2. Conventional Wisdom is Confusing Me

I’m confused, and I wish more people were.

First, my email inbox is peppered with information, sent to me by well-meaning friends, that turn out to be full of baloney–the so called urban legends; tales, or “facts” that are actually false. Some are fascinating unbelievable-yet-true (oops–not!) stories. Some are dire warnings of computer viruses or cresting economic tsunamis that I ignore at my own peril. Things would be worse if not for the existence of web sites like Snopes.com, a pretty reliable debunker of modern myths and intentional scams, but, as Snopes will show, some of themare true, so I can’t just ignore everything that might be suspect. By the way, “everything that might be suspect” is a category that may cover practically all of the information that I consume–yikes! (But there is hope…read on…)

OK, so the internet is well known to contain large pockets of swill indiscreetly swirled in with the nourishing parts. What about what one finds in the general media–newspapers, popular magazines, TV and radio shows? Surely (!) I can trust my own first hand experiences, and, having worked as a scientist, I occasionally am the originator of the raw data from which published conclusions are drawn, but 99.99 percent of what I believe comes second (third or thirtieth) hand through conversations or some form of media. We all know that lots of what we see/hear through the media (and other commercial sources) is false or biased. How do we know that? From the media. For example:

Its was no surprise to me that “Wonder Bread has agreed to settle federal charges that it made unsupported advertising claims that calcium in its products could make children’s minds work better and improve their memories.” As a healthy-food eating member of the Cultural Creative crowd I developed an impression of WonderBread-as-Evil around the time I discovered hummus and granola. But then there is the article in the Boston Globe¹ stating that scientific studies indicate that “organic produce may not be any healthier than the conventional kind.” That’s got to be wrong, right?? Bet I can find a study that “proves” that organic is better. I want to find such a study. And I would believe it–but would it be True?

Then there is the Time magazine² article saying “forget what you know about eggs, margarine and salt. The conventional wisdom has been overturned–repeatedly–by surprising new research.” Oh god, not again. Yes, “nutrition advice seems endlessly mired in scientific argument, the self-interest of food companies and compromises by government regulators.”³ Seems like “the conventional wisdom” is being overturned so often that we can no longer tell which side is UP. If we wait long enough maybe the overturning will be overturned. For example, another article pulls up scientific evidence to claim that “we shouldn’t believe the increasingly popular claims that boys and girls think differently, learn differently, and need to be treated differently.”⁴

To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler it would be if men died for ideas that were true! H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

The media feeds us our conventional wisdom, for example it tells us all about the cultural wars between the Red and Blue states. But an article in Scientific American⁵ explains how the “American split in [the] ‘Culture Wars’ [is] unfounded” and the “the two sides are closer together than usually thought.” I trust Scientific American more than most sources, and I found the article encouraging and self-confirming. But to what extent do I believe it because it conforms to my existing beliefs, and to what extent do I believe it because it comes from a trusted source? Scientific American comes down pretty hard on the side of advocating that global climate change is real and is human-caused. That’s what I believe. Yet there is a minority opinion, supported by both scientists and less knowledgeable pundits, claiming that “the facts don’t support the hysteria” around global warming. For example, see The Skeptical Environmentalist, by Bjorn Lomborg, a onetime member of Greenpeace. Now, in my opinion Mr. Lomborg is a member of a wrongheaded group of extremists, like the Flat Earth’ers and the Holocaust deniers. But, sadly, he is probably more knowledgeable about the subject than I.

But wait—some of the things I strongly believe are culturally marginal, even heretical, not only to main stream culture, but within the progressive cultural bubble I commune within. And don’t forget all those stories about famous scientists and thinkers who’s ideas were at first scoffed at by both the general public and the scientific establishment. It seems as though practically all of the important novel ideas of history were first scoffed at. William James said: “A new idea is first condemned as ridiculous and then dismissed as trivial, until finally, it becomes what everybody knows.” ⁶ Then again, success stories get a lot more attention—what is the percentage of ideas that are “first condemned as ridiculous” that remain so?!

