Science, Belief, and the Cultural Burden of Superstition

By Barry Pomeroy

In this idiosyncratic study I imagine the scientific enterprise to be an edifice of reasoning and experimentation that we share with every animal all the way back to the protozoa. Only recently, in geological terms, did we choose to indulge in fantasies and stories, and although they served to entertain us through the dark nights, and could be used as memetic tools, they sometimes confounded us when confronting real threats. The river is not coming after us to demand prayer, the water is not rising to wet the expectant frogs, there has been rain in the mountains and we should move to higher ground. In order to examine what conspiracy theories, Santa Claus, fairies, luck, ghosts, and gods might have to offer the post-Neolithic mind I trace the logical implications of those superstitions through anecdote and history.
The science section begins as a kind of hymn to the experimentation and reasoning of those whose efforts made our lives better. I include more recent scientists, as well as those Indigenous cultures which retained information over ten thousand years so that the landforms and taxa around them might make sense to their descendants. Such systems, regardless of how robust, are also subject to the superstitions from the age of fantasy, however. A closer look at prejudice in the scientific system, a discussion of cultural inertia and an unfounded and denigrating way of thinking about our ancestors, show how those intellectual shortcomings continue to trouble our understanding.
A profound ignorance of how our world works has mixed fantasy and science, is eager to shift blame to another, and culminates in our own lack of self-knowledge. This takes the form of the ego’s effect on our reasoning, our susceptibility to the blinding of self-undermining media, and our tendency to think emotionally rather than rationally.
This study is meant to be more than a list of problems, however. In both the scientific and fantastical world, this more than ten-thousand-year-old story is about our striving, our recent missteps, and our greatest accomplishments. Returning to an older way of looking at the world, we are climbing out of the hole of self-imposed superstition and emerging into the light. We might blink at first, but the real world is more beautiful and fantastic than the one we invented, and phenomenological magic waits around every corner.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barry Pomeroy
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781990314148

Barry Pomeroy

Barry Pomeroy is a Canadian novelist, short story writer, academic, essayist, travel writer, and editor. He is primarily interested in science fiction, speculative science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, although he has also written travelogues, poetry, book-length academic treatments, and more literary novels. His other interests range from astrophysics to materials science, from child-rearing to construction, from cognitive therapy to paleoanthropology.

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Introduction

The modern scientific enterprise is merely the latest incarnation of a two billion year legacy. Our ancestors inherited a confusing and complex world, and we tried to make sense of it using the tools at hand. Although a few will now reach for fantasies when interpreting the world around them, there is a long history of others whose search for meaning was located in what the world was rather than what they wanted it to be. Despite recent missteps, despite straying from the path that the earliest beings had established, we are their descendants, the inheritors of a long and colourful history.

This study examines the mistakes we have more recently made when we forgot the ancient lessons offered by the phenomenological world and celebrates the resiliency of our ancestors’ achievement. Although some have recently forgotten the eons-long record of experimentation and the recording of results, we can congratulate the rest that they have chosen to return to the fold of scientific accomplishment.

The earliest workings of experiment and scientific thought can be credited to the protozoa. They timidly reached into their Proterozoic environment, gradually realizing in their simple way that their world was divided between cold and light, hot and dark. This was the earliest example of experimentation, and in many ways the most pure. With their sensation limited to the weakest grasp of nutrient and temperature, the protozoa were able to tie information processing to detection and make decisions on the basis of their findings. Perhaps they were arrogant about that accomplishment, for the scientific process stalled at that stage for half a billion years, protozoa using the tools at hand to decide between flagellating to the top of the water to seek the sun and nutrient or drift to the bottom to avoid the heat and starve.

Life in the Cambrian became abruptly more competitive. The tentative gestures toward the surface made by the burrowing worms was interrupted by predatory, legged proto-crabs who were more efficient in their movements and more determined in their search for food. The worms could only dive, and leave the sunlight to those more equipped to take advantage of it. Their burrowing was an experiment of desperation, but others followed and before long the oxygen rich sediments were an ecosystem in their own right. Multiple experiments were tried and data gathered, and even as the climate shifted and the Earth grew hotter with increased carbon dioxide, more active lifeforms, the ancestor to the molluscs and arthropods, Kimberella, Spriggina, Parvancorina, and Yilingia crawled and strove on the quiet beds of ancient seas.

