Looking for truth in all the wrong places
This is part 5 (of 10) of my August 2020 Challenge. We’re at the halfway point.
I am trying to fit all of my posts into the context of a broader narrative. In other words, that is an unnecessarily pretentious way of saying I hope they all link together, in a way.
Yesterday was Part 1: Embracing the wilderness.
For some context, you may to read that post if you haven’t already. There is a very tenuous link to this post. Very.
Part 2: Tolerance in a post-truth society: where do we draw the line?
Natalia said that she ‘wanted to ask [me] to write smth on the issue of tolerance in the context of post-truth society (where do we draw the line and stuff)’ and I thought this was a great opportunity to make a tenuous link between this and being out in the wild. (why not?)
This is a fascinating yet troubling area to grapple with, one that is often on my mind. In fact, it was on my mind a lot last week. When you’re out in nature wandering (and wondering), your mind also tends to wander (and wonder), but for me it’s usually a pleasant sort of meandering wandering, where so many things seem so clear when you’re hiking at high(ish) altitudes. Perhaps it’s to do with the pure alpine air.
It’s hard to answer, especially concisely and in a way that makes sense. It’s murky and can easily go off in various directions. This attempt at an answer definitely veers off in different directions.
If you’ve read what I rambled on about in Part 1, you could take heed from Robert Macfarlane’s words in the closing paragraphs of his book, The Wild Places:
‘We are fallen in mostly broken pieces … but the wild can still return us to ourselves.’
In other words, forget about staying connected with society, turn your back on all the mayhem and nonsense, and escape into the wild. Why not?
But that’s running away from the issue and as responsible citizens in today’s frenzied, hectic and confusing world, we shouldn’t be doing that, right?
I struggle to deal with this ‘post-truth’ pervading society today. It’s frustrating because I feel like I’m right and everyone else is wrong. Or, rather I should say, I feel like we’re right and everyone else is wrong. But the reality is, we all feel that we’re right. Right? But what if we’re wrong and everyone else is right?
But how tolerant can we be, should we be, in the face of such tomfoolery? But what’s tomfoolery to us is someone else’s truth. And vice versa.
What does this mean? That we should be tolerant to all viewpoints? People like to say that they ‘respect’ certain ‘beliefs’. One might say ‘well, I’m not religious, but I respect the fact that you believe’ or others might say ‘you might deny the effectiveness of facemasks, but I think they work, but let’s agree to disagree, okay?’ Is this acceptable? If something flies in the face of common sense or decency, should be just put up with it, for the sake of getting along? Or should we challenge others, call them out in their lies, try to convince them otherwise? Is it worth it? Is it possible? Or is it futile?
When things are harmless – and what does ‘harmless’ mean, where do we draw that line? – then should we be more forgiving? And if it’s life-threatening, should be put up more of a fight? I’m not sure whether others of my age bracket will feel the same, but I feel that when I was young[er], in the days before the internet, conspiracy theories were limited to hare-brained ideas like ‘man never landed on the moon’ and ‘JFK was killed by the mob’. Now, these crazy fringe ideas are well into the mainstream, and the rise of groups like QAnon and the stuff you read [about] on 4chan or 8chan or on Reddit…good lord, it’s terrifying. And more and more people believe this stuff and it boggles the mind, but what the hell, if anything, can we do about it?
The way I answer this question about where to draw the line, or how much I can and am willing to put up with is by asking myself a question: can I change the situation? Can I change this person’s mind? (doubtful, most of the time) Does it affect me personally? Can I ignore whatever they’re saying, and walk away, without incurring any harm?
The problem is, many of these bizarre fringe stories start off small, and then spread like wildfire. All it takes is someone with a platform and a huge following to influence millions. Think about how the anti-vaxxer movement has spread so rapidly (thanks Jenny McCarthy). Prominent officials have been liking and retweeting QAnon material and it’s slowly spreading. Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan, who has around 80 million social media followers, has peddled pseudoscience and alternative therapies for covid-19 for months and then what happens? He and his family test positive and now all of his followers are really eager to see how they get out of this. And so on.
Now the shit really starts to get real.
As one of my favourite writers, Barry Ritholz, recently tweeted: ‘The purpose of propaganda is not to convince you of something that is false, it is to create sufficient doubt so as to cause you to no longer know what it is true…’
And I think that captures so much of the problem today, and it comes from information overwhelm and constantly changing news cycles. No one cares about nuance and subtleties, it’s all about blasting us with information, much of it spurious, and not making an attempt to convince us of anything, but to seed enough doubt in our minds that we hardly know what is real and what isn’t anymore.
I actually read an enlightening and highly informative article relevant to this just the other day:
It’s well worth reading in its entirety, and actually, most of the key bits are in the first 1/3 of the article, so you could start with the first few paragraphs, but the basic premise is contained in the headline. In other words, some of the sources that the author, and I, consider reputable and trustworthy are increasingly to be found behind paywalls, or they rely on generous reader support. The crap, on the other hand, is usually peddled about for free, and is ubiquitous on social media. For the purposes of knowing what’s out there, and seeing what ‘the other side’ thinks, I like to look at some of these articles. But what’s interesting, especially for my Ukrainian-reading audience, is how many of these sites I try to click on are blocked here. Why, I wonder? Probably because they come from Russian (or Macedonian)-bot generated mills. Many of the free ones that I have been able to access are so clearly – to my eyes – not true, but that hardly matters to the people they’re targeted towards.
And so what we get is this vicious cycle of confirmation bias where we’ll believe anything if it fits into our comfortable narrative and ideological perspective.
A handful of good excerpts from this article:
‘But it does mean that it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.’
