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From Covid to gender to Gaza, narratives of enlightenment and disavowal lend false certainty to questionable claims
Facts are funny things. They protest too much about their reliability. The things we know with most confidence do not announce themselves as such. They are woven into the fabric of our learning and experience. Those things we learn as facts are more brittle. Something gleaned from The Big Book of Facts is unlikely to be false, but few of us would credit someone who repeats it with much intellectual authority. That’s because facts repeated as such are a step removed from the real world. This is true even of less trivial knowledge, much of which we necessarily take second or third-hand from official sources or the media.
When the Covid-19 pandemic began to spread globally early in 2020, the official advice in much of the West was that surgical masks would not prevent transmission and should not be worn by the general public. In a matter of weeks, this advice was reversed. Surgical masks would help, we were told, and were recommended in public places. It was widely believed that the original advice had effectively been a white lie to prevent people from buying up all the available masks and leaving frontline medical staff without them. This narrative surely added to the popular conviction that masks were effective: ‘They told a lie, but now we know the truth’.
Never mind whether masks were in fact effective, or what that even means. I suspect their widespread take-up was based on the false belief that that wearing them would either make wearers safe from infection or prevent them from passing the virus on. This was never true: the claim was that they would reduce the rate of infections, but the official messaging deliberately avoided quantifying that. When masks were made compulsory in many situations, it reinforced some people’s conviction that they must ‘work’ (even as it caused others to doubt that, and even the reality of the pandemic itself). The point is that, for many, the early reversal of official advice made the conviction much stickier that it might otherwise have been.
This is a familiar pattern. A narrative of correction or enlightenment seems to make a new claim or idea seem that much more convincing. People used to believe in God; now we know better. People used to think gender is binary; now we are so much more sophisticated. Of course, not everyone accepts these new ideas, but those who push back are assumed by the enlightened to be stuck in the past. Either they are willfully clinging to outdated ideas for some kind of comfort (God) or they Just Don’t Get It (gender). We enjoy thinking this way so much that sometimes we’re tempted by made-up versions of the same story: before Columbus proved them wrong, people used to think the Earth was flat!
Another way of saying this is that people get more attached to stories than to mere facts. And we particularly like stories about progress. The germ theory of disease is just boring chemistry until we learn how it overthrew the benighted miasma theory that had dominated since antiquity. And, of course, the theory of evolution is the archetype of scientific discovery overturning traditional beliefs. Even those who would struggle to explain how natural selection actually works can tell you it disproves Creationism. But the pattern is not restricted to the history of science.
Moral enlightenment?
When it comes to historical examples, there is often a moral dimension. People used to think slavery was morally justifiable, we are told. People used to think the British Empire was a glorious thing! Now we not only know better but are better. Nevertheless, in this example, the very relationship between these two things complicates the picture. There is truth in the ‘revisionist’ claim that the empire was built on slavery and plunder. There is also truth in the ‘counter-revisionist’ claim that Britain played a major role in ending slavery, and not only within the empire itself. It is also possible to overplay either claim in the service of a simplistic political narrative. We all know which is peddled in schools and universities, but that doesn’t make the other one entirely reliable.
People used to talk about the Truth with a capital T. The internet has given us the TRUTH in all caps. Sometimes it’s partly or even largely true in precious little letters. But the truth rarely takes sides in a consistent way. And stories about myths overcome and TRUTH established ought to be red flags. There will always be nuances to be debated, and often not just nuances.
No, I do not propose reopening the debate about whether slavery is a good thing or a bad thing. But is all slavery the same? How does the bond servitude described in the Bible compare with chattel slavery? How does the transatlantic slave trade compare with the trans-Saharan? Or either with modern slavery? We can rank these things on a moral scale if we like, and perhaps it’s worth asking if there was something especially evil about slavery practised by societies that claimed to be both enlightened and Christian. But the truth is complicated.
