America’s Great Divide is Really Between Those Who Accept Facts and Those Who Do Not

It's a variation on the old joke: "There are two kinds of people -- those who divide the world into two kinds of people and those who don't." We even define this as a spatial dimension running from left to right. This is alright for a start, but may I suggest that the divide is more properly between those who accept facts and logic vs. those who don't. 

There is an oft-quoted line by Carl Sagan, who explained, "In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are humanand changeis sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion." 

I won't speak for religion here, but Sagan sure gets it right when it comes to politics -- you don't see a lot of mind changing among our nation's elected officials, even when the topic is something that ought to be subject to the accumulation of data. 

Global warming is the most obvious and … as destructive weather events increasingly show … the most critical such topic of this era. The evidence is increasingly convincing that global warming is not only here, but we are the cause. The effects will become worse and worse. 

Yet there are those, particularly in politics, who continue to deny the reality of global warming. It's not as if they have not been told. The debate goes on and on, but the defenders of doing nothing continue to grasp onto lines of evidence that aren't really tenable, and increasingly to arguments that are transparently ad hominem. 

It is a matter of intellectual honesty vs. intellectual dishonesty. The evidence and the mathematical calculations are there. The calculations may be hard for most people to understand, but that is no excuse for rejecting the results. The common response from global warming deniers -- "I'm not a scientist" -- is not acceptable as an excuse for policy setting. 

Another refusal to consider scientific evidence in an honest way can be observed in the case of the anti-vaccine advocates. There is a long list of anti-vaccine tropes that get passed around on internet discussion groups. Every one of these spurious claims has been thoroughly rebutted, time and time again, but there don't seem to be a lot of Sagan-type thinkers among the anti-vaccination folks. 

What do you call a pattern of thinking that starts with a conclusion and insists on ignoring all countervailing facts? What do you call a pattern of thinking that -- even in the presence of overwhelming fact and logic -- simply continues to repeat all the old long-since-demolished arguments? It is tempting to apply a word like flake, or even to use that fashionable term cultism. Perhaps fanaticism is appropriate. Those terms may describe in social and organizational terms what these people represent, but I think that we might be better served by simply recognizing this way of thinking as intellectually dishonest. 

The crux of the matter is that some people simply don't accept the idea that they are required to be intellectually honest. It seems to be the way for a lot of politicians. They can feed on the emotional and economic interests of their voters by reciting nonsense. If you live in an oil producing state and have a financial interest in the growth of the petroleum industry, the politicians can tell you that everything is fine, that you aren't doing any harm, and that the opposition are themselves the fanatics. It won't be true, but a lot of office holders get away with it. 

Intellectual dishonesty is what is ignored by official journalism 

And this is the problem. The idea that journalism is supposed to be "balanced" is an ill-defined principle. The process of finding one naysayer seems to be the way of journalism, at least at the lower levels. And if you are a reporter, you can always find that one naysayer, even for a principle as simple as the fact that the world is round rather than flat. When it comes to global warming, there is a whole industry dedicated to spreading the big lie. When it comes to the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing measles and rubella, there is the equivalent of an industry spreading the big lie. 

I don't think that journalists are inherently unable to separate the simple truths from the big lies, but there is something in the culture of newspapers and television news hours that resists taking sides. The dailies might profitably take a hint from Carl Sagan's famous remark. 

And to finish with one more old joke, remember the saying that everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it? It's a saying that reflected a reality previous to massive industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels. It seems that we have been doing something about the weather -- as an entire species -- and we should figure out how to stop.

(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics. He can be reached at [email protected]) 

-cw