critical thinking

Consume responsibly

It is said that “truth is the first casualty of war.” There are two aspects to this truth – that the chaos of conflict makes it difficult to discern exactly what is happening, leading to what we might now call “misinformation” and, additionally, the tendency of governments to deliberately mislead their citizens and others for strategic reasons, better known as “disinformation.” Both aspects are very much in play in the current conflict between Israel and Hamas.

There was a time when it was easy for governments to control information. At that time, also, there were editors and fairly clear and stringent (if imperfect) journalistic standards in place before a story would reach its audiences. The internet, among its good and bad characteristics, has eliminated almost all oversight.

Today, anyone with access to the internet has the potential to reach wider audiences than the most powerful person of a century or two ago – and to do so instantaneously. As a result, we are swimming in information.

In principle – in the utopian idea some may have had a few short years ago – this access to virtually unlimited resources would make every citizen capable of consuming the most information possible and empowering us to make informed decisions. This principle seems to have proved disastrously wrong. Instead of weighing the balance of opinions in the most vibrant marketplace of ideas ever imagined, many of us seek out only that information that reinforces our preexisting prejudices and fast-held opinions.

Moreover, bad actors – including governments – and unwitting innocents are purveying false information. We are manipulated by lies that are difficult to discern from fact and most of us are guilty of sharing false information without intending to do so.

We are facing the possibility of a “post-truth world,” exacerbated by technological changes and advances in artificial intelligence. Even given incontrovertible evidence, significant parts of populations choose to believe demonstrable fallacies – the most obvious one in our geographic neighbourhood being the “Big Lie” that Donald Trump won the 2020 US presidential election. Even the universal availability of contrary proof does not preclude people from coming to the wrong conclusions.

Google News and many other agencies, to their credit, have begun aggregating fact-checks from verified sources that now appear at the bottom of many news feeds. Of course, these cannot vet the things that come through our email inboxes.

The advent of artificial intelligence is going to turn what had been trickle and is now a flood of misinformation and disinformation into an absolute deluge. In this issue of the Independent alone, by coincidence, multiple stories address the risks of what is occurring and the need for media literacy and critical thinking.

All of this relates, in a very specific if not immediately obvious way, to a more positive news story in this issue. British Columbia is set to become the second Canadian province to mandate compulsory Holocaust education in the school curriculum.

Ensuring that young citizens complete their education with knowledge of the Holocaust is vitally important. The Holocaust, since well before the internet age, has been the subject of both misinformation and disinformation. Comprehensive education may help people emerge from the school system with a baseline of shared information around a seminal event in human history.

But more is needed. The problem is so vast, a broad approach is required to ensure that most of us, young and old, can discern fact from fiction.

A “supply-side” response is not going to work. There is simply no possibility of stanching the burgeoning amount of lies and misleading content online (and elsewhere). Critical thinking, media analysis, information literacy – these are crucial skills for individuals and society at large. We are way behind the curve in delivering these through our institutions.

Confronting the tsunami of misinformation and disinformation is an intractable challenge. It seems, though, that democratic countries are on the right track: we are acknowledging that it is a problem. There are individuals and organizations – in the public, nonprofit and private sectors – working to bring reliable and trustworthy news and information to the fore. But we must do our part – think twice before you forward a link or email, do your own fact-checking, subscribe to a wide variety of respected publications or channels, be civil in your discussions. It may be a cliché, but it’s appropriate here: be a part of the solution not the problem.

Education v. advocacy

I’ve dealt with all kinds of conflicts as an Israel educator the past 25 years, from the mad parent who storms in and says, “Why do you have that map on your wall and not this map?” to the parents who get into fights in the carpool line because they don’t agree about something taking place or what somebody posted on Instagram.

Israel education could face even more pitfalls and political pressure this fall after May’s conflict in Gaza. A new survey of American Jewish voters that found 22% of all respondents believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and that 20% of respondents under age 40 don’t believe that Israel has a right to exist.

It’s challenging to make the classroom a safe environment for such conversations if the home and community are not. That’s why we think it’s important to take the stance we have adopted at the Centre for Israel Education: educators should not use their podiums to spread their political views or launch polemics. Our job is not to tell students what to think, but rather to train them how to think, an effort best accomplished by incorporating as many primary sources and as many different voices as possible.

Taking that apolitical stance, checking your biases at the classroom threshold, is an empowering approach to the education about Israel for teachers and students. Educators can explain to parents that their job is to enable students to think critically for themselves, to assess sources, to understand the differences between history and narrative and between competing narratives, and to appreciate the ideals of a Jewish state and its realities, which are messy, complex and imperfect.

Israel educators should establish a tone of respectful discourse, incorporating listening and critical thinking at the beginning of the school year. It’s OK to disagree with somebody else’s opinions and ideas, as long as the discussion is based on stated sources.

That’s how we teach every other subject. A literature student, for example, who wants to assert that Nietzsche or Sartre was a nihilist has to provide evidence from texts, not just cite a parent, a teacher or a social media influencer.

Educators also must help students understand the vagaries of vocabulary? What words are laden and to whom? “Occupation” means different things to different people, and there are reasons some people talk of Judaea and Samaria while others speak of the West Bank.

Understanding vocabulary is a skill that needs to be taught, as are map reading and literary analysis. When we teach students these skill sets, we enable them to reach and defend conclusions based on documents they’ve examined themselves.

This educational approach is far different from the advocacy model: “If you hear X, you should say Y.” My two kids, who are now in college, would have rebelled if I had told them that. They would have done the opposite just because they were teens.

