On his blog yesterday, James Fallows distilled something that has long needed clarification. Rather than try to describe it, I’m just going quote pretty much the whole thing:
Yesterday I posted an item about the open letter from 15 past winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, calling on China’s government to release the latest winner, the imprisoned civil-liberties activist Liu Xiaobo. I noted that two names were interestingly absent from the list: Al Gore (despite the presence of Jimmy Carter) and Nelson Mandela (despite his fellow South African Desmond Tutu’s role in organizing the letter).
When I returned to my computer just now, after an hour away for lunch, I found several screens full of incoming emails all to the same effect. Here’s a sample:
“I don’t see the name of the 2009 Nobel peace prize winner either–namely Barak Obama.”
And:
“The list seems to be missing someone else who might have an influence on the Chinese government, oh heay, where is our fearless leader’s John Hancock? Was President Obama too busy playing golf to bother? Didn’t Obama win one, too?”
I am sorely tempted to use the names of some of these senders, but… Many dozens of emails total, all with this same theme — the hypocrisy of Obama in not speaking up for his fellow laureate, and the hypocrisy of me for not pointing that out. Here is what’s interesting:
- Something must have happened to get a lot of people riled up about the same topic all at the same time. Was it mentioned on Fox? Did it get onto a right-wing site? I don’t know. I just see what’s in the inbox.
- Not one of these people could apparently be bothered to check and see that, within hours of the award, Obama had in fact urged the Chinese government to release Liu Xiaobo. The final words of the official White House “statement by the president” were, “We call on the Chinese government to release Mr. Liu as soon as possible.”
That’s followed by a big, fat picture of Obama along with the story about his urging the Chinese to release his fellow Nobel winner. Fallows then concludes with something that is that rarest of things, a genuine must read:
It took me approximately two seconds on Google to find numerous references to Obama’s statement. For tips on how you can do this at home, see here. I’m not blaming anyone for wondering whether Obama had in fact issued a statement. I do blame people for not bothering to find out before issuing a blast.
The combination of ignorance, lack of curiosity, and certitude is a very difficult one to offset.*
____
*And lest this last sentence further inflame some people, I mean it very specifically: Ignorance = lack of knowledge, in this case about what Obama had done; lack of curiosity = not spending the two seconds it would take to check; certitude = “was he too busy playing golf?”Ignorant incurious certitude: a modern curse.
There you have it folks, America in 2010 in a nutshell. People with access to unlimited information who are nevertheless so certain of easily disproved things that they are not at all shy about sharing them with you. And, of course, the problem compounds itself when you get into issues where it takes more than an almost effortless two second search for clarity.
The modern twist is that on any topic that has a serious amount of disinformation floating around, you might have to click on more than one link to get the full picture, and that’s when certainty get reinforced with reassurance. The greatest attraction of the internet is agreement, and the more you interact with other people who agree with your easily disproved notion, the less likely that you’ll ever be able to figure out that your facts are wrong. Take, for example, this conversation between Rachel Maddow and some Joe Miller fans in Alaska:
One young man insisted that Holder is “the most anti-gun attorney general this nation has ever had.” When Rachel asked how he arrived at this, he had absolutely no idea why he believes what he believes. He referenced Holder’s “voting record beforehand,” which made no sense, since Holder has never held elected office. Asked what it was, exactly, that Holder did on gun policy he didn’t like, the Miller supporter — who, remember, feels so strongly about this issue that he brought it up — replied, “I, uh, I honestly, uh, I don’t know enough about him to answer that truthfully.”
So, Rachel moved to the next voter who’s mad about Holder, and who also brought up the subject. “He’s anti-gun,” the woman said. Asked what he’d done that’s anti-gun, the Miller support replied, “I don’t have all the facts, but I know that he is.”
Paul Waldman noted, “Keep in mind that these are folks who are so mad about this particular issue, and so fervent in their defense of their Second Amendment rights, that they’re out on a corner talking to people about it.”
[Note: You can see the video at the link. My complete and total hatred of cable news easily extends to MSNBC. I couldn’t make it through a complete hour of Maddow’s show any more than I could one from CNN or Fox. However, this particular clip is short and actually informative.]
When pressed as to what specifically Holder had done, one guy suggested looking up his press releases with Google. Okay, Mr. Alaska wingnut, let’s see “eric holder”.
Of the nine suggestions from Google, five of them are about right wing scary tales. I didn’t even remember “nation of cowards”, but he used the phrase in a speech about race a year and a half ago and it caused a very minor flap. Twenty months later, it’s the fifth most popular search for the attorney general on Google.
When you Google “eric holder second amendment” what you get is page after page of scare stories. Many of these are based on quotes that have been stripped of their context to make them scarier. Unanchored from their original meaning, they are then speculated on with such relentless intensity that they take on lives of their own.
They read like conspiracy theories, and that isn’t a coincidence. Conspiracy theories obsess over one incongruent piece of information, often of dubious authenticity, until it takes on enough importance to outweigh the tens thousands of easily verified facts that support the accepted version. That’s how some unqualified whacko who thinks the hole doesn’t look big enough turns a Boeing 757 with sixty-four people on board, testified to by hundreds of witnesses, into a cruise missile fired by the U.S. Government at its own military headquarters. It’s also how repeating the phrase “nation of cowards” over and over like some kind of Wiccan cant transforms a speech that praises America’s racial progress and calls for more into a virulently anti-American screed.
And it isn’t just right wingers. Here’s a horror story of misinformation from nice people in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica:
I was at the local Albertson’s yesterday, very crowded. The check out guy, aunion member who went out on strike with all the other grocery workers in LA a couple of years ago, was chit-chatting with a woman who was checking out about $400.00 worth of items. So they had a long time to talk. The woman was saying that there’s no money left in the social security system, that they’d spent it all. The clerk said, “Yeah, I heard that too, there’s nothing left.” The women went on to tell this horror story about how her mother died and when she went down to sign up for her mother’s social security, they told her she wasn’t entitled to it because she was over 18. (She was in her 40s.) The clerk and the two people ahead of me gasped and said “you’re kidding” and “what happened to all that money she paid in then?” The clerk sagely replied, “it went into the congressmen’s pockets that’s what happened.”
At this point I couldn’t take it and I interjected that nobody has ever been entitled to inherit their mother’s social security and they all insisted that you used to be able to do it. All three of them. I wasn’t going to get into that absurdity in the grocery store, so I just said, “Look, the most important thing is your social security and it will be there for you unless you let your representatives mess with it right now. You should tell them you don’t want them to do anything to social security.” The clerk looked at the other customers and sort of wryly laughed, saying “I don’t think that’s right. It’s not what I’ve heard.” The woman whose mother had died recently said, “It’s not true. When I went down there to collect my money they said there wasn’t any left in the system. I want to know what happened to all my mother’s money.” The other person (also in her 40s) said, “all I know is that everybody says there won’t be any money there for us.”
There you’ve got all three of Fallows elements: ignorance, incuriosity, and that fatally wrongheaded certitude. Can anything be done about this, who knows? But for the time being it doesn’t show any signs of stopping, so we’ve got to get used to it.
