Kent: Historical sense is what keeps us human – and future generations might lose it, if we’re not careful

2022/10/22 Leave a comment

Good discussion and reflection:

“Imagining the functionality of a human being without historical sense is really scary.”

It was an uncharacteristically grim observation made by my old college tutor, Perry Gauci, during a Zoom conversation in the summer of 2020. My peers and I had always regarded Dr. Gauci as indefatigably cheery: His infectious grin had reassured and encouraged me through my first round of Oxford history interviews, and his pre-exam pep talks were as energizing and inspiring as the best cornerman encouragements. But what he’d said also made complete sense at a moment when the world felt as if it were teetering on the brink; when many of us were at once scrambling to try to see into the future while maintaining some semblance of normality in the “now.”

Imagining a human being without historical sense is scary. The thought of living exclusively in a blinkered present moment is scary. Scarier still is the thought of an entire generation, not to mention society, operating from a position of historical ignorance. And yet that is exactly the situation in which we find ourselves today.

The people and events of history may be rooted in the past, but how we talk about those things, what we write about them, and how we teach them (in other words, how we practise history as the record of human experience) tell us a lot about who we are and what we value right now. It’s easy to think of all those who came before us as either foolish or luckless enough to have lived in a time that’s not the present. But conditioning ourselves to believe that we’re the exception is, at best, naive and, at worst, a fatal mistake.

Thinking of ourselves as a chapter in an as-yet unwritten history book, on the other hand, is likely to force deeper self-reflection: Whose stories will we champion? What values will we defend? What models will we offer ensuing generations? In an era of environmental change, rising inequality and seismic shifts in the international political arena, we need to understand how our institutions have developed in order to understand why they don’t always have adequate responses to these crises. History gives us this power. No other subject helps us to understand so comprehensively what it is to be human. No subject is more vital to our very humanity.

That’s why it was so shocking to read, as of September, 2020, that almost two-thirds of surveyed Americans between the ages of 18 and 39 did not know that six million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believed Jews caused the Holocaust. In a survey commissioned by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, The Guardian reported, 23 per cent of respondents said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. Twelve per cent said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.

The implications of this kind of ignorance are staggering, but the ignorance itself isn’t entirely surprising given the downgraded status of history in most schools. Here in Canada, the Ontario social-studies curriculum for Grades 1 to 8 contains not a single mention of the Holocaust. In early 2022, the cost of this became frighteningly clear. In January, several participants in the so-called Freedom Convoy to Ottawa displayed flags and signage bearing swastikas. The following month, the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre called on the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) to recognize antisemitism as a “crisis” after another alleged incident at a middle school. The organization’s president and chief executive officer, Michael Levitt, said in a release: “Anti-Semitism has reached epidemic proportions at TDSB, and it is time for the board to recognize this as the crisis that it is. It is unfathomable and shocking that, in 2022, a Jewish teacher is faced with Nazi salutes and a ‘Heil Hitler’ chant in her classroom. Clearly, something is broken in Toronto’s public school system and requires immediate attention.”

It’s dispiriting, to say the least, to realize that we are sleepwalking toward becoming a Visigoth state like the one described by Neil Postman. “[For] the Visigoths,” he wrote in his popular and widely circulated graduation speech, “history is merely what is in yesterday’s newspaper.” If you’re reading this, chances are you already know that history is much more than that. It is, in fact, everything and all of us: It’s quite literally inescapable. As educator and author Susan Wise Bauer observes in The Well-Trained Mind, history isn’t just a subject: It’s the subject. “Unless you plan to live entirely in the present moment, the study of history is inevitable,” she writes. For many, myself included, history is inherently, inevitably and infinitely compelling, but there will still always be those who question its “usefulness.”

One simple answer is that historical knowledge is power: The control of history, which shapes our political and cultural identity, is precisely why cathedrals of knowledge from the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress (and from Catholic collections during the Reformation, to Jewish collections during the Holocaust, to Islamic collections during the Balkan wars of the 1990s) have been targeted for destruction and appropriation since earliest times. “There is no political power without power over the archive,” Jacques Derrida observed: Ancient Mesopotamian rulers used the texts preserved in their libraries to decide when to go to war, while today authoritarian regimes and major technology companies vie for control of the archive as it migrates to a digital realm.

On an individual level, studying history gives us roots: a context for our existence. Individuals who lack that context lack a significant element of self-understanding but also an understanding of their relationship with the rest of society. Rootlessness limits our ability to function, to empathize, to feel invested in anything beyond our own immediate needs. It also disempowers us.

