Walking dogmatic minds back towards shared reality

Almost two-thirds of young Americans don’t know how many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, more than half cannot name a concentration camp and one in 10 believes the victims of the Holocaust were to blame for their own genocide.

These were some of the more dramatic findings in a study conducted across the US by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, which interviewed 10,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 39.

Ordinarily, such figures might have lingered slightly longer in the headlines.

But this is 2020, which means Greg Schneider’s study appeared in the aftermath of another depressing poll, this one revealing that 56% of Republicans believe pretty much whatever the far-right fantasist movement QAnon feeds them.

And last week there was more, as Christian fundamentalist YouTuber Sheila Zilinsky announced to her thousands of acolytes that basketball superstar LeBron James was an “illuminati wizard” whose trademark throwing of chalk dust into the air before a game is how he hides what he’s really doing — summoning demons.

The collected emissions of Zilinsky have been watched more than 12 million times on YouTube. When each of these stories rolled past me on social media, they were accompanied by a sort of exhausted, collective sigh, as literate liberals wondered how Americans could be so ignorant.

Schneider, whose organisation conducted the Holocaust study, described the results as “shocking and saddening”, concluding that if “we let these trends continue for another generation, the crucial lessons from this terrible part of history could be lost”.

I understand those responses and agree with Schneider that the results of his study are saddening.

But I can no longer agree that they are shocking and I am no longer sure that education — at least in its current form — is the solution.

In a post-factual world there are no lessons to be learnt from history, because lessons no longer exist.

A lesson requires one to see cause and effect.

But if the last four years have taught us anything at all it is that for hundreds of millions of people there are no causes and no effects.

There are simply beliefs, trundling past like ideological sushi on an internet conveyor belt, to be swallowed whole or ignored.

I suspect Schneider felt shocked because certain vast, terrible pieces of knowledge feel as if they should be innate.

And yet no knowledge of past events, no matter how horrific they might have been, is innate or permanent. Once the past moves out of living memory, it begins to fade incredibly quickly and requires extraordinary amounts of political will and academic and societal engagement to keep it hovering like a ghost in the present.

So what chance can history possibly have now, as our education is left to the internet, our material wellbeing is governed by predatory merchants and their creatures in government, and our immortal souls are tended by people who think LeBron James is conjuring special basketball demons who live inside chalk dust?

I want to believe that education can fix this.

But before it does, it will first have to understand the power of belief, and understand that people who reject historical facts or scientific consensus or photographic evidence that the earth is a sphere do not know nothing.

On the contrary, they know a great deal.

Some know, for example, that climate change and Covid-19 are hoaxes, and that US President Donald Trump is a godly man who loves Jesus.

Others know that the only way to lift South Africans out of poverty is to ban private ownership and drive away the banks.

Yet others know that apartheid wasn’t really that bad, and that black people just need to pep themselves up a bit and move on. And they know these things with as much certainty as an astronomer knows the sun will rise in the east.

Education is no longer enough. I must be honest and admit that ridicule won’t help either.

Whatever satirists might say, the truth is that satire doesn’t change minds: it reinforces them.

The more you ridicule a Trump voter or an EFF member, the more proof you are providing that they are right and the more delight they take in your obvious discomfort.

No, what we need now, working alongside teachers and writers and broadcasters, are the people who deprogram former cult members; working with supreme empathy and patience to walk lost, dogmatic minds back towards a shared reality.

Because unless we find some common concept of what the world is and should be — in which, at the very least, we know about Nazis and that they were bad — the cult leaders will swing our minds shut like a bunker door and that will be that.

What lessons can be learnt when our education is left to the internet and QAnon fantasists?