Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations
Mark Kingwell
Biblioasis
The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters
Timothy Caulfield
Allen Lane
Meta is getting out of the fact-checking business. The Silicon Valley company that owns and operates Facebook and Instagram will no longer employ third-party fact checkers to verify the accuracy of users’ posts and to staunch the flow of dangerous misinformation by individuals or groups on its platforms. Instead, in what one commentator has called an “extinction-level event for truth on social media,” the company is switching to a system that relies on users to flag erroneous or misleading posts, similar to that employed at the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Claiming that restrictions on misinformation and misleading posts unfairly curtail free speech and are “out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the change will return the platforms “to our roots around free expression,” even while acknowledging that the move will likely increase the volume of “bad stuff” circulating online.
It’s that “bad stuff” that keeps many observers awake at night. Misinformation and disinformation proliferate online as a result of ideologues and snake-oil purveyors vying for our support, attention, and dollars. Appeals to knowledge and expertise have generally been sidelined in favour of appeals to our emotions – most frequently fear and rage – as a way to mobilize people against a perceived enemy, be it immigrants, women, vaccine supporters, journalists, or “the woke mob.” Simple answers to complex questions allow for an unearned sense of surety in a world that is ever-more complicated and uncertain, while conspiracy theories and untested propositions provide justification for belief where none may be warranted.
Along with this crisis in the ability to access and parse quality information comes a decrease in the level of trust citizens have for experts or institutions. Into this void rush opportunists and provocateurs including far-right agitators, wellness gurus, social media influencers, and political prevaricators, up to and including the convicted felon about to be inaugurated president of the U.S. The resulting miasma leaves individuals adrift to “do their own research”; paradoxically, the lack of a solid informational centre results in people who are far more certain of their own rightness having been exposed to faulty or incorrect facts and data.
This situation results in what philosopher and University of Toronto professor Mark Kingwell calls “doxaholism” (from the Greek doxa, meaning opinion), or an “addiction to conviction.” In his latest book, Question Authority: A Polemic About Trust in Five Meditations, Kingwell defines the condition as “a harmful craving for and attachment to loud, divisive, and identity-conferring opinion” and notes that “destructive certainty functions in inverse proportion to the degree of trust we vest in traditional institutions.”
Kingwell’s specific focus in these meditations comprises five areas in which he determines trust has been eroded: politics, academia, media, religion, and science. In each of these areas, authority has been undermined by a coterie of inexpert but agenda-driven voices insisting that a group of elites attempting to consolidate power is hiding or manipulating the truth at the expense of ordinary people. The fact-free anti-intellectualism that is elevated in their place promotes a pervasive paranoia and a “nagging suspicion that the game is rigged.” The result, says Kingwell, is a situation in which “[s]emidormant strains of ideological virus grow symptomatic, so that once-dismissed antisemitic or secret-world order paranoia is spun into the healthy bodies of new generations.”
In one respect, Kingwell points out, this situation has long plagued us. It was 1964 when Richard Hofstadter first published his influential essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and 2004 when Karl Rove referred disparagingly to the “reality-based community.” But neither Hofstadter nor Rove could have imagined a world in which a candidate for U.S. president would seriously argue that immigrant communities in Springfield, Ohio were eating domesticated dogs and cats, or a first-term congresswoman would speculate that the 2018 California wildfires were caused by “lasers or blue beams of light” that had something to do with a conspiracy by the Rothschild family to build a railway on the burnt land. (Or something like that: I confess the argument makes little to no sense to my reality-based eyes.)
The difficulty in this race to the bottom, as Kingwell rightly points out, is that those who still find themselves enmeshed in the reality-based community are at a disadvantage. Paranoia and conspiracy theorizing go hand-in-hand with ideological certainty and a willingness to shatter norms of evidence and basic civility in staking a case. “If one cannot assume that an interlocutor or political opponent is of decent good will, constructive disagreement is not possible,” Kingwell writes. This is only one of the many reasons downloading content moderation online to social media users is doomed to fail.