Powerless people become easy targets for exploitation, propagandizing and manipulation, particularly by those who appear to offer membership to a group or cause. As University of Michigan associate professor Bob Bain put it to me, “Stories help orient us to the present. If you’ve got no story, then you’re primed for someone else to give one to you.”

Not surprisingly, there’s a great deal of skittishness over the idea of teaching children any kind of agreed-upon narrative, because no one wants to be accused of forcing the “wrong” kind of story on impressionable minds. But the result of teaching no coherent story at all is a fragmentation of knowledge, what Dr. Bain described to me as “the byproduct of a generation of people like me who were taught that any grand narrative is manipulative, paternalistic and evil, without realizing how necessary it is.”

There’s an obvious tension at play: On the one hand, we need history to build understanding and appreciation for shared values and responsibilities, while on the other we need to remain vigilant against distortions that create an oversimplified narrative, the kind that, as renowned historian Margaret MacMillan writes, “flattens out the complexity of human experience and leaves no room for different interpretations of the past.”

In her brilliantly concise and accessible The Uses and Abuses of History, Dr. MacMillan details many examples of such a flattened history: from the 19th-century Grimm brothers collecting German folk tales to prove that there was such a thing as a German nation dating back to the Middle Ages, to dictators, including Robespierre and Pol Pot, creating new calendars to begin history afresh, and Mao and Stalin writing their enemies out of the record. The BJP government has consistently attempted to rewrite history to present India as a Hindu nation from its earliest beginnings, while here in Canada, French-Canadian nationalists have often focused on the past as a story of humiliation at the hands of the British while neglecting examples of co-operation (for instance, over the building of the railways and through the early years of Confederation) or, indeed, French-Canadian sympathy for a rival foreign government during the Vichy regime.

More recently, the trend in the West has veered the other way, toward deconstructing and challenging inherited national narratives in pursuit of a type of historical catharsis. So, do we teach history to build a sense of national pride, or to poke holes in it? As Daniel Immerwahr wrote in The Washington Post toward the end of one of the most tumultuous years in living memory, “Such questions have always struck me as odd, for two reasons. First, we design curriculums around what students will learn rather than how they’ll feel. The aim of a geometry class is not for students to love or hate triangles but to learn the Pythagorean theorem. Similarly, the point of U.S. history isn’t to have students revere or reject the country but to help them understand it. The second reason is that, by imagining history class as a pep rally or a gripe session, we squeeze the history out of it. The United States becomes a fixed entity with static principles, inviting approval or scorn. And that makes it hard to see how the country has changed with time.”

Clearly, in an age of “fake news,” Google and Wikipedia, engaged citizens need to be culturally literate, critical thinkers. There is no better subject than history to develop an appreciation of context and an ability to interrogate evidence. Just as we expect a math curriculum that systematically builds on blocks of knowledge and developing skill sets, we should also expect a logical history curriculum (preferably an international one) for our children. If it were commonplace to hear graduates claim that they’d never learned to divide, there would be an outcry. So should there be now.

Such knowledge-based learning needn’t tell students what to think, but would rather provide the tools to learn how to think. In the digital age, perhaps more than ever, “users” (to adopt the purposefully dehumanizing tech term) require a sense of sequence and consequence, a nose for collecting sound evidence, and an ability to discern the difference between sophisticated and oversimplified analogies. To look something up, you need to know what you are looking for.

And in these hyper-partisan times, history reminds us of the importance of nuance and the enduring fact that there will always be contradictions. No single group is right all the time, and we all need to be able to hold two opposing ideas in our head at once.

It’s easy to reach an exhaustion point: to throw up our hands in despair at the relativism of everything. Lynn Hunt captures this problem beautifully in History: Why It Matters: “If it is so easy to lie about history, if people disagree so much about what monuments or history textbooks should convey, and if commissions are needed to dig up the truth about the past, then how can any kind of certainty about history be established?”

The fact remains that, imperfect though it is, we need historical truth. Without it, we have no leg to stand on to counter the claims of dictators or Holocaust deniers. But just what exactly is historical truth? Most would agree that it boils down to actions or events, and arguments as to their causes and consequences, which can be verified by historical evidence. As the evidence changes, so must the story. Historians’ work will never be done, therefore, because the stories we record and interpret are in constant need of correction, adjustment and reinterpretation based on the available evidence. And the questions they ask will necessarily keep changing, because we’re always wanting to ask questions that are relevant to the present.