They were better equipped to test their environment than the protozoa. The slugs could track the nutrient rich sediments which tasted the best, thus indicating its mineral signature, and the worm-like proto-crustacean needed to discern which prey could be caught with the least effort. They were constantly checking the results of their experiments, and even blind and deaf as they were, they knew the environment was testing them. A wrong step, a chance mistake of prey for a toxic stromatolitic mat, and they could die, and their species with them. They took chances, but they were careful to avoid fatality. They reached out, but not before they examined their environment and made tentative assays. They had no time for fantasy, if even their mental processes were complex enough to house the thoughts.

With the arrival of the true arthropods, half a billion years ago during the Ordovician, the slow moving prey animals either lost their birthright above the sediment, or developed shells and learned to hide in the sand and mud. A tremor in the ground meant approaching danger, and they learned quickly not to test nature’s patience. The Earth had become intemperate, and sea level changes and glaciation led most of the splendid and extensive family of trilobites to extinction. Some, like the bryozoans, gave up on movement and lived in vast colonies, subject to the passing whims of predators and climatic shifts. And the echinoderms and crinoids, the star fish of the period, slowed down their experimentation into a kind of evolutionary dark ages and the corals joined them in turning away from the light.

In the long eons that preceded the Devonian, cephalopods and articulate brachiopods began to move around on the sea floor. Suffering through the extinction event at the turn of the epoch, early jawed fish began to explore the thermoclines, and out of desperation began to turn on each other. This meant some had to experiment more radically, in their search for an environment free of predators. They could have remained to fight with their fellows, but some were driven into the intertidal zone, where, following the plants who had already made the move, they experimented with breathing air. Armoured fish drove early lung fish prototypes into the mud flats, where they overstayed their welcome until they were able to crawl and walk farther inland. Myriapods, arachnids and hexapods established themselves on land, crawling into a hundred different niches, taking advantage of the nutrient bloom from the earlier immense colonization of plants from the carboniferous period.

Life on the land was initially one of opportunity. Each new explorer had a different report on what they’d seen, and with none before them, their report was believed. They endured the frigidity of the night, unprotected by the temperate water, and upon the basis of that discovery, they moved farther inland until the sea was merely a memory and a story. If any lied, claimed the arthropods who’d gone before them were friendly or who overstated the beneficence of the sun, they doomed their fellows to extinction. Lying changed nothing about the natural world, and nature has never been kind to those who mislead.

Once the fish moved onto land, their task became harder, but the plants that had gone before them grew wild and profuse. There were no competitors or toothy predators, and before long, amphibians turned to reptile and soft watery eggs to sacs and shells. Carrying the sea still in their blood, the animals colonized the land thoroughly, learning how to survive the vagaries of temperature and reaching into every niche and crevice. They crawled on a rock and tested their success, they plumbed river bottoms and assayed the nutrient load of the silty streams. By this time they had become planning animals, debating each of their moves and ensuring their future success by carefully evaluating their environment for its dangers and reproductive potential.

Although the trees and other plants were their scaffold, they were also the downfall of many, for the greening of the continents became a carbon sink, and carbon dioxide levels dropped until many of those who remained in the sea had reason to regret their timidity. As they died in the millions from an increasingly acidic ocean, those on land thrived, until the late carboniferous rainforest collapse. The arthropods, most notably the huge dragonflies and millipedes who grew large in the abundant oxygen and who had ruled the land without predators, now had to face evolutionary experiments. Amphibians and reptiles lost their interest in eating insects and fish and began to hunt the dense jungles even as the world grew dryer. The amphibians who left the water either developed a scaly skin or did not survive the new conditions, and the reptiles moved farther inland and sought their cousins for prey.

This was a time of carnage and fear, as the huge sauropods dominated the swamps, smaller dinosaur cousins crept in and ate their eggs and young, and still other titans clashed in mighty battles which would determine who would die and who would dine. In this war-torn era, decisions were made in moments, as predators debated internally whether they could win against their prey in a way that did not leave them crippled with injuries. Bluff charges likely began during this time, as animals tested one another for weaknesses and signs of fragility or cowardice and in that way ensured the survival of all.

They thrived in these deadly surroundings for millions of years, until a chance meteor wiped the sauropods and most of the theropods from the world. The Chicxulub impact caused earthquakes, tsunamis, and a global firestorm that likely killed every one of our ancestors who stood to watch. The resultant wildfires, combined with the acid rain and ocean acidification cooled the Earth for centuries, and for many years blocked the sun, thus disrupting photosynthesis and creating an impact winter. With the collapse of the food webs, and the destruction of the leafy plants by fire or lack of light, only those dinosaurs who would become the birds were able to continue. The seismic wave split the rock at the Deccan traps and volcanic plumes filled the sky and only the most alert survived the general collapse.

