I knew a lot of things when I lived almost entirely in a little world where such things were well-known. In that little world, we all knew those things.
We knew that the Bible said the Earth was only 6,000 years old and we knew that the Bible said the world was going to end very soon, starting with the Rapture, which was going to happen any moment now. We knew the Bible had a lot to say about eternal suffering in Hell. (We weren’t quite sure where the Bible said such things, but we knew it did.)
We knew the Bible was true because Noah’s flood had carved the Grand Canyon; and because there were human and dinosaur footprints mixed together in Texas; and because scientists had confirmed the universe was missing exactly the amount of time that should be missing because of Joshua and Hezekiah; and because of all the stories we recited about sailors surviving getting swallowed by whales, just like Jonah; and because the European Common Market had 10 member countries — one for each horn of the beast in Revelation.
We knew other things too. In our church youth group, we all knew what “Stairway to Heaven” said if you play it backwards, and we knew the real meaning to the lyrics of “Hotel California,” and we knew that African converts had told our white missionaries that American rock music used the same drumming that they had used in their former, benighted, demon-worshipping African religions.
We knew that Catholicism and Judaism taught salvation by works. We knew that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine and Abraham Lincoln were devout, church-going believers who spent hours in prayer and never missed their daily devotions. We knew that Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Voltaire repented and converted on their deathbeds. We knew that the “Eye of a Needle” was a gate in Jerusalem that camels passed through all the time. We knew that the Second Law of Thermodynamics disproved evolution. We knew that Madeleine Murray O’Hair was very close to getting the FCC to ban all religious broadcasting. And we knew all kinds of things about Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood.
We knew all those things even though, as it turns out, none of them is true. But we knew them anyway because we mostly only knew others who knew what we knew, and we didn’t know anyone who knew better.
This list of urban legends, myths and slanders is embarrassing and ridiculous, but I’m not presenting it here to try to embarrass or ridicule the little world of the white fundamentalist/evangelical subculture I grew up in. That just happens to have been my own community of misconception, so it’s the one I know best from personal experience.
That ethnic and religious subculture is particularly prone to becoming a community of misconception for a whole host of reasons and defects and temperamental quirks that are worth exploring in more detail, but that’s not my point in highlighting that list of examples here. My point here is that every such little world also serves, in its own way, as a community of misconception. Spend enough time in any subculture — religious, academic, professional, athletic, artistic, military — and you’ll come to know all sorts of things that everyone in that little world “knows,” things everyone there learns almost imperceptibly despite those things not being true. Some of those things will be urban legends and rumors and stories that are just a little too perfect to question. Some of them will be tales that aggrandize the little world or that disparage outsiders. Some of these things that everybody knows will be precisely articulated and almost ritually recited, while others will be left implicit and scrupulously unstated.
And in every such little world, every such community of misconception, it’s all too easy to absorb this positive ignorance of the untrue things that “everyone knows” without ever realizing that you’re doing so. This can happen mostly innocently.*
We human beings are finite and fallible. None of us can know everything on our own, and all of us are capable of being innocently misinformed. We don’t have the time or the capacity to interrogate everything we ever see or read or are told by others with the thorough skepticism and dogged rigor of a fact-checker at the New Yorker. Our BS-detectors are never 100-percent perfect. And so sometimes we come to “know” things that we later learn are not true at all, and sometimes those things we thought we knew are embarrassing and, in hindsight, ridiculous.
That happens. And it can happen even to very intelligent, well-educated people too, particularly when their area of study and expertise runs deep but narrow. “It’s not rocket science,” we sometimes say, suggesting that some concept should be easier to understand than that complex field of study. But if someone has spent years studying to become a rocket scientist, then they may turn out to be woefully unprepared to assess or evaluate anything that’s “not rocket science.”
The congregation of that fundamentalist church I grew up in included a handful of scientists from nearby Bell Labs. These were undeniably brilliant people. Some of them — due, partly, to their belonging to more than one community, sect, guild or discipline — were able to participate in our church’s subcultural community of misconception without absorbing or reinforcing its misconceptions.** But some of them still came to know many of the same untrue things the rest of us knew about Noah and Jonah and rock music and Madeleine Murray O’Hair. The brilliant things they knew in their professional lives didn’t necessarily preclude them from absorbing the embarrassing “knowledge” of the legends and lore of our community of misconception. They knew better when it came to other things, but not when it came to everything.
