Deceit Culture 2

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof laments Americans' "profound illiteracy about science and math" and offers some amusing examples. One-fifth of Americans, it seems, "still believe that the Sun goes around the Earth." (Bowing to the statistic, Kristof adds: "...instead of the other way around.")

Kristof warns that

[w]ithout some fluency in science and math, we'll simply be left behind in the same way that Ming Dynasty Chinese scholars were. Increasingly, we face public policy issues - avian flu, stem cells - that require some knowledge of scientific methods, yet the present Congress contains 218 lawyers, and just 12 doctors and 3 biologists. In terms of the skills we need for the 21st century, we're Shakespeare-quoting Philistines....

This disregard for science already hurts us. The U.S. has bungled research on stem cells, perhaps partly because Mr. Bush didn't realize how restrictive his curb on research funds would be. And we're risking our planet's future because our leaders are frozen in the headlights of climate change.

In this century, one of the most complex choices we will make will be what tinkering to allow with human genes, to "improve" the human species. How can our leaders decide that issue if they barely know what DNA is?

[The Hubris of the Humanities, December 6, 2005.]

There is a wonderful irony here. Kristof's "Hubris of the Humanities," criticizing "the arrogance of the liberal arts, the cultural snootiness of, of ... well, of people like me - and probably you," itself displays, in its fixation with knowledge, the typical humanist's blindness to the essential ingredient that is screamingly absent from our public discourse.

You don't need "knowledge of scientific methods," or any other particular kind of knowledge, to make good government policy. What you need is logical reasoning ability — the kind that a proper education in math promotes, and that only a tiny minority of people on this doomed planet possess. (Scientists, incidentally, can be fine workhorses in the lab, even demonstrate aptitude for intuitive leaps, without being especially logical.)

Why is U.S. society off the rails? Not because leaders don't know how to handle beakers. It's because people — government policymakers, journalists, citizens — have poor thinking skills. They begin with correct premises, and proceed inexorably to wrong conclusions. In between is piles of fallacious reasoning.

And that's when they haven't abandoned efforts at reasoning altogether in favor of divination and faith.

This actually understates the problem, assuming as it does the desire (if not the means) to know the truth. In our Deceit Culture, where lies fill the air, lots of people have not the least wish to know the truth — a condition that is surely connected to our saturation in seas of advertising. For many, delusion is the only sure route to what they want or need in life.

One broad hint of our acceptance of lies in the political realm is that that is what we get from our elected leaders. It can hardly be good for you when your leader lies to you. We should know this as a matter of general principle. We should spotlight indications of official lies; demand response; scrutinize the arguments; home in on the truth; insist — what could be more obvious? — that our representatives not lie to us. But we don't. This is not a population that demands truth from its leaders as a matter of principle. Frank Rich, whose New York Times columns provide useful compilations of White House lies, summarizes the selling of the Iraq war by commenting that it's simpler to ask what was not a lie:

The situation recalls Mary McCarthy's explanation to Dick Cavett about why she thought Lillian Hellman was a dishonest writer: "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.' "

[Dishonest, Reprehensible, Corrupt ..., by Frank Rich, New York Times, November 27, 2005.]

Some people blame Bush, but this is not the work of one man, or one administration. It's the culture.

In a Deceit Culture, no information is reliable. It's not a place where gentlemen of leisure ponder the truth and seek to disseminate it gratuitously. This is a material world. There is intense competition all around. This race is not for pansies. Gentlemen do not scramble as they'd have to to get their message out. When information reaches you, somebody has paid for your eyeballs. And goddamn it, they want something back for that money.

The New York Times is just another player in our Deceit Culture, so it too is unreliable, although fortunately it's not inconsistent with its agenda to offer some truth sometimes. On WMD, they claimed error but ignored the indications of their own deliberate deceit, an offense which in this case could be considered treasonous. In promoting expanded privileges for the press (a shield law for reporters), they conducted a campaign of deception against their readers. These two issues came together in the case of Judy Miller, whom Times boss Arthur Sulzberger Jr. reportedly decided to support without really thinking much about the matter (earning himself several rebukes in the Times's own pages, a circumstance perhaps unprecedented for a Times publisher). So the Times fought a public campaign to protect false, and treasonous, government propaganda. Now that they've lost, and tarnished the idea of protecting journalists' sources, the protection for real whistle-blowers — individuals who try to alert the people to government lies — has been weakened, and the forces of deceit are stronger.

Related: New York Times-related items at urielw.com.

Continued: Deceit Culture 3.