First Reading. This from former Senator, scholar, and public intellectual, Daniel Patrick Moynihan:
“The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.” (March 2003)
Second Reading.
From financier, philanthropist, and statesman Bernard Baruch, writing in June 1950:
“Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
And this from former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, at a February 2002, press conference on the lack of evidence linking Iraq with the supply of weapons of mass destruction to terrorist groups:
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.”
I know I swore at the television when I heard Donald Trump enthuse about his love for the “poorly educated” after his primary win in Nevada last year. Among the countless cringe-worthy comments made by candidate Trump, this one really got to me. It was one more sign of the shrinking respect for learning in our society. We are witnessing in our public life, the continued, and too often deliberate, corrosion of our commitment to rational inquiry, deep learning, and the institutions that sustain them.
My fear is this: If we Surrender to Stupid, we, as a liberal democracy and religious community, will forfeit any claim we have to the values that define us. We cannot be complicit in allowing trust in the promise and ideal of learning to crumble.
At the core of this threat is a personal and collective hubris, an extreme and unjustified claim to superior knowledge, an overblown sense of self-assurance, an excess of arrogance, and an inflated sense of competence. If we talked about sin here – which we don’t— I’ve talked to Josh about it –intellectual hubris, or more properly, the hubris of ignorance, would rank right up there. As an open invitation to bad choices, it’s not a good basis for trying to build the free, fair, just, and compassionate society to which we aspire.
I remember when my father would greet his friends, typically by a “Hey,what do you know?”, or, more accurately, “Whaddya know?” The response was almost always, “not much”, sometimes, “nothing”, “how about you?”
Researchers have continued to increase understanding of how we think and how we come to know things. It’s no big surprise that my Dad’s generation was not far off. In computer terms, one researcher calculated that, give or take, we each store about 1 gigabyte of information. I don’t know whether that’s a lot or a little, but I can tell you we just bought an SD card smaller than a fingernail that holds 64 gigabytes of memory. The real issue, however, is not how much information we store, but how we use it to think, to anticipate how to act based on information and experience, make some inferences about cause and effect, and with that, hopefully, make good choices.
It’s a behavior that expects and accepts complexity and rejects simplism. This really is a word. I looked it up. It does not have the virtuous connotation of “it’s a gift to be simple,” or the concession that a complex issue is being introduced in a simplistic manner. Rather, it suggests a much more pervasive set of perceptions and behaviors, much like those captured in terms like sexism, ageism, or racism. The first time I heard Donald Rumsfeld’s tongue twister about the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown knowns, I thought it was just more babble from the Bush people. That reflexive reaction, grounded deeply in my distaste for President Bush, his men, and his policies, was a great example of doing what I’m criticizing here, namely, responding emotionally and mindlessly to words that made no sense to me at the time. In hindsight, it turns out to be a pretty good framework for untangling complex issues. It’s the difference between the problem-solver and the know-it-all. I probably don’t need to tell you that these are folks whose natural habitat seems to be everywhere. They speak with convincing certainty and will beat you up verbally until you agree that they’re right. These folks, I’m sure, inspired the term, “knows just enough to be dangerous.” You don’t want to talk politics or religion with them.
Cognitive researchers have confirmed what people have suspected for thousands of years, namely, that we think we know more than we do, and that individually, our smarts don’t take us very far. It is true that we sit at the top of the food chain, and we’re smarter than all the other plants and animals. At least as far as we know. But can you describe how a toilet works, how an ATM gives you money, how a zipper works, how the best ice cream is made? Or why the snorer can’t hear the snore? Could you fix any of them? Could you write a 10 page essay on the life of Martin Luther King based on what you know right now?
Here’s the reality. First, except for the very few things that we’re especially skilled at, we know just enough to get by. With few exceptions, our knowledge of the world around us and how things work, is shallow and superficial. The typical analogies are “just the tip of the ice-berg”, or “a mile wide and an inch deep”. Perhaps a better image is of a tree, which we see above ground, but know that there is a deep and complex root system that has nourished, shaped, and secured the small part we can actually see above ground. We are limited by time, energy, and memory in our ability to fully understand the complex ecological, mechanical, and technological systems that engulf us. So, we learn enough to function reasonably well in our daily lives, despite our personal limitations.
Second, what enables big things to happen in society is not any one individual, but many people with distinct, specialized skills working in some kind of collaborative fashion. Because we just can’t know everything we need to know to survive and thrive, we must trust in community to divvy up and share the mental and physical labor that keeps us going. The concept is as simple as it sounds. Different people in the community have different gifts and graces from which all may gain or lose.
Let me give a quick example. The day after I met Judi, who is now my wife, I took her to lunch at my favorite restaurant. Once we had worked around the splinters in the picnic table bench, I asked her what she liked to do (I was a pretty smooth talker back then). She said she liked to cook. I said I liked to eat. That sealed it. Details continue to be refined, of course, but it began as an excellent and satisfying division of labor. Now just imagine the range of specialized knowledge and social interactions required to a build our cars, planes, cellphones, and computer networks.
