THERE ARE NO WITCHES

Author: Arne Jarrick
Year: 2017
Publisher: Svante Weylers Bokförlag
Language: Swedish

We are all wrong sometimes even when we are sure we are right. We all make assumptions that turn out to be baseless or draw conclusions that prove inaccurate. Being able to tell right from wrong means being able (and willing) to process and adhere to facts. Unfortunately, I have in recent years, by close observation of the public space, been inevitably guided to the conclusion that the ability (or willingness) to recognise facts as an essential part of an argument is greatly underdeveloped in large portions of our community. More regrettably still, fact resistance has moved from populace to policy.

The rejection of truth is not a new phenomenon. It has been a defining element of postmodern philosophy for decades. In recent years, more and more detailed accounts on how wilful and militant ignorance has permeated the public space have appeared, most notably “Bob Woodward’s “Fear” about the ongoing intellectual collapse of the Trump administration. Swedish writers, scholars, and journalists have, too, produced several volumes on the topic of fact resistance. I have read “Det finns inga häxor” (not available in English but a translation might be “There Are No Witches”) by history professor Arne Jarrick.

Professor Jarrick sets out to examine if Sweden is still a knowledge-based society and if so, what can be done to preserve it. He discusses the role of politics and the importance of a modern educational system, but also popular culture, media, and social sciences.

The book raises many crucial issues and gives a number of interesting references to psychological and social research in the area, such as Brendan Nyhan’s and Jason Reifler’s 2016 experiment that showed a clear correlation between self-esteem and openness to facts. Another interesting study indicated that fighting opinion with facts might be counter-productive as it often triggers an aggressive reaction from the person in the wrong, thus shutting tight any opening to a balanced dialogue. Twitter is extant proof that this observation is accurate.

Despite his noble intentions and plentiful nuggets of valuable information, unfortunately “Det finns inga häxor” is not a particularly well-composed piece of writing. It is obvious that it was written in a hurry and in a state of emotional turmoil. Jarrick is understandably exasperated and appalled. And it shows. He makes sweeping statements and claims, employs truisms, and invokes emotional argumentation. To me, the book sounded more like an uncommonly long letter to the editor than a coherent argument.  

There are several striking weaknesses. For a book that claims to be written in the defence of knowledge, and sets out to discuss the knowledge-based society, it is mind-boggling that it contains only a vague definition of the concept of knowledge, which by the way is placed in the very end of the book. In fact, there is no reference to the large body of epistemological research that predates this book and with which Jarrick has to be at least aware of. The closest to a definition that Jarrick takes us is his statement of fact that “a knife either is or is not sharp” not accounting for the fact that sharpness is very much subjective and thus a poor proxy for an objectively binary relationship and offering no explanation of how knowledge of this fact can be obtained.

Moreover, he seems to possess a remarkably poor understanding of social sciences. In my ears as an anthropologist the whole concept of “cultural evolution” rings off-tune but I will forgive him. He is merely a historian, after all.

Far more problematic is his proposal that knowledge needs to be based on natural observations. In Jarrick’s example, people who claimed knowledge about witches in the past had no actual knowledge because witches did and do not exist. Knowledge about birds, on the other hand, is knowledge because birds exist. I understand what Jarrick is aiming for here and will not discuss this from an existentialist point of view. I will still disagree with his point. If knowledge about manmade cultural phenomena does not constitute knowledge, then theology, linguistics, archaeology, and musicology cannot qualify as knowledge either. I cannot accept that as being a useful slicing of the term.

Further evidence of Jarricks poor understanding of social studies and humanities is found in his complete misunderstanding of Bruno Latour. Jarrick fleetingly, without providing a reference, responds to Latour's article “On the Partial Existence of Existing and Nonexisting Objects” published in 2000 where Latour provocatively proposes that Ramses II could not have died from tuberculosis because tuberculosis was not discovered until 1882. Jarrick goes as far as saying that he would have called Latour an idiot if he hadn’t promised himself never to call someone an idiot. Incidentally, the idiot here is not Latour. His paper is an exercise in connecting historical events with their own social epoch. Jarrick should have observed that Latour has no problem with saying that “Ramses II died from what we today would call ‘tuberculosis’” and he does not challenge that the germ that killed Ramses II was the organism we now know as Mycobacterium tuberculosis (or in Latours text ‘Koch’s bacillus’). What Latour submits for consideration is that the social construct of tuberculosis that allows us to incorporate it in our cosmos and connect it with the death of the Pharaoh had not taken place in ancient Egypt. One could say that while Robert Koch ‘discovered’ the Mycobacterium tuberculosis, he ‘invented’ the concept of tuberculosis. Jarrick completely fails to see the difference as his vision is clouded by his own whiggish understanding of “cultural evolution”. He is, after all, merely a historian. 

Despite these lacunae in his knowledge of anthropology and metaphysics, he left me with one astonishing insight about knowledge, for which I will be forever in his debt. There is good evidence that the collective accumulation of knowledge about the natural state of things in our surrounding has increased and continues to increase exponentially since the 17^th century. But chances are that the distribution of knowledge has barely increased linearly. If this is true, it would be fair to assume that the gap between the apex of our knowledge as a society and its base is expanding rapidly. What we have created is in effect a tremendous knowledge inequality. It appeared to me, that the difference between what Leonardo da Vinci knew and what an average farmhand knew was smaller than the difference between what Neil deGrasse Tyson knows and what I know.

This makes for a huge imbalance in the access to knowledge but also the ability to assess the level of knowledge. I submit that it was easier for the Duke of Milan to understand the scope of da Vinci’s knowledge than it is for the President of the United States to understand the current research boundaries of modern physics. Look at it this way, if I speak a little Russian, it is easier for me to appreciate the language skills of someone who claims they speak Russian than if I had not spoken any Russian at all. The knowledge gap would have been too wide for me to bridge. When people can no longer properly appreciate the scope of our collective knowledge and grasp the magnitude of their own relative ignorance, they will by necessity overestimate their abilities. To paraphrase Socrates, one has to know a lot to be able to comprehend how little one knows.

A YouGov poll in July this year, asked men whether they thought that they could win a point against Serena Williams. It turned out that the less the respondents knew about tennis, the more confident they were that they would be able to win a point against the best female tennis player in history.

And this, I think is the key to our failure as a knowledge-based society. Our liberal democracy has focused on the *right* to know, but we failed to enforce the *obligation* to know. We have made knowledge available, but we have allowed it to remain optional. We can all claim to be geniuses and none of us needs to accept being called out as ignoramuses.

Sadly, all the self-proclaimed geniuses out there seem to forget Goethe’s famous words “Das erste und letzte was vom Genie gefordert wird ist Wahrheitsliebe”. Consequently, it may very well be so that I am the one who has been wrong throughout this whole review.