Posted 25 May 2020
BUT WHAT IF WE’RE WRONG?
I decided to give myself a day off from writing yesterday.
Instead I chose to re-read “But what if we’re Wrong?” by Chuck Klosterman (2016). I first read it two years ago but I remember feeling quite under-whelmed by the experience. My recollection was of it not quite being the book it could have been.
Or perhaps it just wasn’t the book I wanted it to be.
The central question Klosterman asks is just how sure can we be that everything we think of as an absolute truth today will not be over-turned by a new and different truth tomorrow? Some of his examples seem fairly esoteric to my ‘more science than arts’ brain. For instance, he examines what defines greatness today versus what may define it in the future: Will we one day reposition ‘Independence Day’ over ‘Citizen Kane’ in our league table of great films of the twentieth century? Will we still remember Rock and Roll in three hundred years’ time?
But other examples he gives are rather less esoteric and therefore rather more appealing to my scientific leanings.
Four hundred years ago, Copernicus and Galileo demonstrated that our planet was not at the centre of the Universe after all. Religious dogma had kept us centre stage of the cosmos for nearly two millennia once the ancient Greek philosophy had put us there. But through the insights of Copernicus and Galileo our central role in the Universe was turned on its head, seemingly overnight – though Klosterman shows that it actually took near a century for this ‘overnight’ change to happen.
How confident can we be that we are at the end of similar ‘big surprises’? Klosterman ponders if it is arrogant or defeatist to think that all human endeavour is now at a point of diminishing return because we are now so close to getting it all right.
Two years ago when I first picked up this book I was seeking answers. My life journey then was taking me into the new paradigm of nutrition but disturbingly, that journey was suggesting the fifty year old model of how nutrition worked was fundamentally and dangerously flawed. Seemingly we were at another Copernican moment. As someone educated in the infallibility of science, I wanted to know how we could have made such a mistake. My faith in science needed a restorative boost and I guess that was what I was looking for when I found Klosterman first time around. Sadly he did not give me that boost.
By yesterday evening though, and 260 pages later (I seem to remember it taking me a lot longer to read it the first time) I realised the book is rather better than I remembered. In fact, the first and last chapters are so densely packed with insight it took me nearly as long to pore over those few pages as it did to read all of the remaining 230 pages!
But of course, it’s not the book that has changed. Pandemics, COVID19 and lockdowns have changed me.
Retrospection first.
Rewind 35 years. I particularly remember one of the early lectures of my undergraduate days at York. The then head of department Professor Wolfson stood in front of a full lecture theatre and waved one of the weightier physics textbooks above his head. “The thing is” he smiled “seventy percent of what is in this textbook is wrong. Today we don’t know which 70 percent it is, so we are going to teach it all to you anyway. Maybe one day some of you in this room will help us workout where the true 30 per cent lies.”
And I guest that is what Klosterman is arguing – beware the 70 per cent (though Klosterman does not use the 70:30 concept). He warns that on-lookers might consider it dystopian to be ever skeptical of the seemingly obvious: “Surely it must be terrifying to view the world from the perspective that most people are wrong?” he rhetorically asks of himself. I think that was what made reading his book for the first time so discomforting: Can I ever be certain about anything ever again? And if I cannot, what does that say about me?
Klosterman does warn against something called naive wisdom: Just because you ‘know’ something that does not mean that fact has to be in the unchanging 30 percent. The 70 per cent is not the sole preserve of the stupid. The fact there is a ’70 per cent’ is not an intellectual failing but rather an “emotional sanctuary from existential despair”.
And a time of coronavirus is certainly a time of existential despair. Although Klosterman could not have predicted it in 2016, a time of pandemic is bound also to be a time of rampant naive wisdom.
“Of course lockdowns will cut deaths“; “of course wearing face masks will help“; “of course it’s all Boris’ fault“. All, any or none of these things could be in the never-to-be-proved-wrong 30 per cent. But fundamentally for my point here, they could all be wrong.
In our digitally connected age, the arena where it all seems to happen is Social Media. Here, the half-life of ideas is seemingly far longer than the written word. The 70 per cent can take root for no more robust a reason than it tickles the confirmation biases of the masses. The act of ‘sharing’ promotes longevity of ideas irrespective of the veracity of those ideas. The meme has become the proxy for fact; the more catchy the meme, the seemingly stronger the fact has to be.
