The following appears in the Summer 2007 Discovery Institute Views, our semi-annual newsletter for members.
You have been reading about Discovery Institute fellows on the front pages in recent weeks, as well as in op-ed articles, interviews and Internet blogs. In a few cases we have struck a chord across ideological lines, as with our Cascadia Center’s promotion of plug-in hybrid autos. As a way to substantially lower dependence on foreign oil (or any oil), reduce air pollution and improve our economy, it has bi-partisan appeal. Whether you believe that human beings are primarily responsible for global warming, or not, you can agree on win-win strategies for energy conservation.
Interestingly, in happy cases like the plug-in hybrid car, the follow-on questions that have to do with process — how do we achieve this policy we all support? — are less contentious than they are for other public issues. Perhaps that is because the search for practical answers is one that simply doesn’t raise peoples' temperatures. Rather, it's the clash of values that excites passions.
The Discovery mission has always been to “Make a positive vision of the future practical.” The difficulties come these days with the vision, not with the practical solutions.
To illustrate with another example, scientists and philosophers in our Center for Science and Culture advocate academic freedom for teachers, especially at the college level, but also in high school, to explain the scientific evidence for and against Darwin’s theory and in favor of intelligent design. Normally, academic freedom isn’t challenged as a social good. But in this case, the matter is regarded as controversial because of the prejudices —pre-judgments — people bring to the subject. Most liberals, and even some conservative libertarians, draw the line at freedom of speech for people who are, they say, just plain WRONG. (Insert here analogies to “flat earth” advocacy and “Holocaust denial.”) They can’t even imagine how intolerant and philistine that makes them sound.
Fortunately, while universities have mostly closed off their science departments from scientific critiques of Darwin’s theory and mainstream media find it hard to report fairly what we support (in contrast to the words and phrases our opponents try to put in our mouths), there are still publishers who believe in a fair intellectual fight, and, of course,
there is the Internet.
When I served at the U.S. Census Bureau, then-Senator Patrick Moynihan of New York took me to lunch in the Senate Dining Room to discuss federal statistics and their implications, which fascinated him. He is remembered, among many things, for his observation that everyone is entitled to his own opinions, but everyone is not entitled to his own facts. That is a true and helpful rule. But I think Moynihan would be surprised today to know the extent to which facts themselves are in dispute in our public discourse. Is Islam a religion of peace? What does the Quran actually say, and how is it interpreted? Is homosexuality the product of nature or nurture (or both)? And, of course, what are the main causes of whatever global warming is going on, and what is the factual basis for and against Darwin’s theory of evolution?
Contending sides even fight about how the factual questions are asked, and they try to bring in side arguments to influence the dispute. So it is that we have abortion either supported or opposed by Americans depending on how the pollster phrases his inquiry. The debate about embryonic stem cell research is twisted by some media outlet’s decision to remove the key word “embryonic.” As Wesley Smith, our senior fellow on bioethics points out, that makes all the difference. There are demonstrated medical successes for stem cell research, but none for embryonic stem cell research, which also is more controversial on ethical grounds, of course.
You can attribute some of the differences over facts to plain ornery ruthlessness. Once you decide that you’re right and good, and your opponents must therefore be wrong and bad, it’s easy to slip into an attitude that whatever you do to them is well warranted. (We see a lot of self-righteous excuses for deceit in politics, of course, but for sheer unprincipled, no-holds-barred political combat, it’s hard to surpass your typical university faculty.)
If you identify an implacable enemy that you want to destroy, but that enemy is distant, you may feel inclined to strike all the harder at someone who is not nearly so threatening but, as a target, has the advantage of being close by. In such cases, one thinks, why not strike first? Almost all the racial and ethnic and political crimes in history have been committed by people who either contend that they are avenging past wrongs or that they are preventing anticipated ones. Self-deception or will-to-power, it amounts to the same in the end. Look at the sectarian violence in Iraq.
But another reason for differences of understanding — facts and opinions both — may be found in the way the human mind operates. How we think about facts — the “who, what, when, where, why and how” facts that journalists are supposed to examine first in a news story — depends greatly on the varied functions of human memory. In “The Seven Sins of Memory,” Daniel L. Schacter, chairman of Harvard’s Department of Psychology, describes the seeming tricks that memory plays in shaping our views of reality, including supposed facts.
Memory’s transience means that accurate recollection weakens over a remarkably short time, even a day or so. Absent-mindedness springs from “a breakdown at the interface between attention and memory,” so that some facts that might matter are overlooked because our attention is elsewhere. “Misattribution” happens when we confuse sources of information or confuse a fantasy or thought we had about a person or event with reality.
(How many jurors fail to recognize this human foible and assume that some busy executive or official who says, “I don’t recall,” is almost surely lying?)
“The related sin of suggestibility," Schacter writes, “refers to memories that are implanted as a result of leading questions, comments or suggestions when someone is trying to help you call up a past experience.” A part of memory we are especially loathe to own up to is “bias,” the effects that our worldview, past experiences and beliefs have on our appreciation of facts — “knowingly or unknowingly,” as Daniel Schacter puts it.
That expression, “knowingly or unknowingly” is telling. Bias of either kind “says more about what we feel now than what happened then.”
In an era when feelings seem to matter so much, the unreliability of memory seems to bother people less. They are sure of “their” facts because they feel so strongly. No wonder people with dissimilar worldviews cannot even agree on facts.
Schacter points out that the failings of normal memory often are the flip side of their advantages for us. Absent-mindedness, for example, means that our brains are attending fully to something else. Dr. Schacter attributes this to evolution, but he doesn’t provide any evidence for it. He seems to assume it.
That may be his own “bias.” He at least should consider the possibility of design!