As Julia Lovell, winner of the 2019 Cundill History Prize for her book, Maoism: A Global History, explained in a panel discussion with fellow shortlistees, “Historians always have to answer the ‘So what?’ question.” Traditionally, the questions posed about 19th-century China could often be reduced to “Why did it fail so badly?” But now, in light of China’s rise to 21st-century superpower, that question has become “How can we find the seeds of China’s contemporary success in the 19th century?” Evidently, the practice of history teaches us a number of things: not least, flexibility, patience, humility, and the value of keeping an open mind.

The good news is that the public appetite for history has never been greater. Anthony Wilson-Smith is president and CEO of Historica Canada, an organization devoted to promoting an understanding and discussion of Canadian history. The fabled Heritage Minutes, commercial-length history lessons blending re-enactment and narration, are arguably Historica’s greatest achievement, reaching about 27 million users annually. The first ones aired in 1991 and featured Valour Road, the Winnipeg street that was home to three Victoria Cross recipients; the Underground Railroad, which brought runaway slaves to freedom; and Jacques Plante’s invention of the goalie mask. Lines such as “Doctor, I smell burnt toast!” and “I need these baskets back” quickly entered the cultural lexicon of many young Canadians. One of my friends, of South Asian family heritage, said that the Minutes (in particular, the one about the Chinese workers who built the railroads) did more to teach her about diversity in Canada than anything she learned in school in the 1980s and 90s.

Current events have also informed a spike in interest. “We track the top five most-read pieces every week in the Encyclopedia,” explained Mr. Wilson-Smith (Historica Canada operates Canada’s national encyclopedia on a digital platform). “At the outset [of the COVID-19 pandemic], pieces on the 2003 SARS outbreak and the 1919 Spanish Flu routinely made the list. Once the public focus on BLM and Indigenous rights and discrimination erupted, we saw an immediate spike in related stories. For more than 10 weeks, articles on residential schools and Black history in Canada (including pre-Confederation slavery) have been among the top five.”

The success of the Heritage Minutes illustrates the potent combination of human interest and contemporary relevance in making history appealing. Curiosity about the past often starts on a personal level, which perhaps explains the explosion of interest in ancestry websites, DNA test kits and TV shows exploring celebrities’ family histories. The sensational success of the musical Hamilton illustrated the power of a compelling and important story, creatively told (the main character might be a dead white guy – a lawyer, banker and politician, to boot – but a hip-hop-influenced score and majority-Black cast brought fresh appeal and insights to a new generation of audiences). “Reality” series featuring historical re-enactments – families “sent back in time” to experience life as pioneers or on the home front during the Second World War – as well as computer games, Netflix series such as The Crown, and historical fiction also indicate the enduring claim of history on the public imagination. There’s a comfort in the sense of order that can be imposed on the past, particularly when our own times seem to be characterized by great upheaval and unpredictability.

So what’s the bad news? In short: plummeting history enrolment at universities, concerns among practitioners that the subject is fragmenting beyond recognition, and students who don’t recognize themselves in the history they study at school and can’t connect the disconnected fragments they have learned. There’s been plenty of hand-wringing in Ontario over nosediving elementary math scores, with fewer than half of Grade 6 students meeting the provincial standard in the 2021-2022 school year. By comparison, there’s been resounding silence around another subject in which elementary students have long fallen behind. By now, you can probably guess which subject that would be.

But it’s STEM jobs that are hiring, we’re told. “Historians make lattes” was the wry observation of one history teacher I spoke with. Certainly, schools are getting much better at teaching previously overlooked aspects of our history, including Indigenous history (which the last curriculum overhaul made compulsory) and social history. But these bits have been superimposed on a disjointed, incomplete curriculum – a curriculum that, as it stands, doesn’t only threaten to kill off student enthusiasm for history as a subject but sends them into the world with huge knowledge gaps. It’s a muddled curriculum, pieced together by the separate agendas of politically capricious governments, boards and education departments. It’s a timid curriculum, reluctant to embrace the conflict, collisions, controversies and paradoxes in history. It’s a curriculum heavy on centring “deep dives with lots of primary sources,” as Dr. Bain described equivalent American syllabi to me, but shy of providing a connected overview, leaving these projects “like postholes with no fences to connect them.”

The alternative doesn’t have to be a return to “rote” learning, but rather a joined-up attempt at building broad knowledge from the earliest years to create context for understanding later on. When history is only introduced as a subject in Grade 7, after which it’s limited to a couple of years of Canadian history taught largely out of any kind of chronological or global context, the results aren’t surprising: Students enter middle school without any sense of the “story” of history, high-school teachers despair that students come to them without the knowledge or skills to learn how to think historically, universities experience plummeting numbers of history applications, and, in turn, we as a society become increasingly ahistorical in our outlook, not to mention distressingly polarized in our discussions of such things as the toppling of statues.

