The Republic of Ignorance
Never have we been drowning in such an ocean of ignorance.
Perhaps at least part of the reason is that so much utter and complete nonsense is available to us via the Internet- and when all is said and done, we believe what we want to believe.
I got into a heated discussion the other day with an African-American neighbor who insisted that the "first president of the United States" (actually, the first president of "The United States in Congress Assembled," aka the Continental Congress) was a black man. This is based on two pieces of significant misinformation. In his defense, I myself have believed one of them for years.
The point we were both deceived about was the notion that John Hanson was the first president of the Continental Congress. Even the Smithsonian had had an exhibit promoting that piece of historical misinformation for a while, though it has now been taken down.
In fact, Hanson was the ninth president of the Continental Congress. Peyton Randolph was the first. John Huntington of Connecticut, the seventh, was the first to serve under the Articles of Confederation, which were adopted on March 1, 1881. He stepped down on July 10 and was succeeded by Thomas McKean of Delaware, the first to actually be elected under the Articles. Samuel Johnston of North Carolina had been elected the day before but declined the office.
The position was a ceremonial role, in essence, the moderator of a debating society and wholly unrelated to the office of President of the United States under the Constitution.
The second piece of misinformation is an internet myth confusing the president of the American Colonization Society, an African-American who emigrated to the newly-founded nation of Liberia and served as a member of its Senate, with the white politician from Maryland who in fact served as the ninth (not the first) president of the Continental Congress and the third to do so under the Articles of Confederation. Both men, as it happens, were named John Hanson, and a photograph of the Liberian senator is often used on sites promoting the confusion of the two men. In fact, photography did not even come into widespread use until the 1850's.
Why do so many African-Americans cling to the myth? Because it's a point of pride, and it's human nature to surrender such ideas only reluctantly if at all. While easily disproven, this is one of the more benign such myths to be circulated on the Internet. Despite the inherent absurdity of the notion that such a position would be given to a former slave in the early days of a republic in which slavery was still very much in existence, one could wish that it were true. One could wish that the history of our nation was such that it could be plausible.
With the advent of the Trump administration and the rise of the Alt-Right, all manner of ridiculous urban legends from the Right have gained greater credence. The president himself was once a "birther," who insisted that his predecessor, Barack Obama, was not born in the United States even after Mr. Obama produced a birth certificate proving that he was born in Hawaii. Various extremists from a variety of political perspectives subscribe to the "truther" notion that the attack by al-Qaeda on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, was an "inside job." Probably never in history has the "tinfoil hat brigade" (named for people of questionable sanity who wear hats made of tinfoil to prevent aliens from reading their minds) had a louder voice. Without question, the Internet- not only history's greatest resource for disseminating information, but also for spreading disinformation- has played a large role here.
So has the politicization of science. American and Canadian universities have become mechanisms for promoting a political viewpoint which scorns the notion of objective truth. Right and Left alike are more inclined to try to intimidate and silence those with whom they disagree than to listen to them, understand their position, and enter into dialog.
As in the case of journalism, a disproportionate percentage of academicians are on the political Left. Even in the sciences, from the decision by the American Psychological Association in 1974 to remove homosexuality from the category of mental illnesses onward, questions have reasonably been raised about the degree to which the social and political attitudes even of scientists have distorted their perception of the facts. The greater tendency of peer-reviewed papers whose theses are at odds with the narrative of liberal social and political beliefs to attract strict scrutiny and strenuous objections than those with whose conclusions scientists as a group are more comfortable has been noted among many on the Right. This is true in the social sciences as well as in "hard science." The result has been a breakdown in the credibility of those who used to be regarded as authorities capable of settling debates and issues. On the Right and the Left alike, we've become a nation of people who can find support for pretty much any nutty premise on the Internet, and who are apt to believe pretty much what we want to believe. And no, censorship by the social and political Left is not a viable solution!
I came across another rather malignant example of the phenomenon earlier today. Ironically, it was posted by a conservative white man. It maintains that AIDS originated during the development of the first live polio vaccine and that a Polish doctor by the name of Hilary Koprowski knowingly infected "millions of people" with a disease whose existence would not even be discovered until two years after he supposedly began the process and three decades before AIDS became a public health problem.
The notion that the AIDs virus somehow originated from the work on the polio vaccine has even received some scientific support. But even those who give it credibility emphasize that it is far from proven, and in any case, it's difficult to see how a virus could be deliberately spread years before its existence was even discovered! In fact, the evidence for a more recent and far more mundane origin of the epidemic is far stronger, but it seems that our modern society just can't resist a good conspiracy theory.
The election of Donald Trump, a man whose history of questionable public ethics and dealings with the law, as well as erratic personal behavior and bizarre public positions has been well-known for decades by anyone who simply made an effort to be informed, seems conclusive proof of just how gullible and open to deception we as a society have become. It doesn't seem to matter whether we're on the Left or the Right; we believe what we want to believe, and the evidence be damned. The number of Democrats even today who will insist that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction and that George W. Bush "lied" rather than being honestly mistaken in reaching a conclusion supported at the time by pretty much every intelligence service in the world, or was AWOL during his service in the National Guard, is massive. Facts no longer matter. In the wake of the school shooting in Florida this past week, we continue to hear arguments that the easy availability of guns in the United States, unparalleled in the developed world, has no relation to a murder rate also unparalleled in the developed world. I even came across an article this past week arguing that statistics which compare American homicides to those of other developed countries rather than including Third World countries and failed states in which few laws of any kind are enforced and social and economic chaos reigns- and which uniformly are those whose murder rates approach or exceed our own- are somehow "cherry-picked," simply because they compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges!
We live in a post-reality world. We feel free, like our president, to make up "alternative facts" as convenience warrants, or to believe any crackpot and disregard any legitimate authority we choose. We have become polarized that we only believe those who agree with our own predetermined conclusions. Although I myself make every effort to avoid it, I have to admit that I'm in pretty much the same boat as everybody else; the only difference is that I at least make an effort to acknowledge the truth in what the other side says, and the nonsense being peddled by my own.
But it's hard for any of us to tell the two apart these days. No matter how smug and arrogant the Left may be, or how paranoid the Right, both are drowning in an ocean of their own partisanship, their own ignorance of any viewpoint but their own, and their own passion for what fits the narrative they prefer as opposed to the facts. The unprecedented availability of information has coincided with a breakdown in the means by which information can be reliably verified, and the result is a society mired in intellectual chaos.
I'm not sure what can be done about it. But I sense that if anything can be done, it lies in the realm of a greater willingness on the part of all of us to be even more skeptical of "facts" which purport to support our own preferred narrative than to undermine it. It will require a willingness to engage in listening rather than screaming, and to engage the arguments are opponents are actually making rather than those we would prefer to believe that they are making and willfully choose to hear.
But that would mean overcoming human nature. That would mean finding a way to separate sense from nonsense even when it's the nonsense we would rather believe. It would require giving up cherished delusions and be accepting of uncomfortable facts. And it would require it somehow becoming a great deal easier to distinguish the truth from the tissue of lies and half-truths which form the substance of our communal lives.
I wish I could say that I'm optimistic about our finding a way of doing that. If we are going to survive as a free society, we somehow have to. But I don't see how we're going to pull it off.
Perhaps, if this isn't too offensive to those who disdain others for doing so, I might suggest that we pray for guidance.
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