What do you mean by ‘God’?

Of the people who left Europe for North America in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, there are two notable types who have gone on to have a significant impact on their new home – those who could not stand other people disagreeing with their religious views and hence wanted to go where they could establish themselves without challenge from others; and those who were fed up with vicious and futile religious disputes and wanted to go where religion would be a private matter and never intrude into the public domain. 

The first type can be fanatical about their beliefs and intolerant towards others who won’t subscribe to their doctrines. The second type are wary of theological conflicts and want tolerance for diverse ideas about God.  

In time, this will feed much of the polarisation in the United States.  One side hankers after a quasi-theocracy based exclusively on their version of ‘God’. Puritanically they strive to declare all but their ‘God’ is the true one and whose will – according to their interpretation – should therefore command everyone without exception.  Anyone who disagrees with them is an enemy of God.

By contrast, the other side tries to remind everyone that the Founding Fathers explicitly declared that matters of government and religion should be kept separate.  They champion cultural diversity and religious tolerance.  Invoking the name of ‘God’ (or not), people are expected to pursue their ideals so long as they do not threaten or undermine the wellbeing of others. 

Some may think of this divide as one between the faithful and the godless.  But actually it is between those who hijack ‘God’ as a cover for their own ends, and those who respectfully recognise that what God means for people is to be found in the many relationships diverse people have with the supreme ideal in their lives. 

The holier-than-thou hijackers are prepared, in the name of their ‘God’, to condemn people to be executed on questionable evidence, force victims of rape to carry any resultant pregnancy through to birth, threaten others with deadly weapons, obstruct life-saving vaccination, or prolong the excruciating suffering of terminal patients who want to end their lives.

In the opposite camp are people who would not presume to claim absolute and exclusive knowledge of God; people who appreciate that God is about love –manifested in kindness and fairness, in countless ways in different situations in life; people who care about living together, appreciating their complementariness, and learning through the growth of shared understanding.

This clash in the US has been deepening. Those who have little time for a loving God, have become more arrogant and delusional in insisting their hatred and prejudices are sanctified by the inner voices they hear.  Resisting the spread of their influence are people who, regardless of whether or not they use the word ‘God’ every time they speak, want society to be fair and inclusive so that everyone can be in communion with moral goodness that is worthy of the appellation ‘divine’.

Ultimately, who gains the upper hand in this clash will have sweeping consequences for the US, and indeed the world.

The Evidence-Denial Complex

In politics, in business, in everyday life, there have always been people who try to take advantage of others by conning them – with lies, distorted reports, cunning misdirection, etc.  What they fear most is being exposed for their dishonesty. But in recent decades, they have been able to access support from an increasingly powerful network of misinformation – the Evidence-Denial Complex.

The rise of the Evidence-Denial Complex can be traced to two late 20^th/early 21^stcentury development: the undermining of public interest journalism in conventional media; and the spread of ‘social’ media that is relieved of all public interest duty.  The first has happened through a mix of takeover of media outlets by those allied to the Right, and the persistent and deliberate weakening of impartial public broadcasting (e.g. reduced funding for and heightened attacks on the BBC, privatisation of Channel 4).  The second has come about because governments grant commercial operators of internet platforms the right to host any information posted by participants, without any responsibility to check its veracity.

The net result is that while there are fewer and fewer opportunities in conventional media to carry out in-depth investigations (because they generate relatively little money for the media owners, or worse, they threaten the interests of those owners or their associates in politics and business), systemic liars can use conventional media owned by their plutocratic allies as well as troll farms working across social media platforms, to pump out false and misleading stories to displace warranted beliefs by groundless ones.

At the most pernicious level, they work in concert to attack the credibility of objective evidence.  Since evidence – scrutinised by scientific procedures, gathered by impartial investigators, assessed by experts – is critical in separating out credible assertions from unfounded claims, the fostering of a culture of irrationality becomes an underlying goal.  The very notion of ‘evidence’ is treated as fake.  

For the sake of profiteering from economic chaos, promoting attachment to authoritarianism by fuelling a sense of insecurity, or diverting attention from plutocratic iniquities by attacking vulnerable scapegoats and liberal ‘do-gooders’, evidence-denying campaigns are launched to deceive as many people as possible to win political power.  

Familiar faces can be found amongst those who declare there is no evidence that the climate crisis requires radical action; that racism is still widespread and harmful; that safety measures are necessary to protect people in the midst of a pandemic; and that withdrawal from strategic partnerships with neighbouring countries is damaging politically and economically. They cluster around these lies because their preferred tactics is the con, and their con only works if people can be routinely nudged into looking away from the evidence.

What can be done about the Evidence-Denial Complex?

There are three courses of action that should be taken forward:

·      Education: ensure teaching at all levels helps to develop a good understanding of evidence – what it means, how it is gathered and assessed, its use in different practices, and examples of its collection and false evidence being refuted.

·      Regulation: effective rules and enforcement must be brought in to stop large scale deception continuing. See, for example, ‘Five Categories of Irresponsible Communication’: https://henry-tam.blogspot.com/2018/12/five-categories-of-irresponsible.html

·      Publication: we must not allow falsehoods to spread unchallenged; so objective findings and analyses should be widely shared and discussed through scholarly works, objective media outlets, civic information networks, etc.