Here’s where the Hubris of Ignorance gets to be dangerous. If citizens have an exaggerated and unjustified view of their intelligence, they’re not likely to do the hard work of learning about complex systems. They’re way more likely to embrace simplism than acknowledge complexity.
And we live in a society that strives to simplify complexity. This is certainly true for our technologies. We used to have to go to the bank, the hardware store, or the pharmacy. My grandmother told us stories of using the crank phone to call the operator. I grew up in a house where you put your finger in a dial and spun it until you had all your numbers. Now we just press, swipe and tap. To buy, we open a keyboard, link to Amazon, search, enter, tap, and open the box one or two days later.
These efforts to simplify our lives gives us what we need to help make our way in an society disrupted by rapid social change. Just think about the term, ‘user friendly.” The danger here is when we begin to feel that our mastery of a few basic keystrokes, or mere mention of a president’s name is the same as understanding how a smartphone, computer, or presidential administration actually works.
There’s no evidence that Americans are any less smart than they were 50 or even 100 years ago. The problem is that at least some people think they’re bright when they’re not. It’s even got a name, the Dunning-Kruger Effect, after the psychologists who described it in 1999. What they found is that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you are not actually dumb. Although they refer to these folks in correct terms as “unskilled” or “incompetent”, their key finding is the same: “Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.” (Death of Expertise, p. 41) We should be careful, however, not to imagine an ‘us’ and ‘them’, when these traits are likely spread throughout the population.
That said, their vote counts the same as yours.
Now to be fair, we all overestimate what we know. Once we see that we don’t do so well on a task, however, we scale back our self-assessment. The difference is that the “unskilled” or “incompetents” do not have the ability or self-awareness to know when they’re not very good at something, by stepping back, looking at what they’re done, and recognize that they’ve done it wrong.
Moreover, there is simply no way to educate or inform these folks, who, when in doubt, will make things up. For example, in one cluster of surveys, the researchers asked if their subjects knew about certain technical concepts from physics, biology, politics, and geography. Most said they were familiar with genuine terms like centripetal force and photon. But they also claimed they were familiar with plates of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine. These are all made up terms. In another study, nearly 90 percent claimed some knowledge of at least one of the 9 fake concepts in their survey. (Death of Expertise, pp 45-46)
Let me share one more example. In 2015, a survey asked Democrats and Republicans if they would support bombing Agrabah. If you’ve watched survey reports, you know how dramatically these two tribes differ in their responses to policy and opinion questions. Nearly one third of the Republicans expressed support for such action; 13 percent opposed it. Only 19 percent of Democrats supported bombing, while 36 percent opposed.
Does anyone know about Agrabah? It’s the setting for the Disney feature, Aladdin. And before you dismiss this as a gotcha’ moment, grasp the reality here: 43 percent of the Republicans and 55 percent of the Democrats took a clear position on bombing a fictional place in a cartoon.
Now, let’s give a little boost to the Hubris of Ignorance, by stirring in our natural inclination to seek opinion and information that reinforces our prejudices and preferences, and emboldens us to disparage and dismiss contradictory information. This is the now famous Confirmation Bias. We all do it. If we don’t like what we read or hear we dismiss it and look somewhere else. That’s what Google’s for. For me, Fox is hard to watch, but for many others, it’s the information and attitude source of choice.
Consider how you feel about fossil fuels, immigration, vaccination, tax reform, gun control, opioids, white supremacists, or anything to do with the production or consumption of food. Now think about why you feel that way and where you get your information. Finally, ask whether you could conduct a balanced three- hour workshop on one of these without doing any further research. These are rhetorical questions, so we don’t need to have a show of hands.
This human tendency to exaggerate what we know, to be unaware of the limits of our own knowledge, and to select for reinforcement of our deeply held values, may be annoying or distracting at a personal level. Put this together with a cultural tradition of anti-intellectualism, extreme egalitarianism (“I’m as good as you and the next guy”.”); aggressive substitution of personal opinion for factual reality (“I’ve been in the real world, and I know just as much as the nerds with the white coats.”); a sense of grievance, victimhood, and unfair treatment (“They don’t work, and the government still sends them a check.”); a preference for force to resolve conflict (“I like that he doesn’t back down to anyone, he just pushes right back.”); a strong inclination toward simple rather than complex realities; and a lack of respect for expertise, and you’ve got a volatile, unstable mix. You don’t have to look any further than Charlottesville last week.