“In the nation as a whole there is now a knowledge gap, a communications gap, and an allegiance gap. We don’t understand one another; we don’t trust one another; we don’t like one another.” This is E.D. Hirsch writing about America in 2020, though much of what he describes could equally be applied elsewhere. A loss of cohesion, Dr. Hirsch argues, is the partial result of “a loss of commonality in what we teach and therefore in what we know.” If change is to happen, it needs to happen with coherence, commonality and specificity.

We pay a certain lip service to this idea by framing history as a part of “civics” education, but the fact is that it is so much more than this. The title of my book refers to a “vanishing” past not because history itself is going anywhere, but rather because the discipline of history has become segmented, sidelined and co-opted for other purposes. “History fights for its place in the curriculum with civics and geography,” Dr. Bain observed during our conversation, “but its attention to time, place and context is what makes it really distinct.” In other words, history doesn’t simply tell us how to be good citizens: It equips us with the knowledge we need to comprehend our world clearly, and the ability to analyze it accurately.

“Precision is not a skill: It’s a value, an obligation, a moral duty,” Dr. Gauci observed toward the end of our Zoom conversation. The skills-versus-knowledge debate is an old one in history teaching, and generally it’s a misleading one: You need both to do history properly. Dr. Gauci worries about how little many students seem to know about the political process, as well as about limited public discernment when it comes to discussions around current events. But history, to him, is about even more than this. “It’s always been the instinct of many of the most creative minds to look back,” he said, and here I was pleased to see the old smile return. “The great dreamers all needed the past. We stare into space and we wonder, so it seems strange not to do it in the rear-view mirror, too.”

Source: Historical sense is what keeps us human – and future generations might lose it, if we’re not careful

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In Fight Over 1619 Project and Nikole Hannah-Jones, White Ignorance Has Been Bliss—and Power

2021/05/26 Leave a comment

Of note, particularly the historical reminders and context:

Hell hath no fury like a white conservative confronted with the unvarnished history of slavery and racism in America.

For nearly two solid years, right-wing reactionaries have been apoplectic over the 1619 Project, a journalistic exploration of the indelible impact of Black enslavement on these United States put together by New York Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones. The same angry mob has also attacked a heretofore obscure, four-decades-old analytical methodology for understanding the institutionalism of white supremacy and anti-Black racism called Critical Race Theory.

The white conservative rage has been prolific, producing two House bills seeking to ban CRT and other “anti-American and racist theories” along with legislation in about a dozen states. The Trump administration put out its own 1776 Report, meant to “correct” the 1619 Project—which the American Historical Association called “simplistic” and full of “falsehoods, inaccuracies, omissions, and misleading statements.” Now the mob is vilifying Pulitzer Prize-winner Hannah-Jones, getting the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill to cravenly retract a tenured position offer, replacing it with a five-year professor of practice contract.

All of these efforts obviously aim to re-center the white supremacist historical fable that roughly 350 years of slavery and Jim Crow were unfortunate—but inconsequential—events in an America of full equality of opportunity, where any difference between the races could only be a result of Black laziness and white superiority. That fairy tale speaks volumes about how desperately reliant white supremacy is on maintaining white ignorance. You just can’t have one without the other. It’s that embrace of ignorance that lets these racists ignore the long tradition of mandated white ignorance they’re now trying to extend into the future.

“White ignorance,” according to NYU philosopher Charles W. Mills, is an “inverted epistemology,” a deep dedication to and investment in non-knowingthat explains white supremacy’s highly curatorial (and often oppositional) approach to memory, history and the truth. While white ignorance is related to the anti-intellectualism that defines the white Republican brand, it should be regarded as yet more specific. According to Mills, white ignorance demands a purposeful misunderstanding of reality—both present and historical—and then treats that fictitious world-view as the singular, de-politicized, unbiased, “objective” truth. “One has to learn to see the world wrongly,” under the terms of white ignorance, Mills writes, “but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority.”

To challenge that epistemic authority with uncomfortable but verifiable facts about race and racism guarantees the wrath of those who are otherwise quick to claim “facts don’t care about your feelings.” The 1619 Project has required tweaks and corrections. But the wholesale discounting of the initiative by white conservatives, who ignored the sloppy, error-filled 1776 Report, is more than a classic display of hypocrisy. It’s a testament to how deeply critical white ignorance is to white supremacy.

In reality—not the manicured “reality” of white supremacist historical delusion, but bonafide existence—historical fact has always hurt the feelings of white supremacists. In response, they have consistently used self-serving lies of omission to make themselves feel better. Were they less averse to historical truth, today’s white conservatives might already know this.