The same is true of empire. I understand why people are frustrated by a ‘balance sheet’ approach, where we acknowledge the bad things that happened while pointing to some good things. Can we not agree it’s a bad thing in principle to have whole societies ruled by a small elite from the other side of the world? I think we can, but in practice the question is ‘compared to what?’ With the partial exception of Europe in World War Two and its aftermath, empires have rarely absorbed free societies. And to present ‘divide and conquer’ as a cunning strategy is to flatter the imperialists who mostly benefitted from existing stratification and inequality. The right to be dominated by tyrants of one’s own complexion is a dubious one.
It is perfectly legitimate to make moral judgements about what people did in the past. The mistake is to think we simply know better than our forebears, let alone that we are better. As if, to use the same example, it had been the imperialists rather than their subjects who were ignorant and primitive. And as if everyone had been oblivious to the iniquities of empire until ten minutes ago.
Permission to stop thinking
It is also a mistake to think that one or two ‘killer facts’ about, say, the comparative wealth of India before and after the Raj, or indeed the abolition of sati and the building of the railways, suffice to end all debate. Serious debate about such things is not the kind of thing that can be ‘won’ or ‘lost’ in that way. Nevertheless, we all have a tendency to pin our beliefs on facts, and to attribute other people’s disagreement to ignorance. Sometimes people are indeed wrong because they are ignorant or misinformed, but most disagreement is not like that. If it were, politics would be a very different business. We would not really have to think about it at all.
It is an overemphasis on brute knowledge that accounts for another unhelpful tendency: blaming schools for not teaching children about the horrors of European imperialism, or indeed about the railways. Or about the horrors of Communism, or the glories of the Songhai Empire. Pity the poor history teacher, who fails miserably to imbue her charges with everything a responsible citizen needs to know about the past. Listening to such complaints, one would think the hallmark of a good education is never having to open another book.
No doubt we would benefit from better informed arguments. But, too often, facts are marshalled to shut down debate rather than to advance it. From climate change to transgenderism, the claim that ‘the debate is over’ is a naked power play. But not much better is the rote repetition of facts – true or otherwise – with no intent or effort to persuade. This goes as much for assertions that ‘climate change is nothing new’ or that ‘men can’t become women’ as for the woke stuff. Invoking such facts serves less to change anyone’s mind than to bond people on the same side of the argument, effectively giving them permission to stop thinking. (The clue to this is that neither truth touches on what’s really at stake in the respective debates.)
Arguments about most things concern more than facts. Moral intuitions and political preferences are in play. Let’s take gender, where the science itself is much less contested, but where people will nevertheless have heated arguments about whether sex is binary or on a spectrum. Well-informed advocates of the latter position point out that the obvious indicators invoked by their opponents – like genitals and even chromosomes – are confounded by ‘differences in sex development’. Having read a little on the subject, I’m tempted to say the correct foundation for the sex binary is ‘gonads’, but the truth is my own belief that there are just two sexes is not based on science at all (even ‘basic biology!’) but on simple observation combined with inherited common sense. Those things, as much as facts, are fuel for thought.
Knowing over seeing
The controversy over pronouns is a good example of what can go wrong when ‘don’t you know’ takes precedence over ‘can’t you see?’. Someone who is uncomfortable with the ‘singular they’ for people who identify as ‘non-binary’ will often protest that it’s bad grammar. Their opponent typically knows better: ‘Don’t you know the singular they has been used for centuries? ‘ they ask, reaching for their Collected Works of Shakespeare, before adding the coup de grace: ‘You used it yourself two minutes ago’. Indeed, the luckless pedant probably did. And in correcting them, the advocate of the singular they repeats the pattern of truth replacing error and sticking smugly in place.
The problem for non-binary grammarians is not that the singular they is not well attested, but that it already has an everyday function different from the one they want for it. As I wrote in a previous essay, it has always been used to denote an unknown or hypothetical someone of either sex, to avoid giving away someone’s identity, or to maintain distance from the person in question: ‘All this is why it feels weird to use they and them when referring directly to a particular person in normal circumstances. It leaves a question mark in the air, not just about the person’s gender, but about the speaker’s attitude to them’. This weirdness cannot be dispelled by appealing to centuries of singular theys. But it’s easier to correct people’s misconceptions about grammar than it is to persuade them to talk in a way that feels unnatural for good reason.
