Reallity

The other day I was reading a book on education that quoted Edward Said: "Facts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them." The less people are interested in reality, the more they will be indifferent to becoming untethered from it.

In some circles, people charged with describing and increasing our knowledge of reality are dismissed as "elitists." That's probably an accurate description. They know more than most people about a given subject, they have thought about it longer and more deeply, and they are dismissive of those who believe in green cheese and in brownies at the bottom of the garden.

Myself, I think we need elitists. When I get surgery - nothing I'm planning on - I want my doctor to be an elitist. I want him to have graduated at the top of his class from a fine school. If he has a couple of extra degrees, swell. I don't want a doctor who complains about "elite doctors" and how the medical profession stabbed him in the back.

Of course, these things happen. Doctors have believed all sorts of garbage in the course of their history as a profession. They didn't really have the diagnostic tools or the knowledge. Now they have more of both. They don't know everything about diabetes, but they know enough to give you better advice than the guy who works behind the counter at the 7-Eleven.

Maybe it's my age, but it seems as if there's more ignorance around than there used to be. Not stupidity - the stupidity quotient has been pretty steady. But more people are getting permission from their thought leaders to ignore what we know and base their actions on what they believe.

Faith-based, they call it. God will make it better because God makes things better. That hypothesis will be tested in the next decade, I believe. My reality-based perspective suggests that people may make things better, but probably they will screw them up. It's a crapshoot, at the very least.

But still, through all the nonsense and wrong turns, we have arrived at pretty good guesses about a lot of things. We have dropped an apple and, a thousand times out of a thousand, the apple has fallen to Earth. We feel confident in predicting that will happen the next time. So far, that fact does not need to be guarded and contextualized, but a lot of other ones do.

Did you see Sarah Palin trying to describe the ride of Paul Revere? It was deeply embarrassing, not so much for her - she went past embarrassment on the great fame highway about two years ago - as for the people who support her, many of whom, I'm betting, actually know the legend of Paul Revere.

The facts about the ride would be better, but those really aren't that well known. But at least give us an ungarbled version of the legend.

The Longfellow poem is the legend. People know the Longfellow poem, which is famously memorable (although not quite as earwormy as some selections from the work of Robert W. Service), so they know that the signal was lights in the Old North Church - one if by land, two if by sea. The British came by land. Palin somehow got the lights confused with bells (the church-steeple problem is my guess) and additionally said that Revere was warning the British that they couldn't take our guns away.

Well, no, he wasn't. What's more, when you watch Palin on tape, you can see that she's just throwing the bull, like a high school sophomore who hasn't read the assignment. It's pathetic. You don't have to know the poem, or even the real story - you just have to say, sorry, I don't know that tale very well.

That's the thing about the New Ignorance - it pretends to be the new knowledge. And those of us with passing knowledge of the facts, those of us who have read, perhaps, books by contemporary historians of the Revolutionary War, know that there are real facts to be gathered and laid out.

Notice I didn't say truth. We are not in a battle over truth, because the world is so marvelously complex and wondrous that the truth is hard to find. Paul Revere took some secrets to the grave; perhaps you yourself will take secrets to the grave. But the no-longer-secret things, the baseline of knowledge that we have agreed to accept so we can move on to the next discovery: These items need adherents. They need people to shout the facts' names and not pretend it's all a matter of opinion.

Some things are a matter of opinion; others are not. Education helps you distinguish between the two. That's not complicated.

You and I, yes, and someone named Cheryl could be part of a socially acceptable narrative. First time!