When Ronald Reagan said "facts are stupid things" I thought he was making a profound statement about the difficulty of deriving objective meaning from facts. Apparently, he was actually just fumbling an attempt to quote John Adams, who called facts "stubborn things." I thought of this while reading Leonard Pitts latest column in which he expresses his ongoing frustration with what he sees as the profound anti-intellectualism of the Bush Administration.As I sat down to write this post, I googled the Reagan quote to confirm it. I actually thought he had called facts "silly," not "stupid." Glad I checked. What I found was an entertaining list of famous quotations about "facts." Some cynical, some humorous, and some adamant. The variation of these quips suggests that while facts are clear and objectively verifiable, there significance, meaning, and value rarely are. In this sense, gaffe or not, Reagan's characterization could be understood as profound.
In my observations of facts and the use and perception of facts in American politics, I have found that there often exists a troubling confusion about(or intentional conflation of) the difference between "facts" and "truth." While a fact is essentially true, many, if not most, significant truths are more than just collections of facts. They are particular configurations of facts connected by a logic. Truth is debatable; facts are verifiable. The only truth conveyed by a bare fact is that it is true. Left alone facts convey absolutely NO meaning. The fact that the sky is blue means nothing until augmented by interpretation or context.
Since bare facts have no meaning without context, and no reasonable meaning without reasonable context, factual disputes ought to be the least acrimonious and most easily resolved. Verification by observation or the dictates of logic should suffice. For example, everyone, regardless of political, social, cultural, or religious background should be able to agree that logic dictates that the existence of God is NOT a "fact," though it may be true that God does exist. Why would religious leaders balk at the clear logic of the claim that God's existence is "technically" not a matter of fact, but rather a matter of belief, the truth of which is taken on "faith" by believers?
The fact that religious leaders try to "prove" that God exists by amassing factual evidence seems profoundly problematic to me. It seems to evidence a serious lack of faith in the faith of faithful (forgive me). If the existence and nature of God become matters of "fact," what would become of "faith?" Wouldn't a world in which behavior and belief relied exclusively on factual bases be considerably less humanistic? Didn't everybody who watched Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy spar on Star Trek recognize the centrality of faith (an explicitly non-rational thing) to humanity?
Much of the anti-intellectualism in American politics emanates from this type of irrational attachment to perceived truths amidst a sea of conflicting data, information, and truth claims all backed ostensibly by "the facts." This information overload may cause believers to ignore, sometimes intentionally and willfully, the logical distinction between "truth" and "facts." The example of religious beliefs is particularly salient to the debate about anti-intellectualism in American politics because religion has always played an important role in our lives and our politics. It is in this type of seemingly narrow self deception (the existence of God is a fact!)that the power of anti-intellectualism can be found. Twenty-First Century anti-intellectualism, nurtured by mind boggling advancements in communications technology and the physical sciences that look like science fiction to most folks, is like good old fashion demagoguery, slick salesmanship, and revivalist evangelicalism on steroids.
Neuro-psychologists tell us that our perceptions of truth are extremely resilient. The presentation of evidence, factual evidence, is very often no match for our previously established beliefs. In a technological and communications environment in which opportunities to reinforce virtually any belief can be found with all the trappings of credibility, science, or moral consensus, the effort to teach people the elementary logical difference between "fact" and "truth" is often a Sisyphean task. Firmly held "truths" provide wary Information Age citizens with a bulwark against the endless variety of contradictory claims by supposed experts, scholars or scientists who couch their opinions in the language of facts and scientific evidence.
It's Ironic that the triumph of science may be a contributing factor to anti-intellectualism, in that it has caused religious leaders to be lured into a factual(or scientific) argument about God, an argument which they cannot win on science's terms and which by engaging on such terms weakens the logic of faith itself. In comedian Bill Mahrer's movie Religilous, he mocks the efforts of the faithful to produce empirical or logical evidence for their faith-based beliefs. The struggle between Mahrer and his unsuspecting victims reveals a failure (intentional or not) to distinguish between "facts" and "truths" on the part of both.
The conflation of "facts" and "truth," particularly the ultimate truth, may have created a situation in which many Americans, mindful of their cherished freedoms of religion and expression, actually do believe they have a right to their own "facts." This failure to recognize an important, if subtle, logical distinction may also be a factor in the very common confusion of knowledge and wisdom.