This was not a time for fantasy. Not a time that anyone who could not manage their world around them would survive. The era demanded attention to detail, memory of past events, and cautious experimentation. The world had changed radically and suddenly, and none could afford centuries-long evolutionary deliberation or mistakes. Only those who were the most careful, those who cautiously crept through the new reality, could survive. Animals taught their progeny where best to find food, how to watch the skies and the land for predators, and those lessons were passed through a million generations as the skies slowly cleared and the level of light and warmth returned to something like the previous normal. Any animal which did not re-evaluate what they’d learned from their environment and extrapolated that to the changed world died.

Once again burrowing saved those who were threatened with the K.T boundary extinction. The early mammals, tiny shrew-sized animals, had passed on the advantages of burrowing, and before long they were expanding into the new ecological niches opened up by the extinction event. The early Cenozoic saw a land covered with flowering plants, pollinators who had evolved to assist the plants, mammals filling hundreds of niches formerly populated by the reptiles who’d been resentfully driven into the swamps and backwaters as well as deserts of the world. The climate cooled and dried, and mammals had diversified enough to accumulate and transmit culture.

Birds, especially the corvids, teach their young, and even interact with other species. Birds dropped shells onto rocks to break them open where their beak did not suffice and used sticks to pull termites out of their hills, but in the primates the urge to explore the environment reached new heights. The orangutan was soon building nests less elaborate than those of the imitative birds, but they were making decisions on location and climate. The apes carried hammer stones and sticks for kilometres before using them to open nuts or pull insects from their homes. They passed on their skills to their young, but it was long centuries before they were able to improve on what they’d been taught, and once having improved, were able to tell others of their discoveries.

Those days of weak experimentation and fragmentary theory were soon superseded by the actions of humanity. We mastered the use of fire first, then communication, likely, and then began to tell elaborate stories about ourselves that we eventually named culture. Upright apes of the fossil record, we slouched past the bones and shells of our early ancestors who laid the groundwork we followed. We smashed stones in our clumsy hands, and lengthened our reach with a club and then a handle for an axe. The world around us was suddenly instructive, as we looked for new wonders in the passage of light and dark, the chance sharp stone in a creek which might be duplicated, and how sticks might be bent into a weapon or a shelter.

Technological feat followed invention until knowledge began to accumulate, and when even the prodigious memories of our ancestors could not collect all we knew, we took to transcribing our thoughts and ideas painfully onto the cave wall, onto bone and wood and ivory. We left a record for others to follow, and that shortly led to the great libraries of the world and still more accumulation of knowledge. As a species we could finally see beyond the amoeba dream and look at the stars, take measurements and develop mathematics, in order to describe both what lay around us and what was in our minds.

This is when we began to go astray. For the first time in two billion years, we began to turn away from the world around us. Finding it insufficient, we dreamed of realities unlinked from survival as well as the evidence offered by the world. Not content to rely on the mischance of the world around us, on the faithful ritual of seasons and life cycles, in the dearth of our understanding we began to develop elaborate narratives. We used stories to describe our place in the world and how we came to be. Without the knowledge of our dim ancestors and all the work they’d done so that we could make those proclamations, we invented gods and demons, ghosts and luck, and in other ways diverted the channel of animal experimentation for the first time. Our stories spoke to our deepest fears, and the best minds distracted their genius on distinguishing aspects of fiction, feeling, and subjective reality. Religious theorists battered their heads against the same rock that the protozoa had tested and found wanting, and only the theologian found it rich in sentiment and facile explanation.

The other animals did not, or perhaps could not, follow us down that long and fruitless path away from the light. They kept experimenting, sniffing the meat first, and then licking it, and then finally tasting a bit and seeing if it agreed with their stomachs. They still lived in the world that we had abandoned for our fantasies, and could not afford to distract their senses with fakery when they might be eaten or needed to eat.

We chose that other path for a long time, and in many ways we are still in that stage of society. Carrying the reptile within us in the hypothalamus, we are restless about dangers which no longer trouble our sleep, such as the heavy-jawed dire wolf and cave bear, and in their absence we have invented new horrors to take the place of the old. We are both the plains ape lately come to language and transcription, cowering in our fear under stories we invented recently enough to know their provenance, and the reactive reptile lurching forward at food and leaping away at danger.

