Dangerous Intersection: Human Animals at the Crossroads of Science, Religion, Media and Culture

Welcome to this website, which is a written record of my personal exploration of many topics, especially the four topics mentioned above.

Back on February 21, 2006, I created the first post for Dangerous Intersection. Originally, this website was intended to be a collaborative effort involving many contributing authors at a time when it was more difficult for individuals to set up their own websites. We’ve had many guests authors over the years. Currently most of the new writings are my own.

My overall goal is to present information and opinions that you can trust that you will still find worth your while even when you disagree with me.  One of my favorite in-person comments came from a well-accomplished lawyer who is also extremely conservative. He said, “Erich, I sometimes visit your site. It is fascinating and well-written. But I disagree with almost everything you say.” That comment was a prelude to a good conversation over lunch and eventually a friendship.

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I am a consumer attorney residing in St. Louis, Missouri, with my two daughters. I also work as a musician and photographer. I have compiled numerous video interviews, lectures and documentaries on my YouTube channel.

For my day job, I am an attorney at my solo practice, Erich Vieth – Attorney at Law. I have prosecuted cases as class actions against predatory lenders and other unscrupulous businesses. Visit my Attorney website and you’ll learn a whole lot more about the legal work I have done. I also teach at St. Louis University School of Law and Bahçeşehir University in Istanbul, Turkey.  I also work part-time with Arch City Defenders, a non-profit.  I formerly served (1986-1990) as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Missouri, focusing on consumer fraud.

With regard to music, I have played the guitar and sang at various locations in St. Louis. I’ve been playing music ever since the 1970’s, when I co-founded the 8-piece jazz-rock band “Ego” with Charles Glenn. At present, I perform music mostly as a solo act –my favorite styles of music are folk, jazz and rock. I do some of my own arrangements, which tend to be eclectic.

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In 2006, conservative Republicans were coming to power in the United States. Many of them disparaged science and showed obeisance to fundamentalist religion (as I write this, in 2020, the political Left is now hard at work trashing science). Our misguided Middle-East policy was being driven by a Manichean outlook and wars of choice were being fought with no discernible military objective. Free market fundamentalism was the national “strategy” for running the country.

All of these were causes of concern to me. I kept wondering how it was that so many of us were so willing to allow ourselves get carried by rhetoric that conflicted with the facts.  Even back then, the legacy media divided us into warring tribes. Based on years of studying cognitive science (including many graduate seminars at Washington University at Saint Louis), I sought to draw connections between the dramatically dysfunctional events of the day and cognitive science studies concerning human animals. I use the term “animals” intentionally and without disrespect to non-human animals.  Many human animals are troubled by the fact that humans are talking apes with obvious biological connections with all other animals and plants. This is a website for human apes who appreciate our biological inter-connections with all of our cousins, whether they be porcupines, earthworms or maple trees.

I have often posted on religion, a topic that I find especially intriguing. The evolution of my thoughts on religion can be seen in a series of five posts I wrote in 2010, titled “Mending Fences.” People fall into many types of groups that delude themselves and try to turn thinking into a contest between warring tribes. This applies to every group of human beings that ever existed. The more closely bonded the people, the stranger the delusions, and I’ve also come to understand that these delusions are often evolutionarily adaptive. In May 2012, I had the opportunity to read Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, which eloquently set forth much of what I had been grappling with for years. I’m also influenced by the writings of David Sloan Wilson, focusing on his distinction between “factual realism” and “practical realism.”

I majored in philosophy and psychology at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis. I then attended Saint Louis University School of Law. Much of my legal career had been litigating insurance cases, but I took a detour in 1986, becoming an Assistant Attorney General for the state of Missouri. I investigated and litigated consumer fraud, but my most compelling case was investigating my own boss, Missouri’s Attorney General (for more, see the end of this article on a college I founded).

I’m protective of the privacy of my family. Therefore, I rarely write about my daughters on the Internet. I’d love to share stories about my children–and I do share them with my close friends–but not on the Internet.

Thank you for visiting this site. Here’s my email if you would like to exchange ideas privately:

erichvieth@gmail.com