When you're presented with information from people that you truly believe won’t lie to you, do you accept it? Most of us would. If, say, a doctor tells you that you can improve your diet and your health by following NHS guidelines, would you trust them? For most of us, the answer is yes. But how do you know you’re not being lied to? How do we know that we can trust those that we’re supposed to?
We all have a responsibility to look beyond that which is presented to us as truth. Sarah Palin is a gun toting, backward, prejudiced idiot, who doesn’t know the difference between the Queen and the Prime Minister, or North and South Korea, right? Well, it’s a nice caricature that we’d like to believe. Palin has provided material for satirists, film makers, comedians, those who think it’s funny to make fun of disabled children etc. etc. But if you look beyond that which is presented to you, it is possible to find an alternative truth. As Shana Pearlman, author of The Palin Effect: Money, Sex and Class in the New American Politics, pointed out, HBO’s Game Change, which told the story of how Sarah Palin was selected as John McCain’s running mate, was not that hard to believe. Except it should have been; it was littered with factual errors. But it conformed to our accepted view of Sarah Palin, so it was accepted in turn.
There are numerous examples of those who have accepted wisdom, and found it to be to their detriment. For twenty-six long years, John Nicholson was a vegetarian, but he was also incredibly ill, with joint pain, exhaustion, chronic IBS, piles, and a serious weight problem. Tired of being sick, John decided to do the unthinkable: eat meat and eat lots of it. Twenty-four hours later, he felt better. After forty-eight hours he was fighting fit. Twelve months on, he had become a new person. His health was utterly transformed. He was first shocked, then delighted, then damn angry. He tells his story in The Meat Fix, which shows how John uncovered an alternate universe of research condemning everything we think we know about healthy eating as little more than illusion, guesswork and marketing.
In a new book, The Myth of Choice, Kent Greenfield addresses the idea that our choices are more limited than we think. Social media and the internet have revolutionised our access to information, but are we really as free as we think? Probably not. He gives the example of Will Phillips, a ten-year-old from Arkansas. He refused to stand for the pledge of allegiance at school, in order to protest the lack of equality for gay and lesbian Americans. You’d think that would be a worthy cause, but this didn’t stop Will from being reprimanded, or ridiculed, by students or teachers. As Kent explains, ‘Patriotism is so customary for us that it sometimes disables critical thought...But such patriotism comes at a cost, especially when citizens of other countries are also socialized to believe in the exceptionalism of their own nations’.
The fact remains that going against the grain can be incredibly hard. But does that make it brave? Alom Shaha wrote for the New Humanist about how he’s often presented as ‘brave’ for going against his strict Muslim upbringing, to write The Young Atheist’s Handbook. He states that this worries him:
I’m worried because there’s something insidious about the idea that I am brave, because at the heart of that suggestion is a very negative view of Islam and Muslims. Perhaps we should all be worried when a major publisher chooses not to publish a book, not because the book was poorly written or because it lacked sales potential (they agreed I was “promotable”), but because people working for the company would rather self-censor than put out ideas that might cause “offence”. Perhaps we should all be worried when powerful people in the media behave as if they have swallowed whole the idea of Muslims as a uniform, intolerant mass, incapable of dealing with the idea of one of their number leaving them.
Perhaps it’s not brave to go against accepted wisdom. In fact, we need to change the accepted wisdom on bravery. Looking further into accepted truth shouldn’t be an act of bravery; it should be something that we owe to ourselves, and do on a regular basis. Shana, John and Alom did. Should we consider James Delingpole brave for going against the accepted wisdom on climate change in his book, Watermelons? No. Should we admire him? Yes. It’s only ourselves that we harm by refusing to look beyond that which is presented to us as fact.