Networked zealotry

Reinforcing refuge


The internet also allows people to tap into ready-made articulation of their alienation from educational, academic or media groupthink. Or even participate in such articulation themselves. In undermining the role of the traditional information "gate-keepers" by providing alternative information sources, the information super-highway also makes it easier to identify the failings of such "gate-keepers".

If anything in your own experience reacts against the offered groupthink, then alternative viewpoints are now much easier to find. My own scepticism regarding certainty about anthropogenic effects on climate partly came from how much it reminded me of previous enthusiasm for eugenics (also a cause of the great and the good based on "cutting edge" science) but also going to a Bureau of Meteorology seminar and being horrified at the appalling quality of what was being passed off as climate "modeling". I was not a great fan of econometrics - being partial to to economist David Clark's dictum that, if the data is sufficiently tortured, it will confess. (There is also the small matter that a model simply tells you the consequences of your factual and other premises.)

But I knew more than enough to realise what was being passed off would have been laughed out of court if someone had been silly enough to offer it as economic modeling (given that it failed to capture what we knew had happened). I gather the quality of climate modeling has improved (it well and truly needed to), but it was not reassuring. Later work by Ian Castles (former ABS Chief Statistician) and David Henderson (former OECD Chief Economist) on problems with (pdf) the economic modeling underlying IPCC estimates just gave further grounds for scepticism about the rampant certainty. (The linked interview includes evidence of groupthink within the IPCC; this paper [pdf] provides a useful discussion of the issue of using market exchange rates or Purchasing Power Parity comparisons.)

But if allegedly scientific questions about climate dynamics become markers of status, of moral and intellectual worthiness--and so gist for networked zealotry--then any hope of civility is lost. But so is any chance of rational debate in any space dominated by such passions. You cannot have a factual debate if disagreement is evil.

The notion that it is all about righteousness also leads into what I call the 'homeopathic' approach to intellectual and artistic life, where any failure to follow the correct line then taints everything else you have said or done, because it is now all the product of someone unclean and unrighteous. A particularly nasty instance of this being this attack on Jodie Foster's life and work because she refused to abandon Mel Gibson, a friend. But your own views don't give you positive moral standing, don't display your cognitive worthiness, unless contradictory views do the opposite.

None of which means that zealotry and congenial groupthink shopping is the only option. The internet is also a marvelous tool for genuine enquiry.  The wealth of genuine scholarship available at one's fingertips is immense. But even that can make the search for emotionally reassuring narratives powerful; a way of dealing and sorting and not being overwhelmed.