I did not know of Dan Sperber, and that I regret. I should have known about the cognitive scientist and philosopher, for he's anything but obscure. Prof. Sperber has taught at the London School of Economics and the universities of Princeton, Michigan, Hong Kong, Chicago and the Central European University.
I guess he can't keep a job. But seriously, ladies and germs, in the 1970s Sperber began investigating what occupies so much of our minds, especially in the Dark Age of Trump. He set about "finding rationality in the seemingly irrational," as Manvil Singh writes in The New Yorker's sublimely absorbing article, "Don't Believe What They're Telling You About Misinformation."
This mind is grateful that from Sperber's scholarly work, the tension, conflict and irreconcilability of the rational and irrational are resolved — "explained" might be more suitable — by thinking of just two helpful words: factual and symbolic. "Factual beliefs—such as the belief that chairs exist and that leopards are dangerous—guide behavior and tolerate little inconsistency," observes Singh. "The second category [Sperber] has called 'symbolic' beliefs. These beliefs might feel genuine, but they’re cordoned off from action and expectation."
In down-to-earth political terms, these coinciding phenomena explain how a hardcore Republican voter can believe that Trump always tells the truth while also believing he's a degenerate liar. He'll argue to the death his authentic symbolic belief in Trump the messiah while knowing, factually, that Trump is more akin to something Satan scraped up from the muck of Hell.
There is one generally persuasive way to eke out from this voter what he knows to be true. Offer him money. We know that right wingers consistently fall for Trump and other fascists' "fake news"; from there they sit at their computers all night frenetically forwarding the bogus stories to the poor bastards on their email list. Last year a group of social psychologists dangled carrots of cash before a group of GOP guinea pigs for correctly identifying fake news and — voila! — the researchers "found that the difference [between 'conservatives' and liberals] drops by half when people are compensated for accuracy."
In 2015, when Republicans were still calling Democrats sapheads and ideological lapdogs for believing in the Iraq war's ungodly casualty rates, a research team of political scientists paid money to members of a bipartisan group for acknowledging true casualty counts. In this study, the differences between Republican and Democratic responses fell by an astonishing 80%.
Sure, some will say, we've always known that Trumpers can't all be complete blockheads; that many or most understand what's really going on. Prof. Sperber's work simply helps to reduce the elaborate components of the rational and irrational to a couple words — factual, symbolic — when trying to sort out, particularly in writing, exactly what swirls in the miasmic minds of these yahoos.
But there's something else involved here; something of greater importance. What all this comes down to is the rather startling conclusion that our understandable anguish over the reams of mis- and disinformation churned out by Trump and his media allies and even the Russkies and Chinese are actually no cause for panic. To put it in a cliché, they're only harmlessly preaching to the choir.
I'll let Singh take over. "[An MIT political scientist] acknowledges this ... when he writes that 'few scholars have established a direct causal link' between rumors and real-world outcomes. Does the spread of misinformation influence, say, voting decisions? [A Cambridge social-psychology professor] admits, 'Contrary to much of the commentary you may find in the popular media, scientists have been extremely skeptical.'"
Furthermore, not only have we been misinformed about misinformation, "it’s possible that we’ve been misinformed about how to fight misinformation," as The New Yorker's Manvil Singh says.
I'm here to help. Here's my pragmatic advice on how to fight misinformation and save your sanity: ignore it, waste no time fighting it.
I say this because vanquishing misinformation and its evil twin disinformation is far beyond the reach of the societal weapons we have. Both are more "a symptom than a disease," notes a Yale professor of law and psychology. They're symptoms of "polarization." "institutional trust," "a lack of interpersonal trust," "a sense of alienation" and a mound of "social pathologies" we can do nothing about. Perhaps someday, but certainly not before November 2024.
Some readers may find my advice — ignore all the crap — defeatist and depressing, while others may find it liberating, even consoling. I choose the latter. For in devoting untold hours to fighting a phenomenon about which one can do nothing, years later one could also find oneself the village idiot, as they say, raving from block to block about one's heroic battle with the all-powerful purveyors of misinformation, disinformation and fake news.