The Answers Are Not in the Back of the Book

4 Oct. 2009  --  Martin Berger

      Our Alternative Services Committee originally intended to offer us this day a commentary on Things We Learned in School That Aren’t True, to be linked with Columbus Day, an observance that comes up in about a week.  The service was to feature the bright young historian who now teaches Latin American history at YSU.  She will no doubt address this audience in the future, and she will do so splendidly, but as things have worked out, this Sunday you’ll be addressed by me instead.

      I cannot speak with authority about Columbus.  I grew up on the outskirts of a city named after that individual, but apart from that I have no professional expertise in the Age of Exploration, the Age of European Conquest and Exploitation, or whatever we should call it.  I have touched upon the topic in survey classes, and I have some opinions, but my work as a historian has focused on Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries.  

      So I am going to approach the general topic of what we know, or what we think we know, from different directions than those that Columbus and his three moldy vessels followed in 1492.  (Those vessels, incidentally, were cheap and expendable, quite unlike the costly state-of-the art contraptions that we have more recently thrown into space.)
      Of course we know things that are wrong–some from school, some from the vast pool of information and misinformation that’s called Urban Legend or Everybody Knows.  There are still a lot of people who believe that eating carrots will enable them to see in the dark.  That belief comes from a World War II cover story circulated by the British in order to prevent the Germans from figuring out the British use of radar to find and intercept German night bombers.  (The Germans had their own radar program and weren’t fooled about what the British were doing, but the cover story lives on, even though Bugs Bunny didn’t work the night shift.) 

      People have been persuaded that draining large quantities of blood from patients almost always improves their medical condition; that the course of future events may be determined by careful examination of the innards of assorted sacrificed creatures; that yelling at a television set influences the flight of a football; and that stock and housing prices could never go down.

      It’s hard to tell which weird assertions, in our weird world, are true and which are false.  We can’t just go by the sincerity and general credibility of the person who makes an assertion.  We had a  President whose gullibility led an aide to say “It’s not what he doesn’t know that’s the problem, it’s what he knows that isn’t true.”  But even he was sometimes right; it was morning in America, once every day.

      Of all our many sources of error, I am going to focus on one that I find especially pernicious.  It is also a relatively easy target.  It is dogmatic assertion, as backed by authority and cast as faith.
      My examples are mostly drawn not from the academic learning that I’ve made a living explaining to students, but from personal observations.  This is in keeping with the ways that this church is accustomed to search for truth; we draw on many sources of inspiration, not only from a single authoritative group of texts, and we tend to distrust authority of all varieties.  We routinely respond to statements of opinion by asking for evidence.  This pulpit suggests authority, as it stands a bit above pew-level, but that’s the result of church-building tradition and the practical wish to make the weekly spiel easier to hear.  We are generally civilized enough to listen without interrupting, but we don’t confuse the voices of our ministers, or our Alternative Service speakers, with the voice of God.

      Not everyone feels this way about authority.

      For some years now I have tried to encourage the same spirit of questioning by asking students to repeat after me the familiar schoolyard challenge: Oh yeah?  Says who?  It’s a little like a Responsive Reading.  With UUs it’s not necessary to do the chant.  We already respond to the bumper sticker that says “Question Authority” by thinking “Who says I have to do that?”  This insubordinate spirit is a large part of what keeps me in this organization (we haven’t the time right now to discuss whether we should call it an organization), despite my annoyance when members or guests (or perhaps poltergeists–how to disprove that possibility?) put trash in the recycling and vice versa.
      We all have our own stories as to how we came to our present intellectual stances.  Probably we forget a lot of our own formative experiences, but one that I recall vividly occurred in 9th-Grade World History.  Our textbook began with the human race and its ancestors.  That textbook wasn’t creationist, but it reflected what was then known, so the textbook’s version of the human family tree included the celebrated hoax known as Piltdown Man.  Now, by the mid-1950s, the new technology of radiocarbon dating had demonstrated that the coffee-stained bits of human and simian bone that had been presented as our ancestor were nowhere near old enough to qualify. Piltdown’s fake ID had been busted, and a fellow student had read about the bust in Scientific American.  Our teacher insisted that she would continue to teach Piltdown Man because he was in the textbook.  She was entirely uninterested in what was or was not true; the book was her authority.  To question the book’s authority was to challenge her authority.  She would hold to her line as rigidly as any drone in Stalinist East Germany, ritually invoking the wisdom of MELS (that’s Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, the first two of whom were themselves pretty antiauthoritarian).
      Miss Derivan would not recant, but she did back off to the extent of ignoring Piltdown Man.  She had demonstrated, at least to some of us, an important principle: do not trust people in authority, particularly stupid people in authority.

      So far as I know, no educational theorist has recognized the usefulness of exposing the young to arbitrary, irrational, dogmatic authority.  There must be opportunities for educators (in publications, grants, etc.), for following up this point.  But such experiences of being subjected to inane dogmatism, which must be universal, don’t make everyone skeptical.  Many people want to be told what to do, and what to believe.

      What a great many normal people seem to want (“normal people” as opposed, perhaps, to “Unitarian-Universalists”) is faith, which can be defined as “insistence on believing something, whether or not there is any reasonable evidence for it.”  It can be a desperate thing, this search for faith.  A very clever person, Madame de Staël, wrote “I do not know exactly what we must believe, but I believe that we must believe!  The 18th Century did nothing but deny.  The human spirit lives by its beliefs. Acquire faith through Christianity, or through German philosophy, or merely through enthusiasm, but believe in something.”  She was understandably rattled by the French Revolution, but many people can share her distress, and her craving for something to hang onto.

