There is now an almost total disconnection between the validity of a story and its media success. If it's a good enough - or convenient enough - story, it will echo eternally around the media universe. We lack any publicly accepted way of saying "This is demonstrably wrong," and as a result there is almost no disincentive to unconstrained spinning, trafficking in poor information, and downright lying. The result is a diminishing accountability at almost every level of public discourse and a burgeoning industry of professional Swiftboaters.
There used to be a regular program on BBC radio during the 1980s. It was only five minutes long, but in that five minutes the makers sought to examine a modern myth to see whether it held up to scrutiny. During those Regan/Thatcher years, a popular way of attacking the conspicuously successful (and inconveniently socialistic) Swedish social system was to knowingly point out that they had the world's highest suicide rate - as though the prices of all that official altruism was widespread cultural despondency. Actually it turned out that Sweden didn't have an especially high suicide rate- the country was ranked somewhere in the thirties, below France, Spain, Japan, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, and Germany, and just one place above the United States - but it was too good a story to drop, and to this day you'll still hear it.
I suppose it doesn't really matter if people continue to think the Swedes are killing themselves at record-breaking rates, or if people believe that The Da Vinci Code is a true story (as I was confidently assured by a New York policeman), or if they think that Eskimos have four hundred words for snow, but it really does matter if they believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11, or that global warming is an anticapitalist plot, or that Senator Kerry was a coward during his Vietnam service. These things matter because they have direct real-world consequences, and in a media-soaked universe they point out the Achilles' heel of democracy. Democracy was intended to flourish by engaging the intelligence of the wider population - on the assumption that people might, on average, be able to assess what is in their best interests. But if the information upon which they make their assessments is of poor quality, how can that work?
This question is more urgent as we blunder from one global crisis to another on the basis of bad or spun information. We need to be confident of the data we're using and to know when we lack trustworthy data. And we need to act upon reliable data rather than sidelining it if it doesn't sit comfortably with the agenda to which we've already committed. We need, in short, a way of arriving at positions based more on knowledge and reason than on ideology, political convenience, or the needs of business. And we need, in particular, to move on from unproductive positions - to know and admit when we're wrong.
We have one great example of a sort of cultural conversation where this is the case, and that is science. Whatever it's shortcomings and perversions, science is nonetheless committed to an explicit system of validation. Scientific statements are made in accessible (though not always easy) language and propose hypotheses that must be testable -that is, subject to a comparison with current evidence and logic. Among other things, this means that people will sometimes have to admit that an idea they have cherished and nurtured in, in fact, wrong. This act of pragmatic humility is the very underpinning of science and one of the prime reasons for its successes. It allows us to move from ideas that are clearly untrue toward ones that are, at least for now, serviceable. At a certain point, we all had to agree that the world could usefully be regarded as round.
Science is an extraordinary intellectual invention, a construction designed to neutralize the universal human tendency to see what we expected to see and overlook what we didn't expect. It is designed in many ways to subtract data - to create experiments sufficiently insulted from externalities that we can trace a clear connection from a cause to an effect. It seeks out to cancel prejudices, environmental contingencies, group think, tradition, pride, hierarchy, dogma - to subtract them all and to see what this or that corner of the world looks like without their effects.
But then there is the brain itself - a brilliant machine but with a few occasionally troublesome work-arounds. These work-arounds enable us to form complex ideas from insubstantial data - to "jump to conclusions" or "make intuitive leaps." They allow us to recognize familiar pattens when we see only parts of them. They allow us to make deductions about meaning from context. All these valuable talents carry with them a downside: A familiar but wrong conclusion is more likely to be reached than an unfamiliar one.
Most of us, in our daily lives, arrive at our feelings about things through a vast and usually unexamined hotchpotch of received opinion, prejudice, cultural consensus, personal experience, reason and observation. We would generally be hard pressed to trace the source of those feelings in any rigorous way: Why, for instance, would I call myself a liberal pragmatist rather than, say, a neoconservative or a Trotskyite? I'd like to think it's because I carefully evaluated the various philosophical choices. But I know that I'm not free of prejudice (those neocons dress so badly!) and that I probably arrived at my current position as much through my particular unexamined hotchpotch as through reason. If we don't know the sources of the attitudes we hold, we can avoid taking responsibility for them and leave ourselves plenty of ways of saying we weren't really wrong - or that the thing that has turned out to be wrong wasn't what we meant anyway.
The conceit of science is that we should be satisfied when our ideas are shown to be wrong, for we've moved on from a delusion and our picture of the world is therefore less wrong. Of course, it doesn't feel like this at the time; far from knowing more, we feel like we suddenly know a lot less. A bit of the world we thought we'd secured is wild and mysterious again. This is a difficult feeling to live with; it's much more comforting to cling to a familiar idea even when it runs against the tide of evidence than to have no idea at all.
If you've spent a long time thinking yourself into a certain intellectual position, you are naturally resistant to letting it go. A lot of work went into it. If it "felt right" to you for whatever complex mesh of personal reasons makes an idea "feel right," then to abandon it isn't just a question of rationality but also a question of self-esteem. For if that feeling was wrong, how many others might be? How much of the rest of your intellectual world are you going to have to pick apart? And if everyone has watched you thinking your way there and seen you building your city around it, there might also be the simple issue of losing face.
For this reason, these essays exhibit a kind of intellectual honesty often lacking in much of human discourse. They give me real hope for the human race. The humility it takes to admit that you're wrong and the fortitude it takes to endure the chilly interval of uncertainty until the next step - finding a better idea - are manifest again and again. And there's courage, too, when evidence leads you away from the comfortable consensus into thoughts that might be highly incendiary and politically sensitive - thoughts you might not even like very much yourself.
If we are ever going to achieve a rational approach to organizing our affairs, we have to dignify the process of admitting to being wrong. It doesn't help matters at all if the media, or your friends, accuse you of "flip-flopping" when you change your mind. Changing our minds is our hope for the future.
Brockman, John. What Have You Changed Your Mind about?. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 2009.
I read the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteAnd I too say, Amen.
Was this a preface to a series of essays or something?
Yes. It was the introduction to this book:
ReplyDeleteWhat Have You Changed Your Mind About?
which I have never read, but read that introduction to it on Amazon on the "look inside" option. I have read parts of another book which I borrowed from my sister from the same series called "What Are You Optimistic About?".
I read it. Thanks for promoting literature of merit.
ReplyDelete