In our narratives about how our world works we lean heavily on the idea of cause-and-effect predictability. But a causation slot that must be filled in makes the world seem more knowable than it really is.
In his book How The Mind Works (1997) psychologist Stephen Pinker notes that the very idea of science assumes that there are direct causes for any material effect. Ask an experimental psychologist about the nature of a particular behavior, and the conversation will eventually drift toward its possible social or familial roots. Look at research on urban gangs, and the talk will soon include the contributing forces of peer and environmental factors. The social and hard sciences are generally in the business of seeking first causes. They need this conceit in order to work. To be sure, we are often better off because of their efforts, but not always.
For most of us this science template has probably infused itself in the ways we make sense of the everyday world. Looking for causal chains seems like the very definition of mental rigor.
From this perspective cataloguing effects is not enough. For example, uniform crime reports are interesting, but only get us so far. Our accounts for how the world works is anchored in our faith that things can only get better when causes are revealed and controlled. After all, events without apparent causes are disorienting. A tree that falls and kills a passerby tests out willingness to accept seemingly random events with lasting consequences. We want to know why, and how to control conditions that can prevent such deadly events.
Even with this natural impulse, we overuse the template. A causation slot that must be filled in makes the world seem more knowable than it actually is. We cherish lexicons of determinism. For example, we easily classify people into personality types, where the labels (“neurotic”, “needy,” “depressed,” “obsessive,” to name a few) become concrete explanations for behaviors tied to personality traits. But why Aunt Millie has a personality disorder is still anyone’s guess. Similarly, when a plane falls out of the sky we resort to the same template for making sense of what has happened. When we ask “what went wrong?” we expect a precipitating cause to be named. Only later do accident investigations usually reveal multiple problems that combined to create a disaster.
In our rushed and over-communicated age we rely heavily on the simplistic and deterministic.
Consider a different kind of example. Imagine if you are a neuroscientist. How long can you retain your professional credibility if you take the risk of acknowledging that the mind is partly “unknowable?” Neuroscientist’s study the brain and generally shun discussion of the “mind,” the useful label for what the brain has given its owner by way of a wealth of experiences and perceptions. What I see in my ‘mind’s eye’ is likely not what others see. But how do we find the causes for those mindful thoughts? A brain scan won’t cut it. Consciousness can’t be reduced to predictable neural pathways. And so the idea of mind muddies the scientific impulse for the measurement of particular effects. Thus the brain sciences generally remain silent on this rich idea, preferring to study the organ of thought more than thought itself.
This kind of problem is why the search for first causes tends to force us toward the absurdly technical or the overly simplistic. On the simplistic side, compressed ideas about why things happen indeed yield answers: usually good enough to see us to the end of the day, but not very reliable as bases for creating lasting understandings. The shorthand vocabulary of causes that we inevitably use give us dubious deterministic links that we nonetheless cling to. And so Muslims cause terrorism, African-American males are dangerous to be around, and politicians are corruptible. Each labeled category is pushed next to an arrow that points to a list of supposed causes, producing “answers” that in their narrowness are hardly worth knowing.
Sometimes the best response in reply to an unfolding set of events is uncertainly. Even with the need for simplicity in our busy lives, we have to save room to let in the messiness that is part of the human condition. Instead of imagining arrows, we need to think of webs. A web is a better representation of lines influence that are complex and pass through rooms of intermediate and unknown causes. If we want to be a little smarter all that is required is the resolve to give up the short-term thrills of unearned certainty.
When enough bad information is spread around it licenses all kinds of fantasies that take on a life of their own.
Since the mid-1800s information traveling at nearly the speed of light has transformed the opportunities for Americans to know more about their world. Of course the printed text offered a much earlier gateway to the minds of others. But book culture still works on an extended clock, using time to develop more considered insights. In contrast, electronic culture in the information age tends to give us allegations and assertions on the fly. Now and then a few are actually true.
We are at a transition point when anyone can “publish” at will. Access to digital media seems to create infinitely permeable understandings of what “information” can be. We are no longer shocked that willful distortion and strategic disinformation is regularly in the mix of ‘views’ on offer. But it is dismaying to see even a president-elect abandoning the usual rhetorical circumspection that comes to leaders who are about to speak in behalf of a nation. Trump is a fantasist. Never has a new chief executive come to the office with less regard for the reality-based world. Politifact’s example of a tweet from Trump on November 15 is typical: “The @nytimes sent a letter to their subscribers apologizing for their BAD coverage of me.” Not true. Nor is there an evidence for the stunning claim that he “actually” won the 2016 popular vote, as he recently asserted.
Trump is a fantasist. Never has a new chief executive come to the office with less regard for the reality-based world.
Any historical period has included individuals engaged in malicious distortion. The Second World War’s Tokyo Rose was perhaps the most famous. But we seem to be at the threshold of an era where claims anchored in evidence have no special status. This new mutant version of the information age finds ready acceptance of “alternate narratives” that are wrong, but carry just enough veracity to be taken seriously.
There are disturbing signs of our weakening regard for the truth everywhere. A majority of Republicans still believe President Obama is not an American citizen. The evidence of his birth certificate and transformational presidency is not enough. And then we have the news that The Oxford English Dictionary has chosen “post truth” as its word of the year, reflecting—among other things—the low-knowledge/big-change results seen recently with Britain’s Bexit vote and the 2016 presidential election.
People who study these things estimate that one in three Twitter posts are generated by computers programmed to lob what are literally mindless attacks against others. The accuracy of those issued from real humans often aren’t much better. And we now read reports that Facebook and Twitter are scrambling to tighten controls on “false news” stories and mindless invective thrown at political opponents. They have been overrun in part by “disinformation specialists” both home and abroad that enter the fray of national debate under cover of anonymity. These hacks are able to repeat dubious accusations that would never see the light of day in a fact-checked magazine or newspaper.
The willingness to believe falsehoods even overtakes scientific evidence and academic expertise. These days academic analysis is not so much admired as dismissed or ridiculed. Many Americans have redefined universities as political organizations, perpetuating what they see as a runaway political correctness that substitutes for reasoned understanding. I’ve had columns and posts about communication processes trolled by readers less for what I said and more for who I am. For some it is enough to know that a person is an academician to make the label self-indicting.
When enough bad information is spread around it licenses all kinds of fantasies that take on their own life. So when a street in Miami Beach floods, some residents can still find reasons to blame the local water department for leaky pipes rather than accept the inconvenient truth of melting ice caps triggering “king tides.” Of course most of us eventually face consequences for not living in the reality-based world. As almost any smoker can tell you, truths have a way of imposing themselves on our pitiful efforts to look away from the obvious.
Beyond simple untruths, when proposed policies offend important values—justice, fairness and compassion, to cite just a few–there is too much time for the mischief of disinformation and misinformation to have their ways with us before reason can add to real understandings. As Winston Churchill famously remarked, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
I was never much of a believer in teaching “media literacy” courses to students at all levels. But the subject may indeed be needed to save us from the quicksand of fantasies scattered across the internet, and soon to be given the imprimatur of presidential authority.
