been shut down. Of the five fully-functional shuttles built, two were destroyed in flight, taking 14 crew members with them. As the shuttle Discovery was flown from Cape Canaveral to Washington this week for delivery to the National Air and Space Museum, there’s been a lot of hang-wringing among space enthusiasts about the end of the program. As much as space exploration excites me, though, I have to say good riddance.

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About half of my friends think the other half are moron. And the other half think the first group are idiots (or worse).

It’s not that I have stupid friend. I merely have friends who disagree with each other about political issues. Actually, I’m vastly oversimplifying to say that it’s half against half. Among my friends, I have libertarians, anarchists (of different stripes), social conservatives, progressives, “new Democrats” and some who are just plain hard to classify.

There’s overlap between the groups as well. The problem is that almost everybody is certain that his position is the right one — and it’s hard for him to understand how a right-thinking person could have to a different conclusion. Each person sees the weaknesses in the things the other person believes, not few see the potential weakness in their own positions. It’s just human nature.

This is why almost everyone believes that there’s a conspiracy against his position. Just Tuesday, Mitt Romney was talking about a “vast left-wing conspiracy” among the media and progressive left groups to stop his campaign. In 1998, Hillary Clinton spoke on NBC’s Today show of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” against Bill Clinton. So which side is telling the truth? Is there a left-wing conspiracy or a right-wing conspiracy? Or are they they just two different sides of the same coin?

The problem for every side is that humans have a tremendous tendency toward confirmation bias. I think about this frequently when I see things that my (very bright) friends say in opposition to one another about politics, but I thought about it in a much more serious way because of a great article that I read Tuesday by a libertarian economist who wrote an article in The Atlantic in December in which he had to admit to having been wrong. (Thanks to Andrew Coulson at the Cato Institute for linking to it.)

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About 10 years ago, I was at the home of a new political client for a photo shoot involving his family. He lived with a wife and two teen-age kids in a large, sprawling house that looked really impressive. When I got there, the candidate wasn’t home yet, but his daughter was expecting me and let me in.

I told her I wanted to look around at the different rooms to find the best place to shoot pictures. She started showing me the downstairs and then mentioned a large den upstairs with a fireplace that she thought might be nice, so we went to look. We walked up a massive staircase that led to two upper floors, one of which partially looked over the foyer and living room.

We walked down a couple of halls and I started feeling as though I was in a motel. There were doors everywhere. We looked at the den, but I finally asked her about all the other rooms.

“What’s in all of those rooms?” I asked. “It’s just the four of you who live here, isn’t it?”

It turns out that most of the rooms in the house where empty. She showed me. They were large and bare. The daughter couldn’t explain why they had all that empty space and she didn’t seem to understand why I found it odd to have all that much space for so few people.

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