ALT REALITY

Jerry Harkins

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.  The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.  Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”                                                                                                                                     –Genesis 11:5-7

As a strategy for keeping the people in perpetual darkness, God should have known that a people smart enough to build the Tower of Babel would not have been seriously challenged by the need to translate.  Modern acolytes of the Great Deceiver – whether of the church, the state, business or the media have accomplished far more than that.  Indeed, they have learned to re-shape not only reality but the very definition of reality.  They are a talented species that has created a serious problem for themselves.  Alt Reality has become the new anarchy.

Oh, yes, we live in strange times.  Until about twenty years ago, the history of the human race was largely the story of a young species of intelligent animals trying to understand its surroundings and its place in them or, in short, to get a grip on reality.  That curiosity is not unique to humans but, unlike our fellow creatures, we developed tools and processes specifically to enhance our quest for truth.  And we were successful.  We learned to make fire and split the atom, to sow and reap, to read and write, to dance and sing and play and pray.  We learned that space and time are relative and, in 1969, we sent explorers to the moon.  In short, we cast out some of the darkness and tamed parts of nature.  We also came to understand that every time we answered a question, new ones popped up but we found the journey itself exciting.  We were hooked not only or even mainly on the ends but at least equally on the means we invented to get to the ends.  On science and philosophy and art and theology.  Our intellectuals were addicted.  But always there were some who regarded this obsession as either arrogant or heretical.  A few saw it as an opportunity for self-enrichment. 

The Book of Genesis depicts a Creator whose most important commandment was that we should stay away from the tree of knowledge lest we ourselves become godlike.  The specific knowledge that unlocked godliness was said to be the knowledge of good and evil but, as it turned out, all knowledge could be good or evil and you never knew which from one moment to the next.  We ate the apple but did not became godlike.  We became fully human, pilgrims on a journey with no final destination.  We were trapped, neither here nor there like Schrödinger's cat which could be both alive and dead simultaneously.  Truth was elusive and often counterintuitive.  A physicist, Werner von Heisenberg, discovered an inherent uncertainty at the heart of reality and a mathematician, Kurt Gödel, formulated a theorem that purported to prove that a provable system must necessarily be false.  For a time, it seemed that Lewis Carroll might have been right after all.  Needless to say, God, who does not play dice with the universe, was not amused and, ever since,  some of his principal agents have waged war on behalf of ignorance.  They are not the only ones.

The cult of willful ignorance is a characteristic of every kind of autocracy and an intimate  companion of deceit and dishonesty.  In the Oceania of George Orwell’s 1984 this intimacy is made explicit in three slogans:  Ignorance Is Strength, War Is Peace, and Freedom Is Slavery.  Orwell modeled Big Brother on Joseph Stalin who was famous for re-writing history to obliterate enemies of the state.  “Socialist Realism” was anything but realistic whether in art or science or economics.  Trofim Lysenko was more a madman than a biologist but his crackpot agricultural theories enjoyed official favor for decades in the face of widespread Soviet starvation because Stalin saw in them a path toward creating the Soviet superman just as Hitler had seen the extermination of the Jews as the way to create the Teutonic superman.  It was madness and morally repugnant but it was also harebrained – contrary to established fact.  Yet the deliberate cultivation of ignorance and darkness dominated Russian life for seventy years and German life for twelve. 

The advancement of knowledge always involves the need to change one’s thinking and is, therefore, threatening.  Knowledge is power only in the narrow sense that it conveys an advantage to those who have it over those who do not.  Otherwise it is frustrating, especially for those who lack it and are most likely to fear it.  Today, the world faces what is the most profound revolution it has ever witnessed:  the Information Revolution and its inevitable consequence, the global economy.  Everywhere everything – religion, politics, national and personal economic prospects, cultural values, philosophical assumptions – is changing at warp speed.  We all live in a profoundly disconcerting world.  As King Mongkut of Siam sings, “Some things nearly so / Some things nearly not / There are times I almost think /  I am not sure of what I absolutely know.”   It is not at all surprising that a cabal of scoundrels has arisen to take advantage of these dislocations through deceit, deception and outright fraud.  Their weapon is being called “alternative reality” but George Orwell called it simply “The Big Lie” in his dystopian novel, 1984.  The idea is simply to lie outrageously about everything to everyone. Most people will believe anything if your lie is big enough, simple enough and repeated often enough.  

Leaders, of course, require followers, in this case followers willing to embrace what is obviously and objectively unreasonable.   The root of this vulnerability is fear of change abetted by simple incomprehension or mistrust of science or even an attraction to conspiracy theories.  People who think the earth was created in seven days some six thousand years ago and that the fossil record is the work of the devil are flying in the face of logic and evidence.  They are stubborn in their ignorance but their belief systems are not necessarily due to a lack of  intelligence or education.  They believe what they want to believe but they are also the victims of those who intend to profit from the social chaos they can engender.  The same is true of people who believe that space aliens landed at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 but here the case is more subtle.  It assumes the unproven but highly probable idea that intelligent life has evolved elsewhere in the universe but it ignores the engineering obstacles that act to reduce the probability of an actual encounter in 1947 (or 2018) to virtually zero.  At present, it is far more likely that the debris found near Roswell is exactly what the Air Force said it was, a weather balloon.  Only a person with a paranoid personality could believe that dozens of military and government officials knew about a crash landing of space aliens and kept it secret for more than seventy years.

