The dangerous consequences of accepting even one “alternative fact”

On January 7, Dr. Dan Neides of the renowned Cleveland Clinic published an essay that repeated the discredited connection between vaccines and autism. Neides works at the clinic’s Wellness Center, which has long supported many questionable therapies: It teaches patients mindfulness techniques that help their metabolism “burn hotter,” and it presents reiki, or “energy healing,” as a legitimate healing technique that works by “increasing vibrational frequency” and “stimulating universal life force.”

Three days later, Trump met with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent critic of vaccines, apparently to discuss the formation of a vaccine-safety commission. (The Trump administration says a final decision has yet to be reached about the commission, but Kennedy appears to be proceeding as if it will happen.)

After these two events, the medical science community leaped to defend the safety of vaccines and highlighted the imminent dangers of skepticism. But their criticisms did not go far enough. In addition to increasing the likelihood of vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks, Kennedy Jr. and Neides — and those who fail to condemn the foundation of their scientifically disproven views — are badly damaging people’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction. The potential consequences reach far beyond our collective willingness to participate in vaccination.

Without addressing the flawed cognitive systems that make space for these views, we end up treating symptoms but not the disease — which means those symptoms are likely to recur, perhaps more severely than before.

Open-mindedness, whether about the potential dangers of vaccines or the possible efficacy of energy healing, is always tempting. It demonstrates humility about our ability to understand the world, and compassion for worldviews that are different from our own. But without careful consideration, open-mindedness opens the door to falsehoods disguised as “alternative facts” — whether about the mechanism of energy healing or the size of a crowd — and disables our critical faculties.

To understand why this is so, it’s crucial to recognize that beliefs do not exist in isolation. The philosopher W.V. Quine spoke of “the web of belief,” a metaphor meant to illustrate that any single belief is connected to and sustained by its connections with other beliefs. The belief that vaccines cause autism, though it may look like a single discrete health issue, is in fact the tip of an epistemological iceberg.” Accepting it means endorsing a much larger set of commitments — and throwing others out.

Some of these commitments are what Quine calls “higher order beliefs — beliefs about our beliefs,” of which he gives two examples. The first is that “[beliefs] gained from respected encyclopedias and almanacs,” and respected sources generally, “are much more to be relied on than those gained from television commercials.” The second is that “what we think we see is, much more often than not, genuinely there.” The examples are only two among many higher order beliefs, and their relationship to each other, as well as the rest of the web, is dynamic. A higher order belief from one’s youth, such as the reliability of parents for life guidance, may lose force over time, and potentially disappear entirely.

Usually adding a belief to the web is simple, and doesn’t require modification of higher order beliefs. You are driving your car and see a red light: Belief in the presence of the red light becomes part of your web without any difficulty. But sometimes it’s not so easy. Take evolution: Your respected pastor — whose judgment, you believe, is generally to be trusted — may assert evolution is unproven, while respected scientific authorities assert the opposite. If you accept the truth of evolution, it means you must modify your higher order belief: My pastor’s judgment is reliable on spiritual matters, but not about science.

Similarly, the judgment of our senses, though generally reliable, may lead us to a different conclusion than a randomized controlled trial about the efficacy of a particular medication. Adjudicating the force and valence of these higher orders is essential to the structure of the web.

With regard to the safety of vaccines, it’s clear that respected scientific authorities have exonerated them. Consequently, in order to add “vaccines cause autism” to your web of belief, you must weaken confidence in these authorities, and increase the force of other higher order beliefs so they can supply adequate alternative justification. To those who follow the debate over vaccines, these higher order justificatory beliefs are all too familiar: Natural is better than unnatural; scientists are in the pockets of Big Pharma; mainstream media can’t be trusted; you are the best judge of what’s good for your body. Neides makes this move when he characterizes accepting scientific consensus as “blind faith.” So does Kennedy, calling journalists dupes who repeat talking points fed to them by corrupt government health officials.

When truisms about “natural” goodness and the unreliable “mainstream” are at the center of your web, their effect is to modify the basic process of adopting lower-order beliefs. Fears about any “unnatural” product will be more easily integrated, as will belief in the effectiveness of medical therapies that are exotic or alternative. That’s why we should be unsurprised Neides is wary of GMOs, despite a scientific consensus that they are entirely safe, and that the Wellness Center where he works offers a suite of outlandish and unproven therapies.

In fact, the world of so-called alternative and complementary healing is a case study in how to insert unreliable beliefs into the center of the web. There are two ways to account for the perceived efficacy of reiki. The first is to explain its perceived efficacy without embracing higher order beliefs in the existence of “universal life force energy.” High-quality studies have shown no difference between sham reiki and reiki performed by a master, supporting the conclusion that the benefits of reiki are the result of companionship and relaxation. The second is to postulate a parallel metaphysical system, upon which our health depends, undetectable by modern scientific methods but accessible to a skilled expert.

When you accept the second justification, the floodgates open. If there are parallel metaphysical systems out there, wouldn’t it be possible to tap into them as an alternative to vaccines? Who’s to say otherwise? Not mainstream scientists, since at the center of the web is the assertion that mainstream scientists aren’t to be trusted! The result is that complementary and alternative medicine practitioners, having altered their web of belief, are generally more hesitant about vaccines, as are those who solicit their services.

The web of belief helps to explain why conspiracy theorists are also strongly inclined to fear vaccines, and, to a lesser extent, genetically modified foods. Like someone who believes in the existence of healing vibrational frequencies, the conspiracy theorist’s beliefs depend on a higher order distrust of science and the government. Witness, for instance, the conspiracy theorist and host of Infowars Alex Jones’s opposition to vaccines and GMOs, which fit easily into a web that also accommodates 9/11 being an inside job and the government spraying us with chemicals to encourage homosexuality.

Despite what partisans might wish to believe, science denial has, until now, been a bipartisan affair: Witness fear on the left about GMOs, or Jill Stein’s vaccine skepticism. But with the ascent of Trump, we are in entirely new territory. A central part of Trump’s appeal is his empowering, anti-elitist skepticism of experts. Adding faith in Trump’s assertions to one’s web means eroding key higher order beliefs — the reliability of the media, scientists, government agencies—in a way that no other political candidate ever has.

It is for this reason that Trump represents such a grave danger. The issue is not partisan, and the danger is not merely his specific beliefs about climate change, or the dangers of vaccines, or the size of crowds, or the prevalence of voter fraud. His beliefs and his appeal represent an attack on the basic epistemic norms that generate reliable beliefs, just as the Cleveland Clinic’s embrace of “vibrational frequencies” undermines the medical science the clinic supposedly represents.

Whatever our political or spiritual persuasion, it is essential to see that embracing a belief — or a political candidate — cannot be done in isolation. A single “alternative fact,” though it may seem trivial, can have far-reaching consequences for the web that sustains rational belief.

Alan Jay Levinovitz is an assistant professor in the philosophy and religion department at James Madison University and the author of The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat. His next book is about the dangers of nostalgia.

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