Detecting Falsehood in Official Narratives

The secularization and liberalization of the meritocracies of Western societies in recent decades is having, and reasonably will continue to have, adverse effects on the orthodox Christian minorities living in them. Particularly noteworthy is the shutdown of churches in 2020 and 2021. Some questioned the need for the shutdown at the time, and more felt it was being extended unreasonably long for churches. It is to be expected that the future holds other public policy choices with adverse effects for the Christian subculture, offered as expert opinion that laymen are not competent to criticize.

Jay Richards, Director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at the Heritage Foundation spoke at the recent Apologetics Conference of the Southern Evangelical Seminary on October 13 in Rock Hill, South Carolina regarding what enables people to detect when the official narrative people are given is wrong. And beyond that, how can people identify a narrative that is so wrong that it must be resisted; one must not be complicit in actions based on that narrative.

He pointed out the movie, A Hidden Life, written and directed by Terrence Malick, about an Austrian villager who would not enlist in the German army after the German annexation of Austria. Although his priest told him that enlistment was not endorsement of the Nazi regime, and he possibly could be a medic, the man refused, since he would have to wear a swastika, and feared that his children would lose faith if he participated in the German army. As a result, he was executed.

“He was probably not the only pious Christian in the village,” Richards said. How did he know that the German regime was so wrong that it had to be resisted? Richards said that he could only offer “conjectures and working hypotheses about this.”

Past Intellectual Orthodoxies

He pointed to the warning of Michael Polanyi, a Hungarian chemist and philosopher who worked in Berlin in the 1930s. Since he was ethnically Jewish, he fled to Great Britain. But Polanyi noted that in Great Britain there was a “progressive move to control” much of society by the state, and in particular to control scientific development. The state would control “big science.” But this, Polanyi said, would destroy science. Science is the work of independent researchers in pursuit of truth. Polanyi feared that orthodoxies would develop which would then be imposed by the state. He then switched his career to being a social scientist and offered criticism of big science.

Richards said that there have been several orthodoxies “which just control the means of discourse.” The dominance of eugenics in the early twentieth century was one example, he said. The Scopes trial was not simply about evolution, but also about eugenics, which was promoted as socially directed evolution. All knowledge was supposed to contribute to eugenics. While there were nineteenth century precursors, the major development of eugenics occurred in the early twentieth century United States.

Remarkably, it was believed that not only desirable physical traits, but also personal character was transmitted through the generations by genes. Therefore, people with bad character should be prevented from having children. The basis for believing this was not evidence, but entirely “theoretical conjecture,” Richards said. Today, we recognize eugenics was wrong, but “there’s no cost to be borne” today by recognizing it as wrong. Slavery is another example of something now recognized as wrong. There is no reward to accepting the current consensus, but before the consensus view changed, there were people who dissented from past consensuses. “How can we recognize false expertise in the present,” Richards asked.

Computer Modeling and the Coronavirus Lockdown

Beginning in the twentieth century, “scientific expertise has been behind a number of intellectual crazes.” People do not recognize themselves as part of a craze but are simply “trusting the relevant authorities.” But some people “recognize immediately” when authoritative claims are unwarranted. Richards gave as his first and prime example the 2020 lockdowns, which he reported on the same year in the book The Price of Panic with Douglas Axe and William Briggs. The hypothesis that population-wide lockdowns were a good way to stop the advance of a respiratory virus lacked evidence but was the supposition of medical authorities. Yet “almost no one” asked for evidence, accepting instead a top-down consensus.

In July 2020 the American public was polled about what percentage of Americans had died from the coronavirus. The average American guessed that 9% of the population had died (i.e., 30 million people in just 4 months). In fact, 0.06% of the population had died. Saturation with claims of a deadly new disease resulted in a false picture of the real danger and impact of the disease. It was a false picture “generated by a perception of a type of expertise.” Experts commonly want power to control what they are confident that they know. Only if they are in a position of power to control policy and/or information flow can they be tyrants. This kind of “tyranny of expertise” is what the nation dealt with in the coronavirus lockdown. Most Americans believed the experts in power, while some did not. Why did some (including Richards) not believe?

He said that he did not believe the experts because he was interested in computer modeling, and particularly the use of those models to inform public policy. Such use, he said, “is just generally a disaster.” Public policy should not be based on untested statistical models. Richards and his associate, William Briggs, knew the source of the computer model used to justify the shutdown, Neil Ferguson of the Imperial College of London (not the individual of the same name who is an economic historian). His earlier models of the progress of diseases did not predict what actually occurred. They predicted epidemics and fatalities far beyond what actually happened, Richards said. It was simply something that Richards and Briggs “happened to know.” But as far as the public or political office holders knew, the fatality rate Ferguson’s model predicted – a 3.4% infection/fatality rate – was reliable. Nevertheless, he was “suspicious” of calls for a shutdown before he saw the results of the model.

