Much to my, and everyone else’s, astonishment I turned out to be good at Logic at University. It fed my fascination with how we know what we know – epistemology in academic-speak. Not that it was well taught. Tedious hours of angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin philosophising about where the speckles on a hen resided in our heads - I kid you not – did not add much, in my estimation, to the sum total of wisdom in the universe. But in general it was worthwhile and has continued to grip my interest in more pragmatic situations in later life.
The phrase ‘tribal epistemology’ turned up this week, a weighty expression referring to the cult-like absolutism of present day political fandom. Get your ‘facts’ from one source devoted to your idol and everything else gets blocked out as irrelevant and/or malign noise. What is taken as the incontrovertible truth is a sliver of reality and often not even true. Feeding bodies with only one food, whether burgers or carrots, is rightly frowned on, so why should we fill our minds with an unbalanced diet of thoughts?
My early training as a journalist was in the days when it wasn’t considered professional to hold fixed political views. The job was to observe, keep an open mind, review each situation or personality on their merits. Similarly political astrology won’t work well without detachment. Allow your personal feelings to creep in and you’ll get it wrong. Manys the time I glared at GW Bush’s chart after Iraq wishing the heavens would fall on his head. But it wasn’t what the astrology said and he sailed out of his double term into a peaceful retirement.
Not everyone has the time or inclination to stay on top of a morass of conflicting information. My father decided early on which party he’d vote for, just to get the decision out of the way, and took no interest in politics thereafter. In contrast, my early habit of reading right across all news media, to kick start the day, has stuck as I attempt to glean some coherence from a babble of clashing opinions and facts.
Laziness isn’t the only excuse for not being well informed. Living in an echo chamber where the like-minded all agree can be comforting, reinforcing a sense of identity. I’m ‘one of us’. Any dissenting voices become the objects of attack since they threaten the cohesion of the sect and threaten the security of belonging.
And on a macrocosmic level, hatred, as political leaders well know, is a nifty way of bolstering identity. Have an enemy outside and the national esprit de corps is strengthened. The USA have a peculiar bent in this regard. For decades they focussed their hostility on communists and once the Berlin Wall fell they had to find another outside enemy in Muslims to distract from internal fracture lines. The Israelis and Palestinians; Pakistan and India; Scotland and England – direct the anger outwards and it quietens domestic argument.
The inability or unwillingness to grasp complex thinking also plays a part. Years ago Arthur Koestler was researching a book on Indian gurus and the question he asked himself each time was ‘are they fake or are they genuine?’ Eventually he decided it was the wrong question. The correct one was ‘how much is fraudulent and how much authentic in each of them.’ None were shining white, all had flaws and cooked up a performance at times.
Accepting our idols have feet of clay comes hard. The realisation that even talented super-beings can be right and wrong, good and bad shouldn’t tumble them from their pedestals or negate their good qualities and talents. Yet for most avid fans it is a devastating shock. Their hero(ine) has to be perfect. The rage directed at any hint of criticism is because it threatens the dream of a champion, who is omniscient in all things.
I’ve always been good at cherry-picking, knowing even those whose views I loathe are occasionally right, and those I admire can get it crashingly wrong at times. Never having been a joiner-in to groups and being robustly invested in my outsider identity, it is easier to sift through the tangle of opposing ideas without being seduced into one corner or the other.
Is it worse now that it used to be? The twittersphere has jacked levels of vituperation up to toxic levels. The Native American proverb ‘Listen or your tongue will make you deaf’ has been swept aside in a tsunami of bile against any who refuse to bend the knee to the ‘Us’ line on any side of a political demarcation dispute.
Using facts and the truth as disposable commodities is the way of the despot, whether in a family or out in society. Yet it only happens is we allow our minds to be manipulated out of inertia, cowardice or desperation for kinship in a cult with a Supreme Leader. It is salutary to remember that both Hitler and Mussolini were regarded as bad jokes and buffoons before they turned into malevolent autocrats. Both of them imposed their own warped reality on their unquestioning followers and they surged to power over the heads of those who held both in contempt.
Richard Nixon reckoned the ability to lie was essential for political ambition to succeed. Joseph Goebbels instructed the faithful: ‘Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.’ Trump hasn’t quite cracked that one yet.
How we think and what we think is crucially important. In a universe rightly obsessed by seas awash with plastic debris, concern about what pollutants we spew into the atmosphere and what toxins we ingest with our food, we are remarkably careless about what garbage is injected into our heads. Just a thought.
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