In November 2016, Oxford Dictionaries announced that their Word of the Year was “post-truth”. They defined this unsettling term as a state of affairs where “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Early the next year the term “alternative facts” raised millions of eyebrows and caused sales of George Orwell’s 1984 to increase by 9,500%. Later in 2017, both the American Dialect Society and the Collins Dictionary announced that their word of the year was a phrase: fake news. There had indeed been an enormous number of phony news stories and news sites, but politicians immediately co-opted and distorted “fake news” to mean “any news I don’t like”. Which is a very post-truth thing to do.
Clearly, truth was having a rough couple of years. Many pundits quoted Mark Twain: “A lie can go around the world while the truth is putting its boots on.” Except Twain never actually said that. Which, paradoxically, shows how true the statement is. The misquotation was going around the world at the speed of light, promoted by the very people worried that truth no longer had any boots at all.
But--to paraphrase something Twain really did say--the reports of the sudden death of truth were exaggerated. First, the fact that so many people are outraged by post-truth politics, alternative facts, and fake news shows that many of us still do care what’s true and what’s false. Second, while the current assault on truth is very real, truth has had enemies for a very long time. Fake news, propaganda, logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and outright lies are nothing new.
But truth really is under attack today in new and alarming ways. The internet has allowed misinformation and propaganda to spread and multiply at the speed of light. It’s also created a world where anyone, no matter how harebrained their beliefs, can find websites and like-minded people to tell them they’re right. After a stint in this echo chamber, they decide that their opinions are just as good as “elitist experts” like scientists and policy analysts, and dismiss them as out-of-touch liars. The results are pretty shocking. Do you believe the earth is flat, or that many powerful people are secretly sinister reptiles? You can find plenty of people on the internet who think so too, thus reassuring you that these are perfectly non-nutty things for a grownup to believe.
While post-truth politics is commonly (and justifiably) associated with Donald Trump and the populist right, problems with truth exist across the political spectrum. A generation before Trump was elected, it was a Democratic president who said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman”. But he did. And it was academics far to the left of Bill Clinton who popularized the idea that there’s no such thing as objective truth; only social constructs manipulated by those with the most power.
Another trend that affects both sides of the political divide is increasing partisanship and ideological groupthink, which makes both sides more extreme in their views and more prone to confirmation bias and tunnel vision. People consult their ideology to decide what is true, when it should be the other way around.
This increasing polarization, along with social media and its disinhibiting effects, has turned our public discourse into an absolute farce. Have you ever tried to reason with someone who thinks personal attacks and ALL CAPS make devastating arguments, in front of an audience who thinks so too? I know I have. Social media has revealed how many people don't know the basic rules of logic and evidence. Many debates today are like playing basketball against an opponent who doesn’t know the rules, throws punches, counts personal insults as baskets, and refuses to acknowledge any points you make. Worse, the people watching the debate may think that’s how you win basketball games, too. And that makes the whole exercise useless. Debates serve little purpose if the debaters--as well as the audience--don’t recognize some basic framework for determining what’s fair, what’s factual, and what’s logical. And millions of people have no such framework.
That's a huge problem, because democracies depend on citizens being capable of reasonable, logical discussions. And that requires that people be able to think clearly and logically. Good debate and good thinking are closely related, because in both cases, conclusions need to be based on logic and evidence. In other words, the abysmal quality of public debate in our country reflects a deeper problem: a widespread lack of critical thinking ability.
This doesn’t just hurt society as a whole. It hurts citizens themselves. We need good thinking skills in our personal and professional lives as well as our civic lives, so we can make good decisions about what to believe and what to do. Should I worry about vaccinating my child? Should I break up with someone I like because our astrological signs aren’t compatible? Should I believe the preacher telling me that wives should obey their husbands? Should I trust the car salesman saying this is the perfect car for me? How about the politician telling me that violent crime rates are going up, and that they would go down if we all had more guns?
In all these cases, what we believe matters, because it affects the decisions we make, and those decisions have real effects on us and the people around us. That will be a recurring theme of this book: truth and logic matter, because falsehood and nonsense are toxic and sometimes deadly. The stakes are too high to believe whatever feels good.
So, if the well-being of democracies and their citizens depend on good thinking skills, and citizens lack those skills, then what's the solution? Abandon democracy? Let a central authority tell us what to believe, and how the country should be run? I don’t think so, and neither did one of the founders of our democracy, Thomas Jefferson, who said:
I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.
"Inform their discretion by education." This mirrors Margaret Mead's dictum that people should "be taught how to think, not what to think." That’s where critical thinking comes in. People aren’t born knowing how to be good critical thinkers. All of us--not just kids in school but all of us--have to be taught how logic and reasoning work. In my next post, I'll talk about why that's true, and just how hard it is to see the world clearly and logically.
No comments:
Post a Comment