Truth or Consequences

Damn lies and no statistics

Logo: Ralph Edwards Productions

Dear Readers: This is a travel week post instead of the normal Tuesday essay. It’s your chance to have a look inside my process—watch my meandering brain seek out logical connections in search of an argument. Take it FWIW. I’ll be back to researching and citing references in next week’s article.

Social dissensus is an underlying problem in America today. Establishing a general agreement on facts—that is, working out a basic social consensus on a shared, empirical reality—seems an almost insurmountable undertaking. Historically, conflict arose in society because of competing interests: cattlemen versus farmers, industrialists versus workers, film moguls versus actors. Those were normal, concrete disputes over a distribution of resources and power. The parties to the conflict shared a common understanding of how things worked: the question was, who was entitled to what? That was the central struggle. There was space for political posturing, of course, but it was off-center.

Today, a portion of the country has become untethered, disconnected from their own power and interests. Such individuals prioritize emotional commitments and identities; these are buttressed by fantastical ideation. Inhabiting Earth Two, they live in a world in which vaccines are deadly and guns are not; immigrants are threatening their way of life but corporations are not. And so these voters elect story-tellers rather than policy-makers to Congress. Extremists make the perfect representatives: their role is to rail against the disdained, on behalf of the aggrieved.

Elect nihilists, get chaos.

As social institutions deteriorate, public persons—and especially politicians—feel less pressure to explain themselves in any convincing way. (See Boebert, Lauren.) They are not in Washington to enact a policy or pass a budget; their mission is to get in front of a camera and advance a storyline.

The ascendancy of narrative and the decline of explanation

What’s the difference between narrative and explanation?

A narrative is a story, an account of connected fictional or historical events. A story has no intrinsic truth value. Distinguishing between truth and fiction—that is, to substantiate the elements of a narrative as real—requires explanation.

An explanation is a reasoned justification, using logic and evidence, for an observed phenomenon or event(s).

We are today standing on shaky ground, reality-wise. Growing numbers of people in the United States accept as true statements about events and persons that are demonstrably false. And conspiracist assertions are easy to disprove. For example, the Pizzagate conspiracy narrative promulgated a dark fantasy about a Democratic cabal that ran a child sex ring out of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria basement in DC. Believing this to be true, twenty-eight year old Edgar Welch drove from North Carolina to the restaurant in Washington with an AR-15 style rifle. This armed man was determined to rescue abused children from the pizza shop’s basement dungeon. Welch fired three shots in the restaurant, and luckily no one was injured. The shooter was quite chagrined to discover the restaurant had no basement and the kids at Comet Ping Pong were eating pizza with their parents. The trauma they suffered was from a guy yelling and shooting up the pizza parlor. On the long drive from from North Carolina, Welch imagined himself acting heroically to #save the children. This man’s fantasy vanished the instant he was sentenced to four years in federal prison. Reality 1, Internet 0.

Media and political culture favors stories of conflict between two equally matched opponents. This framing is popular because it quickly engages readers. Both sides journalism has been a driver and sustainer of this trend.

Paul Krugman famously joked that if one party claimed the earth was flat, the headlines would read: “Views Differ on Shape of Planet.” Bothsidesism is so ingrained in journalistic practice that an absurd assertion is not summarily rejected as false; it must be balanced by equal attention to “the other side.”

Krugman’s hypothetical may have been flippant but it was apt. The believers in the flat-earth movement, an adjunct of Q-Anon conspiracism, are increasing in number. Should reporters cover flat earthers like any other oppositional movement? One side (from 3rd c. BCE astronomers to 21st c. astrophysicists) asserts the earth’s sphericity. Neil deGasse Tyson: “Earth is round.” The other side believes it is flat. David Weiss: “Our planet is flat and stationary.”

Now Weiss finds it tedious to associate with the majority of people – though he ‘unfortunately’ still has some friends who believe in a round Earth. ‘I have no problem with anybody that wants to believe we live on a ball. That’s their choice,’ he says. ‘It’s just not something I resonate with.’

Whose quotes are juicier? Whose story is more entertaining?

I’m not saying that journalists are legitimizing flat earth beliefs in their reporting. But the absurdity of the flat earthers isn’t far from election denialism, and the latter is treated seriously by the press. Outrageous claims of election tampering are thus normalized. Not only is there no evidence of “a rigged election,” the contention itself is illogical. If the Democrats had the capacity and the intention to tamper with ballots, why only “flip votes” at the top of the ticket? Why not give themselves overwhelming majorities in Congress? If Biden could have secured the presidency through fraud, how could he have lost the House? The whole thing is nuts. So far, I haven’t seen any interview with election deniers, e.g., Ted Cruz, that ends with the reporter saying, “You’re nuts,” and walking away. Nope, what happens is the news cycle continues and we “move on.” “Truthiness” substitutes for empirically proven elements of fact.

Sooner or later, reality knocks. For erstwhile Trump attorney Jeffrey Clark, the knock on the door was from the FBI, with a warrant . . . and back-up. Clark’s awakening to reality—standing shoeless in los calzoncillos in his driveway—was captured on video for the world to view.

Some narratives are true. An explanation can be embedded in a narrative, such as a “speaking indictment” brought by a prosecutor. In such an indictment, the prosecutor includes more factual details (i.e., evidence) than required by law. They may include dates, times and snippets from communications among defendants to tell a story of wrongdoing that is public-facing. The public learns what the accused is being charged with, how the defendants’ alleged actions violated the law, (sometimes) the purpose of those actions, and the harms the wrongdoing effectuated (or tried to). The truth of such a narrative is tested—adjudicated in court through an established process. This is an institution-affirming process.

The internet, by contrast, has no gate-keepers or quality control; it is a perfect medium for circulating narratives. It is not a venue for adjudicating truth claims, as in court, or even for more prosaic forms of explanation like policy reports. White Papers are boring and take forever to read; they are not exciting or enjoyable. I guess it all comes choices: do I want information that “I resonate with”? Or do I want factual information that has been vetted in some way? Uncovering the truth can take a fair amount of effort but it’s worth it. It keeps me Grounded.

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