This fuels an unhealthy progression to an ideology that assures people they are right about what they believe. “It engenders a delusion of simplicity that benefits people with inflexible minds”. Klosterman was perhaps a little harsh here but unless we are going to put a mirror up against it, how ever do we get away from it?
“We live in a culture of casual certitude but the present tense version of the world is unstable”. (I did say the second reading of the book was particularly full of insights!)
Without necessarily realising it, I do tend to ask the question “but what if we’re wrong?” rather often.
As someone who is critically curious, my questioning can be almost childlike – I am not paralysed by the pressures of consensus. I do not have a preconceived notion that any idea is right, wrong, always going to be right or always going to be wrong. Asking such questions has the intention of opening minds rather than closing them.
Yet, the critically curious are often vilified in debate. Interestingly when those debates are between two polarised camps, the critically curious can find themselves hated by both sides.
All too often debate on Social Media is like a game of ping-pong between two sides with polar opposite views exchanging, reacting-to and mostly rejecting each other’s ideas. Facebook is generally not the place for creativity to come up with new ideas. Those who do, don’t fit-in with the rules of engagement of those ping-pong games and they end-up being disliked by the protagonists on both sides of the table. Maybe this is the route of all discourse on Social Media.
For example: “Has Boris done a good job or is it all his fault?” There is no more polarised debate at the moment. Well, actually there is – as I type, “should Cummings stay or go?” is a very polarised debate today with very few protagonists on the ‘stay’ side of that fence. Going back to Boris though, the debate over his role is very divisive.
Last week, I read a number of articles referring to computer modelling showing Trump, Johnson and Wilmès (of Belgium) all have blood on their hands for delaying action on coronavirus. I am sure the models can be interpreted to say that. But real data trumps models. More analyses of the real data show that severity and timing of lockdown measures are not correlated to COVID19 deaths. Now this a problem for both camps on either side of the Trump, Johnson and Wilmès debates. If their lockdown decisions are not correlated to outcomes, then they can neither be blamed nor lauded for their actions. The critically curious that raise this point then become hated by both sides. Don’t get me wrong, I love statistical models and the refuge of safety they create. In troubled times, immersed in a model can seem a safe and sane place to be. But I am under no illusions that their outputs are no more immune to being the wrong side of the 70:30 debate than anything else.
By simply asking the question “What if we’re wrong”, the critically curious can so often be vilified.
But is that just detrimental or is it dangerous? Klosterman errs to the former but maybe that’s because when he was writing there was no SARS CoV2. But because of Coronavirus I’m more inclined to the latter. Vilification of critical thinking is as socially detrimental as it is divisive but when we are in world on a precipice, I would suggest that is also dangerous. It hijacks conversation. It gets us all looking in the wrong direction.
For many, it is easier to dismiss the critical thinker as a heretic than it is to question your own beliefs. Perhaps the illusory world of certitude many occupy has no place for the critically curious. Maybe “what if we’re wrong” is just too uncomfortable a question for most.
But maybe a time of turmoil is the exact time to be asking that question. The world has changed and I believe irretrievably so, but not necessarily to the detriment of everything. The new order will show we were wrong about many things; at a personal level I know I was wrong about many things I believed to be true about myself.
When I posted my “Mirror of Truth’ piece last week not only was that me ‘having a go’ at a different style of writing, it was also an introspective piece on personal change. Writing a piece like this is one tangible evidence of that – two months ago I do not believe I would have been able to write like this, or certainly be brave enough to press the ‘Post’ button even if I had.
I believe it would be naive of me (or any of us) to expect an oasis of the old world-order to exist just so that I may continue unchanged after all this is over. There can be no assumption picking up where I left off; I have to evolve in a changing world – Darwinian natural selection dictates that.
I was lucky enough to have Prof Wolfson as my personal supervisor for all three years of my time at York. I can still see the disappointment (or was it disapproval) on his face when I declined his invitation to stay-on an pursue a PhD. I told him then that a PhD was not right for me.
But what if I was wrong?