bmovement

“ So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back — like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust — of course you can’t, it’s just people talking — but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV — a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’. ”

“ When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together. ”

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On the Andaman Islands, Edward Horace Man observed in the nineteenth century, the death of a shaman’s child was seen as a “sign that his power is waning,” and he would now be under pressure to show “further proof of his supposed superiority” lest the public’s awe should fade.

Oddly, such declining fortunes can help sustain religious faith. The notion that a shaman’s prowess waxes and wanes allows the society to witness repeated failure without questioning the over-arching idea of shamanic power. It’s eerily like the modern stock market: when a famous stock analyst places a series of bad bets, we say he’s lost his touch and look for an analyst who hasn’t, rather than question the notion that his “touch” was ever anything other than a series of lucky guesses. In modern “secular” societies, as in “primitive” religious ones, faith in expertise is sustained by the timely disposal of experts.

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