truth under fire
“Yet does it matter whether I’m believed? What’s coming, comes. And you who’ll witness it will have your pain to tell how much truth I hit.”
---Cassandra, from Agamemnon by Aeschylus
What is striking about the string of alarming headlines of late is the realization that we could have predicted this---in fact, we have. The fires out west and the growing list of monster hurricanes and flooding events that have devasted the rest of the country are well within the predictive models that were presented by climatologists over the past 50 years. The reemergence of COVID via the Delta variant and the political reaction in the various states in which it has spiked was certainly foreseeable given the ongoing battles being fought by our own “culture warriors”. The shock and awe we sense with each new event are tempered by the recognition that none of this is a surprise—we had been warned, but like the mythical prophet, Cassandra who was doomed by her truthtelling, the warnings have gone unheeded.
The rejection of scientific authority is a movement that has been building for years. More a product of a rejection of inconvenient truths rather than untruths, deniers can be placed in two camps. There are the low-information believers who are groomed and gaslit and the opportunistic manipulators for whom the truth simply gets in the way of their agenda. The cognitive dissonance created in the wake of the battle over truth is both harmful and debilitating for our democracy. The novel coronavirus that has our globe in its grip has been aided at home by ambitious governors and legislators who value power and their own well-being over their constituents. The insidious attempts to create doubt in a sea of certainty over what should be non-issues like masking for schools, vaccinations, and climate change legislation are all done in service to those who see opportunity amidst our own self-destructiveness. It is the curse that is described by the Greek myth of Cassandra, the prophet doomed by the gods with the gift of prophecy only to be ignored and ridiculed.
Cassandra, for those who have forgotten, was the daughter of Priam, King of Troy, who was given the gift of foresight by Apollo in return for promising him her favors. When she reneged, her gift became her burden. She would offer warnings that would not be believed:
...Cassandra alongside the priest Laocoon warn the Trojans about the Wooden Horse being filled with Greek warriors ready to take Troy by surprise. But Laocoon is devoured by a serpent sent by the gods and no one believes Cassandra anyway, so that the Trojans disregard their warnings and bring the timber construction inside the city...
When night falls, the Greeks exit the Wooden Horse and open the gates for the rest of the army. Troy is conquered and sacked. Cassandra flees to the temple of Athena and wraps her arms around the statue of the goddess. The Lesser Ajax pulls her away from the statue… He rapes her on the temple floor…
--Ancient World Magazine
tribal tendencies
This version of the myth comes from Homer’s Illiad. However, her legend is picked up by other Greek authors who describe her as later becoming the concubine of King Agamemnon whose death she foretells, along with her own in Aeschylus's Agamemnon. Cassandra suffers throughout antiquity for the sin of being a truthteller whose warnings are ignored. This is the curse we share today as science and reason are ignored even as the warnings they bring bear fruit. In our case, however, there are no gods to scapegoat, none who casts evil spells. Denialism is not new and, in fact, is deeply seeded in our human nature:
The human talent for rationalization is a product of many hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation. Our ancestors evolved in small groups, where cooperation and persuasion had at least as much to do with reproductive success as holding accurate factual beliefs about the world. Assimilation into one’s tribe required assimilation into the group’s ideological belief system – regardless of whether it was grounded in science or superstition. An instinctive bias in favor of one’s “in-group” and its worldview is deeply ingrained in human psychology.
--Adrian Bardon Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University
Rather, we seem to have inherited the “denial” gene from our primordial forbearers as both a gift and a curse protecting us from forces we otherwise could not control. For those of us inclined to meet the truth head-on using science and reason, it is near impossible to accept those who choose to confront the oncoming threats by pretending they are hoaxes. It can be argued that all the great “falls,” the end of all empires, could have been avoided had reason prevailed and had warnings been heeded. Never before have our own warnings been clearer or the mounting threats more existential while our powers to overcome them have been so potent. It would be foolish to assume that those who disagree with us need more or better information to change their minds:
The failure of various groups to acknowledge the truth about, say, climate change, is not explained by a lack of information about the scientific consensus on the subject.
Instead, what strongly predicts denial of expertise on many controversial topics is simply one’s political persuasion.
...(I)deological polarization over the reality of climate change actually increases with respondents’ knowledge of politics, science and/or energy policy. The chances that a conservative is a climate science denier is significantly higher if he or she is college educated.
--Adrian Bardon
global implications outweigh our differences
In fact, the most recent Pew Research Center Poll affirms that climate change, for example, has become a partisan issue that has been losing favor even among its detractors:
Partisans remain far apart on several overarching questions about climate change. Much larger shares of Democrats and those who lean toward the Democratic Party than Republicans and Republican leaners say human activity is contributing a great deal to climate change (72% vs. 22%), that it is impacting their own local community (83% to 37%) and that the government is doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change (89% to 35%).
...Republicans and Republican leaners who describe their political views as moderate or liberal (roughly a third of all Republicans and leaners) are much more likely than conservative Republicans to see local impacts of climate change, support policies to address it …
--Pew research Center, June, 2020
If there is hope, it lies in the knowledge that we are unlike mythical creatures in that we evolve. There is also hope in the diminishing numbers of Americans, including Republicans, who are convinced that the warnings are true. The real problem is that these are global threats. It would be wrong (and arrogant) to think that we alone have the power to solve complex problems or that we alone are impacted by our decisions. The scrum among partisans in our country is a sideshow to the main event. It impedes valuable assets such as our global influence, expertise, and wealth that can make a difference in any effort for a unified approach to solving these problems. In keeping with the theme here, it is our own Achilles’ heel causing our limping.
“What’s coming, comes”
The story of Cassandra is in itself a cautionary tale that has been passed on to us from antiquity. It is like a time-released warning as a prescription for our time. Denying the signs that are so overt-- or worse, defying them-- is a curse we choose to bear at our peril. The Republican Party and its acolytes obliterate truth. Their lies and conspiracy theories surrounding climate, COVID, and the true exigent dangers that threaten not only us but the world only cloud the truth, deny the inevitable. The once-proud party of Lincoln has devolved into a party of “no”, then “nothing.” It exists now only as an intransigent death cult, mortally dangerous as it implodes, ignoring the warnings of its own demise.