In our naiveté, we thought the scientific revolution which in the west brought about the Enlightenment was a period of innovation, but it was instead intensely reactionary. We went back to an earlier way of thinking, not forward away from our animal past. We made a recent misstep into dangerous and pointless fantasies, and now we were trying to get back on the path the protozoa had laid down for us and our many millions of ancestors had trod. The new theorists were vilified and attacked, but the animal instinct to believe in reality was strong and the fantasies increasingly weak.

Struggling against the confinement of religious thought and superstition, the early empiricists of the Enlightenment discovered the component parts of the air we breathed, began to probe the geological past, and saw in the steam whirring from a closed chamber energy capable of being harnessed to work. The hot air balloon took to the air, math began to describe the movement of the planets, and we were told that we would shortly become a rational society. Advancements in medicine, physics, biology, an understanding of electricity and magnetism, chemistry and new mathematics were demanded as a way to understand a world which had suddenly become more complicated and wondrous.

There were those who wished for a return to a simpler life, when the actions of the stomach could be ascribed to demons, and when the stars kept to their place in the fixed ether, but they found themselves in conflict with others who’d armed themselves with the gifts of their animal past. The world could answer any question, if it were asked properly, and we were increasingly aware that the vague, untestable dreams of the mystics were an anomaly in the fossil record. No animal would catch itself guessing when its life was at stake, and in Enlightenment terms, no human should as well.

Our geological and biological history is a record of our growing pains, a kind of diary from this side of the millennia about those who struggled before us so that we may sleep safely, so that disease may be kept at bay, warmth cover us at night, and the mysteries of the universe that lay just beyond our feeble grasp possibly unraveled. This book is about those who are carrying on the fine tradition of experimentation and theory, and about those who struggle to get accustomed to the rapidly changing face of the plains now that the mammoths and sabre toothed tigers are gone, and we have decided to invent our own fears and succors.

Ninety-nine percent of all the biota that has ever lived has gone extinct, but their bones are not a tale of defeat. Rather they represent a story of survival, of the successes which allowed us to continue living on the planet today. Each one of our ancestors did more than eat and propagate, they also made choices—however trivial they might appear to us now—that helped us survive into the present.

Others made missteps, and although many of our inventive ancestors are no longer here to debate with us the wisdom of their gods and demons, their mistakes persist in the culture. This study is an attempt to celebrate the successes of our animal past and to bring our more recent superstitious silliness into the open where such nonsense cannot long endure the sun and the rain.

The Vast Edifice of Culture

The vast edifice that is culture is as fragile as a butterfly’s wings. It is as beautiful and as tenuous. Over the many centuries of struggle since we first began to exert our control over the world we have tried to build something that we might have in common. We planned for a time when our achievements would become simpler and better organized, and to that end we accumulated, stored, and perused information. We began, perhaps, with the type of rock that responded best to chipping, and although there were those who doused our cooking fire and pitched our blasphemous spear point in the river, we had hope that each success would lead to a better life for everyone.

Those unsatisfied with our progress viewed each technological, moral, and educational change as a threat. They railed against their neighbour when a crop failed, and praised the sky for rain. They bowed before an indifferent sun and built huge temples to praise a story they had forgotten originated with themselves. Their influence is still felt, for they spent those same centuries codifying and organizing superstition, pushing back against social change and equality, and trying to bid us return to our nakedness on the African savannah when we were more often prey than predator.

Over the millennia we pressed shapes into clay tablets, pushed rafts out to sea before a storm, twisted fibres together into rope, burned food to release nutrient, and bent a stick with a cord to make a bow. We worked tirelessly on the accumulation of human knowledge. We rose each morning rejuvenated, ready for another day of learning how to manipulate the natural world in order to make our survival more assured.

Once our ancestors had more time, they began to evaluate a world they could see but did not yet understand. Those of a more lax turn of mind had already populated that world with gods, but others, like Aristarchus of Samos advanced the theory that perhaps the earth moves around the sun and does not—as common sense would dictate—sit at the centre of a universe that revolves around it. Copernicus was aware of this notion through Archimedes’ work when he wrote his own similar sounding treatise. The Islamic scholar, Aryabhata (476–550), similarly proposed a planetary model which spun the Earth on its axis. He was able to use that to calculate many astronomical constants still in use today, such as the periods of the planets, times of the solar and lunar eclipses, and the motion of the Moon.

