Just Act (Like It's) Normal

Willard Van Orman Quine, the 20th Century philosopher of language, provides us with an idea that helps to explain one of the strategies by which people allow themselves to believe extremely unlikely, even utterly ridiculous things.  It is possible, Quine tells us, to believe or, at least, to vigorously insist on the truth of, anything, with complete logical consistency.  All that is required is that you structure the whole of your beliefs and claims about reality so as to avoid  contradicting this privileged claim.  That is, you can insist on the truth of any proposition as long as you embrace the other propositions that it logically entails and reject any that contradict it .

     So, for (a very simple) example, one can logically maintain that the Earth is at the center of the solar system, and that all the other heavenly bodies revolve around it in orbits that form concentric spheres.  What about all the observational (scientific) evidence to the contrary?  There are a couple of strategies for dealing with this.

     One strategy is to construct a world view within which these seemingly troublesome observations are actually not incompatible with geocentrism.  The weakness in this approach is that it can require one to embrace some quite unlikely claims.  The defenders of the Ptolemaic system against the Copernican system developed a panoply of epicycles and retrograde motion and other devices to accommodate the increasingly detailed observations that were available to astronomers.  But the solar system began to look less and less like the perfect creation of a perfect god, and more and more like some Rube Goldberg device that was trying to shake itself apart as it went through its regular motions.

     Early Copernican astronomy needed some of these devices, too.  But they gradually disappeared as the theory was adjusted to fit the observations, rather than such odd notions as the perfection of circles and spheres.  Thus, because it does take the evidence seriously, this strategy has a tendency (by no means always effective) towards self-correction.

     A second strategy, one that has no such tendency to self-correction, is to find some way of discounting contrary evidence.  In its most transparent form, this strategy amounts simply to ignoring evidence that conflicts with one’s views, and perhaps treating that which supports one’s views as beyond criticism.  This is often called cherry picking the evidence, and is a favorite strategy of undergraduates.  They will cite as the very gospel the one scholarly article or scientific study that supports their thesis and ignore the dozens which undermine it.  

     A more sophisticated version of this strategy is to attempt to invalidate contrary evidence by some sort of rhetorical move.  Conspiracy theories often turn on this—evidence contrary to the conspiracy is discounted as simply part of the conspiracy.  Anyone who questions some element of the theory has simply fallen for the plot.  For example, no amount of evidence was going to shake the convictions of those who believed that Obama was born in Kenya, because the evidence was just part of the cover-up.  And anyone who didn’t see this was a fool, or a tool.

     Why does this matter?  It certainly isn’t news that human beings aren’t very good at thinking.  But that is why the conservative press is able to employ more sophisticated versions of this strategy in their efforts to defend the Trump presidency, to portray the Trump administration as somehow the normal working of our political system.  There’s misdirection:  whenever Trump does something particularly illegal or corrupt or disgusting, we are inundated with reminders that Clinton is guilty of all things.  There’s framing:  as the evidence of collusion with the Russians accumulates, conservative pundits bend their rhetorical skills to showing that Trump hasn’t done anything illegal, however corrupt and contrary to the country’s interests his actions may be.  And there is the crap artistry one would expect from an administration headed by a professional crap artist:  as Trump blunders through the G-20 and subsequent meetings in Europe, squandering the good will of our allies and giving our enemies much to laugh about, we are treated to surreal accounts of his foreign policy vision.  And so on.  

     There is nothing normal about any of this.  Or maybe it is perfectly normal.  I guess it depends on context.