‘This means that a lot of the most vital information will end up locked behind the paywall.’
‘Possibly even worse is the fact that so much academic writing is kept behind vastly more costly paywalls.’
‘This means that the more reliable an article is, the less accessible it is. On the other hand, pseudo-scholarship is easy to find.’
And people don’t take the time to actually read the carefully read the well-researched, obviously far more nuanced articles. I try to stay away from anything that reeks of ideology or politics, but I have to share this, from my good pal and loyal and devoted blog reader Dr Wasabi Islam:
A few years ago the Harvard scholar Karen King came out with her theory, based on a fragment of papyrus that came into her possession, that Jesus had a wife. It was a big story and most academics and clerics were dubious then and even more dubious now, and everyone debunked the story. One of the journalists behind the story, Ariel Sabar, originally covered the story in 2012, revisited it in 2016, and has recently written a book about the entire episode. In a recent interview in The Atlantic, he described some of his research methods. If only all journalists and writers were so meticulous and conscientious:
‘…[w]hat is the nature of truth and what are the different paths people take to seek it[?] As journalists, by profession and by temperament, most of us are empiricists. We believe the facts exist. We believe that we can go out in the world and see things, document them, establish a kind of reality through reporting and through investigation. We may not always get all the facts, and we may make mistakes along the way, but we believe that we can get closer to the facts through investigation… [a]nd then you have people of faith, who in parts of their lives accept the truth of things they can’t always see or prove. I think a third leg of that stool is postmodern scholars—and Dr. King isn’t the only one. They don’t believe in the objective existence of facts as most people think of them. They believe that the people or the groups that have the power to tell and sell a story essentially create reality.’
‘So in terms of lessons, I guess I’m going to stick with, you know, the values that I hold dear as a journalist; there’s still value in old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting: knocking on doors, picking up phones, going through documents, and leaving no stone unturned. That process, which can be labor-intensive, leads us to places that are important, especially in our own historical moment, where there’s this rise of “alternative facts” and disinformation campaigns.’
After all this, what can we do about this? There are two things, other than running away into the wilderness and/or burying your head in the sand:
1 Learn how to talk and reason with people who see the truth differently. And here is where I am going to cop out and fail to explain how exactly to do this, not because I’m lazy, but because I genuinely can’t quite remember clearly enough to articulate it. There have been quite a few articles over the years dealing with this topic, with headlines like ‘How to talk to your crazy, conspiracy-believing uncle Chuck at this year’s Thanksgiving without it leading to a family war!’ and ‘Too scared to talk to a liberal? Here are three tips to get them to listen’. There are good ways and bad ways to talk to people, and using arguments with well-reasoned, developed ideas is, counterintuitively, not usually the best tactic. The best book I’ve read on this topic is probably Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics. I’ve recommended this book a couple of times before.
2 Use your position in society to develop critical thinking skills in others. In other words, if you’re a teacher, you’re in a great position to shape and influence minds and to get people to be more discerning with the ‘truth’.
I can see how many people read and view my blog posts, and I can see the geographical breakdown. A sizable portion of my readership comes from Ukraine, which means that the vast majority of those readers are either teachers, students or former students. And I know a good portion of my non-Ukrainian readers and followers are also teachers of some sort, so this message is getting to the right audience.
I won’t go into too much detail about how to go about doing this, but we do have the opportunity to develop the right kinds of skills in those we come across, those whose lives we touch, and to get them to see through some of the bullshit out there. It’s not easy and we’re not going to get through to all of them, but if we can make an impact on some of them, then that’s better than nothing. In many cases we’re also up against their school teachers and their parents, and those are tough battles to win. But I have a key philosophy here that I think can really help (I naively hope).
(There's a track from that Manic Street Preachers' album posted above: 'If You Tolerate This, Your Children Will Be Next')
When I’m teaching adults, I may or may not share my actual beliefs. I’m such a believer in playing the role of Devil’s Advocate and looking at every issue from both sides that I deliberately try to keep my own views vague and unclear so that I won’t influence my students’ opinions. A favourite tactic is to make some outlandish statements that sound utterly ludicrous on the surface, that I may or may not actually believe, but to provide good, sound backing arguments to them so that they seem pretty damn believable. To give just two examples I use repeatedly in the classroom:
1 Not only is it a good idea to test cosmetics on animals, but the more pain and suffering you can inflict upon the animals, the better.
2 We should allow professional athletes to dope, it should be completely legal and drugs should be made equally accessible to all.
I try to convince my students that I truly believe in these statements, laying out the points in support of them, setting the stage for being able to look at any set of arguments, no matter what the topic, from both viewpoints. And from there, we look at where we get the evidence from, how trustworthy it is, how reputable the source and whether there are any alternatives that we should consider.
(by the way, I really do believe in one of those above statements – can you guess which one?)
When I’m teaching teenagers or younger learners, I keep my own beliefs strictly out of the classroom, looking at issues from both sides, and if the students walk away from class not knowing what I truly believe, then I feel like I’m going some ways in doing my job effectively. Very often, at the end of a series of debates I will give my actual opinions, and I love encouraging my students to challenge me and get me to change my mind. By being open about the fact that you, as an educator, are open to the possibility of changing your mind, based on being a good, active, open-minded listener, then they may see the possibility of being similarly-minded in their approaches.
Does this loosely connect with the idea of truth and post-truth? I hope so. I mean to demonstrate that we can look at any issue from both sides, and we shouldn’t believe and accept everything we hear at face value, but should learn to question things, probe for the correct answers and most importantly, carefully consider where the information comes from.
At times it might be a battle, but it’s one worth fighting.
Persist. Don’t give up.
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