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Wednesday, Dec 3, 2008
From miracle diets to creationism to rumors about the origins of 9/11, a new book traces our irrational love of misinformation.
By Louis Bayard
Read more: Religion, Books, Conspiracy, Science, Reviews, Book reviews, Louis Bayard
Oct. 2, 2008 | The U.S. government blew up the twin towers. The AIDS virus was engineered by scientists to kill African-Americans. Chinese explorers landed on American shores in 1421. Crystals will heal you. Aliens landed at Roswell. The Priory of Sion is protecting the secrets of the Messianic bloodline. Barack Obama is a Muslim.
If you believe any of those propositions, you are ... well, let's tack toward charity. You have been swept along in a tide that the British polemicist Damian Thompson likes to call "Counterknowledge." Moreover, you are legion. Millions of unwary souls from every quadrant of Earth are swallowing a daily diet of quackery, conspiracy theory, bogus history and faux science. We haven't just turned off our bullshit detectors, we've permanently disabled them. And in so doing, Thompson argues, we've made for ourselves "a thrilling universe in which Atlantis is buried underneath the Antarctic, the Ark of the Covenant is hidden in Ethiopia, aliens have manipulated our DNA, and there was once a civilization on Mars."
Thrilling but, of course, wrong. Demonstrably wrong in most cases. And yet we're ready to buy in, aren't we? Dear God, what won't we buy into? UFOs, miracle diets, astrology, Bible prophesy. Satanic ritual abuse, recovered memory. Aromatherapy, reflexology, craniosacral therapy. What ties together all these ancient and not-so-ancient belief systems is, by Thompson's reckoning, simply this: They all purport to be knowledge without actually being knowledge. They are "misinformation packaged as fact."
And packaged all too well. "Ideas that, in their original, raw form, flourished only on the fringes of society are now being taken seriously by educated people in the West, and are circulating with bewildering speed in the developing world." The result, he says, is "a pandemic of credulous thinking ... a huge surge in the popularity of propositions that fail basic empirical tests." How wide a pandemic, you might ask? How great a surge? Thompson is a stickler for facts but -- ironically enough, given the nature of his enterprise -- he's not so keen on hard numbers. And the ones he provides don't necessarily back him up. A 2004 Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans "believe that God created human beings in their present form about 10,000 years ago." (In anatomical terms, modern humans date back at least 100,000 years.) But that finding is virtually unchanged from the 44 percent figure in a 1982 poll. We may not have progressed on this subject, but at least we haven't gotten significantly dumber.
Thompson is far more effective at charting how counterknowledge has morphed under modern conditions. As the Internet tears down traditional news portals, untested propositions go hurtling through cyberspace, vastly increasing the ability of bad information to take root -- that is, to look simply like new information. "A rumor about the Antichrist can leap from Goths in Sweden to an extreme traditionalist Catholic sect in Australia in a matter of seconds," writes Thompson. As for creationism, it is now less a religious phenomenon than a technological one. Sites like CreationWiki and Conservapedia and Kids 4 Truth (a primer in intelligent design) dress up their unsecular ideas in secular clothing -- and obliterate the difference between fact and faith more effectively than Sarah Palin ever could.
But why harp on American fundamentalists when, as Thompson points out, irrationality is just as deeply entrenched in the Islamic world, if not more so? A 2006 poll of higher-education students in the United Kingdom found that fewer than 10 percent of Muslims accept evolution. Among the populaces of Indonesia, Pakistan and Egypt, that percentage drops to 2, 5 and 3 percent, respectively. Turkey is now overtaking the United States as the wellspring of creationist agitprop.
No surprise that, in the Internet's strange-bedfellows world, Christians are now sharing intelligent design curricula with Muslims, just as some creationists are overlapping with Holocaust deniers. The same readers who swallow hogwash about freemasonry and the Great Flood and the Priory of Sion are the first in line to buy books like "The Jesus Papers" and "Fingerprints of the Gods." "If you believe one wrong or strange thing," writes Thompson, "you are more likely to believe another." Especially if you're seething with hostility toward political, intellectual and scientific elites. Counterknowledge, for all its transience, gives its owners an enduring feeling: They have been entrusted with the very secret they weren't supposed to know.
It's a contagious feeling. Thanks to "The Da Vinci Code," 40 percent of Americans now believe that churches are concealing "the truth" about Jesus. Tens of millions have seen "Loose Change," the "documentary" that charges the Bush administration with single-handedly carrying out the 9/11 attacks, right down to elaborately faked cellphone calls from Flight 93. And in today's bazaar of craziness, conspiracy theory is far from being the only booth. The best-selling book and DVD package titled "The Secret" exhorts us to reap untold riches through the simple troika of asking, believing and receiving. (As best I can tell, it's virtually identical to professor Harold Hill's "think system" in "The Music Man.")
Damian Thompson is a feisty and sure-footed debater, and he has great fun with the bogus archaeologists who want to turn the Americas "into the Grand Central Station of the ancient world, visited by Greeks, Romans, Celts, Phoenicians, Israelites, Nubians and 'Hindoos.'" He is equally withering on "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail" and its pseudo-historic cronies: "Open a page at random, and there is a good chance you will find a passage that reads: 'We could not believe what we had in our hands. If these documents were what they said they were, then the whole history of [insert as appropriate] would have to be rewritten,' etc."
Next page: Is religion a training ground for irrational thinking?
The big secret about secret societies
The Da Vinci crock