I am still sometimes troubled by the 70 million conundrum, namely that last November 70 million American adults voted for Donald Trump to be their president, despite the overwhelming evidence of his rank unsuitability for the role. It is discomforting to consider that so many could be so misled; 70 million is not a small number of human beings, a cadre that will largely have completed a high school education and have a lot of influence over the functioning of an effective society.
The classic argument is that the nation has divided into bubbles that are almost mutually exclusive. Some of us read the New York Times, watch PBS and have a Facebook feed populated by thoughts from similar people to ourselves. Others read the New York Post, watch Fox News and reside in a wholly different bubble.
This helps, but it is not enough. How can so many people fall for such nonsense? True, they don’t all believe all of it. In congress, nobody believes the election was stolen. Heck, Trump does not believe it himself. But Liz Cheney shows what happens if you tell the truth. In the same way, not all of the 70 million think that most Mexicans are rapists and all the other claptrap. Some accept the nonsense as part of an overall package that feels better than the alternative.
But quite a few believe it all. Whatever bubble they are living in, how can they so lack any discernment?
My sister, as often happens, said something interesting last week when I posed this question. She said that perhaps it was not surprising when there is so much else we are expected to believe. Her reference point was God.
From an early age most of us are led to believe that the world has a single creator, and that this creator will judge all of us at the end of our lives and send us either to paradise or hell. In some religions we will be reincarnated, moving up or down a perpetual league table each time. Various ancient books have been bequeathed by an unlikely series of prophets, not just telling us what is right and wrong, but more dangerous stuff about one race being chosen over another and the need to treat clergy as if representatives of the divine. The pope is infallible and a descendent of St. Peter. That wafer I am handed on a Sunday morning really is the body of Christ. Heck, God even appointed the Queen.
St Thomas on Fifth Avenue not only offers wonderful music, but I also enjoy many of the homilies. I remember one from Christmastime a few years ago. A rather honest homilist shared that many times he had doubted the literal truth of the virgin birth. He added that the logic he used to assuage his doubt was to consider everything else that he believed. Against all of this, a virgin birth feels not just possible but almost humdrum.
My sister is on to something. Set against typical religious beliefs, conspiracy theories are eminently believable. If Moses and his army really did walk across the red sea, surely a few thousand officials could easily conspire to steal an election, and a paedophile ring probably is being operated by the Clintons from a Washington pizza joint.
Think about the reasons we choose to believe our various religious doctrines. People we respect, starting with our parents, taught us to. Most of our friends believe. We want to fit in, and don’t want to be discriminated against. It is too much hassle to change. It makes us feel good. We don’t believe all of it but the overall package seems better than the alternative. Lots of the other tenets that help us live our lives might fall apart if we challenged this belief.
I think the list above is very similar to the list of reasons in the heads of the 70 million. If we think about it this way, perhaps it is easier to understand how the 70 million came about.
It also engenders other humble thoughts. If I lived in Wyoming, I would probably be among the 70 million. If I had lived in Germany in the 1930’s I would probably have been a Nazi. If I lived in Mississippi and had money in the 19thcentury I would probably have employed slaves. If I needed a house in a nice area in the 1950’s I certainly would not have condemned redlining.
It also makes me think of other things we are led to take on trust. Do nuclear weapons really keep us safer, and is it justifiable to go to war to stop one country developing them when our own country has them already and some of our allies have too even if treaties say they should not? Is lifetime heterosexual marriage and the nuclear family the natural way of things, even now we live for forty years after our kids have grown up? Is maximising work a good goal for humanity? Is it defensible that I could move to live relatively easily almost anywhere, but that most of humanity could not choose to live in my country? Do I really deserve my status, even though 90% of it came from having wealthy, white parents in a developed country and 90% of the rest because I happened to inherit an intelligent brain and few physical disabilities? Did most Russians really want to destroy me, is communism an ideology seeking to rule the world, is capitalism and what passes for democracy always better, and is it unreasonable for the Chinese to challenge a “rules based” world order when others define all the “rules”? Is euthanasia such a terrible idea, given that 50% of all health care resources are spent keeping very old people alive?
Functioning society seems to rely on many other doubtful premises. Can I trust my bank? Should I hoard gasoline because a pipeline went down? How can it be that yesterday it was unsafe for me to sing without a mask and being far from others and in an airy space, whereas today I can blast away without any such limitations?
Viewed this way it becomes easier to understand the 70 million. I can also understand how I can act as a part of the smug elite, imposing dubious beliefs on others while pretending I am more enlightened.
We can also see how far humanity has still to travel. Than be an optimistic realisation, since surely with education and global thinking we can unlock so many possibilities. Or it can be depressing, when we realise just how inadequate our education has been to prepare us for life.
I can see a space for a high school course on the subject of discernment. In the olden days posh kids studied classics and philosophy – this would be a more practical approach to those subjects. Modules could be designed to cover estimation, causation, research and media, scepticism and dialectics.
It is interesting to note that the only societies to have made meaningful progress down this path are in Scandinavia and perhaps the Netherlands. These tend to be small, rich countries where the church has little influence. Here is it harder to build feelings of being a chosen people or a militaristic philosophy.
It is also easy to see the barriers to such a radical education. Society needs collective assumptions to be stable. Who would lose if basic tenets were challenged? I could start with the wealthy, the church, the military and others with power to defend. Those are the groups that tend to set the agenda.
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