OK, so I collect articles about controversies. I am drawn to the grey areas. They fascinate me. Here is one from the Globe’s Ideas section: “Experts have plenty of advice for parents–if only they could agree”⁷. (You know where that one is going—let them cry in the crib? Yes!…No!…Yes!!) I appreciate the relatively even-handed coverage of both sides of many issues in Ideas. For example, “What’s good for pharma is good for America,”⁸ despite the title, argues well from both sides of the issue of whether the pharmaceutical industry needs more regulation. But when all the evidence is given convincingly on both sides, what then does one chose to believe?

So…what rabbit hole am I leading you down? I won’t tax you with more examples here, and I’ll stay away from topics such as life after death, distance/faith healing, extrasensory perception, and the new age implications of quantum mechanics until a latter essay. What I am doing is setting the context for a broad range of topics related to knowledge, belief, truth, and uncertainty, to be explored in other essays. The questions raised implicitly above, psychological ones about belief certainty, philosophical ones about whether reality can be known, sociological ones about how information spreads, educational ones about supporting critical thinking skills, and cultural ones about the role of media in a democracy, are covered in “101″ college courses and have defined the perimeters of well established academic turf wars for centuries (if not millennia). And yet something is new to compel our exploration here.

First, it is increasingly important that all humans be able to skillfully navigate the swells of uncertainty and ambiguity that interrupt the currents of daily life. Second, new research and thought are making available valuable instruments in our attempts to do so. And third, new forms of wisdom are developing in society and in all of us that are worth celebrating and intentionally supporting.

We are overloaded with information–a cliché but a painful truth for many of us. While the quantity of information available swells it seems that its average quality is diminishing, even as the complexity of the problems facing us intensifies. Some, such as David Michaels whose work is described in “The Manufacture of Uncertainty,”⁹ contend that corporate and political forces are intentionally polluting the information space. Along similar lines in “The Assault on Reason” (Penguin 2007) Al Gore says “public discourse [has] become less focused and clear, less reasoned…the ‘consent of the governed’ [is] becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder.” There are indeed problems at the systemic level, and we could investigate a range of partial solutions that have been offered for media, corporate, educational, and governmental reforms. But for now I want to draw your attention to the inner psychological dimensions. Indeterminacy (uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradox) in knowledge is inherent and also becoming increasingly problematic. We can point to two complementary responses to this indeterminacy. We can try to reduce (i.e. fix) the problem. I will save that inquiry for later, but first I will consider the other response: accepting and adapting to the inevitabilities of indeterminacy.

As family members, workers, and citizens we must make countless decisions, usually between the rock of wanting to make the right or best decision and the hard place of having inadequate information. Something about how the ego works makes it particularly regrettable, frustrating or embarrassing to have been wrong. Thus, it is difficult to admit to the full scope of our unknowing, and of our vulnerability in this regard.

In fact, we mostly move in the opposite direction. It would seem that certainty and confidence are more important than truth. Though cultures such as ours in the United States seem particularly exaggerated in this regard, the phenomena is universal–lets call it “bullshit” for the moment. The entertaining little best-selling philosophy book titled “On Bullshit,” by Harry G. Frankfurt (2005), differentiates lying from bullshit, which it claims is more insidious in society. Bullshit remains bullshit whether it’s true or false. The bullshiter has complete disregard for whether what he’s saying corresponds to facts. He “does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to [truth] at all.” For him or her, what is important is to have an opinion, to make an impression, or to save face.

The bullshit phenomena needs two roles to sustain itself: most salient is the purveyor of bullshit, but equally destructive and perhaps more pervasive are us bullshit consumers taking in so much of what we hear at face value, guaranteeing a compliant “market.” It is easier to believe than to question (unless the information is unpalatable to us). And of course we take on both roles from one moment to the next. We manufacture certainty, both in our listening and in our speaking, reams of it every day, whether it is logically warranted or not. We only have so much energy and attention to spend ferreting out the truth, so one consequence of the increased quantity and complexity of information is that we must manufacture more certainty in our lives.

