Faith alone: the origin of fake news

A very interesting controversy broke out recently in Quebec. Apparently, Patrick Beauchesne, deputy minister of the environment for the provincial government, wrote a letter several weeks ago to the federal environment minister, expressing concern that the upcoming overhaul of the “Canadian Environmental Assessment Act” might be giving the “traditional knowledge” of indigenous peoples in Canada too broad a definition, thereby placing it on an equal footing with scientific knowledge, when assessing the social acceptability of resource development. As soon as he found out about that letter, Ghislain Picard, chief of the Quebec and Labrador region of the Assembly of First Nations, reacted by accusing the Quebec government of plunging Quebec’s relations with indigenous peoples back 50 years.

So far as he was concerned, any attempt to define traditional knowledge or to limit its scope was necessarily a return to European colonialism, since traditional knowledge was whatever indigenous peoples wanted it to be, to be used by them whenever they felt it to be appropriate. During the ensuing controversy, both the federal and the provincial governments apologized for the deputy minister’s letter, following which a group of law professors from the University of Ottawa, led by Thomas Burelli, accused the Quebec government of racism for having even suggested that there might be any conflict between the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples and the scientific knowledge of the colonialists.

However, as Yves Gingras, a well-known professor of the history of science at the University of Quebec at Montreal, pointed out, the whole idea of attributing “traditional” knowledge exclusively to indigenous peoples, and scientific knowledge exclusively to Western civilization, is completely bogus. Science, in fact, belongs to everyone, and always questions the fundamental assumptions of all kinds of knowledge, of whatever origin. To which I would add that many different indigenous peoples, all over the world, have often used scientific knowledge for their own purposes, when dealing with governments or private corporations involved in resource development schemes in their respective regions. Like human rights and laicity, scientific knowledge is supposed to be universal and to belong to all human beings equally. In an ideal world that was truly democratic, especially socially democratic (neither elitist, nor sexist, nor racist), it would be equally accessible to everyone on this planet.

Unfortunately for indigenous bureaucrats like Picard, reserving traditional knowledge exclusively for indigenous populations is in fact the most obviously colonialist way of participating in this controversy. Which is not to say that non-indigenous bureaucrats, from the private or the public sectors of the economy, in any part of the world, ever take a more scientific, or rational, stance when planning resource development, than the indigenous bureaucrats do. Most resource development has to do with the extractive industries (fossil fuels, minerals, wood, seafood, etc.), that exploit enormous areas of the Earth’s surface mainly for the maximization of private profit. By far the largest part of which ends up in the pockets of a tiny group of extremely rich people, rather than becoming a terribly efficient source of income for the millions of people who end up doing most of the work.

In mainly private-capitalist, neoliberal countries like Canada, most of the governments involved in developing natural resources spend a relatively large portion of public funds providing services for the extractive industries (building roads, cleaning up waste, etc.) and end up getting very little back from the private companies in the form of taxes or royalty fees. Whereas in mainly state-capitalist countries like China and Saudi Arabia, most of which profess various anti-democratic ideologies (such as totalitarian “communism”, absolute monarchy, theocracy, military dictatorship or “guided democracy”), resource extraction, like everything else, exists mainly to benefit the empire-building strategies of a very small number of extremely powerful oligarchs.

In any case, traditional knowledge also belongs to all the world’s peoples, not just those currently considered to be indigenous. Everyone seems to forget the fact that since human populations started spreading out all over the globe several hundred thousand years ago, it is not at all obvious which peoples truly arrived first in any given region, within any one of the world’s continents. Even European peoples (regardless of when their respective ancestors may have originally arrived in whatever part of Europe) possess traditional knowledge, as anyone can find out by reading such popular books as The lost art of reading nature’s signs: Use outdoor clues to find your way, predict the weather, locate water, track animals—and other forgotten skills, by Tristan Dooley (2014). A book in which the author is continually citing examples of traditional knowledge taken not only from his own homeland surroundings in England, with additional material from the USA, but also from his numerous visits with indigenous peoples in many other parts of the world.

