How Science Deniers and History Refuters Manipulate Reality.
Truth and facts are seemingly irrefutable realities of life, yet they are susceptible to distortion under the wrong supervision. What we have to blame for these misinterpretations is faulty human perception and the power of biases. Those who refute historical events, much like those who devalue the nature of science, share one characteristic: an unwavering reliance on their beliefs. These individuals take facts or realities that present themselves daily and reject them with unabashed certainty simply because they cannot exist within the context of their reality. The study of science significantly differs from history based on the concreteness of natural realities compared to historical truths. Much like historical events, some scientific phenomena can be seen and proven in real-time. Yet, people still find ways to take events they’ve experienced and perceive them in a way they never were.
In their book, “Origins—Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution,” Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Donald Goldsmith convey how, when an individual is presented with the success of science in relation to natural phenomena, they can react in one of four ways. The second and third responses to scientific success are super interesting because these reactions are adverse and, in many ways, entrenched in fear. According to Tyson and Goldsmith, the second reaction is when “a much larger number ignore science, judging it uninteresting, opaque, or opposed to the human spirit” (pg.19) and the “third, another minority, conscious of the assault that science seems to make upon their cherished beliefs, seek actively to disprove scientific results that annoy and enrage them” (pg.20). What we see here is the acknowledgment of science’s existence as a practice, but its refutation simply because its existence does not correspond with the realities of those whose biases it rejects.
These reactions to scientific study that Tyson and Goldsmith describe can also be applied to historical and social events. As I have said before, history presents its own set of issues regarding interpretation simply because it is an entirely human study. Unlike scientific phenomena, which would exist whether we humans stumbled upon it or not, history relies exclusively on human relationships and behavior. With this being said, negative interactions with social events based on bias or hatred happen daily. We see it on social media, in the news, when we open the paper. The way real-world events are portrayed to the public is with little care for the truth. Instead, we get clickbait titles, opinions cloaked in the guise of fact, and hate speech dressed up as progressive rhetoric. The refutation or attempted disproval of events reflects the fear felt by individuals who purport this type of doctrine. Instead of acknowledging wrongdoings and educating themselves—which is expressed as a pillar of their social foundation— we find these people time and time again falling into the same historical traps we’ve seen throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: the strength of propaganda and rhetoric.
These two political vehicles solidify our ineptitude to comprehend reality in a factual way, not coated in a layer of bias. It stems from this tremendous influx of information we consume and how social media is used as the modern platform for news. It’s challenging to know the truth and the lie when information is constantly presented as fact. During my time in college, I focused a lot on how propaganda and rhetoric are used as tools in politics that divide and isolate populations—making it that much easier to indoctrinate weak-minded, uneducated, scared individuals. Because science is so concrete and history so human, these two fields of study scare those who do not wish to understand the truth. It scares them because both of these subjects reflect humanity in a way that delegitimizes what people hold dear to them and what they use as pillars of their truth.