In 200 BC Eratosthenes not only pondered the obvious spherical nature of the planet, he went about measuring its circumference. He set up metal poles in Alexandria and Syene, measured the exact difference between them, and then used the angle of the sun striking the poles at the same time to geometrically calculate the curvature of the earth. Some forgotten inventor laboured over the wheel, observed the movement of a lodestone and called it a compass, and Gutenberg shoved type into his linseed coated printing press. Newton wondered how to explain the orbits of the planets and invented calculus; Einstein pondered ants walking up the wall of an elevator and wondered if they were moving at the same speed as he.

Even while scientists and builders, philosophers and naturalists laboured over centuries to build libraries and schools, laboratories and tests, there were also those who undermined those efforts. We spent valuable time and energy struggling against the terrorists who wished to tear down the entire edifice and build anew, each time based on a different fever dream of control and autocratic rule. They were those who still watched the sky for portents, the chicken-gut prophets, the crystal fondlers, astrology followers, the anti-vaccinators and global climate change deniers. Using the confirmation bias of their closed loop mentality, they now trade conspiracy theories online. Like an evil currency of defeat they strive to pollute that most extensive library in our long history.

They are the schoolyard bullies of the life of the mind, the vandals who burn the bakery where they buy their bread, the stable where they keep their horse. For every one of us for whom knowledge was our watchword, who strove to make sense of a varied and chaotic world, there were those who wasted neurons trying to unravel the meaning in the slapping of manure in a green pasture. For every scientific advance, there were those who called upon gods and crystals and magic, trying to Harry Potter the world around them as if reality would buckle to suit a fantasy, as if they could rub their need into a stone and desperation would turn it into gold.

Rather than simplify the overwhelmingly complex and wondrous universe to a facile story, and thereby pitch everything we have learned in order to base our lives on caterwauling in the dark, we need to move away from those who insist on licking the posts on the palace we’re building. The superstitious range from those with dim unthinking faith in invisible entities to holding a rabbit’s foot when boarding an international flight. Rearing its Hydra-like head into modern affairs like a barbarian at a child’s birthday party, superstition is the party clown that terrifies the children and disconcerts the adults. With clumsy skills and terrifying effectiveness, those caught in its mindless grip either tear at the posts that hold up the cultural edifice, or run their rough tongue along the doorways for reasons that are as inscrutable as they are patent nonsense.

Such behavior would have a negligible effect, possibly, if the culture were more stable. As it is, the building is but a fragile shell in which we pedestal our reason, logic, the urge to communicate, and the use of evidence. Even while those most valuable discoveries are taken from the shelf and examined for their contribution, modified and stretched to better serve our goals, we are under siege. Outside, the forces of animate entropy, in the form of fanatics and the very mad, tear at the walls, wanting, in their incoherent way, all coherence to fail.

We cannot afford to let them win any more than we can afford to provide them an intellectual haven. Across more than two hundred countries and in every home, we’re trying to build a lifeboat of knowledge so that at least a few may be saved from the nonsense of the many. In the palace we have begun the greatest barn-raising of all. We thereby join hands with our many million ancestors who tried to improve human knowledge and achievement and ignore those who gibber at an empty sky which promises heaven once we’re dead. If we work on the palace we can guarantee our descendants will have a room. If we abandon the enterprise we can guarantee that our offspring will starve in rags and wallow in filth.

Anti-intellectualism and the Ability to Evaluate Evidence

Perhaps because I had never spent too much time thinking about evidence and how people engage with historical or scientific facts, I endured a barrage of unsettling ways that people view history before I finally began to worry about the message they were sending.

I was driving with my friend Biss, moving his mother-in-law to Arizona where she would be living with her sister. She wasn’t able to drive the car across the country herself, and when we were offered the chance, he and I leapt at the opportunity. We took a leisurely route west of Boston and into Pennsylvania, Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas.

On the trip we stopped to visit several tourist sites, and those were my first encounters with the fake news of the pre-internet period. At a tourist information office in Hannibal, Missouri we were invited to tour where Tom and Becky had been lost in the caves. We could visit where Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) had grown up, and also see the fictional location of Tom and Becky’s poignant adventure in his novel. It was merely one in a long list of sites of interest, and we didn’t remark on it at the time, but a physical site for a fictional event struck both of us as odd. We passed on into the west without taking the time to see the cave, although I wondered later if we would have been treated to a re-enactment of the novel, or perhaps even meet Tom and Becky in period costume.

