5x5 F**k it Friday: Five flavours of modern toss from the enemies of progress
Living in a country where 52% of the population voted to leave the EU, it’s easy to say that most people are idiots.
The majority of people in the western world enjoy an education that’s better than at any time in history and their long, comfortable lives are almost devoid of the risks which have punished humanity. That’s all down to progress in science, medicine, and public policy, representative democracy in all its imperfect forms, and tediously bureaucratic international bodies replacing warfare.
It seems hard for many people to connect the second part of the above paragraph to the first, encouraging a level of dissonance which enables too many people to deny the challenges which could stop progress in its tracks.
Here are five pieces of stupidity that just won’t go away.
1 Denialism Global warming isn’t real. The Earth isn’t a sphere. The Moon landings didn’t happen. HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. The Holocaust was made up. A shocking number of people subscribe to some of these beliefs, although thankfully not all at once.
Few people had trouble accepting that lead in petrol was bad for children’s brains: it’s a nice, localised problem and won’t someone think of the children. It was accepted that CFCs and other chemicals weaken the ozone layer and might be bad for people, because we like getting a tan. But an industrialised world of more than seven billion people could affect the climate? Suddenly that’s too much.
Maybe it’s because the leaded petrol and CFCs were pre-internet problems. The debate was conducted in the national press and on TV (the mainstream media), essentially by an elite who decided it was a win that outweighed the relatively small lobby of the lead and CFC industries. The internet has democratised debate, and the results have not been impressive.
There’s obviously a lot of commercial pressure — the fossil fuels industry picked a playbook left behind by the tobacco industry’s almost-successful rearguard action in the Nineties and Noughties. Coal miners and oil workers don’t want to lose their jobs, and no-one’s just suggested they get a lot of money in compensation for letting us fix global warming. Which would be fair: they’re just ordinary people.
But where’s the payoff for believing the Moon landings were faked, the Holocaust didn’t happen, the Earth is flat or HIV doesn’t cause AIDS? It’s surely much harder to conceive of a sizeable international workforce being employed to fake six Moon landings and one near-disaster, or that Jews kept in slave camps then made up the murder of millions because it wasn’t already horrific enough? If you think the Earth is flat, you have to come up with really complicated ways to explain gravity, astronomy, and why Sky uses satellite dishes.
And why not come up with something more interesting: the Earth is a cube (you could go around it but the horizon would be flat), NASA landed on a parallel Earth and the astronauts who came back are doppelgangers, AIDS is caused by invisible pixies.
Maybe denialists can just feel they’ve got one up on ‘the man’, because there are…
2 Conspiracies everywhere Of course people in power have agendas which are at odds with their publicly stated goals, I just don’t think that they’re disguised very well. Many of the denialisms are attached to fantastic and circular conspiracies about the true rulers of our world.
Usually, you just have to look at someone’s prior actions, throw in the people they associate with, compare the actions of that group to their stated intentions, and it turns out that greedy bullshitters are going to carry on being greedy bullshitters, for example. Is there a global elite that see everyone less rich than themselves, and the world they live in as no more than an resource to be exploited? There’s a lot of evidence for it.
But does a secret cabal of lizards from the age of dinosaurs/inside the Earth/planet Mong/Luxembourg rule the world wearing human skinsuits? It’s like someone took a fantastic metaphor about the inhumanity of the global elite and forgot that a metaphor isn’t real.
Unless David Icke is really just distracting the world from the space brain parasites. And Luxembourg’s not real. It was made up by Hitler to confuse the Allies.
3 Check your privilege During a discussion about Theresa May this week, I was told that any man criticising her is essentially sexist.
Check your privilege is a defensive tactic normally employed by socially excluded groups who fear being co-opted by the those they hold responsible for their problems. It denies the human faculties of empathy and imagination, or the possibility of co-opting sympathetic members of the group in power to achieve your goals.
All the same, I’ve never heard it employed so broadly. Would I be racist if I said Barack Obama was a bad president (he was disappointing), or Sadiq Khan a bad mayor (I like him)? Can I say Robert Mugabe is a bad man? For the record, I think Boris Johnson was a bad mayor, Nigel Farage is a phoney, and I find Daniel Craig’s Bond terrifically dull.
Maybe Theresa May is a lizard anyway. Can I criticise her now?
4 Nationalism. And patriotism Britain has done lots of great things. And lots of bad things. It continues to do both. Do I feel a proud beat in my heart when I think of the Union Jack and a shirt with Three Lions? NO. It’s nice to have an identity, but can I actively dislike someone for not being British or English? NO.
I like living in a tolerant, open society where there’s a reasonable rule of law, free health care, transparency of government and not too many ads on TV (if you think there are, you’ve not travelled a lot). The age of the nation-state is dead to me. We live in a wonderfully connected society where I want to be as free to jump on a plane to somewhere else as their citizens are to come here. I might want to stay there, and if I do I’ll pay taxes and all that malarkey. I’ll miss the beer and pork scratchings.
5 Woo From anti-vaxxing to crystal healing, homeopathy and herbal remedies, woo comes in many flavours. And while crystals don’t hurt anyone, the anti-vaxxing and homeopathy are both exploitative and dangerous. The problem is that they’re taken up by the kind of people who confuse being open-minded with lacking the ability to critically evaluate information.
If you think herbal remedies aren’t dangerous, imagine being the bear whose bile gets milked for Chinese herbal medicine. Your St John’s Wort or echinacea comes from the same school of wishful thinking.
Downbeat ending, huh? Happy Friday!
