Anti-vaccine demonstrators lead a sustained protest against the Alberta government ending COVID testing, tracing, and isolation in Calgary, Alta., on Aug. 12, 2021.Jeff McIntosh/STRJMC
If we did not know it before COVID-19 then we certainly know it now: People will believe the wildest things. The pandemic has brought every crank and know-it-all skittering out of the woodwork to claim that vaccines are a plot to pollute our bodies or track our movements and heaven knows what else. Even highly intelligent individuals can be heard arguing quite seriously that, “you know, vaccines don’t really work,” passing casually over the fact that the unvaccinated have been flooding into intensive care at many times the rate of those who are properly inoculated.
It is one of the paradoxes of the century. People are better educated than ever before. They have a vast store of knowledge quite literally at their fingertips, accessible in an instant through the touch of a screen. And yet they seem to swallow nonsense just as easily as their grandparents – and, thanks to social media, spread it much more easily.
Correcting COVID misinformation does not equate to cancel culture
Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States. The Twin Towers were brought down by miniature bombs planted to justify a U.S. attack on the Middle East. Hillary Clinton ran a child-trafficking ring out of a Washington pizzeria.
The myths about vaccines – they were rushed into production and so can’t be trusted, they alter your DNA, they contain microchips, they cause variants – are the most dangerous of all. By discouraging people from getting vaccinated or boosted they prolong the pandemic and put countless lives at risk.
Even more disheartening are the implications for the future. If we can’t resist delusions and misinformation in the midst of the greatest health emergency in a century, what does it say about our ability to work through the next big problems that confront us, from environmental degradation to the erosion of democracy to the continuing threat of war? Have we lost one of our greatest gifts: the ability to reason?
Two timely new books say no, not just yet. Despite all the madness abroad in the world, we still have the capacity to think and act rationally, but only if we regain our faith in facts, knowledge and the institutions that underpin them.
Steven Pinker in Rationality and Jonathan Rauch in The Constitution of Knowledge both start off by acknowledging that our background as a species often leads us into irrational thinking. Back on the savanna, it made sense to flee at just the rumour of danger because sitting still could get you killed. Early humans lived in small, related groups that lived and thought tribally.
Even today, we have a deep need to belong. That leads us to embrace views that signal our loyalty to the group, even if those views make little objective sense. As Mr. Rauch puts it, we prize looking right more than being right. So we seek out whatever evidence will support our preformed beliefs – the very opposite of rational inquiry.
Our thinking is riddled with bad habits that distort how we see the world. We overinterpret coincidences, overgeneralize from anecdotes and jump from correlation to causation, says Mr. Pinker, a Harvard professor known for his book Enlightenment Now. On top of that, we suffer from a series of logical biases. Mr. Rauch, a veteran American journalist and author, lists a few of them. We overestimate the likelihood of things that make a splash in the news, such as kidnappings and terrorist attacks – the so-called availability bias. We often stick with beliefs even if the evidence disproves them – the perseverance bias. We believe things we hear often – the familiarity bias.
The good news is that we can move forward despite these unfortunate tendencies. The history of human progress proves it. We no longer burn heretics at the stake, or enslave other humans en masse, in part because brave thinkers of the past exposed the irrationality and immorality (the two are linked) of such practices. Most us no longer think of homosexuality as an illness or a sin. Most of us take our vaccines, too, and let those who are against them howl at the wind.
We still have strong institutions and traditions that undergird Mr. Rauch’s constitution of knowledge: libraries, universities, peer-reviewed scientific journals, independent courts, a free press. As he puts it, “The reality-based community would not have endured and expanded for four centuries unless it possessed formidable strengths: its institutional depth, its vast networks, its reserves of integrity.”
Restoring that constitution will not be easy. The press stands accused of spreading “fake news.” Free expression is under assault on many university campuses. Skepticism about expert opinion is rampant.
To overcome these threats, the authors argue, we need to bolster our institutions, redouble our commitment to free speech, and learn to recognize our failures of logic. As Mr. Rauch argues, humans may be biased and tribal, but “we are also capable of outwitting our biases and tribes and thinking well.” A deadly health crisis with millions of lives on the line would be a good time to start.
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