We can’t engage, empower and prepare students for tricky conversations by teaching them automatic answers or avoiding the complexities altogether. That path leads to students concluding that their teachers lied to them and to believing the worst accusations against Israel.

Instead, we educators must tackle these difficult topics by modeling respectful, informed conversations regardless of personal opinions about, say, whether Israel used disproportionate force in Gaza in May. We must provide historical context and complexity to equip our students with resilience and help them become critical consumers of information so that the slogans they encounter on campus and social media don’t resonate.

This endeavour can’t be limited to one Judaic studies classroom; it has to be embedded into the daily consciousness and experiences of everyone in the school. It requires support from non-Jewish educators and those teaching science and math, literature and social studies. It involves school administrators, board members, rabbis and parents engaging in the same respectful, informed conversations, and accepting that the best practice in Israel education is to treat it as education.

That’s how we can avoid the pitfalls and politicization of teaching about Israel and produce thoughtful Jewish adults who can engage with difficult questions rather than drown in competing narratives.

Tal Grinfas-David is the vice-president of outreach and pre-collegiate school management initiatives for the nonprofit, nonpartisan Centre for Israel Education in Atlanta and is a former Jewish day school principal.

Conspiracists not new

Prof. Simon Devereaux (photo from Twitter.com/UVicHumanities)

The belief in far-fetched plots is not a new phenomenon. There have always been people who gravitate towards and embrace conspiracy theories. In a Feb. 18 talk, hosted by the Jewish Community Centre of Victoria, University of Victoria history professor Dr. Simon Devereaux focused on “the golden age of conspiracy thinking,” highlighting various false intrigues of the latter half of the 20th century.

According to Devereaux, there are three principal elements to conspiracy theories that give them persuasive power among their adherents: big events must have big causes; no big event is random or accidental and must, therefore, be the result of a sinister and nebulous group’s intents or actions; and the most complicated explanation must, by its nature, be the correct explanation.

In his talk – entitled Conspiracy Thinking: A Rational Guide to Thinking Irrationally – Devereaux gave the November 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy as an example of “commensurate scale,” the need to equate consequential events with convoluted background planning. A 1992 letter to the New York Times by historian William Manchester was cited as both an explanation of and a counter to this tendency: “if you put the murdered president of the United States on one side of a scale and that wretched waif [Lee Harvey] Oswald on the other side, it doesn’t balance. You want to add something weightier to Oswald. It would invest the president’s death with meaning, endowing him with martyrdom. He would have died for something. A conspiracy would, of course, do the job nicely. Unfortunately, there is no evidence whatever that there was one.”

Devereaux then debunked many of the arguments employed by conspiracy theorists as reasons for why Kennedy might have been killed, including the belief that the young president was prepared to keep the United States out of Vietnam. He argued that Kennedy was a “hawkish” president who had the same secretaries of state and defence as his successor, President Lyndon Johnson.

On segueing into his second point – the inability of conspiracy theorists to accept that big events can happen randomly – Devereaux explained, “conspiracy thinkers ultimately want to believe that the world is an orderly place in which individuals are capable of keeping events under control. They don’t want to believe that the world is a sometimes chaotic place in which deeply upsetting events can happen for no apparent reason. It must, therefore, follow that some superlatively powerful group of individuals must be the directive force behind all events of enormous human significance.”

Growing disenchantment in the late 20th century of the nation state as a power to do good compounded the problem. As the United States lurched deeper into the ethical morass of Vietnam, Western governments, which were often seen as solutions to societal ills, with such programs as the 1930s New Deal, were no longer viewed as virtuous. The Watergate scandal of the mid-1970s, too, contributed to the increasingly held notion that people in government may be inherently corrupt.

Economically, the OPEC crisis and stagflation of the 1970s further demonstrated the “sad proof that government could not ensure that postwar prosperity could last forever,” and led to the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the distrustful neoconservative view of government, which continues to the present, said Devereaux.

“It is more consoling to think that there is someone in control, even if their intentions and purposes are entirely evil, rather than think there is no good explanation for the terrible things that sometimes befall us,” Devereaux argued.

To conspiracy theorists, the more elaborate and bizarre the assertions of conspiracies, the more compelling the argument. They are wont to believe, said Devereaux, that an unconventional approach to seeking answers is the right approach, and are dismissive of any reasoned proposition that runs counter to their argument.

“It is a world of amateur knowledge refusing to accept the world of professional knowledge. Any pattern of systematic, analytical thinking embodied, for instance, in a university, entails conventions,” he said.

To a conspiracy thinker, university professors represent people who are controlled; academics cannot say or do certain things without incurring professional censure. A common aspect of conspiracy thinking is to “trust no one,” i.e., “do not accept any conventional form of received wisdom.”

The rejection of conventional wisdom fuels their notions of being braver and deeper thinkers than others, as only they can follow the elaborate and frequently ludicrous connections of the conspiracy, said Devereaux. Thus, a conspiracy appeals to their intellectual vanity – they believe they are sharing hidden knowledge, therein fostering the idea that they are smarter than everyone else by not falling prey to “fake” mainstream news. Paradoxically, according to Devereaux, the more gullible the conspiracy believers, the more intelligent they think they are.

In his concluding remarks, Devereaux pointed out that there have been numerous conspiracies throughout history. However, most were either limited in their scope or inept, or both. Somewhere along the way, human nature ruins the plot; someone leaves the group, exposes the operation, or bungles the job.

Sam Margolis has written for the Globe and Mail, the National Post, UPI and MSNBC.