I haven’t, so far in this blog, deigned “Fake news” with a single post although I have referred to the increasing polarization in societies with some concern. When I type “fake news” into the Zlibrary, it reveals a lot of titles on the subject – most of recent vintage but some going back a decade. Kurt Andersen wrote a couple of recent intellectual histories which explored the phenomenon brilliantly – with the usual suspects being rounded up namely
- the “relativity” elaborated in the various proponents of postmodernity discussed from p142 of Voices in the Air – the 2021 posts
- the ease with which new social media have undermined the legitimacy of newspapers; and trivialised and polarised everything
Do we really need a
200 page book to tell us that “fake
news” is in the eye of the beholder? Or indeed that, when we decry those
who deny climate change and the benefits of vaccination, WE are guilty of the
same behaviour – namely that we choose
to trust our own preferred groups of people. This is the basic message of a new book - Bad
beliefs – “Why they happen to good people” (2022) - by philosopher Brian
Levy which has just been made freely available
by the publisher and author but which I don’t recommend because it
contains so much jargon.
Very few of us have the scientific
training to “follow the science”. What those of us who accept that
climate change is a reality have done is defer to those with the expertise. Those
who deny simply don’t share our faith in science – let alone government – and choose
to trust those found on social media.
Of course, there is the little matter of the “falsifiability” embodied in scientific method – requiring theories to be set aside when evidence emerges that challenges them.
Something called The Institute for Arts and Ideas (IAI) expressed things rather nicely in its “aims” -
There is little that we
can be certain about, but we can be confident that a time will come when our
current beliefs and assumptions are seen as mistaken, our heroes - like the
imperial adventurers of the past - are regarded as villains, and our morality
is viewed as bigoted prejudice.
So the IAI seeks to
challenge the notion that our present accepted wisdom is the truth. It aims to
uncover the flaws and limitations in our current thinking in search of
alternative and better ways to hold the world.
The IAI was founded in
2008 with the aim of rescuing philosophy from technical debates about the
meaning of words and returning it to big ideas and putting them at the centre
of culture. Not in aid of a more refined cultural life, but as an urgent call
to rethink where we are.
That rethinking is urgent and necessary because the world of ideas is in crisis. The traditional modernist notion that we are gradually uncovering the one true account of reality has been undermined by a growing awareness that ideas are limited by culture, history and language. Yet in a relative world the paradoxes of postmodern culture has left us lost and confused. We do not know what to believe, nor do we know how to find the answers.
I’ve made no secret
of my sympathies for those who see multiple realities – who assert that there
is no single truth. How could I do otherwise when I have argued there were 57
different ways of understanding capitalism? Or when I celebrate that outsiders
are generally more insightful by virtue of the sense of different worlds
they bring with them?
But in all this, I insist on proofs
of falsifiability. Mere assertion is no use – what disturbs me is that the new “deep
sceptics” (who bring the scepticism
I have always admired into gross disrepute) have no such criterion – or preferred
group. They seem to oppose just for the hell of it.
It’s at times such as this that I begin to question my admiration for such contrarians as Chris Hitchens who took such joy in the process of disputation. The profession of lawyers has that same inclination and is it, therefore, any wonder that the USA, having the largest number per capita of litigious lawyers, just happens to be the country in which “fake news” has become so dominant?
The author of the book with which I started this post – Brian Levy – has a more readable article here in which he reasserts his basic point that we all need a group we can trust
No doubt, psychological biases play a role in what people end up believing (though the extent to which we are irrational when we rely on these biases is open to question). No doubt there are many irrational and uninformed people around. But these facts don’t explain the partisan split we see on surveys, or indeed the many bizarre claims attributed to our fellow citizens.
Many of these reports are hugely exaggerated; inflated through some combination of expressive responding, the use of partisan heuristics or the sheer unwillingness to admit ignorance and downright trolling. To the degree there is a partisan divide, it doesn’t arise from their stupidity or our rationality. It arises from the fact that we place our trust in different sources.
A simple question,
therefore – where do we find the verifiable sources quoted by the “deep sceptics”??
"we can be confident that a time will come when our current beliefs and assumptions are seen as mistaken, our heroes - like the imperial adventurers of the past - are regarded as villains, and our morality is viewed as bigoted prejudice."
ReplyDeleteMy mind went straight to Star Trek III "The Voyage Home", in which McCoy coming across a 20th century patient waiting for a kidney transplant in a corridor of a hospital, gives her a pill that grows her a healthy new kidney, and comments that the medicine of the day was barbaric and carried out by butchers.
One of the things I have noted in the monolithic wall of propaganda from the media over COVID is that they continually talk about, being led by the science, as though scientific opinion was itself not divided on the matter, a belief they would no doubt want us all to accept.
And, on climate change, even if we accept, as I do, that most of the cause of global warming is the result of human action, that does not at all mean that the response to it is unanimous. If holding back development does not really change that much in terms of consequences, but does impoverish developing economies, the question surely has to be raised as to whether some other solution is preferable as Lomborg has said. As with most things, the answer lies in more development and raising the poor countries that would be most affected out of poverty, not the opposite.
The same applies with all of the wall of propaganda about trees. As Lomborg says, a hectare of wind turbines actually reduces Co2 in the atmosphere, by more than a hectare of trees. And, whilst everyone talks about CO2, what about the fact that each year, tees shed billions of tons in leaves that rot, releasing methane which is 25 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and each year, billions of tons of trees themselves simply die, and rot again releasing large amounts of methane into the atmosphere.
If we look at many of the interventions in the past supposedly led by science, they have had bad effects that were not anticipated. All of the flood defences put in in the US, tended to cause further environmental damage, and to cause even worse flooding downstream for example.
As I wrote recently, in relation to Britain, every year when houses get flooded, its now linked to climate change, rather than the obvious point that this is what happens when you build lots of houses in flood plains, and when you cram all of your residential property on to just 1% of the land mass, and then concrete over all of the area around it, preventing adequate run off.