The truth cult

For much of its history human beings have taken part in rituals in which an authority informs other people of what is supposed to be the Truth. I call this the pulpit model of information. For centuries Europeans went to church and an authority got up in the pulpit and told them what to believe about the world (and other places).

This model was later adopted by the schools, no doubt because the schools were established by churches. Whatever the reason, schooling until recently consisted of listening to an authority tell you what to believe about the world (in universities, it still often consists of this). In school, though, you were even tested to make sure you’d learned the approved view of things.

In school you also acquire the idea that Truth is something that can be found on the printed page. Consequently we come to accept something that has been published as true, without verifying that it is.

It’s not surprising that we come to look on the truth as something that is dispensed by authorities. Consequently, we look around for people who look like authorities, and treat what they say as information. Furthermore, we treat the methods they use to come up with things to say as methods that can be used to define information. We are often wrong.

Given the track record of authorities (remember all those biological weapons that, according to authorities, Iraq was just itching to use against the West?), depending on them to tell us the truth is a questionable approach. Another problem with this approach is that there is considerable doubt as to whether we need to know the truth, anyway.

Here’s something that’s true: Churchill, Manitoba, is named for John Churchill, first governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company. That’s a fact. Despite being a fact, though, it doesn’t help me get served when I drop in to the local branch of his company.

Every day we are bombarded with truths. The newspaper tells us things like what the temperature was yesterday in Beijing and what celebrities have (or had) their birthdays today. I remember once reading in the paper that it was the late Alfred Hitchcock’s birthday and thinking “I can’t really send him a card, can I?”

Better than mere truth is information. Information is confused with many things that are not informative, though.

Facts, as we have just seen, are not necessarily informative. Unless I’ve made a bet about what the high temperature in Beijing was going to be, that fact cannot be said to inform me of anything.

Furthermore, many items of information are not factual. The idea of intelligence, for example, cannot be said to be a fact, since there is widespread disagreement about just what intelligence is. However, the concept of intelligence is informative because in speculating about it we discover useful things. We have even discovered some of the shortcomings of the idea of intelligence.

As we have also seen, authoritative statements are not necessarily informative. Another reason they're not necessarily informative is that they disagree with each other. In fact, many of them work according to decision models which encourage disagreement as a way of establishing crucial issues that need to be tested. Courts of English law, for example, require two or more highly trained professionals to argue for exactly opposite points.

People also often assume that a logically sound argument is informative. However, it need not be. We can reason as soundly as it’s possible to reason and still be wrong.

Deductive reasoning starts with a general premise or principle. It then applies that premise to a specific piece of evidence and draws a conclusion about that piece of evidence. For example, we might reason like this:

• All Canadians are British subjects. (general principle)
  
• John FitzGerald is a Canadian. (evidence)
  
• Therefore, John FitzGerald is a British subject. (conclusion)

Well, that conclusion is true. However, let’s suppose we reason like this:

• All Canadians have French first names.
  
• John FitzGerald’s first name is not French.
  
• Therefore, John FitzGerald is not a Canadian.

That conclusion is not true, although the reasoning is entirely sound. Since my first name is not French, the conclusion that I am not Canadian follows logically from the general principle that all Canadians have French first names. The problem, of course, is that the general principle is wrong. Consequently, all statements that follow logically from it are most likely to be wrong. That example is a bit artificial, but people draw sound conclusions from erroneous premises all the time.

For example, many people reasoned out thoroughly logical arguments that on January 1, 2000 the world would be thrown into chaos. I say their beliefs were serious because they acted on them. They stockpiled food, for example, they bought portable electric generators, and some even created fortified shelters to protect themselves from people who hadn’t stockpiled food or bought generators.

As we saw on January 1, 2000, though, the computers didn’t fail. Some of the premises in those thoroughly logical arguments had been unsound. Logic is a tool. Logic does not guarantee that your arguments will stand up any more than a hammer guarantees that the bookcase you build with it will stand up.

Information is often confused with consensus. The supposed existence of a consensus among scientists about global warming is supposed to imply that the consensus opinion is highly likely to be true. Well, a hundred years ago a consensus of scientists would have told you that other races were inferior to whites.

The issue of consensus about global warming seems to have been raised initially as a red herring. That is, people argued against taking action against global warming because there was no scientific consensus about what caused it.

However, consensus has nothing to do with it. At one time there was a scientific consensus that the sun revolved around the earth. That point seems to have escaped the people who are opposed to taking action against global warming, though. Now they complain that this consensus they considered so desirable is being forced on them.

What is informative about an idea is its ability to predict events. The chief value of consensus seems to be coming up with a plan that everyone, or at least everyone important, is willing to go along with. To me, that seems a lot like what lemmings do.

