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| Mars — nothing to do with the Moon |
I write a lot of children's non-fiction, a lot of adult non-fiction and some children's fiction. Fiction is currently beset by arguments about what counts as cultural appropriation. I'm not going into those arguments, but they revolve around ownership of story and whose truth should be told by whom. This is not going to be about cultural appropriation, but about truth.
The truth about human history, whether of an individual person or a nation, is partly subjective . There are facts, though they are not always discoverable — how many people died of a plague, how many people attended a president's inauguration ceremony. Then there are causes, which are more complex and open to interpretation: what really caused World War I, why does Trump lie about his inauguration crowd? These are not objective truths; we can discuss them until we agree but we might still be wrong and there is no conclusive proof to be found.
It used to be universally acknowledged that you could get a straightforward fact right or wrong. What was accepted as true might change over time as more is discovered, but it wasn't a matter of opinion. The age of the universe was until this year thought to be 13.77 billion years. New data suggests it might be a billion years younger. But the universe does actually have an age which we could, in theory, discover. People have never liked challenges to what has long been perceived as true. When European scientists first discovered that Earth orbits the Sun rather than the other way round, they were condemned and forbidden to teach this new knowledge as it was seen as a contradiction of the Bible. Consensus reality has a powerful hold, especially when backed up by religious belief. But still, the new truth - or more accurate version, the closer approach to the truth - usually takes root. Now, only some rather odd people believe the Sun moves round the Earth.
Let's take that small faction as an example as that belief is less contentious than some others we could use. There is no emotional investment in what celestial bodies do, as there is in, say, the anti-vax position or whether climate change is 'real'. It is clearly demonstrable with mathematics that the planets orbit the Sun, and if you don't like mathematics, you can go and sit in a space station and watch. There is no argument to be had. Yet some people prefer to believe something demonstrably untrue. Why? Is it because they don't like being told what to think? They don't 'trust' science, even though they have no better way of judging for themselves? They prefer to feel special (humans are at the centre, despite not having existed for the first 4.4 billion years of the solar system)? They are just uneducated and think it's a matter of opinion?
The latest nonsensical bit of untruth is Trump claiming yesterday that the Moon is part of Mars. Reader, the Moon is categorically not, and never has been, part of Mars. Some Americans will presumably now believe this. Some American children will grow up believing it (unless he backtracks today, of course). When did objective truth become a matter of opinion, or of choice? When did it become OK to spout nonsense? We are seeing some of the impact in the 'lies on the bus' issue. It's going to get a lot worse if truth has no perceived value. How can we proceed with education, or with writing factual books, in this kind of climate?
It is an odd world in which fiction demands more truth (the 'true' experience of the right kind of writer) and fact demands less. I waiver between thinking my job is utterly pointless now and thinking it is needed more than ever. Maybe both are true at the same time. Writers and educators must keep the flame of the Enlightenment alive so that fire of rational enquiry can be rekindled later. How much later, though?
9 comments:
Gaining control of information - in both fiction and non-fiction - is about power. We must keep resisting all who want to take it for themselves.
Anne, I am quite certain that your job is needed more than ever.
There's more to life than intellect, reason, and science being presented in a deterministic way that brooks no argument. For example, there are perfectly valid reasons to question how, and if, multiple vaccinations, the pumping of powerful drugs cause harm. Just one of those reasons might be a certain reservation about where science begins, ends, and is twisted to suit the ongoing commercial interests of multi trillion dollar drug companies. And things that make you go.. "Hhm.." when you walk into a doctors surgery, pick up a pen to write a prescription request, and think to yourself..... "Pete's sake...., £100,000 a year, and they can't even front up a biro without a drug company name on it".
That's why the post is about facts that are entirely objective, and quite specifically not about things that have an emotional aspect. I keep interactions with anti-vaxxers to my own social media presence, not ABBA. The post also specifically points out that science changes as new things are discovered, which is hardly 'brooking no argument', is it? I am challenging (here) ONLY people who choose to believe things that can been conclusively demonstrated to be untrue.
So interesting, Anne. Have there been other times in history when certain cultures have had similar denials of clear truths? Is it a symptom of something?
Trump should be banned from Twitter. Even the five year old across the road knows that the moon and Mars are two different places!
Seriously, we need to teach children how to critically review their sources of information.
So many times. Dictators have frequently tried to rewrite history. Why else did the Nazis burn thousands of books?
Lots of times, when it didn't suit a particular group to acknowledge changes in scientific knowledge, cultures have engaged in systematic denial. It's particularly prone to happen in biology, with examples as wide as racial biology explicitly used to support the "natural superiority" of whites over blacks in the American South and European colonial empires as late as apartheid South Africa, Nazi racial biology classifying superior and inferior races, or the weird Lysenkoism (neo-Lamarckism) that found favour in Stalin's Soviet Union. For that matter Creationism against Evolution is still an argument that continues despite evidence.
It's rarer in sciences like physics and chemistry although there were attempts by some German physicists to create Aryan/German Physics in opposition to Jewish Physics - unfortunately for them the most prominent German physicist of the era, Heisenberg, was far readier to accept Einstein's relativity and he was working on the German atom bomb so the Nazi's let him carry on teaching/researching his way.
One issue that made Copernicus' heliocentric theories hard to accept and easy to reject was that it was actually more complex than the geocentric theory prevalent at the time. It wasn't until Kepler published his work explaining elliptical orbits that 'natural philosophers' were ready to accept a heliocentric model, since Kepler's model was a much better mathematical theory to explain what was happening. And there wasn't much resistance to his idea.
There was a lot of resistance to Kepler from the Catholic Church, which claimed the Copernicus/Kepler model was counter to Biblical authority. Kepler published in 1609 and the teaching of a heliocentric model was banned in 1616, a ban reinforced in 1632 with the condemnation of Galileo's works. The Catholic Church did not officially recognise that Galileo was right about heliocentrism until 1992. Luckily, the scientific world, at least in Protestant countries, largely ignored the Church on this one.
All these examples (and there are many) are top down, though. I'm not aware of a previous burst of dedicated rejection of scientific truth from the bottom up, starting with lay people who have access to the truth and deny it (except sometimes because it conflicts with their religious beliefs).
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