This week I finished:

Ulysses S. Grant—A documentary on the 18th President, part 1: Grant plays a big role in my new book as a role model. He was a broke farmer recovering from malaria. His wife’s family owned slaves, giving him an easy way to recover if he chose it. Meanwhile, his father refused to help him as long as he stayed with slaveholders. He had acquired a slave from his wife’s family.

He could have sold the slave or let the slave buy his freedom. Instead he granted the slave freedom. Then helped win the Civil War and became president. Yes, to have owned the slave violated his values, but could he have done everything that followed had he not repented and freed the slave?

Nearly everyone alive today is violating their values in hurting people without their consent, harming far more people than slavery did. Most have fewer resources and didn’t just almost die. We can repent and stop polluting and depleting. Might we stave off a civil war from happening? Might one of us who lives by our values become president?

We can start by learning from Grant as a role model.

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The Eugenics Crusade: Eugenics in the USA, American Experience: I saw this movie while browsing American Experience’s videos after finding last week’s documentary on Citizen Kane.

This movie presents an important historical precedent of how pseudoscience works that is way more relevant to today than anyone promoting so-called “clean,” “green,” or “renewable” energies, or geoengineering would be comfortable with.

First and foremost: people that later generations say were practicing pseudoscience didn’t start with ill intention or wrong science. They start out intending to help humanity as they understand it with cutting edge science. They don’t dismiss the people hurt by their work. Like anyone, including you and me, they are influenced by their culture and they have blind spots. If you attack them, and I hope you do, be humble and notice how your attacks apply to yourself. What are your blind spots? Whom are you disregarding in promoting, say, technologies that require cobalt, which is mined by slaves, or fossil-fuels, as wind and solar do?

What science are you disregarding when you call technologies that require fossil fuels for manufacture, transportation, installation, and decommissioning, and that will fill landfills, “clean,” “green,” or “renewable”? Cleaner than fossil fuels doesn’t mean clean.

It’s tempting to show how today’s “experts” promoting science backed by government programs to benefit humanity differ from eugenicists. The challenge is seeing how similar they are, especially from the perspective of future generations who can’t look past the data undermining their world views, however good they think they are.

• ← Would you have acted in the gravest historical times?