We live in a real world, with real issues, trying to make real decisions that will have real consequences. The problem with all that is that it’s getting difficult to determine what is actually real.
For the past three centuries, science has been the driver of reality. It was a systematic quest to discover objective truth, beyond refute. As such, it overturned old beliefs that were formed over millennia based on religion and tribal affiliation. Before science, beliefs were how we dealt with things we could not understand. The problem with that was there was no way to debate belief. I had what I believed, and you had what you believed. As such, our collective perceived reality was fractured along the fault lines of what we believed. There was no universal understanding of what was “real.” Many wars were fought and many people died because of incompatible beliefs.
Beliefs are the default way we make sense of the world. It takes a lot less of the brain’s processing power to simply believe something than to question it and seek to verify it in some provable way. The enlightenment and the adoption of science represented a huge leap forward in human development by moving our understanding of the world from the lowest levels of cognition, based solely on what we could see or hear, to a more rational, mutually agreed upon, perspective. It allowed us to rise above beliefs and start to create a common sense of reality based on verifiable facts. It also unleashed our ability to innovate by building on a solid base defined by scientific discoveries.
Most of the last 300 years has been marked by science slowly replacing beliefs as the lens through which we view the world. But that progress has been systematically eroded over the past 3 decades and I suspect that the biggest culprit in this has been media. Yes, the same media most of us work in, write about and analyze. The very same media we both create and consume. If we are looking for someone to blame for the current state of the world, perhaps we should look in the mirror.
It’s media – our media – that has reversed the tide from embracing science back to building a bulwark of our beliefs. Today, our understanding of what is real has not only become fragmented, it has been split asunder, with a yawning chasm in the middle. Science used to supply the middle ground of reality. Today, many ignore science as an inconvenient truth.
Here’s the most frightening thing about that. Those ignorant of science are in charge of consequential things, like healthcare, social programs, environmental protection agencies and national defense. As astrophysicist Adam Frank said in a recent essay, “Now we live in a time when science denial inhabits the highest levels of power and receives broad acceptance.”
But for those who choose to ignore science, an alternate reality has to be presented. If that reality happens to align with pre-existing beliefs, it’s a much easier sell. And it’s exactly that human foible that has been seized upon by all types of media because, as it turns out, polarizing for profit is a pretty sweet gig. It has massively driven up advertising revenues for media companies. Some – admirably – still try to cling to the journalistic standard of trying to tell the truth. Others have rushed headlong into making a business of portraying alternate realities based not on science, or the truth, but on profit projections. If you were to look for the single biggest factor leading to the sorry state of the world today, it would not be Donald Trump, or MAGA, or any political movement. It would be media’s deliberate abdication of its responsibility to tell the truth because there are other – more profitable – alternatives.
We have to do better than this. Maybe – just maybe this week’s show of solidarity from all the major networks, including Fox News, in protest of the banning of CNN, MSNow and Politico from the White House because of their reporting of events that challenged Trump’s Alternate Reality will – finally – be a step in a more truthful direction.