Again, the purpose of this kind of ‘knowing better’ is not to persuade anyone else but to reassure oneself. ‘Killer facts’ do not have to survive contact with the enemy if they are never deployed in the field – or if they are used merely to strafe defenceless civilians. The internet readily meets the demand for easy comebacks that satisfy only the incurious. Google “grooming gangs debunked” for an AI overview that reassures the intrepid investigator that the ‘horrifying realities’ have been distorted by ‘politicized myths, statistical exaggerations, and racialized tropes’. Permission to look the other way.
Reportedly, millions of ordinary Russians believe their country’s war in Ukraine is a legitimate struggle against fascism. In the topsy-turvy worldview promoted by the Kremlin, Ukraine is the aggressor. To be clear, the claim is not that NATO expansion was a provocation, but that Ukraine actually started the war. The opposite of the truth. Salutary as it is to be reminded that the mainstream Western perspective – or range of perspectives – is not universally held, it is surely more accurate than the dizzying Russian one. The latter is the equivalent of a thought-repelling AI overview from which dissent is not tolerated.
More dizzying still is the fact that people within the West hold such diametrically opposed views of the war in Gaza. In that case, the controversy is not even – or not fundamentally – about the facts. Everyone agrees that the conflict is decades-old, but that the current war was provoked by the pogrom of 7 October 2023. Everyone agrees that, in the course of the war, Israel has since killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, including children. Is it really the exact number that makes the difference between a legitimate war and a genocide?
The TRUTH about Gaza
It is the moral character of the Gaza war that is really in question. Opponents of Israel quote blood-curdling comments from the country’s far right and suggest the scale of the carnage can only be explained by a deliberate policy of making Gaza uninhabitable. Israel’s supporters point out that the present war was started by Hamas and its allies, and that it remains in their gift to end it by surrendering. Even some supporters of Israel have condemned what they see as its disproportionate use of force, but nothing previously labelled genocide (at least by anyone sensible) has looked anything like this.
Those pushing the genocide line hardest are also wont to claim that ‘Zionism is genocide’ and to call for Israel to be wiped off the map. By contrast, the Gaza genocide claim works by drawing in many who are simply horrified by war and who wrongly imagine that Israel is just another Western state that can choose its wars, but for the most part the claim serves as a deliberate continuation of Hamas’ strategy.
The clear goal of the 2023 pogrom was to force an invasion that would lead to massive civilian deaths, thereby undermining the international legitimacy of Israel. That is partly why Israeli forces have gone to unprecedented lengths to minimise civilian deaths, but that just brings us back to the inadequacy of numbers. There is no acceptable number of dead children. And rightly or wrongly, Israel is too busy trying to win a real war to prioritise the propaganda one.
What real war? In the genocide discourse, Palestinian armed groups – let alone their foreign sponsors – either do not exist or are actually the good guys, notwithstanding their intentions toward Israel and its people. That’s because this discourse fits into a preexisting narrative. Just as we know Western colonialism was wrong, we are invited to see the establishment of Israel as part of the same story. Just as we know the Holocaust was carried out while the world looked the other way, we are invited to see any ‘genocide denial’ as moral complicity.
In keeping with the pattern of enlightenment and disavowal, the fact that the charge of genocide comes from subaltern voices – those labelled ‘terrorist’ by the untrustworthy powers that be – only adds to its credibility. If most Western governments refuse to acknowledge it – if the BBC, despite its extensive coverage of harm to civilians, refuses to use the G word – that only makes it feel truer. That the Gaza war is not only genocide but genocide denied makes it a special and privileged kind of truth.
Much has been made by supporters of Israel of the fact that some of those chanting ‘from the river to the sea’ on demonstrations cannot name the river or the sea in question. Too much. Plenty of protestors come armed with an arsenal of historical and other facts. The problem is they also ‘know’ something that isn’t true. No amount of quibbling over facts will remedy that. What will? The fact is I don’t know.