One problem with alternative reality is that there is almost no such thing as reality itself if we insist on certainty.  In bygone years, students were introduced to probability theory with an example of a zero probability statement:  one day I will swim across the Atlantic Ocean.  Then in 1998, Benoît Lecomte swam across the Atlantic Ocean.  The most obvious thing about reality is that our perception of what is true constantly evolves.  It takes nothing away from the achievement of Christopher Columbus to note that he thought he had reached Asia and that the islands he saw were parts of India, China and Japan.  His discoveries were part of a learning process which was extended by Vasco Balboa who crossed the Isthmus of Panama to encounter the Pacific Ocean in 1513 and Ferdinand Magellan one of whose five ships circumnavigated the globe in 1519.  Intellectuals had long known that the earth must be spherical but after Magellan’s voyage any other hypothesis became untenable.  Yet there remain Flat Earthers to this day.  The pictures taken from space?  Their web site says, “…the space agencies of the world are involved in a conspiracy faking space travel and exploration.”  Sound familiar?

So “truth” or, more accurately, reality evolves – changes if you insist – but it does not go backwards.  Our understanding of the universe is incomplete but no reasonable person can ever again believe that it is six thousand years old or that it has always and will always exist in its present state.  The cumulative weight of empirical observation, measurement and experimentation has overwhelmed what once was a tenable belief.  The Big Bang theory did not close the book of cosmology but it did provide the evidence that precluded any version of steady state.  The discovery of the Higgs Boson did not cast the Standard Model of particle physics in bronze as truth for all ages but it did confirm it as the right direction toward such a truth.  Probably.  Always probably.  Those who reject Darwinian evolution in favor of the biblical creationism story are no longer within the pale of rationality on the subject.  When Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, he stressed in his summary that “this view of life” was a beginning, not an end; that it promised to open a wide variety of questions to scientific inquiry.  Most famously, he wrote, “Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.”  And it was.  Darwin’s seminal work has been richly elaborated and validated especially by the discovery of its genetic mechanism.  But his fundamental ideas of common descent and natural selection are as indelible as any truth can be and theories to the contrary must be consigned to Wonderland.

But truth is always probabilistic.  For one thing, people make mistakes.  A third grade child trying to add three plus four and coming up with five is counting, not adding.  An adult who argues that the sun revolves around the earth because it says so in the Bible is substituting faith for fact.  There is an important difference here.  The child is invoking a reality, that of counting, even if it does not apply to the problem at hand.  The adult is appealing to what may have been a fortuitous eclipse of the sun during the Battle of Gibeon which was misunderstood by the author of the Book of Joshua.  But the politician who claims that climate change is a myth is simply lying for personal gain and is forfeiting the right to be believed about anything.

However, isn’t it possible that the climate scientists are overstating what is essentially a natural fluctuation in average temperatures?  Of course it is possible.  It is also possible that the changes we observe are not significantly related to human activity.  And it is possible that one day you will swim across the Atlantic Ocean.  But don’t bet the rent money on it.  The empirical evidence and the logic strongly point in a different direction.  Moreover if you want to entertain remote possibilities about the climate, you owe it to yourself and others to make a persuasive case for some other agent, something non-human that causes global warming.  It is simply not enough to appeal to “natural fluctuations” any more than it is to appeal to the work of the devil to explain the fossil record.

Of course practitioners of alternative reality readily reject evidence preferring to argue from the absence of evidence, an unknown that they can promote as a fatal flaw.   In the evolution debate, it used to be the lack of what was called “the missing link” without which it was obvious that homo sapiens had to be the result of spontaneous, unique and intelligent creation.  This is the fallacy of argumentum ad perfectionem, the idea that until every I is dotted and every t crossed a theory is false and its opposite must be true.  When that fallacy fails the next resort is to conspiracy theory which is why thousands of Americans believe the Apollo moon landings never happened and the whole thing was a government conspiracy.  It is also why dinosaurs never existed, why fluoridation is a Communist plot and why 65% of Americans reject the theory of evolution.

The Big Lie has been a frequent actor in world history, always available to sacrifice truth and rationality in the service of ideology.  Ideology is not itself immoral but it must follow truth, not lead it.  Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, the Grand Inquisitor in the Galileo trial, knew this well.  A year after Galileo had been silenced, the prelate wrote, “I say that if there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the center of the world, that the earth shares the same heavens where God lives and that the sun does not circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them, than that what is demonstrated is false…”  Perhaps we can say that by 1615 he should have known what revolved about what but it would take the church another 380 years to accept reality.  At least little harm was done.  The most credulous continued to believe an error but life went on.  The same cannot be said of the Big Lies we have been confronting for the past century or so.  It is a long list – a veritable theater of the absurd – of claims that pose existential threats to our lives and well-being.

We indeed live in strange times when our most pressing need is for a child who will shout out loudly, “But the emperor has no clothes.”  Neither we nor that child will ever resolve the debate between Plato and Aristotle about the nature of reality but we can agree with them both that that reality is singular and moral and beautiful.  Even if our understanding of it is imperfect, it has no alternative.

Subsequently

"And a little child shall lead them." (Isaiah 11:6).  In 2019, along came a sixteen year old girl named Greta Thunberg who fearlessly explained not only that the emperor was intellectually naked but, more importantly, why his big lies constituted a crime against humanity.