Anyone else follow the Russian spy poisoning case last week? It fascinates me, but only in a harnessed way. I entertain two assumptions:
1. There's a lot of James Bond stuff that Joe Public never hears about. How much? I have no idea. I'm part of Joe Public, and even if I held part of the Bond information, I couldn't tell you (I'd be killed).
2. There's a type of spy decorum, even among enemy nations: when something in Covert-land takes place, it's addressed in Covert-land, not in the press.
So when I hear about something that takes place in Covert-land, I'm suspicious. Why is this one item hitting the press? Last weekend, the British Home Secretary told the press that the police were looking into the poisoning. The press also obtained a copy of the poisoned man's written allegation that he had been poisoned by Putin.
If my two assumptions are correct, we shouldn't be hearing about this stuff, unless (i) Britain has reasons for smearing Putin, or (ii) there was a breakdown in Covert-land and information got out that wasn't supposed to and now the Home Secretary and other British officials are trying to deal with it the best they can.
I assume there's significant information we're not receiving. I don't have an objection to the arrangement. In these perilous times of terrorism, we don't have the luxury of having a fully-informed press, no matter how much the press wants us to believe that it does keep us informed.
But even though I don't object to the lack of information, it makes me wonder: how can a person form a valid opinion? We never know whether we're getting 2% of the information or 98% of it, and whether 10% or 90% of the information is a lie or otherwise bogus. How does a person form an opinion, knowing that the information he's relying upon is unreliable? Trash (the information) in, trash (your opinion) out.
And it's not just spy games.
Everyone calls this the "Information Age," but I prefer to call it the "Bleeding Information Age."
Information bleeds from everywhere: a hundred million websites; hundreds of thousands of new books every year; 10,000 newspapers; network television; cable television; AM, FM, and satellite radio. The signal trait of the Information Age, one commentator has properly pointed out, is that the data endlessly proliferates.
We can't possibly absorb it all, and the stuff we read or hear could be inaccurate.
And here's the exacerbating rub: We're unworthy information processors.
Not only can a person not absorb all the facts, but no person can master metaphysics, the mysteries of science, world history, and the myriad of other disciplines a person would need in order to process the enormous volume of facts effectively. This has always been the case, but we never realized it. Thanks to the Internet and the Bleeding Information Age, though, I think a few people are beginning to see our innate limitations when it comes to forming opinions.
So what's a person to do?
He needs to find an authority to follow. Not blindly, mind you (after all, we have some information and the power of logic, so we can question), but every person needs some sort of authority he can trust.
I know this conflicts with Americans' deep-seated individualism. In redneck terms, "Nobody is gonna learn me nuthin'." I can respect the redneck if he adopts a resulting attitude of complete skepticism: "I can't know, therefore, I won't believe," but for him to form a firm opinion on something? That's ridiculous.
Of course how reliable an authority we need depends on the importance of the subject at hand. That is why the state regulates and licenses physicians, while anyone can hang out a shingle as a “fashion expert.” But what about really important stuff? Like whether a particular medical treatment is not merely effective, but morally right, and whether there is even a difference between the two. If a person wants to form an opinion – to reason, to think, to reach conclusions with a possibility of being right – he needs a reliable authority, one he can trust to give valid information and/or premises that he can work from. Without that valid authority, he's just flailing away in an ocean of facts, half-facts, ideas, and half-baked ideas. So what will be your authority? Drudge? The Daily Kos? Ann Coulter? The Washington Post? The John Birch Society? Larry King? The government? Fox News? Yahoo? Wikipedia? You might say, "I'll adopt a handful of authorities and use their mix of facts and analyses to reach my opinions." But that ultimately doesn't work either. You will still need an ultimate authority when your little authorities clash. And if they're "little authorities" that you're not trusting fully, why are you trusting them at all?
In areas where she deems herself fit to teach, I trust the Church. For me, that's the only authority worth trusting because it's the only institution that can make a historically valid claim to legitimacy, and I believe she cares about my well-being. If anyone thinks the United States government, the United Nations, the broadcast networks, or the New York Times can cogently make those claims, he's fooling himself.
