Things Ben Carson Has Said That Would Seem Not to be True
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On a related note, Nancy Latorneau:
Recently Carson took a cutesy pot-shot at those elite professionals who actually know things by going on twitter to say, “It is important to remember that amateurs built the Ark and it was the professionals that built the Titanic.” One has to wonder whether Dr. Carson would suggest that amateurs take up the practice of pediatric neurosurgery – or if his particular brand of professionalism is simply exempt from this kind of derision.
What that radio host and Dr. Carson are espousing (and Colbert was mocking) is the tendency of conservative media to attract viewers/listeners by appealing to their feelings about what must be true rather than the facts. When facts intrude on our “garage logic” it makes us uncomfortable because it creates what we call cognitive dissonance. We are comforted by the alternative of simply blaming the elites and rejecting the facts.
That’s why I’d suggest that the root cause of an attraction to anti-knowledge was the creation of Fox News. What Murdoch managed to do with that network was to pose the proposition that facts were merely the liberal media at work. So on one side of the “debate” you have the conservative garage logic and on the other you have liberal facts. The rest of the media – in an attempt to prove they weren’t liberal – accepted this frame, giving credence to anti-knowledge as a legitimate position. That traps us into things like having to argue over whether the science of human’s contribution to climate change is real because denialism is given credence as the opposing conservative view.