There is also a delicious bit of irony to be found in the fact that the government of Canada is apparently promoting traditional knowledge only for indigenous people, and also presumably agreeing with the judgement of the Ottawa law professors that the government of Quebec is being racist for not always behaving in the same way. Particularly when we consider that the same federal government of Canada also believes that anyone who disagrees with having police officers and other authority figures wear religious garb while at work, or supports official laicity in any other form, is also being necessarily racist and anti-immigrant.

In other words, they are making the same kind of error in deliberately misinterpreting the separation of church and state that the indigenous leaders mentioned earlier were making with the distinction between traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge. By assuming that laicity, like science, is a “racist” concept that is only used by rational (anti-religious) Westerners against “traditional” (pro-religious) societies and peoples coming from outside the Western world. As if there were no true believers in fundamentalist religions among the long-established, majority-Christian, Canadians of various European origins!

According to the multicultural ideology adopted by the Liberal government of Canada, it would seem, therefore, that only Canadians of European origin, Canada’s “original immigrants” from an indigenous point of view, can possibly be racist, since both indigenous peoples and recent immigrants from non-European countries are officially excluded. In reality, however, millions of individuals all over the world, coming from any one of the world’s numerous peoples (indigenous or otherwise), are in fact racist, while millions of other individuals, coming from all the same multiple origins, are not. In other words, the ideology of racism is not at all linked to any particular “race”, but is in fact a universal category (albeit an extremely negative one), just like elitism and sexism.

Still, the main point I wanted to make in this article is that this particular controversy about traditional knowledge versus science, like the one about religious garb versus laicity, are in fact fascinating examples of what is now being called “fake news”. In spite of the recent appearance of this particular slogan, fake news have been around for as long as human beings have been around. One of the most interesting earlier versions of this type of concept was put forward almost exactly five hundred years ago, when a former Catholic priest named Martin Luther decided to inaugurate what soon became the Protestant reformation. He began this major upset in ideological history by calling on all good Christians to return to the “golden age” of early (fundamentalist) Christianity, and to fight against corrupt papal indulgences toward rich donors, by recognizing “faith alone”, considered to be absolutely and totally pure, as being the only legitimate path toward religious salvation. Rather than the “good works” also being promoted (along with faith) by the Catholic Church.

Unfortunately, the very idea that any ideological construction, whether religious faith, traditional knowledge, or whatever other kind of belief, should never be challenged or questioned for any reason whatsoever, is one of the most obvious examples of fake news ever invented. In many ways, the search for absolute perfection is the root of all evil, since after all, “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions”. The scientific attitude on this all-important topic, namely that nothing whatever ought to be accepted on faith alone, is the only rational approach. Particularly since it includes the capacity to reject even currently accepted, scientifically established facts, as capable of being replaced by new facts, just as soon as the old ones are proven (by further observation and experiment) to be inadequate. That takes place much of the time during scientific revolutions, which actually occur quite frequently in most of the currently active fields of study. To be sure, given the nature of human emotions, those revolutions often leave behind many (former) scientists who refuse to give up some recently-disgraced theory or another to which they have been clinging (religiously) during their entire professional lives.

Getting back to one of the other examples mentioned above, concerning the controversy around authority figures being allowed to wear religious garb while at work, related arguments about religious clothing worn by women in particular, such as the hijab or the niqab, are also being put forward by a large number of people whose ideas also fall into the category of fake news. I am referring here to all those women who consider themselves feminists, while still wearing the hijab themselves, or all those people of either sex who erroneously believe that women wearing such clothing can still qualify as being good feminists. Meanwhile, the same kind of people (like those from the federal government of Canada) also denounce everyone opposed to the hijab (or similar clothing), for feminist reasons, as being necessarily racist. In this case, it is often alleged that the principle of religious freedom always trumps any possible feminist opposition to cover-up religious clothing, and even that wearing revealing clothing in public, or condoning that practice, is a much greater offence against “true” feminism, than is religious cover-up clothing.

