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Everybody Knows
 Lately
I have been hearing from Muslims
and Calvinists who say I have been misrepresenting Islam and Calvinism.
Considering the sensitivity of the subject, their complaints have been
remarkably polite and
charitable.  And
it appears I was indeed wrong.
What would
I do without such readers to set me straight? I’d make even more
blunders than I already do.
In this age
of democracy, or mass semiliteracy, it is all too easy to parrot second-hand
opinions — what “everybody knows.” And
“everybody knows” Islam and Calvinism have a cruel and
merciless conception of God that conduces to violence and fanaticism. Well,
“everybody” may be wrong. I had no real basis for saying such
things.
It’s
embarrassing to have to confess this. I should have known better. But
columnists are supposed to have confident opinions on more subjects than
anyone can really know thoroughly; it’s part of the unwritten job
description. So it’s tempting to repeat what “everybody
knows” when, in fact, you don’t know. And these vague
impressions, picked up we know not where, may become passionate
convictions. Often what “everybody knows” today is directly
opposite to what “everybody knew” a generation earlier.
For
example, “everybody knows” that religion and science are
opposed, that the Constitution mandates separation of church and state,
that Lincoln abolished slavery with a stroke of the pen, and myriad other
such pseudo facts. Some of these are simply false; others, more fatally, are
misleading half-truths. It’s only when you get to know a subject well
that you realize how ignorant most people’s impressions of them are
— and how ignorant your own used to be.
The
problem is aggravated by mass communications and government propaganda,
which have replaced popular folklore as a source of what “everybody
knows.” They are so powerful that it often seems futile to dispute
them. What chance does the truth of your own experience have against
deliberately engineered “truth” disseminated to millions through
every television?
![[Breaker quote for Everybody Knows: Reflections on ignorance]](2006breakers/060914.gif) Ever
since governments realized
the uses of radio, communication has increasingly become a one-way street;
“mass communication” is the opposite of conversation. Maybe
the Internet can help save us from it.
When
engineering opinion has become a science, keeping your own head clear is a
struggle — and a full-time job. You are bombarded with more opinions
and assertions than you can possibly test or sort out, no matter how
skeptical you are. It’s dispiriting to argue even with transparent lies,
when you are alone and everyone else — that amorphous mass we call
“the public” — seems to believe them. Easier to fall in
with the mass. As I always say, “public opinion” is what
everyone thinks everyone else thinks. Or as Oscar Wilde says somewhere,
“most people are other people,” thinking other people’s
thoughts.
Hence I
think it’s vital to be able to admit your own mistakes, especially those
you make by parroting your environment. If you can laugh at yourself, you
are assured of a lifetime of entertainment. “The fool doth think he is
wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” Think of
Montaigne’s motto, “What do I know?”
In A
Study in Scarlet, Dr. Watson is astonished to learn that Sherlock
Holmes has never heard of the Copernican theory. But Holmes is unabashed.
“What the deuce is it to me?” he demands. “You say that
we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a
pennyworth of difference to me or to my work.” That’s the
spirit!
You know,
and I know, that the earth goes round the sun; “everybody
knows” that. But in what sense do we “know” it? How
many of us could go about demonstrating it? Copernicus himself didn’t
“know” it; he adopted his theory more for aesthetic than for
scientific reasons. (Or so they say; but who are “they”?) Yet we
pride ourselves on “knowing” what we are really only repeating
from authorities we assume we can trust. I learned it from my science
teacher; but where did she learn it? Infinite regress. That way madness lies.
What do I
know, how do I know it, and what actual difference does it make? “All I
know is what I read in the papers,” as Will Rogers said. And nowadays,
that’s a pretty fair summary of what “everybody
knows.” In short, next to nothing.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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