      We humans seem to be predisposed to find significant patterns in what we experience.  We generalize, and we attempt to come up with explanations.  Noticing patterns is a good thing; apparently-unrelated data may indeed indicate the presence of a people-eating predator, or the imminence of a drought.  We also see less vital, less significant patterns, such as faces and animals in clouds, and so on.  Most issues of Skeptical Inquirer report new instances of holy apparitions on moldy tacos and so on.  (This congregation is less disposed than most to that sort of thing; when we had a persistent problem with paint flaking off the sanctuary ceiling, before we installed the vent fan, I couldn’t sell anyone on claiming that the bad paint was an apparition of Joseph Priestley and charging admission.)  We have ways of evaluating apparent patterns and the explanations that people suggest.  There’s not time today to expand on the scientific method, etc., but I contend that a major problem arises when our attempts to explain phenomena harden into dogma, or faith.

      Faith is demanding.  Maintaining it can be as hard as independent thinking.  Finding ways to banish all the ideas or circumstances that don’t fit the program creates strain, and that strain is often expressed in louder and more vehement proclamations, and in more extreme actions.  Perhaps at some deeply-repressed level the inconsistencies remain in the faithful person’s mind, and drive the faithful toward more intense fanaticism.  Faith that admits of no doubt, that allows for no new information and no adjustments, seems to me to be rooted in panic.  There’s nothing between ironclad belief and chaos.  
      “We think with our blood,” was a Nazi slogan, which meant “we don’t think, we follow with all our hearts the intuitive wisdom of our leader.”  “Führer befehl, wir folgen.”  One way to convince onself that faith is pure and doubt is banished is to commit extreme actions.  If I blow myself up for my faith, I demonstrate to everyone that I really mean business, and any shreds of doubt are dispersed along with all the other shreds.  If I burn people because of disagreements over the finer points of theology, I show the intensity of my commitment.  Faith can inspire people to be even nastier than they would be as imperfect, merely-human individuals.

      If my World History teacher had known anything beyond the textbook, she might have done what a real teacher would do.  She could have used Piltdown’s blowup as a “teachable moment” (an ed-biz cliché, but a useful one), to riff on the evolution of knowledge.  Instead she demonstrated the assurance of the ignorant–often wrong but never in doubt.

      It used to be common practice, in introductory history classes, to assign controversy readers.  Students would be required to read scholarly arguments on a topic, presenting opposing views on a topic.  Many students actually did the reading.  Real authoritative opinions would clash head-on, and students who knew nothing of the topic were required to assess the arguments of learned scholars.  It was not uncommon for wretched freshmen to beg their cruel instructors and graduate assistants to tell them, please: which is right?  
      It is painful for people to make judgments when their whole previous educational experience has been restricted to memorizing and regurgitating.  If they are persuaded to question authority, they may adopt new certainties, sometimes at least as silly than the orthodoxies that they have rejected.  Debunking can be followed not by reasoned skepticism, but by rebunking.  If the flagwaving indoctrinations of long-ago textbooks are replaced by newer politically-correct orthodoxies, not much has been gained, even if we sympathize with some of the goals of the corrective rants.  Even the phrase “critical thinking” becomes maddening when ritually repeated.

      A tougher set of problems is suggested by our second reading, the one from Ron Suskind’s account of his interview with an arrogant political aide who claimed that he and his colleagues could create reality, going beyond the annoying cliché “it is what it is” all the way to “it is what we say it is.”  The question of what is truth has engaged the attention of lots of interesting ancient Greeks, Pontius Pilate, and the more recent Postmodernist school.  We’ll have to figure out epistemology on some other occasion.  For now, I’d like to assume that some approaches to evidence work better than others, on the whole, and stick with how we should deal with uncertainty.

      This sermon began with my encounter, some fifty years ago, with Piltdown Man and my World History teacher.  Let us now consider another personal experience, this one from just twenty-some years back.  I think of it as the Parable of the Opel.

      After our VW Squareback ignited while I was I was underneath it (practical note: don’t assume that when fuel  is pooling all around you, you’re safe in the absence of sparks or flame; the heat from an incandescent bulb will light gasoline just fine), we bought a 1973 Opel 1900 sedan.  As a conscientious car-owner, I read the owner’s manual and set forth to do the right thing and change the radiator coolant.
      The manual included a photograph of the radiator and the simple valve that would allow the old stale coolant to be drained out.  I looked at the radiator and could not find the drain-valve.  I felt all around the radiator’s lower regions and could not find the drain valve.  Finally I drove to Wick Avenue for aid.  

      Opel, a significant German carmaker headquartered in Rüsselsheim, was at that time a General Motors subsidiary, as it remained till quite recently.  In the US, Opel was a “captive import,” and a sideshow of Buick, so it was Buick Youngstown that I made my pilgrimage.  I was directed to the sole mechanic who worked on the foreign cars.

      I posed my question about the invisible drain-valve, and the mechanic–a smallish man, surly but wise–delivered a truly illuminating revelation.  “They ain’t none,” he said.  “You just take off that bottom hose and let it run all over the [bleepin’] place.”
      I had been perplexed by the authoritative text, the owner’s manual, which had lied.  No doubt, sometime after the manual was produced, someone figured out that a Deutschmark or so could be saved by omitting the valve.  I ought to have generalized from what I already knew about history–that official, establishment wisdom ought not to be trusted too far, that common sense and available evidence ought to be considered.  

      It’s good to read the manual.  It may well be right.  But it’s better to treat the words of official wisdom as probabilaties, at most, and to check things out.  The Hellenistic physician Galen advised the aspiring doctor to “learn thoroughly all that has been said by the most illustrious of the Ancients”; and then to “test and prove it, observe what part is in agreement, and what is in disagreement with obvious facts,” the better to “choose this and turn away from that.”
      This policy is more challenging than faith, or following authority.  But if we aspire to reasonable action, it is all we’ve got.