Our next historical site was the house where Dorothy had been taken from Kansas and into the land of the Wizard of Oz. It was a nondescript one-floor house, but a sign proudly proclaimed that it had been wrenched from its foundation by the tornado that took Dorothy off to OZ. Although the house was merely a replica, the reluctance of the signage to report on its fictional antecedents merely seemed funny, at least at the time.

Canada possesses similar sites, although they are often more mundane. A sign along the highway reports the longitudinal Centre of Canada, just east of Winnipeg, and other small plaques proclaim the start of the Fort Ellice trail or the location of Canada’s first Polish settlement. I have also visited the site of the Battle of Duck Lake, and the house in Neepawa where Margaret Laurence lived as a child. There are many historical signs, and they relate information the driver might not know, but they are at least accurate. Although some towns had large town sculptures, they never claimed them to be real. They might celebrate Winnie the Poo with a sculpture in White River, Ontario, but the placard tells about the writer’s birthplace rather than brags about where Poo had eaten honey with his friends Tigger and Eeyore.

In British Columbia I had stopped at the site of the driving of the least spike, and although the cheap hastily-added sign from the Vancouver Chinese association that celebrated the Chinese workers who did the work was merely wired to the nearby fence, the whole exhibit was at least legitimate and verifiable. The photo in the tiny museum beside the gold painted spike showed the lords of industry as if they were the ones driving the last spike, but elsewhere there existed a photo of the white workers mimicking the photo they had just seen taken. The Chinese workers had no such heraldry, but the museum at least grudgingly acknowledged their presence.

When I started teaching at Worcester State University, I began to hear of other sites. Somehow the ride of Paul Revere became commemorated with brass horse prints set into the sidewalk along Mass Avenue, as if his tracks had actually been preserved. His call, The British are coming! was likely not what he said at all, for while riding through enemy territory with dozens of other rebels, he was probably more judicious about his noise-making.

For a public raised on Becky and Tom, however, the fiction is never too far behind the fact. After Sarah Palin lost her bid for Vice President, she began to do speaking tours of the United States. On one of those tours, she happened to be in Cambridge and was espousing what she knew about the ride of Paul Revere:

We saw where Paul Revere hung out as a teenager, which was something new to learn. And you know, he who warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells and making sure, as he is riding his horse through town, to send those warning shots and bells, that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free. (Quoted by Melissa Block – NPR)

The ensuing uproar caused Palin to rapidly backpedal, although her next rambling speech about Revere warning the British to watch out for the colonials fooled no one. The interesting fallout from her blunder was how it affected the internet, in the form of Wikipedia. Palin’s supporters began to edit the Wikipedia page on the ride of Paul Revere to represent her version of events.

When George Orwell gave Winston Smith the job of changing the historical account in 1984 he likely never imagined that when such politically motivated fact creation came to pass it would be so blatant. Revising historical documents for the Ministry of Truth is Winston Smith’s vocation, so he is in the unique position of being able to view both the destruction and creation of the historical text. Employed in the Sisyphean task of rewriting newspapers in accordance with the latest party demands for a politically congruent historical narrative, Smith becomes increasingly aware that history is a construct and subject to arbitrary and contingent political exigency:¹

. . . it appeared from the Times of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened. (Orwell 27)

This revisionist history is so widespread in the novel that it affects all textual mediums which are perceived as dangerous to the state.

Palin’s historical revisionists were soon detected; Wikipedia was informed and the page was closed to further edits until the furor died down. They have had to engage in similar rearguard actions with the page on intelligent design, where Christians and atheists battle it out for control over the truth by trouncing one another through the Wikipedia page instead of meeting on the playground like regular children.

Even while many people modifying articles on Wikipedia are trying to contribute to the store of world knowledge, there are others who, more infantile in their notion of the project, are unaware they are contaminating that same well.

An equally significant moment in my understanding of how history was presented in Massachusetts was when I drew Plymouth Rock on the board. I drew a ship anchored at an island roughly twice the size of the ship. One of my students objected to its size and I had to admit that I hadn’t actually seen it. Instead, I’d gone by the myth that every pilgrim from the Mayflower had stepped foot on the rock, and by that I estimated it must have been an island. In fact, the original was identified in 1741 by Thomas Faunce, who was two years shy of witnessing the disembarking of the pilgrims. He claimed that his father had told him that the rock was the site, and the town later cracked off a large piece to preserve.

My student