In fact, however, the rational truth of the matter is that both wearing cover-up clothing for religious reasons, and wearing revealing clothing in inappropriate situations, are equally at fault. Fake feminists are not only all those who refuse to condemn inappropriately revealing clothing, but also all those who refuse to acknowledge that cover-up religious clothing is necessarily anti-feminist, particularly when being used to advertise Islamic fundamentalism. More or less in the same way that wearing the ubiquitous, extremely strait-laced Mao costume, by both sexes, during the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” in China, was done to promote a totalitarian ideology, deliberately curtailing individual rights for ideological reasons.

Just to complicate matters further, however, it is also true that millions of other (irrational) people often denounce such religious garb for racist reasons, rather than for genuinely feminist reasons. It is also true that many of the other goals of the feminist movement, such as the me-too campaign against rape and sexual harassment, are arguably more important to the cause than the (nevertheless) related problem of women’s cover-up clothing. Another good example of a more important cause being the fight against allowing well-off people to pay poverty-stricken women to become surrogate mothers. For which the Trudeau government in Canada seems to be gearing up at the moment, with the probable intention of removing the existing ban on that genuinely anti-feminist practice. This last practice being one of the better examples of what happens when neoliberalism crosses over the line separating it (at least theoretically) from neofascism.

In other words, even though all these hide-bound ideological stances, toward traditional knowledge, or the role of faith in religious salvation, or the wearing of cover-up religious clothing, or surrogate motherhood, seem at first glance to be about quite different subjects, they all have one thing in common. Which is that they are all examples of fake news, in the sense that they are all inside-out deformations of reality caused by mental rigidity, the incapacity of “true believers” in various different systems of belief to see their way clear toward a rational interpretation of controversial issues occurring in the real world.

The world we live in is, unfortunately, chock full of dozens of different kinds of fake news, which are constantly cropping up just about everywhere, and not just in the examples mentioned above. Another fascinating example, also from Quebec, comes from the 2013 Lac Mégantic tragedy, when an improperly braked train containing petroleum products rolled down a hill and exploded in a little town next to the American border, killing 47 people. The news in this case being that five years later, prosecutors have given up on pressing criminal charges against anyone, including the executives of the railway that owned the train, apparently because they felt that under the existing laws they could probably not get a conviction. Which means that not only the executives of the now-defunct MMA (Montreal, Maine and Atlantic) railway company, but also those from the Canadian Pacific railway company and the Irving Oil petroleum company, all of whom apparently contributed to the disaster in one way or another, through what certainly looks like criminal negligence in every case, all seem to be off the hook.

The fake part of the news obviously being that under a neoliberal regime, very important people who cut corners all the time, in the pursuit of maximum profits, never have to live up to their merely theoretical responsibilities concerning safety procedures. None of those hubristic company executives really seem to give a damn about a bunch of dead villagers. Any more than did the people responsible for the Union Carbide chemical explosion in Bhopal (India) in 1984, or the Chernobyl (Ukraine) nuclear explosion in 1986, or the Tepco nuclear disaster in Fukushima (Japan) in 2011, or the horrendous textile fire in Dhaka (Bangladesh) in 2012, and so on and so forth. Fake news every time, since the people responsible for each one of those “accidents” were never adequately punished for their crimes. No more than those responsible for historic disasters like the sinking of the Titanic way back in 1912, or any of the other similar disasters that keep on happening all over the place, all the time. Criminal negligence has also been mooted in the very recent (2018) Humboldt, Saskatchewan, highway bus collision with a trailer truck, although the usual follow-up, of letting company executives off the hook, has not yet happened this early in the game.

The concept of fake news also applies quite readily to those who have a hard time accepting the fact that Alexandre Bissonnette, the young Québécois who massacred six Muslim worshippers in a mosque in Quebec City last year, really should be called a terrorist, as well as an “Islamophobe”, which is to say someone who thinks that all Muslims are necessarily terrorists themselves. Another person who ought to be referred to as a terrorist is Richard Bain, a Quebec anglophone who tried to murder Quebec premier Pauline Marois back in 2012, and ended up killing or wounding several other people. As well as anyone else, anywhere else, who commits the same kind of political murder for the purposes of spreading terror among a targeted population. People who do not want to admit that individuals from “their” group are terrorists, just like all those coming from some other population, are just as guilty of deliberately misinterpreting the news for ideological reasons as anyone involved in any of the other examples mentioned above.

