The Truth May Be Out There
Many people think they’re too smart to be fooled by chicanery, but telling the difference between falsity and fact is becoming more difficult.
“Particularly if a person thinks of himself as clever,” John Ganz wrote in The Times, “he will often have a hard time admitting his own ignorance.” People are more vulnerable because the modern world is complex, and technological and social change is fast, he said. Charlatans reduce “the chaotic tangle of the age into simple nostrums. Modern life bombards us into exhaustion and boredom as much as anxiety; sometimes we are just looking for entertainment in a surprising notion.”
Take the planet we live on, for example. Even though ancient Greeks determined it was round about 2,500 years ago, some people still claim it might be flat.
“Can you openly admit that you know the Earth is constitutionally round?” Kyrie Irving, an American basketball star, asked in The Times. “Like, you know that for sure? Like, I don’t know.”
Such a statement from someone who is so influential can be dangerous. His public doubts caused some students at a middle school to disbelieve their science teacher, who could not win them back to the round side of science.
“I wanted to open up the conversation, like, ‘Hey man, do your own research for what you want to believe in,’ ” Mr. Irving said.
Science, though, is about more than belief. But he said that because scholars once believed that the Earth was flat, it’s still a debate worth having.
“Our educational system is flawed,” said Mr. Irving, who attended one of the best American universities, Duke, for a year before turning professional. “History has been changed throughout so much time.”
This is a good example of the outbreak of distrust that the author Judith Shulevitz said America is experiencing in her review of “Natural Causes” by Barbara Ehrenreich. The book is deeply skeptical of the wellness industry, mindfulness, Silicon Valley “biohacks” for longevity, the fitness boom, and integrative holistic health.
Ms. Ehrenreich, who has a Ph.D. in cell biology, says that modern medicine is too concerned with profit and its own importance but also warned that her book should not be construed as an “attack on the notion of scientific medicine.”
While Ms. Ehrenreich, 76, is a breast cancer survivor who has decided to eschew doctors, Ms. Shulevitz thinks those positions are risky for readers who might buy into them. Even though “medicine, like any other profession, has its charlatans and jerks, and is certainly being perverted by the bean counters,” she wrote that Ms. Ehrenreich “should know better than to dress up her dislike of doctors as a reasoned excuse to avoid them.”
Simplistic reductions and conspiracy theories function like quack medicine, Mr. Ganz wrote: “They seem to provide a cure, but since they only further inflame the underlying fears, they are just driving their own demand.”
What makes the problem worse, he added, is that people seem to have forgotten that charlatans even exist.
“We all like to think of ourselves as pretty sharp,” Mr. Ganz said, “and the term itself sounds old-fashioned: We laugh at how people in the past fell for phony remedies, but never suppose we could fall for the same tricks.”