Breaking Out Of The Library: Confessions Of A Lizard Person

Many people are shocked by the prevalence of conspiracy theories in the world today. The world of Qanon – where adherents believe that their political opponents conduct a mass campaign of child rape and murder. How could people believe something so crazy and, more importantly, how do we change their minds?

Advocates for information literacy have prescribed a rigorous course of instruction around fact checking, understanding sources, etc. Prof. Barbara Fister recently published a piece called “Lizard People in the Library” outlining her view of what information literacy educators should be doing to counter this. A revised version of the article was post by The Atlantic.

While I agree with much of what Fister writes, I also want us to think long and hard about the effectiveness of what is being proposed. I want us to be honest about the contingency of our own convictions and I want us to be realistic about human nature. I broadly share Fister’s goals but I have differing opinions on means.

 First of all, let me state that I do not find the beliefs of Qanon shocking. Ridiculous, yes, but not shocking. I came of age in a family who were members of an evangelical Baptist Church in the provincial UK of the 1980s. My Sunday evenings consisted of prophecies, speaking tongues, miraculous healing, and exorcisms. Common beliefs within the church were:

• God would imminently smite the world with a nuclear holocaust while we believers would be spared.

• We were soldiers in war against demonic forces seeking to control the world.

• Any sex not between a husband and wife was very, very bad.

• Any culture not created by Christians was inherently corrupt and dangerous.

The congregation were respectable people – teachers, doctors, lawyers. We were not marginal members of society. Some believed the world was 6000 years old and dinosaur bones were either satanic delusion or the remains of creatures killed by Noah’s flood. Of course, not everyone believed the same things. There were debates. But there were also limits. Denying the literal existence of God was a no-no. And, of course, you had better be careful if you disagreed with the powerful in the Church. You didn’t want to be accused of scriptural error – or speaking from some form of demon possession.

This background is important because I do not talk of the “lizard people” as “other”, as fools who have fallen prey to delusions that I am free of. I’m a lizard person too. We’ll come back to this story later on, where you’ll learn how I left the lizards.

So with my priors stated, let me now examine Fister’s proposals:

1. Educators must uphold democratic neutrality and expertise.

2. Educators must “be explicit about ethical frameworks and daily practices of truth-seeking institutions such as science, scholarship, and journalism. Social media platforms enact values that are firmly grounded in beliefs about individualism, capitalism and consumerism”.

3. Leverage those with knowledge on intersecting information systems.

4. Leverage students’ “knowledge about how information circulates through social media”.

Let me start by agreeing with some of Fister’s analysis.

• It is important to understand the ways in which belief, reason and religion intersect.

• There is some value in teaching people how to assess the quality of the information that they consume.

• There is a poor understanding among the public of the complex information ecosystems that forge the online worlds that we inhabit. We must see misinformation as systemic issue rather than a point problem.

• Appeals to discussion must envision the broadest possible public space (e.g. “democracy”) rather than narrow ideological ones.

• Information agency matters.

Let me now move onto the areas that I wish to probe further.

The Limits Of Education

Lets begin with the big question. Fister’s whole approach is oriented to education. So how effective is all this education? Can we solve this in the classroom? We have proved relatively successful at teaching populations to read, write and do basic maths. We have proved less successful at making them scientists, historians or linguists. This not to say that what children and adults are told in classrooms has no impact on them. But it is a small part of what everyone is exposed to. From what we know about human learning, it is less the imparting of information than the feedback you receive about your decisions that is crucial. If we tell children to be discerning about the information sources they use and then they rewarded by others (parents, peers, other institutions) for NOT being discerning – what do we expect the outcome to be? And we are rewarded for our beliefs every day. My child oozes surface contempt for me 90% of the time (as they should), but when they venture an opinion, their desire for my approval is plain to see. “Have I done good, Dad?”

Likewise, as adults we exert subtle and not-so-subtle pressure on others to agree with our opinions. We choose people whom we share beliefs with. We police the beliefs of our employees and colleagues and neighbours.

We prefer validation and conformity to truth.

So if we wish to develop a critical attitude to information, we cannot just focus on education. To do so would be akin to trying to protect ourselves from a hurricane with an umbrella. If we take seriously the notion misinformation is systemic then our approaches need to be systemic. They cannot stop at the classroom door. They must move into houses of legislation, the worlds of the media, the churches and the pubs.

Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts

Right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro has a catch phrase. You can hear it on YouTube videos where he “DESTROYS ugly, stupid college SWJs!!!”. The catch phrase is “Facts don’t care about your feelings”. From his perspective, he is zealous prosecutor of an empirical, fact-based worldview at war with the crazy delusions of left-wingers. And it’s true. Facts don’t care about your feelings. But we don’t encounter naked facts in a state of nature in the world. We perceive the world through our filters and biases. Facts and feelings cannot be so easily separated. But lets assume that facts don’t care about our feelings. It is equally true (and false) that our feelings do not care about facts. If our models of information literacy assume that we are rational then they will fail because we are not.

Conspiracy theories are powerful not because they are rational but because they are emotionally satisfying. Appealing to rationality is a mug’s game. We need to confront head-on the emotional appeal of misinformation and understand the information that we wish to communicate has an emotional valence whether we like it or not.

What Do You Mean “We”, Paleface?

Fister writes:

“While it may seem odd to use the phrase “crisis of faith,” we are experiencing a moment that exposes a schism between two groups: those who have faith there is a way to arrive at truth using practices based on epistemology that originated in the Enlightenment, and those who believe events and experiences are portents to be interpreted in ways that align with their personal values.”

Reading the essay, it’s hard to completely understand whether this is a positioning that she whole-heartedly endorses or whether it’s a dichotomy that she is seeking to undermine. Elsewhere she says:

“Educators, including librarians who teach, will need to dive deeply within themselves to confront and clarify their own beliefs and assumptions about how they know what is real and what isn’t.”

The problem with the initial dichotomy for me is that participants on both sides of these debates claim “Enlightenment values”. Yes, some religious conservatives claim supernatural sanction for their beliefs. But their fellow-travellers claim the mantle of rationality. “Facts don’t care about your feelings”. This is not to fall into an easy relativism because I do believe there are correct and incorrect statements to make about the world. I do believe that there are such things as “lies” that cannot be reduced to “alternative facts”.

However these are not always easy distinctions to make in practice. Each of us knows comparatively little about the world, we take the vast majority of our knowledge about the world on trust for others. I think Fister recognises the complexities of this but I’d like to see her explore this terrain more.

Likewise: “ethical frameworks and daily practices of truth-seeking institutions such as science, scholarship, and journalism. Social media platforms enact values that are firmly grounded in beliefs about individualism, capitalism and consumerism”

Living in the same country that birthed Rupert Murdoch, the opposition of the noble craft of journalism to the grubby commercial of the social media giants is surreal to say the least. Science has its own biases and atrocities to consider. Scholarship can degrade into a race for ever more unreadable articles in ever more expensive journals. And a lot of people like individualism, capitalism, and consumerism. Do we only wish to appeal to the monastically pure who crave the austerity of truth? And if we do, then what does that mean for our chances of victory?

So What Should We Do Then, Smartypants?

While I think there is room in the classroom and the library for the cultivation of information literacy, it cannot stop there. My current animating question is: How do we incorporate this into our daily lives? One way of doing that is to link information literacy to deliberative democracy initiatives. These processes are a form of “slow politics” (as opposed to the “flash politics” of Twitter) where ordinary citizens from different background spend time discussing a topic of importance to them all. Experts are engaged but do not make the final decisions.

Ultimately, I want librarians to both open up their public spaces and move outside them. The problem is perhaps that there are not enough lizard people in the library.

And what of my life as a lizard person?

Well, I eventually left that Church and am no longer a believer in those stories. Why?

• On one level, it was intellectual. I got tired of the lack of answers to my questions.

• On another level, it was emotional. I just didn’t enjoy the singing and praying as much as everyone else did. The promised emotional payoffs did not arise. And I decided that this was not my fault.

• But finally, I left home. I went to study at a university far away from my hometown. I was part of a new community with new pleasures and new pressures.

Yes, we are individuals, but we do not form our beliefs alone. We form them in communities. And if librarians want to change the world then we must find and engage with those communities. We must remake the truth anew together.

“Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking…”