But in late March 2020, the Secretary General of the World Health Organization saw the results of the model and forwarded it to “bureaucrats in the United States public health apparatus.” They accepted the model’s results. Most health officials in the world believed it at that point, since it was advanced by the World Health Organization. There was then “a global response to a pandemic.” It was based on one untested model. The world did not know that the previous predictions from this expert “were really sensational and never were right.” It took Ferguson a month into the shutdown before he was able to get his model into shape to forward it to a software team at Microsoft. After inspecting it, they concluded that it was “a buggy mess that looks more like a bowl of angel hair pasta than a finely tuned piece of programming.”

The on-the-ground justification for the shutdown was the objective of “flattening the curve.” Initially, this was sold as a two-week project. It was feared that a surge in cases would overburden the medical institutions, and people would die (of coronavirus and whatever other ailments they had) because it wasn’t possible to treat them. People believed this prevailing narrative. Richards noted that “most of what we believe, by necessity, we believe because of testimony.” The material objects we deal with in life are in fact collections of atoms, but we do not have to figure out the scientific truth ourselves to live in the world. The scientific truth is “socially transmitted.”

Richards and his associates decided to test whether or not the lockdown was effective in slowing the spread of the coronavirus. The specific hypothesis they tested was that the lockdowns did in fact slightly slow the spread of the disease, but the costs of doing so exceeded the benefits. He said that the idea of lockdowns originated with health officials in the administration of George W. Bush, who advanced a model showing that population-wide lockdowns would reduce the spread of influenza. This became a popular idea in the Centers for Disease Control. When the coronavirus pandemic began, China used lockdowns to stop the disease, so American health officials followed suit. But the idea of lockdowns was based on an untested model.

To test the effectiveness of the lockdown, in June of 2020 Richards and associates used data from different jurisdictions that locked down and opened up at different times. If the lockdowns were effective, one would expect to find a downward bend in the curve of new infections about 10 days after the lockdown, and perhaps an upward curve 10 days after opening up. But such bends in the curves were not found. Any benefit of the lockdowns was “completely undetectable.” The data themselves give no indication of when the lockdowns occurred, or when opening up occurred (even though openings were criticized as deadly). All losses resulting from the lockdowns “in terms of jobs, in terms of education, in terms of lost cancer screenings, in terms of being able to get into emergency rooms, not being able to get married, not being with your loved one when he or she dies” (and this writer would add, not being able to go to church) were not balanced out with benefit. In fact the lockdowns were “all cost, no benefit.” It was a foolish public policy for which “there still hasn’t really been a reckoning.” However, knowledge of the lack of benefit was known “in June of 2020.” The passion of the moment precluded a general public understanding of this. “Social contagion” and the “tyranny of expertise” drove the lockdown forward.

The Climate Change Narrative

On another topic, Richards discussed climate change, which he called “climate catastrophism.” The basic claim here is that there in fact is “global warming” occurring at the present time. It is claimed that this is “human induced.” Finally, it is claimed that warming has bad effects, with hurricanes, droughts, or rising sea levels. He said that evidential support for climate catastrophism involves “a bundle of claims,” of which individual claims may or may not be linked to changes in global temperature. Involved are an “empirical question (what’s happening), a causal question (what caused it), [and] an evaluative question (is it bad).”

On the first question, Richards said that it does indeed seem that the earth is in a warming trend. Satellite data shows some degree of warming (about 0.8 of a degree Celsius) has occurred since 1850. This was “about the time that we started contributing significantly to carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.” But this is not significantly different from earlier warming periods which occurred at the time of Christ and the late Middle Ages. He also noted “diminishing returns” of the effect of increased carbon dioxide levels. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the less effect more CO2 will have in warming the earth. Thus, the early effect of increased CO2 is the greatest. Negative feedbacks of increased CO2 (such as the formation of more clouds which in turn reflect light into outer space, with a cooling effect on the earth) are not included in the global warming models used by the U.N., which assume only positive feedback.

While reduction of CO2 generation is advanced as a solution to climate change, if one carefully reviews U.N. reports, they substantially “admit than none of these policies are going to make any difference.” Even the United Nations own report has said that “moderate warming in the near future is more likely to be beneficial than harmful.” Warming will eventually be harmful a century from now, by which “they mean a slight reduction in global GDP.” This is “nothing like” what people are commonly told. But news reporters, he said, read “a Summary for Policy Makers” by a scientific layman “that tells you what you’re supposed to think.”

