A basic question: are people stupid for believing things? Are they gulls? Are they dupes? Or is there no way of knowing that gets past belief?
It’s a political question, or at least a question that conditions your response to politics. If you follow Plato in distinguishing between doxa (tired) and episteme (wired), then you’re going to have a hard time watching people make political decisions. That’s because political debate always involves various prosthetic attachments to logic, “as-ifs” like enthymemes or the utilitarian calculus that let us debate incredibly complex issues as though we were talking about the same thing, even as we disagree about the fundamentals. If, as in the USA right now, people decide to keep the fakery but lose the consensus, it can get downright infuriating. The truth is out there, so why is everyone happy watching trump tweets projected on a cave wall?
You can lose your mind trying to figure that one out. Plenty of people have, which is why MSNBC is now pulling in ratings about on par with Fox’s among politically-attentive oldsters. MSNBC joins CNN, the Washington Post, and plenty of second- or third-rate political writers in appealing to that truth-obsessed demographic, not by solving the conundrum that’s melting their brains – that’s bad business, since you can only do it once – but by selling a kind of martyrdom. It’s true what you think, that half the country is living a lie. You’re one of the smart ones, the good guys, that sticks to the truth. So truth and knowledge of the truth, which begin as the most profoundly hubristic claims that humans have ever made upon the world, end as a marketing plan. Nietzsche wouldn’t mind!
The alternative, paying more attention to how truth works, is something I’ve advocated on this zero-reader blog since day one. It wouldn’t hurt if we could learn to see what’s happening now as just one more turn of the screw, rather than as a world-ending catastrophe. Part of that means recognizing what a world is, and the extent to which every world – whether it belongs to us or them – is built around forms of ungrounded belief.
I’ve seen these ideas cropping up elsewhere lately, too, in a kind of delayed response to the trump campaign that’s finally something other than an immune reaction. One sign of the times in Emily Ogden’s Credulity, just released, which looks marvelous and which I haven’t gotten my hands on yet. Another is D.W. Pasulka’s American Cosmic, an illuminating study of the modern UFO cult that unfortunately also suggests we’re not out of the woods yet. I’m glad to see Pasulka reveal technology for the cult that it is by laying out the homologies between our attitude towards it and UFOlogy. I’m now convinced that UFOlogy too, cult or not, deserves a fairer hearing than it’s gotten: it’s probably the only religion with a chance of being right about its god. I was nauseated, though, by the book’s final episode, in which the sophomorically-pseudonymed Tyler Durden, a wealthy UFO expert whose story makes up the backbone of the book, converts to Catholicism. Wittingly or not, Pasulka paints a portrait (which may also be a self-portrait) of someone who gets off on his own credulity. “I want to believe,” not as a coy expression of skepticism but as a straightforward statement of desire.
The tiresome thing is that Pasulka’s subjects generally take their beliefs as seriously as the truth. That’s a danger that faces anyone who thinks that truth and belief as clearly separable, because the easiest way to make that separation is to say that what I have is truth, while what you have is belief. We thus make ourselves at once sanctimonious and psychotic, two nasty flavors of human that taste worse in combination.
Robert Pfaller had a good idea about the Greeks, which is that they didn’t take their beliefs too seriously. I think that’s basically right and can be extended to most non-Western societies; Christians were the ones who fetishized truth and then tried to make everyone else do the same. Now every truth looks like a hill to die on. Is it too late for us to become like the Greeks in at least this respect?