They’d perhaps be aware that the United Daughters of the Confederacy—the white Southern ladies group that put up most Confederate monuments, including one explicitly lauding the Ku Klux Klan—released a 1919 manifesto in all but name demanding “all authorities charged with the selection of textbooks for colleges, schools and all scholastic institutions” across the South only accept books depicting the Confederacy glowingly. Conversely, those books that correctly identified Confederate soldiers as traitors or rebels, rightly located slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, depicted the figure of the “slaveholder as cruel or unjust to his slaves,” or “glories Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis,” were to be rejected. The UDC ordered school librarians to deface books that were insufficiently praiseful of the Confederacy by scrawling “Unjust to the South” on the title page. Well into the 1970s, these rules dictated the history lessons taught to Southern children, both Black and white. The group’s rewriting of history to make slavery benign, Black resistance invisible, and white terror no biggie—also known as the ahistorical Lost Cause myth—is being re-engineered for this moment.

Modern complaints about so-called “cancel culture” and political correctness are also linked to white ignorance, allowing the know-nothings who wield it to deny the harms of whiteness while turning themselves into victims of overly aggressive Black declarations of personhood. Across the 1940s and ’50s, the NAACP campaigned to purge racist language from history books, targeting passages that extolled the KKK and references to enslaved Black folks as happy “Sambos.” In response, the Washington Post dismissed their concerns as “humorless touchiness,” an old-timey way of calling them snowflakes. One WaPo editorial stated that to “insist that Negroes be given equal rights with other citizens is one thing. To insist that their particular sensibilities entitle them to exercise a kind of censorship is quite another.”

It took the longest student strike in U.S. history, held in 1968 at San Francisco State College, to finally get collegiate ethnic studies, which have been under attack ever since. To wit, in 2010, Arizona legally banned Mexican American Studies until a judge forced the state to overturn the unconstitutional policy, while the perennial fight over textbook history in Texas led to textbooks that in 2015 featured a section titled “Patterns of Immigration,” stating “the Atlantic slave trade from the 1500s to the 1800s brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” In addition to a bill to prohibit the teaching of the 1619 Project currently making its way through the Texas legislature, conservatives in the state are trying to ensure minimal mention of slavery or anti-Mexican discrimination in textbooks and pushing legislation to create an 1836 Project to “promote patriotic education.”

“Do you want our Texas kids to be taught that the system of government in the United States and Texas is nothing but a cover-up for white supremacy?” State legislator Steve Toth reportedly asked his Congressional colleagues.

And here, Toth is doing what white conservatives actually do with surprising frequency, which is screaming the supposedly quiet part. It’s an admission that by merely telling the whole story and including all the facts, the long and carefully maintained narrative of white innocence—a kind of perpetual white alibi—is disrupted. White ignorance is basically just a “refusal to recognize the long history of structural discrimination that has left whites with the differential resources they have today” creating a fake “equal status and a common history in which all have shared, with white privilege being conceptually erased.” The intentional know-nothingness of white ignorance “serves to neutralize demands for antidiscrimination initiatives or for a redistribution of resources.” Instead, it holds that “the real racists are the Blacks who continue to insist on the importance of race.”

So we have Florida Gov. Ron Desantis declaring the 1619 Project is “basically teaching kids to hate our country and to hate each other based on race,” and Tom Cotton, who performatively introduced a bill last year to ban the 1619 Project in schools, complaining the initiative paints the U.S. as “a systemically racist country” instead of “a great and noble country founded on the proposition that all mankind is created equal.” Earlier this month, during a press conference for the Stop Critical Race Theory Act, co-sponsor Dan Bishop called the academic theory “a smokescreen for racism” and a “divisive ideology that threatens to poison the American psyche.” Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who of course was also there added, “These are the things that we overcame in the civil rights era and I’m so proud that we did.”

White conservatives only get real into anti-racism lip service when the reality of white racism threatens to blow up their spot. That’s surely why in April, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell sent a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona labeling the 1619 Project “activist indoctrination that fixates solely on past flaws and splits our nation into divided camps.”

“My view—and I think most Americans think—dates like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Civil War are sort of the basic tenets of American history,” McConnell said in remarks earlier this month. “There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history. I simply disagree with the notion that the New York Times laid out there that the year was one of those years. I think that issue that we all are concerned about—racial discrimination—it was our original sin. We’ve been working for 200-and-some-odd years to get past it. We’re still working on it, and I just simply don’t think that’s part of the core underpinning of what American civic education ought to be about.”

