In Which Truth Can You Trust?

So what are we supposed to believe? How do we trust what the experts tell us? Not long ago, the analysts and accountants insisted that Enron was a good company. Until recently, the American economy was thought to be in a recession and our teenagers were alleged to be drinking a quarter of the nation’s alcohol. It was once said that annual mammograms were a good idea, then that they were a bad idea, then that they were a good idea again.

What’s the matter with us? Why are we always getting gulled?

The standard answer is that the American people are gullible, if not out-and-out dumb.

In 1988, math professor John Allen Paulos wrote “Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences,” in which he criticized “a lack of numerical perspective, an exaggerated appreciation for meaningless coincidence, a credulous acceptance of pseudosciences, an inability to recognize social trade-offs.”

In 1996, astronomer Carl Sagan wrote “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark,” in which he lamented that “a kind of Gresham’s Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good.”

At least three books with “dumbing”--the dumbing down of our kids, of our curriculum, of America itself--are in print.

Just last week, columnist Michael Kinsley denounced Americans for their “social hypochondria,” mocking our imaginary fears that this or that social ill will “destroy the country or the world unless it is eliminated.”

To paraphrase H.L. Mencken, no pundit ever went wrong underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

But maybe the truth is just the opposite. Maybe we’re getting better at detecting hoaxes and lies.

It’s worth recalling that the “Piltdown Man” hoax--the claim that a skull found in 1912 was that of a million-year-old humanoid--was accepted as fact for four decades, until better tests proved that it was a composite of modern human and ape bones.

Since then, the half-life of hoaxes has shrunk; in 1983, a German forger sold Adolf Hitler’s “lost” diaries to leading media around the world, and the fakery was revealed within weeks. As for the teen drinking “epidemic,” a statistical error made by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse was discovered almost immediately.

To be sure, many people still believe in literal biblical creationism, or in the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion (a hoax alleging a Jewish plot to take over the world) or in the “chariots of the gods” thesis (that space aliens built the Pyramids), but the rising level of fact-based sophistication makes it hard to embrace those views and be taken seriously.

So says Howard Fienberg, a senior analyst at the Statistic Assessment Service, a Washington-based think tank devoted to junk-data busting. At the risk of putting himself out of a job, he cites the Internet as a huge new resource that gives people the capacity to “check things, whereas in the past they would have had to accept things on faith.”

Then why does it seem as if we are more clueless?

“Our ways of measuring are always evolving,” Fienberg observes, and in the course of that evolution, new measurements eclipse and sometimes discredit old measurements.

Thus maybe the real dilemma of our time is not what we don’t know or even what we do know but that we don’t care. That is, if we live our lives guided by a sense of irony, chaos and complexity, it’s unlikely that we will take much on faith. And so we don’t seem to worry much anymore whether something is true or false; the presumption is that everything is “spin” and that we’re all in on it.

Bill Clinton’s chiseling on the meaning of “is” may have been a lie, but it didn’t hurt him in the opinion polls.

Last year “Jihad!”--a book about fighting in Afghanistan, written by one Tom Carew--became an international best-seller. And what happened when it was revealed that the author had faked his service with an elite British military unit?

Nothing. The book is still selling.

In ancient times, the curse of Cassandra was that she alone knew the truth and yet nobody believed her. Today, everyone “knows” that the search for truth is an endless existential wrestling match. Thus the modern condition: We might know correct from incorrect, maybe even right from wrong. But not for long.