Kingwell’s title is ironic, arising as it did out of a 1960s counter-cultural battle cry that has since been co-opted by an army of alt-right podcasters, deepfakers, and AI manipulators. What the current crop of conspiracy mongers and knee-jerk contrarians have in common with far-right politicians is the imperative to sow doubt, spread chaos, and convince the masses that they can no longer trust the institutions of civil society that have been central to social cohesion in liberal democracies. The ability to trust in our leaders, our institutions, and our experts is the glue that holds society together; without it, we are thrust into a whirlwind of political upset and interpersonal strife. “Trust,” Kingwell writes, “is an adaptive technology, renewed in its force by regular use,” while “distrust is an evolutionary dead end, a repudiation of human possibility.”
But how does one know where to place one’s trust when even the experts who are supposed to be at the forefront of fact-based knowledge can sometimes be duped? This is one of the questions popular science writer Timothy Caulfield addresses in The Certainty Illusion: What You Don’t Know and Why It Matters. In a section that criticizes the publish or perish ethos afflicting modern-day science researchers, Caulfield refers to experts who get “duped into submitting to questionable or totally sham publications.” These so-called hijacked journals, which charge fees for publication, do not have any legitimate vetting process or peer review, but rather constitute the online equivalent of a knockoff Gucci handbag.
The problem is first that these phony publications are so sophisticated they end up tricking even seasoned academics into submitting to them and, second, they then become fodder for other researchers to use as evidence in their own work. Caulfield points to one study that “found that the World Health Organization’s library of publications about Covid-19 contained approximately four hundred publications from hijacked journals.” If international organizations charged with creating advice and policy during a lethal global pandemic are unintentionally promulgating information published in fraudulent journals, how is anyone expected to trust anything at all?
This is the conundrum Caulfield is pushing back against in his book. And it is a conundrum, especially because, as Caulfield attests, people actually want scientific explanations for the things that impact their lives. The false advice about Ivermectin being a useful cure for Covid gained traction precisely because a frightened populace was desperate for something that would treat the then new and unfamiliar coronavirus. People will rush out to buy supplements that are advertised as immune boosters even though, as Caulfield states unequivocally, “you can’t boost your immune system.” So interested are people in following scientifically sound advice that they will inadvertently fall for “science-y and pseudo-profound bullshit” that uses vague and obscure language to mask a lack of substance or validity.
One group that is especially adept at exploiting this situation – a group Caulfield clearly holds in utter contempt – is the wellness industry. This sector’s reliance on new age claptrap involving natural, holistic, or homeopathic remedies masks a complete lack of rigour, efficacy, or, in the worst instances, safety. Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, with its focus on jade “yoni” eggs for vaginal insertion as a means of strengthening the pelvic floor (I think?), is a particular target of Caulfield’s opprobrium. Perhaps unsurprising for an author whose previous books include the volume Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?
Like Kingwell, Caulfield notes that charlatans and hucksters have always used science as cover for profiting off bunk or products that are actually dangerous. He points to Franz Mesmer, the 18th century German physician who “believed there was a universal magnetic fluid that was key to the maintenance of health.” (Just to be clear: there isn’t.) He also points to Marie Curie’s work with radium, which led to the promulgation of many products using the radioactive substance, including – and this is true – radioactive jewellery, soap, jockstraps, and even water. (Caulfield notes the golfer Eben Byers died in the 1930s after consuming 1,400 bottles of radioactive water; the Wall Street Journal stated at the time that “the radium water worked fine until his jaw fell off.”)
Caulfield’s book exists at the intersection of popular science and self-help; Kingwell’s is generally more elevated in its tone and approach, even when the author is geeking out over Star Wars or other aspects of popular culture. (To his credit, Kingwell is one of the few people to acknowledge that John Carpenter’s 1988 cult film They Live really isn’t very good.) But both provide salient warnings for the perils our current distrustful, paranoid, and misinformation-saturated culture throw up. The meteoric rise of AI is only going to increase the speed and volume at which false or deceptive material appears and is promulgated; as a society, we need to become much more aware of these issues and how to detect them if we have any hope of finding a way through the morass of misinformation or of restoring trust in our experts and institutions.