That sure is a long-winded way of advising folks to stick to the white supremacist storyline. McConnell is unwittingly offering an example of how, as Charles Eagles writes, “the powerful can make decisions that actually “strive for a goal of stupidity,” rather than for genuine education. Under the guise of protecting children, imposing an engineered ignorance protects the privileged by preserving the status quo and by releasing leaders from responsibility… Too much knowledge could lead to troubling questions and a loss of control of the classroom, and the elite feared the unknown results.”

The price for not adhering to those rules is that white conservatives (give it up for The Real Kings of Cancel Culture, everybody!) will do all they can to have you blackballed, legally banned, discredited and defamed. Jay Schalin, of the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, a right-wing think tank that led the charge against Hannah-Jones, maligned the 1619 Project as mere “political agitation”—inadvertently suggesting he already knows the horrors of American slavery and racism are reasons to be furious. Schalin and his co-conspirators, to protect white ignorance, went after Hannah-Jones. It all brings to mind yet more ignored history, cited by Mills, about how the terms of enslavement included that “Blacks were generally denied the right to testify against whites, because they were not seen as credible witnesses, so when the only (willing) witnesses to white crimes were Black, these crimes would not be brought to light… Moreover, in many cases, even if witnesses would have been given some kind of grudging hearing, they were terrorized into silence by the fear of white retaliation.”

Silence was the end goal then, and it’s the goal now, as a means of preserving white ignorance—which is to say plausible deniability. But the work of Hannah-Jones and folks like Kimberlé Crenshaw, an architect of CRT (and so much more) are undoing myths that are difficult to perfectly assemble without the cracks showing.

“If Black testimony could be aprioristically rejected because it was likely to be false,” Mills notes, “it could also be aprioristically rejected because it was likely to be true.”

Source: In Fight Over 1619 Project and Nikole Hannah-Jones, White Ignorance Has Been Bliss—and Power

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Krauss: Why Is Scientific Illiteracy So Acceptable?

2020/11/26 Leave a comment

Good question and discussion:

In the mid-1980s, when I taught a Physics for Poets class at Yale University, I was dumbstruck when I gave the students a quiz problem to estimate the total amount of water flushed in all the toilets in the US in one 24-hour period and I started to grade the quiz. In order to estimate this, you have to first estimate the population of the US. I discovered that 35 percent of my Yale students, many of whom were history or American studies majors, thought the population of the US was less than 10 million! I went around campus interrogating students I met, asking them what they thought the population of the US was. Again, about one-third of the students thought it was less than 10 million and a few even thought it was greater than a few billion.

How was such ignorance so common in a community commonly felt to contain the cream of the crop of young US college students?

Then it dawned on me. It wasn’t that these students were ignorant about US society. It was that they were rather “innumerate,” as the mathematician John Allen Paulos had labeled it in a book he wrote in the 1980s. They had no concept whatsoever of what a million actually represented. For them, a million and a billion were merely both too large to comprehend.

It remains a badge of honor for many who like to describe themselves as highly cultured or artistic to describe themselves as mathematically challenged, or to say that their brains aren’t wired for mathematics. Because many of those they hold in high esteem have made similar claims, there is no real social penalty to them for doing so.

When it comes to science rather than mathematics, it isn’t so simple. Proudly proclaiming scientific illiteracy is not de rigueur. Instead another refrain has recently become popular among politicians and public figures: “I am not a scientist, but…” Equally prominent, is the statement “I believe in science” (as if there is a choice) which is then followed by some scientific gibberish.

Science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once said, “Reality is that which continues to exist even when you stop believing in it.” The line between being scientifically or empirically controversial vs being politically controversial has been blurred to the point of erasure. In Washington, and many other seats of government throughout the world, belief trumps reality.

Different aspects of the problem were on display recently during the confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett. When asked by Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy about her views on climate change, she said: “You know, I’m certainly not a scientist,” and added, “I have read things about climate change—I would not say I have firm views on it.” Later, following questions from Kamala Harris about whether she acknowledged a relationship between smoking and cancer, and whether the coronavirus is infectious, both of which she answered in the affirmative, she was asked, “And do you believe that climate change is happening and is threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink?” Coney Barrett responded, “I will not do that. I will not express a view on a matter of public policy, especially one that is politically controversial…”

It would have been appropriate for Justice Coney Barrett to argue in both cases that the confirmation hearing was not an appropriate place to discuss her scientific expertise but rather her legal expertise. However, that is different than claiming, as she did, to have insufficient knowledge of the issue to possess any viewpoint at all.

