“Skepticism about experts” is running high these days, and nowhere more so than among the anxious, the angry, and the alienated: QAnon cultists, lockdown protesters flying the Gadsden flag of “personal liberty,” and the roughly one-fifth of Americans who according to a recent study self-identify as anti-vaxxers at least some of the time. An undisguised contempt for experts and a flagrant disregard for facts often go hand in glove: purveyors of “alternative facts” like Donald J. Trump, Alex Jones of InfoWars, Steve Bannon, and Capitol Hill trolls like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene pour scorn on experts.
Anti-vaxxers like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose status as American royalty has made him a social-media superspreader of vaccine misinformation, and Mark Crispin Miller, a New York University professor of media studies who believes Covid vaccines are part of a monstrous plot by billionaire eugenicists like Bill Gates and Ted Turner to exterminate the “unfit” and reduce the rest of us to “neofeudal” servitude, are all about facts and analysis. Both wade into the manufactured controversy over vaccines and public-health measures with footnotes rampant, well-armed by an obsessive review of the medical literature.
Kennedy and Miller remind us that a rejection of expert consensus isn’t always synonymous with the Trumpian article of faith that “truth isn’t truth,” as Rudy Giuliani memorably put it. Both men claim to follow the facts. It’s just that their facts — cherry-picked or taken out of context from legitimate sources or quoted from fraudulent ones — defy what Michel Foucault called the “regime of truth,” the dominant discourses and adjudicating bodies that determine what, in a given society, is true or false. They respect expertise, just not official expertise.
In that light, Miller and Kennedy have a lot in common with a conspiracist and college dropout like Jacob Chansley. Chansley is the so-called QAnon shaman, last seen storming the Capitol in a horned fur headdress, brandishing a spear, on January 6. Asked by the BBC’s Channel 4 News, “At what point in your life did you stop listening to the mainstream narrative?” he replied, “When I realized that doing my own research brought me more information than listening to the news ever could. Once I stopped allowing the news to make up my mind or my narrative for me, I grew exponentially.” Like many in the QAnon cult, Chansley thinks of himself as a “researcher,” part of an interpretive community engaged in a kind of paranoid hermeneutics that scans the white noise of media overload for coded messages about a Satanic cabal of pedophiles that controls the so-called deep state.
From an academic perspective, combating the eroding faith in expertise and the growing belief, in some quarters, that we’re entitled not just to our own opinions, but to our own facts, is epistemologically tricky. As Elise Wang, a scholar of conspiracy theories, points out, reflexive appeals to the importance of “media literacy” as an inoculation against declining confidence in expertise misunderstands the cultural logic behind the rising tide of skepticism. (The Rand report urges an emphasis, in college curricula, on media literacy.) Wang puts her finger on a paradox that makes it difficult for academics to challenge the rogue epistemologies that characterize our times. “Unfortunately, the core tenets of media literacy — don’t believe everything you read, do the research yourself, think for yourself — are also the watchwords of conspiracy theorists,” she notes, in her TEDxDuke talk on the subject.
Circling the wagons around the Enlightenment virtues of skeptical inquiry, evidence-based argument, and disinterested science isn’t a winning strategy in a post-truth moment. Not only do we not have the specialized expertise, in many instances, that would enable us to sort truth from falsehood, but our ideological polarization makes us more susceptible than ever to confirmation bias. Skepticism toward experts and media outlets perceived as mouthpieces for our ideological enemies is often a marker of identity. So, too, is the embrace — sometimes sincere, sometimes ironic (to troll our opponents) — of narratives that fly in the face of the facts but confirm our worldviews.
Worse yet, bad actors like Trump and Bannon weaponize our ideological tribalism and epistemological uncertainty by “flooding the zone with shit,” as Bannon pungently put it. They inundate the news media and thus the public with “an avalanche of competing stories” so disorienting in their competing truth claims but also in their sheer volume that they produce what Sean Illing, writing in Vox, called “a certain nihilism in which people are so skeptical about the possibility of finding the truth that they give up the search.” Or, torn between the warring propositions of the X-Files paradox — “Trust No One,” but rest assured “The Truth Is Out There” — they renounce what remains of their faith in the expert elite and embark, like Kennedy, Miller, Chansley, and countless other Truthers, on their own investigations.
What too many academics fail to realize is that the truth they seek isn’t so much empirical truth — the truth of hard facts — as it is the truth of cultural narratives, which infuse our lives with meaning. Facts matter — desperately, in the middle of a plague that has killed over 4.55 million worldwide. But they become meaningful only when they’re inlaid in the mosaic of narrative. “We seek patterns,” says Wang, “and the more out of control we feel in our personal lives and our work and our world, the more we seek patterns. Stories are how we unite; they’re what get us up in the morning. People don’t believe conspiracy theories because they’re irrational or uneducated or they just don’t have the right information. Far above truth, people seek meaning.”
Sternly instructing the masses that they’ve got their facts wrong — “profsplaining,” let’s call it — is only going to play into popular perceptions of academics as ivory-tower elitists defending their cultural authority against the unlettered rabble. In the public arena, academics, especially those in the hard sciences, need to learn to convey the facts and their analyses not just accurately but meaningfully. In short, they need to learn to tell better stories. Democracy, not to mention our species’ survival, hangs in the balance.
Mark Dery is a cultural critic and the author of many books, most recently Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey (Little, Brown).