Let me give you an example of how hard people work to find information they like, and reject that which they don’t. White supremacists have been quick to adopt the easy to use genetic testing services to prove their racial identity, then discuss the results on on-line forums. Craig Cobb, described as a “gun-toting white supremacist” went on daytime TV for a reality moment that went bad when the host read results that showed he was only 86 percent European, and 14 percent Sub-Saharan African. Cobb, like many other white supremacists, found that their ancestry was not as ‘white” as they had hoped. Their response was to urge one another to rethink the validity of the genetic test, and then, get retested by another service.
I suspect that the exaggerated sense of personal knowledge, hubris, confirmation bias, and a preference for simplism over complexity, has also inspired a new vocabulary, likely unknown to the Founding Fathers, terms like alternative facts, post-truth, post-factual, or false amplifiers. In 2004, President George Bush’s political advisor, Karl Rove invoked the phrase reality-based community. People in “the reality-based community”, he told a reporter, “believe that [the] solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality…. That’s not the way the world really works anymore.”
And this from Stephen Colbert, in his persona of the right wing populist pundit, introducing the Word for the night, Truthiness: “Now I’m sure some of the ’word police’, the ‘wordinistas’ over at Webster’s, are gonna say, ‘Hey, that’s not a word!’ Well, anybody who knows me knows that I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books – they’re all fact, no heart…Face it, folks, we are a divided nation…divided between those who think with their head and those who know with their heart…Because that’s where the truth comes from, ladies and gentlemen—the gut.”
Colbert does what the best political satire does: focus with laser precision on a wonky corner of our politics. This celebration of instinct (the “gut”) and rejection of reason (expertise and learning) explains much about the fractures in our society. Rove clearly recognizes the traditional expectation that policies will have some basis in “discernible reality”, but then cynically recognizes the new reality of unreality. Politicians, predominantly those on the right, have been vocal in their attacks of science, especially the environmental (they don’t like climate research) and social sciences.
You see it clearly in their budgets. One of the best examples is the congressional ban (engineered in collaboration with the National Rifle Association) on the Centers for Disease Control from spending money to research the effects of gun violence.
This mix of shallow knowledge, willful ignorance, sustained and fueled by the hubris of shamefully wealthy patrons, is a toxic recipe for undermining a representative democracy.
Why does this matter to us? Because we are called, in the spirit of prophetic witness, to raise our voices whenever, wherever, and in whatever ways, freedom and human dignity are under attack. To promote– with malice of forethought– the corruption of reason and knowledge in a democracy is such an assault. It is a moral affront to both our civic and religious society. If we are blind to these assaults on reason, we give up a core piece of who we are. Lest we underestimate how much we cherish these values — dignity, freedom, justice, equity, compassion, democracy, peace, and harmony with the earth–just remember how you felt after the 2016 election when it seemed that these had been stomped and crushed.
We will not reverse this slide on our own. We’re limited in time, numbers, and resources. We also have our own blinders. There are some things we just don’t talk about. (Because we don’t talk about them I won’t say what they are.) But our most important asset for pushing back against Willful Ignorance is to support and nurture this place not just as a spiritual home, but as a place of learning. Here, through sermons, lectures, workshops, art, literature and film, and the unique knowledge of friends and members, we can learn things that matter, and re-learn the enduring truths of love, compassion, justice, and care for the stranger. We can support one another as we write, call out deceitful politicians, and, dare I say, speak with the confidence of an educated elite — in the appropriately humble manner, of course.
Finally, we need to nurture, sustain, and protect a still, quiet place, a sanctuary that provides respite from the unsettling changes, social turbulence, and coarseness that swirls around us. Even as we engage these challenges to freedom and equity, we still need our bridge over troubled water. We need a place that welcomes and accepts simple mysteries on their own terms. They are just what they are. I don’t need to know about the atmospheric physics or chemistry that turns the sky pink and blue-gray at dusk to get great pleasure from it. And I know from hearing your stories that you find great joy in such simple mysteries as well.
There is no way I could express this idea any better than Mary Oliver does in her poem,
“Nothing is Too Small To Be Wondered About”*
The cricket doesn’t wonder
If there’s a heaven
Or, if there is, if there’s room for him.
It’s fall. Romance is over. Still, he sings.
If he can, he enters a house
through the tiniest crack under the door.
Then the house grows colder.
He sings slower and slower.
Then, nothing.
This must mean something, I don’t know what.
But certainly it doesn’t mean
he hasn’t been an excellent cricket
all his life.*
So, what should we really know?
* From Mary Oliver, Felicity – Poems, (Penguin Press, New York), 2016
by Lauriston King, Unitarian-Universalist Society: East, August 27, 2017 (Revised August 28, 2017)
Sources and Additional Reading:
Curt Anderson, “How America Lost Its Mind”, The Atlantic, September 2017.
Al Gore, The Assault on Reason, (Penguin Press, 2007)
Jerome Groopnik, How Doctor’s Think, (Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007)
Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise – The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, (Oxford University Press, 2017)
Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach, The Knowledge Illusion – Why We Never Think Alone, (Riverhead Books, New York, 2017)