In this, and all areas where scientific evidence is both public and sufficiently overwhelming, public figures who even feign ignorance for reasons of political expediency should be called out. In her second exchange, having established her bona fides regarding the science of smoking or the coronavirus, an appropriate response from Justice Coney Barrett to Harris’s last question might have been to answer that yes, climate change is a scientifically established fact, but that she was not going to be roped into commenting on related controversial public policy questions.

By the same token Senator Harris’s last question reflects a pseudo-religious “I believe in science but I don’t need to think about what it actually means” mantra. Climate change, which is happening, presents numerous potential threats, but not to the air we breathe, as if it were akin to industrial pollutants.

I raise this point, which may seem like mere semantics, because we have to encourage intelligent and literate discourse from both sides of the aisle. Inappropriate claims like this by politicians who want to be on the right side of science but who can’t be bothered to think about what it implies don’t help. Rather they encourage rational skeptics and irrational deniers alike to reject the actual science by dismissing the statements of those who claim to defend it. Similarly, it also helps encourage a distrust of scientists.

I wrote my new book, which presents the fundamental science behind climate change, in part to specifically respond to this sorry state of affairs. Outrageous denials, or outrageous doom and gloom predictions equally subvert the ultimate goal, which is to develop rational public policy. Gaining a perspective of the fundamental science, which I would argue is not beyond the grasp of a Supreme Court Justice, or a United States Senator soon to be Vice-President, is a precursor to proposing rational policies to address one of the most significant global challenges of the 21st century.

I should underscore that when I discuss scientific illiteracy, I am not focusing on how many scientific facts people may remember. I rather mean the process of science: empirical testing and retesting, logical analysis, and drawing conclusions derived from facts and not hopes. The impact of increased CO2 on heat absorption in the atmosphere is something that can be tested, as can the expansion coefficient of water as heat is added, one of the key factors affecting measured sea level rise. Accepting the reality of these is not something that should disqualify you from, or assure you of, a government appointment.

An equally pernicious misunderstanding of the scientific process involves confusions about uncertainty, as we are witnessing with the current pandemic. Epidemiology is a very difficult part of science because it often relies on sparse data that is very hard to accumulate. Like all aspects of science, the conclusions one draws are only as good as the data one has. Yet, politicians and the public alike have often accepted sweeping claims about the perceived lethality or transmissibility of COVID-19 well before appropriate data has been available. Donald Trump was at one extreme, but others who exploited for political reasons early predictions that millions would die usually did not qualify their remarks with either a reasonable estimate of uncertainties, or with the proviso that this dire prediction was for a world where no ameliorative actions were taken.

It is possible, and indeed I expect likely, that we will not have firm knowledge about the details of its lethality or transmissibility for years, or at least until after the current pandemic is over. And even then, uncertainties will remain. This issue has recently taken on a more personal aspect for me, as I write this while convalescing from what appears to be COVID-19. (Thanks to the vagaries of the US healthcare system, and the recent surge of cases, the results of my test will take seven days to arrive, by which time I am hoping to be well on the way to recovery.)

When it comes to public perceptions of medical or scientific prowess, I blame in part science fiction programs on television or in feature films that give the illusion that faced with a technical problem, sufficiently talented scientists and engineers can both ascertain the cause and create a solution in hours instead of years or decades. That is just not the way science often works. Most important scientific developments are not revolutionary. More often than not they are baby steps taken along a long road of discovery. The recent announcement of two new COVID vaccine efficacies has been remarkable, so that perhaps by the end of 2021 most people will be vaccinated. But while two years is lightning speed in this area, many people remain surprised that it has taken this long.

Fewer people may proudly proclaim their scientific illiteracy than their innumeracy, but our cultural role models nevertheless often openly express their lack of comfort with questions that you shouldn’t have to be a scientist to understand or appreciate. I saw it when I taught at Yale, and I saw it in the Senate confirmation room. It is considered quaint to say something like, “my mind just doesn’t work that way” when it comes to science, as an excuse to stop thinking. But we wouldn’t accept that statement so easily if the question related to Shakespeare’s contributions to literature, or the historical impact of the Holocaust.

The Enlightenment was well-named because it led to a greater understanding of ourselves, our society, and our environment, and was accompanied by the rise of the scientific method. Acting for the common good requires subjecting our own ideas to empirical scrutiny, being open to considering and empirically testing the ideas of others, and letting empirical data be the arbiter of reality. The most compelling reason that all of us, most importantly our public figures, should take science seriously, and honestly, was expressed best by Jacob Bronowski, a personal hero who exemplified the union of the two cultures of science and humanities:

Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.

Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist and president of The Origins Project Foundation. He was Chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists from 2007–2018. His newest book, due out in January, is The Physics of Climate Change. 

Source: Why Is Scientific Illiteracy So Acceptable?

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The Case for Teaching Ignorance – The New York Times

2015/08/26 Leave a comment

Good advice to all of us, whether policy makers or not, on uncertainty and the need to understand the limits of available evidence:

Presenting ignorance as less extensive than it is, knowledge as more solid and more stable, and discovery as neater also leads students to misunderstand the interplay between answers and questions.

People tend to think of not knowing as something to be wiped out or overcome, as if ignorance were simply the absence of knowledge. But answers don’t merely resolve questions; they provoke new ones.

Michael Smithson, a social scientist at Australian National University who co-taught an online course on ignorance this summer, uses this analogy: The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask. Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity. The ever-expanding shoreline, where questions are born of answers, is terrain characterized by vague and conflicting information. The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.

The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” The center of the island, by contrast, is safe and comforting, which may explain why businesses struggle to stay innovative. When things go well, companies “drop out of learning mode,” Gary P. Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. They flee uncertainty and head for the island’s interior.

The Case for Teaching Ignorance – The New York Times.

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The Franco-American Flophouse: Tribes and Truth

2014/09/20 Leave a comment

Great addition by Victoria Ferauge to the four points of Rosling (see How Not to Be Ignorant of the World):

I would add one that I call for want of a better term Tribes Never Tell the Truth.

We are social creatures and every human group family, tribe, clan, class, country, nation, state we belong to has a story about itself and about the people and places beyond its boundaries and borders. Arjun Appadurai put it quite well when he pointed out that “No modern nation, however benign its political system and however eloquent its public voices may be about the virtues of tolerance, multiculturalism, and inclusion, is free of the idea that its national sovereignty is built on some sort of ethnic genius.”

These stories contain facts mixed with myths to form powerful narratives and we cannot help but evaluate the input we get from the world against the storyline of whatever group we identify with. Even the most independent of thinkers can find himself struggling mightily to incorporate information that challenges what he thinks he already knows about the world.   Those who are quick to recognize this about religion or nationalism should acknowledge that there are quasi-religious narratives lurking under the surface of their “rationality”.

As Mircea Eliade said:”Mythical behaviour can be recognized in the obsession with success that is so characteristic of modern society and that expresses an obscure wish to transcend the limits of the human condition;  in the exodus to Suburbia, in which we can detect the nostalgia for primordial perfection;  in the paraphenalia and emotional intensity that characterize what has been called the cult of the sacred automobile.”

These stories are another impediment to seeing the world clearly because challenging them and finding them wanting gets us kicked out of a club we desperately wish to belong to.  Most groups even ones comprised of “free thinkers” do not tolerate even small deviations from the common story.  Is it not true that perceived apostates are treated even more harshly then those who are clearly in the camp of the enemy?  Every group has its own Inquisition, ready to ferret out those who “belong without believing.”

So I would add this heuristic to the list – one that was beautifully expressed by the late Christopher Hitchens –  “How do I know that I know this, except that I’ve always been taught this and never heard anything else? How sure am I of my own views? Dont take refuge in the false security of consensus, and the feeling that whatever you think you’re bound to be OK, because you’re in the safely moral majority.”

The Franco-American Flophouse: Tribes and Truth.

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Ignorance is cheap – but parliamentary knowledge costs – Globe Editorial

2014/09/19 Leave a comment

Globe editorial on ignorance and the Government’s (or at least of some of its MPs) wish to be less open and transparent:

Mr. Wallace posed his own written question asking for the estimated cost to the government of answering Order Paper questions. The answer he got, based on a formula that is dubious at best, was $1.2-million for 253 questions. “Are we sure we’re getting value for the dollar?” Mr. Wallace asked.

Well, let’s think about that. What value do Canadians place on knowing: the percentage of Employment Canada benefits applications that are rejected and how many people have to wait longer than 28 days for a response; which government department is responsible for monitoring the transporation of fissile radioactive material inside our borders; how much money Ottawa has spent developing software since 2011 and what the software actually does; and the amount the government spent on travel expenses while negotiating the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union.

These are just some of the opposition questions currently on the Order Paper, and all of them deserve an answer. Mr. Wallace’s suggestion that MPs should ask fewer questions, because ignorance is cheap, is pretty much one of the dumbest things a parliamentarian has come up with in recent memory.

And as most of us know from personal and professional experience, ignorance is expensive given the implications of bad and faulty decisions.

Ignorance is cheap – but parliamentary knowledge costs – The Globe and Mail.

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