Sunday, August 20, 2017

Trying to use PunditSpeak to critique uncritical thinking

Kurt Andersen has a new book coming out scheduled for a September release, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History. An excerpt appears in the September 2017 Atlantic Monthly, under the title "How America Went Haywire."

I'm very much appreciative of the kind of debunking of pseudoscience and general hokum presented in accessible language that we find in publications like Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic. A big part of the impetus behind journals like those and similar efforts is the recognition that pseudoscientific beliefs have a great deal of influence among the general public. Including among the well educated.

Andersen's article is very much in that vein. And it does provide a good summary of some of the most significant factors among the propagation of anti-science beliefs in the United States in the last half century or so. Mystical fad philosophies in the 1960s. Fundamentalist religion. Academic analysis and critiques of the social bases of science. Faith healing. UFOs and alien abduction stories. The John Birch Society. JFK assassination conspiracy theories. Near death experiences. Extreme individualism. The Internet. The Esalen Institute. Fringe theories of mental illness. Hippies. Ivy League professors. Government deception over Vietnam and various other important issues.

Even with 24 pages in the print edition, that's obviously too much ground to cover in any great detail. But that's okay. It's not bad, as far as it goes.

But it also left me wondering just what he's describing. His arguments are very accessible, because they use language that we hear from TV and print pundits all the time. And that's part of the problem.

American pundits are often stunningly lazy. They rely heavily on familiar narratives. Most of which are framed to cause minimum discomfort to the comfortable. A two-word summary of the problem: David Brooks. Reflective analysis is not required. And, if it might derail the comfortable narratives, even detrimental.

Andersen's Atlantic article suffers from some of the common problems of mainstream punditry. Here's an example:

How widespread is this promiscuous devotion to the untrue? How many Americans now inhabit alternate realities? Any given survey of beliefs is only a sketch of what people in general really think. But reams of survey research from the past 20 years reveal a rough, useful census of American credulity and delusion. By my reckoning, the solidly reality-based are a minority, maybe a third of us but almost certainly fewer than half. Only a third of us, for instance, don’t believe that the tale of creation in Genesis is the word of God. Only a third strongly disbelieve in telepathy and ghosts. Two-thirds of Americans believe that “angels and demons are active in the world.” More than half say they’re absolutely certain heaven exists, and just as many are sure of the existence of a personal God — not a vague force or universal spirit or higher power, but some guy.
He goes on to give other examples of seemingly nonscientific and uncritical thinking. But the one just quoted takes it for granted that the assent of survey participants to vague Christian religious ideas is evidence of not being "reality-based." But that isn't at all obvious from that quotation. For a Christian to agree that Genesis is the word of God doesn't mean that they accept Genesis as a scientific text or a literal description of history. I wondered in reading this if he was applying some sort of dogmatic atheist argument - "village atheist" would be a better description - that being a Christian means that a person has to be a fundamentalist Christian.

Something similar would apply to his comment about the belief that “angels and demons are active in the world.” This is one that I liberal Protestants would be unlikely to agree to. Conservative Protestants would be more likely to. Although they also tend to regard angels active in the world as "idolatrous" Catholic notions. Pentecostals tend to accept the reality of demon activity and faith healing, as well as the ritual of exorcism.

The Catholic case is more complicated, not least because it's a nearly 2000-year-old organization by the Church's traditional count, in which Jesus' disciple Peter was the first Pope. And in theory, the Church never changes its doctrines. It only develops fuller and more accurate interpretations and elaborations of them. So various positions can be rejected in practice while leaving them "on the books" in theory. So exorcism, for instance, is still officially sanctioned by the Church, but under far more restrictive rules than the wilder version the Pentecostals practice.

So it's likely that a significant number of respondents could agree to the angels-and-demons question out of a general recognition that their church believes in them in some way without taking it seriously that there could be disembodied spirits flying through the air meddling in the material world. And some may take angels and demons as some kind of metaphor without assuming that an angel will catch someone falling out of a window or that demons cause the common cold.

I would certainly agree that religious beliefs are a significant contributor to antiscientific outlooks. But survey results do not analyze themselves. Drawing conclusions like Andersen does in that passage requires more analysis than the passage above indicates.

He draws similarly sweeping conclusions in this passage:

The term useful idiot was originally deployed to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further on the left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals — postpositivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, post-empiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists — turned out to be useful idiots most consequentially for the American right. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert once said, in character, mocking the beliefs-trump-facts impulse of today’s right. Neither side has noticed, but large factions of the elite left and the populist right have been on the same team.
A analysis worth of Bobo Brooks himself. Both Sides Do It! But that passage is actually mostly stock conservative rhetoric. And since nobody but academics or specialized geeks could describe the difference between "epistemic relativists" and "descriptive relativists," he's basically just saying that all these here college perfessers and their high-highfalutin ideas are jest gittin' ever'body confused. What cain't we look at thangs in the good ole common-sense way Granpa did? Somebody should write a country song about it:



By the way, if you are actually curious about that catalog of wooly-minded academic theories, here is what I found with a quick search of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:


It would be an interesting exercise, at least for academics or philosophy geeks, to trace how any one of these academic philosophies contributed to, say, belief in UFOs or susceptibility to Rush Limbaugh's hate rants against "feminazis." That's not to say that academic theories don't wind up having wider affects in society. But it seems that the lack of familiarity of any kind of theory of cognition or how to evaluate sources would be more likely culprits.

Again, not everything that would be treated as Deep Thought by TV pundits actually has substance.

As a final example here, he makes statements about the unique qualities of Americanism of the sort that our Pod Pundits love:

Why are we like this?

The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible.
Yes, it is a short answer. And one that leaves the readers scratching their heads if they stop to think about it. What, belief in UFOs and conspiracy theories are special afflictions of Americans? Well, we are Exceptional, you know!

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