Which also includes those who refuse to belief that bombing civilians from the air, in any kind of military operation, also constitutes state terrorism. Every year many thousands more people die from state terrorism than they do from the somewhat smaller-scale terrorism committed by religious and political fanatics. Similar accusations can also be sustained against all those official spokespeople who refuse to use the word “genocide” to describe real examples of genocide, simply because doing so might legally require their government to actually attempt to do something about it.

Still another example of fake news is the inability of many political commentators to recognize that all politicians, and the politically active people who support them, should be called by their real names. The totalitarian “communists” who used to run countries like the now-defunct USSR, including those who still officially cling to the communist appellation for themselves, like the current leaders of the “People’s” Republic of China, were never (and are certainly not now) in favour of handing over the countries under their control to “the popular masses” (ordinary workers and peasants). The social-democrats, in many different countries in Europe and elsewhere, never actually set up any kind of democratic socialism when they were in power in their countries, and are certainly not intending to do so nowadays. The elitist “Democrats” in the USA are even less democratic than the social-democrats, while the even more elitist Republicans in the same country have never genuinely been in favour of carrying out the public will (republicanism).

Even the vast majority of the “separatists” in the Quebec “independence” movement never really supported the idea of having Quebec become at least as independent from Canada as Canada itself is from the USA. Even Quebec’s most nationalist leader from days gone by, Jacques Parizeau, never wanted to set up an independent Québécois currency. All of these myriad political appellations, and hundreds more, are fake news because none of those politicians ever really wanted to set up societies based exclusively, or even mainly, on each group’s theoretical principles. The point here is not to require everyone to exactly support whatever they were initially set up to support, but just to argue that political observers should not be allowing all those people to get away with their diverse subterfuges. If we are ever to get rid of fake news, everyone should just call a spade, a spade, and come up with some more appropriate terms for existing political formations.

Throughout history, opportunist leaders of every possible religion and ideology have used their ordinary members honest adherence to any given system of belief in order to promote their own domination instead. All over the world, martyrs for whatever cause are constantly dying without realizing that their sacrifices were all for nothing. Popular movements of all kinds are constantly being manipulated by their leaders to promote exactly the opposite of whatever it was that they were initially supposed to be promoting. As a result, both of the world’s currently most important “realized” ideologies, private capitalism and state capitalism, have in almost every nation or region become two sides of the same coin, great wealth and great power both being used to promote sadism for the VIPs, and masochism for ordinary citizens or subjects.

The current world has become the best world ever for the domination of both private and state capitalism. On every continent, opposition to VIP domination is always completely localized, divided up along national lines, or racial lines, or gender lines. A situation that makes it incredibly easy for all the world’s leaders, not only heads of state and government, but also chieftains of all the other political, business, religious, social and cultural institutions that help run the world nowadays. If we compare 2018 with any historical watershed such as 1492 (Christopher Columbus), it immediately becomes obvious that the world is much bigger than it used to be, and a lot of people (but not all of them) are a lot more prosperous than they used to be. But also that inequality is much worse than it ever was before, having attained an all-time high, mostly caused by the fantastic sums recently accumulated by the world’s richest people, and the relative stagnation of everyone else’s recent income increases.

Most of us have never been more powerless, in comparison with the enormous capacities of those currently in power. Using Amartya Sen’s extremely valuable concept of (comparative) capabilities, any decent analysis of the measure of good government (or good leadership) nowadays would necessarily have to focus on the fact that most people do not possess anywhere near the kind of material and social capacities to enable them to realize their merely theoretical democratic rights. Access to genuine human rights, real democracy, real separation of church and state, and so on, is extremely limited for the vast majority of human beings. At the same time, an extremely small minority of putative leaders possess much greater power in every domain than such people ever possessed before. Oligarchs like Chinese leader Xi Jinping, or multinational executives like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, have attained almost total control of the world’s most powerful countries, the differences between their methods used to gain that unprecedented power being much less important than the similarity between their results. This is what fake news is really all about: massive dictatorships disguised as good “governance”.