Gender Medicine for Minors

As a third example, Richards pointed to “gender medicine attached to kids,” which he also discussed in a separate presentation. Gender ideology first separated sex (biological sexual differences) from “gender” (one’s internal sense of sexual identity), and then rejected the idea of sex altogether in favor of “gender” (one’s internal sense of sexual identity) and “sex assigned at birth” (an arbitrary social construct). While gender ideologists do not want to be so blunt, this is in fact what their ideology says. Within this framework, it is reasonable to “adjust the body and the social surroundings to conform to the mind.” Thus, there is “gender identity affirming care” (administration of puberty blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and sexual mutilation).

Richards said that “gender identity affirming care” is endorsed by all major health organizations in the United States “none of which” (he emphasized) “have done systematic reviews of the evidence.” Nonetheless, they pressure parents to embark on gender transitioning of their children. “We’re in the middle of this one,” he said. With the coronavirus shutdown, “we’re kind of on the edge” of a disaster that occurred in the past, with climate change, people sense that there is more to this than the official narrative advances.

Discerning Truth from a Party Line

What do people do if they doubt claims that are supposed to be scientific but don’t have time to study? He referred to his own article “Politics Disguised as Science: When to Doubt a Scientific Consensus.” It offers twelve criteria to assess the credibility of a claim to scientific truth. It tries to distinguish legitimate skepticism from “crankish imperviousness to evidence.” Richards believes that “we are going to be treated to a series of intellectual orthodoxies foisted upon us supposedly for our own good in the name of science by authorities that will simultaneously endorse it, and they’ll be authorities that are trustworthy on a bunch of other stuff, and if we’re going to know how to navigate the world and tell the truth, we’re going to have to be able to tell the difference.” We can’t ourselves become experts in the specific topics involved.

A questioner asked about the hard lockdowns in China, and whether these resulted in “less deaths.” Richards said that “we have absolutely no idea because it’s China.” He believes however, that because China locked down, they wanted the rest of the world to lock down so they would not be adversely affected. They released video footage (such as that of an old man dropping dead on the street) “that would terrify everyone else.”

Another questioner asked how false data concerning the lockdown was detected. People were aware at the time that many deaths counted as coronavirus deaths were really deaths from other reasons, although the fatalities counted may have been coronavirus positive. Richards and his associates’ own estimate of coronavirus fatalities showed that while they were “worse than average flu,” they were still far lower than what the pro-shutdown narrative was claiming. John Ioannides of Stanford Medical School, who “exposed the replication crisis in the sciences” came up with the same correct fatality rate in March 2020 as Richards and his associates later did in June 2020. He also cited the leftist author Naomi Wolf who was cancelled from Twitter due to her doubts about the shutdown at its beginning. Richards said he believes that people “have these abilities [to detect false narratives] and I don’t think it’s ESP.”

Another questioner, who identified himself as a researcher on climate science, observed that a scale called Representative Concentration Pathways gives “different scenarios” of climate disaster, on a scale ranging from 2.6 to 8.5 (the value for the worst disaster). He said that many climate models offered to the public assume an 8.5 value. Models based on RCP 4.5 or 2.6 are more realistic, he said, and will give results more like observational data. Richards responded that “now unfortunately there’s an incentive structure in place” to get research funded, and funding will be more likely if a model can be shown predicting a disaster.

This is in line with Polanyi’s warning about the centralization of scientific endeavor. Richards said that there should be “adversarial teams” of experts to give competing assessments of evidence before political or bureaucratic officials act on the evidence. In the case of President Trump in early 2020, an adversarial procedure might have given him “access to the scientists at Harvard Medical School, and Oxford, and Stanford” who were contradicting health officials in the U.S. government.

Probably the most ominous point to be taken Richards’ presentation is the prediction that the future holds “a series of intellectual orthodoxies foisted upon us supposedly for our own good in the name of science.” The lay religious and/or social conservative will have a limited ability to respond, since professional scientific and medical associations are now aligned in favor of globalism and social liberalism. It will help if one happens to know that the prevailing narrative is wrong on a particular crucial point, as Richards did in knowing the source of the model used to justify the shutdowns. It also helps if the prevailing narrative contradicts basic common sense, as transgenderism does. But the narrative is likely to insist that laymen are incompetent to criticize it. Personal research, courage, and God’s providence are the only sure answer for those trying to obey God and discern and state the truth.