Debunk It! How to Stay Sane in a
World of Misinformation. By John Grant. Zest Books. $12.99.
Rockin’ the Boat: 50 Iconic
Revolutionaries from Joan of Arc to Malcolm X. By Jeff Fleischer. Zest
Books. $13.99.
One of the most immediately
useful volumes in the Zest Books line, John Grant’s Debunk It! is an attempt to explain the many lies and elements of
misinformation that pervade our modern world (in which sense it is descriptive)
and show readers what they can do about them (meaning it is also prescriptive).
Books like this are surprisingly rare and always welcome, since they serve as a
counterbalance to the punditocracy as well as political rhetoric and the
idiotocracy that seems to rule the Internet. “Reality isn’t political,” writes
Grant, but that is a problem for people who insist that everything is political and can and should be spun in a particular
direction for purposes of political power, money-making or similar reasons.
That means history, science and other factual realms are fair game for constant
manipulation, whether that means retelling history from a particular ethnic or
racial viewpoint (Holocaust denial, Afrocentrism), creating “medicines” by
diluting active ingredients until they are no longer active (homeopathy), or
using non-expert bloviators – within or abetted by the media – to “counter”
near-unanimous agreement among scientists with expertise in a particular field
(climate change). Grant shows how nonsense driven by personal agendas can cause
great human tragedies (refusal to use AIDS drugs because of belief that the
virus was created by the CIA to use against black people); can lead to the persecution
and imprisonment of innocent people (“repressed memory” of childhood sexual
abuse, extracted by social workers who “knew” how to get young children to
recover what they forgot, so the information could be used against alleged
predators); and can make nonsense seem real just because a lot of people
believe it: “Plenty of people reckon they’ve seen ghosts, fairies, the Loch
Ness monster, and other elusive figures. …Of course, it’s always possible that
the anecdotes really do stack up to
something that is worth further investigation. But we have to do the actual
investigation of the anecdotal evidence, not just assume the collection of
anecdotes is the investigation.” Again
and again, Grant emphasizes that investigation – using, whenever possible, the
scientific method, whose precepts he explains clearly – is required when
checking on whether a particular statement or assertion is true. He discusses
the many ways people try, for various reasons, to mislead others, including
ways in which people inadvertently mislead themselves. He talks about cherry
picking (using only the data that support what you want supported), ad hominem attacks (go after the person
you disagree with, not after that person’s arguments), false balance (a common
media failing, which involves giving 50% of time to two opposing viewpoints
even when one is responsible and the other is ridiculous), confirmation bias
(our tendency to notice more things that go along with what we believe than
ones that undermine our beliefs), and much more. And he explains ways to try to
determine whether people – including the author himself – are presenting truth
or bull. Among his 15 recommendations is to “think about whether the
authorities that someone’s quoting really are
authorities” – that is, authorities in the field being discussed, since you
would not want even the most expert plumber to perform the work of, say, a
brain surgeon. He also warns about checking to be sure quotes are in the
correct context, looking for raw data rather than someone’s interpretation of
it, and trying to be sure that people are not deliberately misusing words to attempt
to sway an argument (a common tactic of creationists who say evolution is “just
a theory” – the word “theory” in scientific context meaning “as close as you
can get to 100% scientific certainty,” and in the case of evolution something
that was known and accepted long before Darwin). There are a couple of missteps
in the book, such as a passing reference to “Fred Phelps” without explaining
who he was (a virulently anti-gay pastor of a church he created) and a
reference to peer reviews being explained on page 37 (actual page: 72). But by
and large, Grant lays out a clear, compelling and, most important, actionable case for identifying and
responding to the widespread errors and outright lies that we encounter daily
in what could easily be called the Misinformation Age.
This is not to say that misinformation is
in any way new. It has been used for centuries, if not millennia, to skew
reports of history in the direction favored by historians working at particular
times and in particular circumstances. Hence the widely quoted aphorism, “History
is written by the victors” – which is how Winston Churchill put it, although
there are plenty of earlier versions of the comment (Napoleon’s: “What is history but a fable agreed upon?”). Yet
this notion has not stopped stories, and exaggerations, from being produced
about various revolutionaries, both successful and defeated, in the years after
their attempts to overthrow a government or society have come to an end. Jeff
Fleischer collects information on 50 such revolutionaries (more if you count
some of his stories-within-the-stories about people with whom the primary ones
he discusses interacted). The book’s title and subtitle show both its strength
(history written to be brief, pointed and interesting) and weakness (a style
that cannot decide whether or not to be serious). Actually, the book’s subtitle
is significantly in error in a way that quickly calls into question what
Fleischer is writing and why: he arranges the profiles according to the date of
birth of each subject, on which basis the book goes from Hannibal, the scourge
of Rome (with Joan of Arc being the 12th entry) to Martin Luther
King, Jr. (with Malcolm X being the 46th person profiled). The most
interesting element of the book is its inclusion of people whose names will
likely be unfamiliar to readers, at least in North America: Vercingetorix, who
fought Julius Caesar in Gaul; Arminius, an early leader of the Germanic tribes
that eventually took over the remnants of the Roman Empire; Metacom, leader of
attacks against Pilgrim colonies not long after the first Thanksgiving; Hone
Heke, a tribal chieftain who fought the British settlers of New Zealand; Mary
Harris Jones, who battled unfair labor practices and for whom the magazine Mother Jones is named; Michael Collins, who
launched numerous Irish Republican Army attacks against British forces; and
others. Presented along with these are stories of such well-known
revolutionaries as Spartacus, Julius Caesar (not usually thought of as a
revolutionary), Cleopatra (also not usually seen as a revolutionary), Oliver
Cromwell, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Harriet Tubman, Mohandas Gandhi,
Vladimir Lenin, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro. Fleischer’s
(+++) book follows a straightforward approach: each short chapter starts by
noting a person’s dates, location and opponent, which can be a nation or group
of people (Rome, Great Britain, Spain, English settlers) or a perceived
societal ill (slavery, taxes, unfair labor practices). The write-ups are scarcely
revelatory and often are little more than a sequence of dates and events – not
the most enthralling way to present history. Along the way, though, Fleischer
does bring up some little-known elements of the past, such as the facts that
the English did not capture Joan of Arc (a French faction, the Burgundians,
did, turning her over to the English for punishment) and that more than a dozen
feature films have been made in France about Asterix, a comic-book character
whose adventures are set in the era of Vercingetorix (who sometimes appears as
a character). For the most part, though, Rockin’ the Boat is pretty plain stuff. Fleischer’s attempts at a
brighter style tend to fall flat: he captions a bust “Cleopatra, marbleized,”
for example, and calls a full-length portrait of the first U.S. president
“George Washington: tight in tights.” As a surface-level, easy-to-read look at
some familiar history and some of its byways, the book is fine, but there is
scarcely anything revolutionary about its selection of its subjects or its
presentation of their lives.
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