That may seem surprising, but it would be even more strange to expect anyone to know better when it comes to everything. None of us can know everything about everything, and all of us are thus prone to wind up “knowing” some things that aren’t true or right or accurate about all sorts of things apart from the things we know better about.
There are steps we can and should take to guard against that, and those are worthy of further discussion. But here, again, my main point is that even very intelligent, well-educated people can absorb and carry a host of misconceptions, and do so mostly innocently, unaware of their own unawareness. We should expect rocket scientists to be well-informed about the field of rocket science, but if the subject at hand is “not rocket science,” then we shouldn’t be surprised that they may know little about it — or that they may “know” things about it that aren’t so.
That’s what I thought, at first, that we were seeing in neurosurgeon-turned-politician Ben Carson. Dr. Carson, who is now leading the Republican field in some national polls, has repeatedly revealed that he “knows” many things that simply are not true. And I recognized many of those things — some of the same misconceptions I’ve listed above. Carson’s devout Seventh Day Adventist subculture taught him many of the same legends and lore and lies that I learned from the white evangelical/fundamentalist subculture I soaked in throughout my childhood and adolescence.
And because I recognized this folklore, and knew where it came from, it didn’t surprise me the way it seemed to surprise others. Maggie Koerth-Baker did a great job describing what it’s like to hear such “shocking” statements and not be shocked by them because of your own background:
I went to fundamentalist Christian schools from grade 8 through grade 11. I learned high school biology from a Bob Jones University textbook, watched videos of Ken Ham talking about cryptozoology as extra credit assignments, and my mental database of American history probably includes way more information about great revival movements than yours does. In my experience, when the schools I went to followed actual facts, they did a good job in education. Small class sizes, lots of hands-on, lots of writing, and lots of time spent teaching to learn rather than teaching to a standardized test. But when they decided that the facts were ungodly, things went to crazytown pretty damn quick.
All of this is to say that I usually take a fairly blasé attitude towards the “OMG LOOK WHAT THE FUNDIES TEACH KIDS” sort of expose that pops up occasionally on the Internet. It’s hard to be shocked by stuff that you long ago forgot isn’t general public knowledge. You say A Beka and Bob Jones University Press are still freaked about Communism, take big detours into slavery/KKK apologetics, and claim the Depression was mostly just propaganda? Yeah, they’ll do that. Oh, the Life Science textbook says humans and dinosaurs totally hung out and remains weirdly obsessed with bombardier beetles? What else is new?
As Ben Carson began repeating the urban legends and folklore of his religious community, I was hearing “stuff that I long ago forgot isn’t general public knowledge.” I remember that stuff, and I remember what it was like to be surrounded almost entirely by others for whom it seemed like “general public knowledge.”
And so, while I was embarrassed on Carson’s behalf watching him expose his misconceptions on the national stage, I didn’t necessarily think less of his intellect or his character. Mainly I just felt bad for him, watching him desperately trying to cling to those ideas outside of the tight-knit community that sustains them, because I also recognized that this community had taught him that he must cling to all of it because everything is at stake.
Or, to put all this another way, I believed that Ben Carson was simply like “Good Jackie.” He was mostly innocently misinformed. We can legitimately criticize him for that, but it doesn’t make him stupid or evil any more than it made poor Jackie stupid or evil when she sincerely feared using the airport bathrooms because of the imaginary spiders the friends she shouldn’t have trusted warned her were there.
But as I’ve paid closer attention to Ben Carson and begun listening more carefully to the way he recites this folklore, and to the versions of this folklore he chooses to recite, I’ve come to think he’s not really like Good Jackie at all. Based on his own words, and his response to others when asked about those words, I’ve come to think that Ben Carson is Bad Jackie.
I’ll explain why in the second part to this post, which is imaginatively titled “Ben Cason is Bad Jackie.”
– – – – – – – – – – – –
* It can never quite be entirely innocent. The legends and lore of this positive ignorance — the bits that catch on and endure and spread — tend to appeal to less-than-noble instincts. They suggest flattering things about ourselves and unflattering things about others. The desire and tendency to accept such flattery and such defamation without feeling any duty to investigate further is never wholly innocent. And also, of course, being willing to swallow a viciously racist story like that urban legend about the missionaries and rock music doesn’t seem innocent at all.
** “Well …” he said, his voice trailing off as he grimaced, uncomfortably, then smiled apologetically. He never finished that sentence, but just that one word — with its suggestion of hesitation and qualification, and the possibility that such qualification might be allowed or even required — provided for me, as a teenager, a tiny crack through which I could begin to see a bit of light. I’m still grateful for that.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In