Of course, the main reason why the expression “fake news” is constantly being repeated these days is because it was coined by one of Donald Trump’s favourite sycophants (Kelly-Anne Conway), to help the current US president get over all his self-inflicted wounds. Namely by systematically blaming his political adversaries for having somehow “invented” every stupid thing that he himself ever did or said. The real fake news in this case being Trump’s own astonishingly successful campaign of getting elected as a champion of the industrial working-class, he being the number one person in the USA most lacking in credibility in order to play such a role. As a billionaire tycoon from the extremely corrupt real estate and casino “industries”, as well as having been a so-called “reality” show personality. Anyone in the world who cannot figure out why Trump has so far “succeeded” in doing absolutely nothing for US workers needs to consult a psychiatrist.

Speaking of the industrial working-class, that sociological entity has become another prime example of fake news, not just in the USA but everywhere else as well. Journalists writing articles these days about how what is left of the union movement in the West should be adjusting to massive changes in the current work environment, are missing the point when they focus on the “fact” that the days of the industrial working-class are over. In the first place, the industrial working-class still very much exists in countries like the USA, even though it is not nearly as big or as important as it used to be. In spite of that, many observers, even including a few professional sociologists, have come to a point where they are denying the very existence of industrial workers as a social class, or even denying the existence of social classes altogether. Which simply means that they have fallen under the dumbing-down influence of the neoliberal ideology that views society itself, in the jaundiced view of true believers like Margaret Thatcher, as being divided up exclusively into individuals and families, without any collective characteristics whatsoever.

In fact, however, in today’s world, the industrial working-class has never been bigger, nor more important, than it is now. What has changed is that this social class has massively moved into dozens of formerly Third-World countries, where it did not have much of a presence in days gone by, while still maintaining even nowadays an active presence in all the countries where it existed initially. Instead of forgetting about the industrial working-class, what the union movement in the West should be doing is linking up, in a much bigger way than they already have, with the trade unions in countries like China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico and so on. Unions that still exist in spite of being very much under government control in at least some of those countries, such as China. The very low wages and rotten working conditions that led to the rise of the union movement in Europe (including Russia), North America and Australasia during the nineteenth century, are quite prevalent these days in all the recently industrialized countries and regions of the world. Which means that if only from an objective point of view, there is a lot of potential for a great deal more of so far unrealized union activity, and for the rebirth of genuine (not fake) social-democratic parties in all those places.

The fake news involved in the case of the industrial working-class is the fact that, under the combined (demoralizing) influence of neoliberalism and neofascism, left-wing people all over the world seem content nowadays to leave industrial workers under the control of ultra-right-wing populist governments and movements, in the older industrial countries as well as in the newer ones. In the older industrial countries, this social class has been completely abandoned to its own devices, as if it never existed, by people still intent on describing themselves as leftists, or democratic socialists, or communists, or anarchists, or whatever.

As a result, the millions of people who still belong to this social class have ended up supporting ultra-right-wing populist movements against the “liberal establishments”, as in the case of the Trump regime in the USA and the other neofascist governments in places like Poland and Hungary, as well as similar parties that are hugely popular, but not yet in power, in countries like France, Austria and the Netherlands. In the newer industrial countries, large portions of this same industrial working-class sometimes even tacitly support state-capitalist governments like the ones in China, India and Brazil, that run their countries in ways that closely resemble ultra-right-wing populism and neofascism, while also being heavily influenced by large doses of neoliberalism.

Unfortunately, however, living in a world exclusively dominated by reactionary ideologies like these ones is not a very good way to prepare for the future. The total incapacity of any of today’s world leaders to deal with any of the current crises, such as massive environmental degradation, the imminent threat of a new world-wide financial collapse, multifaceted geopolitical confrontations between the world’s major powers (all trying to become “great again” at one and the same time), enormous divisions between competing cultures (indigenous cultures, European-origin cultures, Muslim-majority cultures and dozens of other cultures), and the equally dangerous division of humanity between the ultra-rich and the ultra-poor, simply means that the human race may not have much of a future. This is not a time for everyone to sit back and confine themselves to mental rigidity and “obsessive-compulsive disorders” brought on by concepts like fake news and faith alone.