Lets now put aside the term “bullshit” and return to “indeterminacy.” There are some malicious or negligent elements in the growth of indeterminacy, but to focus on those (as “bullshit” does) hides the inescapable and innocently all-too-human element of the “manufacture of certainty.” In short, the emotion of certainty is a biological necessity to action. In the realm of ideas and possibilities we can consider many perspectives, gather more information, and work out the likely consequences of each alternative. But in the real world, when we must act, we inevitably do so with incomplete information, and the felt sense of certainty pushes us from the realm of cogitation into the realm of action.

Yet this natural mechanism seems out of balance, unable to function effectively in the modern context. Public communications are rife with spin, opinion, and false confidence, yet so often we teeter, waver, backtrack, and apologize in the face of decisions, unable to find confidence when it is needed. There are external, systemic, antidotes that could be mentioned, but, again, focusing on the internal for now, what is called for in part is an increased human capacity for holding uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradox–a deeper humility, in what poet Yeats calls “negative capability,” and what Fred Kofman (in his book Conscious Business) calls “ontological humility.” So when I say at the beginning “I’m confused, and I wish more people were,” I am really prescribing a greater openness to and acknowledgment of always already existing uncertainty.

Returning to the theme “the mind of the heart and the heart of the mind” from the last essay, we can say that this capacity for dealing with indeterminacy has intertwined emotional and cognitive elements. Saying “I don’t know,” “I was wrong,” or “I changed my mind,” in addition to submitting one to gross unfashionableness, requires an egolessness based in the heart, a courage to stand with dignity in a vulnerability that, in truth, we all constantly share. The cognitive (or metacognitive) element comes from understanding something about the nature of knowledge. If we understand where indeterminacy comes from, to what degree it is inevitable, when it is reducible, and even when it is desirable, we can open to it with clear and far seeing eyes, and experience this vulnerability as an easy and natural state rather than a cloud we labor under. With this understanding we can skillfully work with uncertainty, not just under its burden.

In addition to this capacity having emotional and cognitive elements, it has a critical social (or intersubjective) aspect. Such human capacities flower in group contexts that nurture them. This means that developing these skills is difficult if one is pushing against the prevailing tide surrounding one, but it also means that any individual, leader, or subgroup can help the whole group “pull itself up by its bootstraps” through small brave and virtuous acts that establish precedents. In a room of distrustful people one person can significantly alter the consciousness of the others by setting a positive example. (Of course, the opposite is also true.)

The ability to understand indeterminacy and deal productively with it is an emerging human capacity. (That is to say, it has always existed in humans, but seems to be a deepening cognitive skill available to an increasing percentage of humanity when one takes a long term historical and evolutionary view.) Tapping into current scholarly thought, scientific results, and the motivational insights of more spiritually-oriented sages in the service of supporting the expansion of this capacity in my readers and their organizations is one of the major goals of this blog.

[This topic is Continued in the next post…]

1. Boston Globe, June 18 2006, Oranges to Oranges, by Blake Bennett. [↩]
2. July 1999, pg 40. [↩]
3. Scientific American, September 2007, “Eating made Simple” by M. Nestle. Speaking of truth-telling, here is an example of me taking a quote out of context to support my own point, for the next line in the article is “Nevertheless, basic dietary principles are not in dispute: eat less, move more,; eat fruits, vegetables and whole grains; and avoid too much junk food.” [↩]
4. Boston Globe Ideas section, October 28, 2007, by C. Rivers & R. C. Barnett. [↩]
5. November 2006, pg 38, by Rodger Doyle. [↩]
6. And, to prove that there is no such thing as a new ideas, there is Arthur C. Clarke’s “New ideas pass through three periods: 1) It can’t be done. 2) It probably can be done, but it’s not worth doing. 3) I knew it was a good idea all along!” penned a century and a half later. [↩]
7. Ideas section of Boston Globe, by Tom Scocca, December 12, 2007. [↩]
8. December 3, 2006. [↩]
9. See “The Manufacture of Uncertainty: How American industries have purchased ’scientists’ to undermine scientific verities when those verities threaten their profits.” By Chris Mooney in March 28 2008 issue of The American Prospect. In this article he reviews “Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health,” by David Michaels, Oxford University Press, 2008. [↩]