Information cannot be defined by its source. If an expert meteorologist says tomorrow will be sunny, clouds don’t decide to go somewhere else just because a respected source says they will. Information is defined by its effect. Information increases the probability that we will act in effective ways. If it never rains on days when the weather forecast calls for rain, you’re going to end up lugging around a useless umbrella. If it always rains on days your bunions hurt, though, your bunions are a mine of information.

The Truth Cult © 2007, John FitzGerald

Young Girl

Aboriginal-bashing

Some Quebec nationalists believe the English-Canadian press is Quebec-bashing, as they call it. They comb the English-Canadian press for anything that can be considered to be anti-Quebec, find a dozen or so articles written over the past fifteen years, then claim that these articles represent a pattern on the part of the entire English press of smearing Quebec whenever possible.

As you will recall, Mordecai Richler was considered to be Quebec-bashing when he suggested that la revanche du berceau had not been a wholesome development in Quebec history. You can also be considered to be Quebec-bashing if you disagree with the government of Quebec, as the city of Westmount was considered to be when it opposed, along with many francophone municipalities, a project of amalgamation of municipalities.

The idea is that Quebec-bashing is part of a campaign to make Quebeckers look incapable of managing their own affairs, and therefore unready for sovereignty (whatever that might eventually turn out to be). Granted, the ignorance of Quebec displayed in the English-Canadian press is sometimes staggering, and if some people see it as a campaign against Quebec I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Also granted, some members of the English-Canadian press corps have formidable hates on for Quebec.

However, English-Canadians are well aware that Quebec has been managing its own affairs for 140 years. There is another group, though, which the English-Canadian press is bashing constantly, with the effect, if not the goal, of implying that it is incapable of self-government.

That group is aboriginals, and in particular members of First Nations. English-Canadian news coverage of aboriginals almost exclusively depicts them as ravaged by social problems and incapable of managing their own lives. On February 5, 2008, I did a search on the Google News Canada English-language site for the word “aboriginal” and the phrase “first nations.” The stories I found were overwhelmingly negative. They dealt with:

• a policing crisis on reserves,
  
• aboriginal drug addiction,
  
• the inability of some aboriginals to manage their compensation payments for abuse at residential school,
  
• the “growing and urgent needs of the aboriginal population”¹,
  
• discomfort felt by aboriginal students at university,
  
• rundown reserves,
  
• aboriginal unemployment,
  
• aboriginal alcoholism (you’ve been waiting for that one, I bet),
  
• the impeachment of the grand chief of the Dehcho First Nations of the Northwest Territories,
  
• the possibility of a shutdown of the First Nations Technical Institute on Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory in Ontario,
  
• the inflated remuneration paid the chief of Peguis First Nation in Manitoba,
  
• the refusal of a group of Roman Catholic bishops to apologize for abuse at residential schools, or to promise to bring abusers to justice.

Aboriginals are depicted in the English-Canadian press as people who are overwhelmed by the pressures of modern society, and unable to cope with these pressures themselves. Lurking behind this depiction are two inferences:

1. that maybe it’s best for Indians to continue to be segregated on reserves, and
   
2. that these problems are so huge that they can only be solved by Big Daddy, the government.

Well, the government’s been doing a fine job so far, eh? As far as I can make out, government policy towards the First Nations is to keep the chiefs happy. They do audit band councils, but the well-being of the ordinary citizens of the reserves, and of those members of First Nations who live off the reserves, is not a prime concern. If you don’t believe me, ask yourself why conditions on most reserves are so abominable, and why the average income of Indians living off reserves is so low.

As for the Métis, the government looked the other way in the late nineteenth century when land reserved for them under the Manitoba Act was being given to white farmers instead. The Inuit were for decades the victims of daft federal schemes which imperilled their survival – for example, moving them to places where they could no longer hunt.

In short, the aboriginal peoples have been wards of government for over two hundred years, and its tender care has rewarded them with shorter lifespans, lower incomes, and higher suicide rates than the rest of us. And now we want the government to do more.

So, you may ask, what else can we do? Well, we could start trying to like aboriginals. We could ask ourselves why we have an apartheid system for Indians. Could it possibly be that we don’t want to have them among us? And why would we not want to have them among us? Could it possibly be that we consider them racially inferior? In this day and age?

Yep. It sure could. It could be that our long history of acting as if aboriginals were children, and the lack of success we’ve had when acting on this assumption, has left us with the idea that our approach failed because aboriginals are bad children, evil children, who are best encouraged to stay in the north or on their reserves where they can do the least harm.

If we are to overcome the current poisonous state of race relations in Canada, we could start by treating aboriginals as our equals. That would mean, for example, dismantling the apartheid system erected by the Indian Act. What do we do after that? I don’t know. It’s not as if we’ve ever had the experience of treating aboriginals as equals before. However, I’m pretty sure that whatever we try will have no chance of failing as catastrophically as the approach we’ve been taking so far.

Aboriginal-bashing © 2008, John FitzGerald