As a bit of an aside, this isn’t supposed to happen. The Left views itself as the defender of truth and accuracy, not a purveyor of mistruth. Recently, I reviewed a book, How to Talk to a Science Denier. It was not, I felt, particularly useful. But one thing that I found revealing was the author’s long discussion of whether “left-wing science denial” existed. He chose one example — Left-wing opposition to genetically modified organisms, specifically on safety grounds — and concluded that it sort of did but not really. He based a lot of his thinking on the research of Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychologist at the University of Bristol. There is, I think, a fairly well-established idea that the Left is the “side” of science and evidence, and the Right is the “side” of science “denial”.
I find that strange, because I can think of quite a few areas in which elite Left-wing or liberal opinion doesn’t sit well with mainstream scientific findings.
For instance: the UK Green Party wants to “phase out” nuclear power. Is that “science denial”? I don’t know, but I think the consensus scientific position is that nuclear power is extremely safe and carbon-efficient.
And the idea that human behaviour and society are in some important way the product of evolution has been so profoundly uncomfortable to people on the Left that as far back as 1978 people broke into a lecture the biologist Edward Wilson, shouting “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide” and throwing water over him, after he had written a book, Sociobiology, which was mainly about the behaviour of insects but which speculated that future science could shed some light on human behaviour. Is that “science denial”? Well, again, that’s a question of definitions, but blank slatism is certainly not directly in line with modern scientific findings.
Or take IQ. Your score on an IQ test predicts your success in life pretty well; your career outcomes and earnings, your school results, even your lifespan. It’s also highly heritable. You can find people denying those facts on the Left much more easily than you can find them on the Right, just as you can find people claiming that biological sex isn’t real.
My point isn’t that Left-wing people do this more than Right-wing people, or even that they’re equivalent: I suspect that if you could find some reasonable way of defining terms like “science denial” or “misinformation” (and “Right-wing” and “Left-wing”), you’d probably end up finding that it’s more prevalent on the Right. But, at least in the largely Left-wing or centrist circles I inhabit, it’s almost axiomatic that misinformation is what the Right do. There’s a serious strain of thought that thinks we are the correct ones, and they are the wrong ones.
But the desire to show your political opponents in the worst possible light, or to believe things that are politically convenient rather than things that aren’t, is entirely bipartisan. It’s just easier to spot when the enemy is doing it.
But what interests me is the question of whether people (on the Left or Right) do this on purpose: are they consciously misrepresenting their opponents and ignoring inconvenient truths, or is it a subconscious, automatic thing?
I wrote some months ago about people switching between different definitions of words in highly charged culture-war debates, allowing them to make claims like “cancel culture is/isn’t real”. I’d assumed it was mainly unconscious, but something that people said to me was: this is entirely deliberate. They define words in ways that gain them cultural power: so a Left-winger might very deliberately define “racism” to include “anything that leads to negative outcomes for non-white people”, and a Right-winger might define it as “only explicit acts of intentional racism by an individual”, so as to make the problem as big or as small as you can. Certainly it seems to happen too often for it to be accidental.
Under that model, people share the ivermectin story or the trans-woman-in-the-spa story to damage their political opponents, knowing or not caring that it’s not true. Ivermectin is a Right-coded thing, so showing that Trump-voting rural Oklahomans are taking it in their thousands and gumming up emergency wards shows just how stupid they are.
But the Cassie Jaye MRA thing, I think, reveals another angle. As Nerst describes it, Jaye’s conscious brain wasn’t choosing the most uncharitable interpretations of what the MRAs were saying: her subconscious brain only presented her with uncharitable options. Her conscious, reasoning mind, the bit of us that we consider ourselves, thought it was simply reporting reality, but in fact the version of reality that arrived in front of it had already been screened, and only the politically convenient bits were available to her. Nerst calls this process of only choosing from pre-screened options “semitentionality”: it’s neither an honest mistake nor a cynical misrepresentation, but some weird different third option.
I think that’s what’s going on when people read stories about ivermectin or trans women in spas. It’s not that they deliberately choose the interpretation most convenient to their pre-existing beliefs, or that they’re accidentally choosing the most convenient interpretation time and time again. It’s that the world our brains present to us is brilliantly constructed so that our friends are right and good and the enemy is bad and wrong. It’s not clear how we can improve the situation — but being wary of sharing any politically convenient stories on social media might be a good start.
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