I was making a comment on another blog where I found myself typing the title above. It reminded me that back when I was teaching college chemistry, the textbook authors were encouraged to be “relevant” by including sidebar and larger discussions of current chemistry topics “in the news.” Something had to be displaced, however, because textbooks were already too large, too heavy and what went were what I called “stories.” These were stories from the history of chemistry, largely about people and the discoveries they made. These stories, however, were what lead to my love of the topic and so our textbooks had the human element wrung out of them. They became dry, tedious, etc.
It was at that point that I recognized that were evolutionarily primed to learn through stories.
Look at the typical “Sunday school” lessons of most Protestant Christian churches. What do they do? Do they teach dogma, christologies, theological fine points? Nope, those lessons are dominated by “Bible stories.” And because our society is so heavily larded with Christians, we are taught via fairy tales. (Please don’t take offense, Christians, it is your book that has tales of talking donkeys, casting demons into pigs, walking on water, turning water into wine, and faith healing of lepers, so fairy tales.)
Along comes an unscrupulous political party which decides to “teach” their flocks via fairy tales. They tell us, don’t believe your lying eyes (or facts, or polls, or data of any kind) believe our stories. The audience doesn’t draw a line at Jewish Space lasers creating fires in California, pharmaceutical companies, using their vaccines to inject microscopic tags into us, and that climate scientists invented climate change to get grants.
Each of these “stories” takes a tiny amount of fact and then embellishes it to the extreme. It is indeed true that scientists will jigger a few things to get a research grant. It has been known to happen. But also, one needs to recognize that scientists who fake data are ostracized, black-balled, never to hold a decent job in science for the rest of their lives. So, the idea that a whole cadre of scientists would perpetrate a massive worldwide hoax around climate change is ludicrous, especially since almost everyone of them would throw their grandmothers under a bus to expose a cheating competitor.
So, stories that claim a presidential candidate is running a child trafficking ring in the basement of a pizza parlor, which doesn’t have a basement, need to be traced back to the source of that story and that source be shamed, discredited, etc. Stocks and pillories are not out of the question.
Stories are powerful. Their misuse, deliberate misuse to mislead for profit, should be a crime, in not in our courts, in the court of public opinion.
Uncommon Sense 