Dishonesty is the Second-Best Policy

by David Mitchell

  Erik Hagerman himself broadly goes along with this consensus. “It makes me a crappy citizen,” he says of the Blockade. “It’s the ostrich head-in-the-sand approach to political outcomes you disagree with.” He has been pouring his energies into an ecological project instead – he’s bought 45 acres of former mine workings, which he hopes to develop into a public park – and the New York Times interprets this as an atonement.

  During stretches of my life when I’m not writing topical columns, my own attitude to reading the news often becomes (to adapt Hagerman’s unsatisfactory blockade metaphor) a medium-strength raft of sanctions. I keep half an eye on events, just in case I suddenly have to stock up on water purification tablets and look for a defensible cave, but no more than half. And I love the comparative calm of it, feel no guilt whatsoever and have no intention of paying for some penitential local swings.

  I think I’ll always value a vague sense of what seems to be generally going on – the alternative would feel like a denial of society. But the way the news reaches us these days, with so much of it either “fake” or “breaking”, is worse than ignorance. It’s a decontextualised screech that monetises its ability to catch our attention but takes no responsibility for advancing our understanding or avoiding disproportionate damage to our peace of mind.

  It’s a barrage of human pain and tragedy, which our brains are not evolved to process without either retreating into a carapace of indifference or perpetually experiencing the kind of trauma previously reserved for medieval villagers witnessing the Black Death. And it’s also up-to-the-minute micro-snippets of information about events, the real significance of which will only become evident in many weeks’, months’ or years’ time; it’s like trying to assemble a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of Satan’s face by being given one piece every hour, each one accompanied by a bone-rattling fanfare.

  Under capitalism, current affairs are presented like this because it makes economic sense. The media generate money by getting our attention, and we grant it most reliably not in response to the accurate, illuminating and proportionate, but to the loud, sensational and frightening. That’s a problem we can only solve by ignoring it.

  * * *

  “Nobody likes this uncomfortable feeling of being this tiny ball flying through space,” Mark Sargent, who believes that the world is flat, told the BBC. I thought that was a revealing statement. I mean, don’t they? Personally, I don’t mind it. In fact, I’m not sure you can really feel it at all. Then again, I wouldn’t say I positively liked it either. I’m not against the world being flat. I’d be fine if it were. I’m content for the world to be whatever shape the world is. Unlike Mark Sargent, I don’t have a preference.

  The remark gives an interesting insight into his approach. I’d say, if you’re trying to convince people of something that flies in the face of scientific orthodoxy, it’s advisable not to let slip that, before you started your researches, you had a huge emotional preference for what you ended up concluding. It may lead people to believe you’ve attached more weight to evidence supporting your theory than to evidence refuting it. And, let’s be honest, people are going to be pretty ready to believe that anyway because you’ve been trying to convince them that the world is flat. And it isn’t.

  But what do I know (other than that the world is round)? Mark Sargent has 43,415 subscribers to his “Flat Earth” YouTube channel. He’s an extremely successful advocate of a conclusively disproved theory. This guy could flog shares in Myspace. And he obviously reckons the notion that there’s something slightly off-putting about the planet being a ball is a key selling point.

  Sargent was being interviewed at the first Flat Earth International Conference, held in North Carolina, as part of a light-hearted little BBC website package on the subject. “Let’s take a wry look at this tiny subculture of harmless eccentrics,” was the tone. “Why do people still think the Earth is flat?” was the title.

  The answer seemed to be that they just used their gut instinct and common sense: it looks flat – or flattish, flat with a few bumps – so it must be. Marilyn Teed, who’d travelled to the conference from Pennsylvania (presumably without the help of GPS), explained how she knew: “I went down to the seashore, down New Jersey, and I did my own testing … you take a straight edge and you go from one end and you follow the horizon of the ocean and … it’s flat.”

  Assuming no access to information other than the evidence of her own eyes, that’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion. You’d need to either have an instinctive genius for astronomy or be as obsessively drawn to spheres as Mark Sargent is repelled by them to stand on a bit of the world and decide it seems flat only because it’s actually a tiny, imperceptibly curved part of an unimaginably massive ball. But, in fact, she has had access to other information.

  As part of her research, she says she’s “watched over 50 hours of video”. Mainly adaptations of Terry Pratchett books, presumably.

  The only thing that seriously bothers me about this is that it was the first Flat Earth International Conference. This isn’t a regular event held by a dwindling band. These people’s crazy notion is, albeit to a tiny extent, on the rise again. As the conference’s website puts it: “Like you, we grew up believing in a heliocentric globe-Earth model” (translation: spherical Earth orbiting sun – like in, say, reality), but “After extensive experimentation, analysis, and research, we have come to know that the truth of our cosmology is not that which we’ve been told.” It also states chillingly that “every experiment ever conducted to prove even the simple spin of the Earth has failed”.

  That’s not true. What “extensive experimentation”? People have been up in a bloody rocket, looked out the window and seen that the Earth is round. There are loads of photos. Yet the website seems so plausible, so reasonable. It’s a neat, slightly boring webpage, as if it’s the rules for the election of officers of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. It’s the blandest-smelling horseshit you can imagine. Why is it there? Why do they think that? Why do they want to convince people? Why are people convinced? The Earth is round! We found that out ages ago! We’ve got to move on.

  I don’t really think significant numbers are going to start doubting the Earth’s shape. What worries me is how, in this bewildering internet age, every fact, however apparently undeniable, has the potential to become a subject for debate. The canniest thing Mark Sargent said in his interview was, “Don’t take my word for it – I could be a mental patient recently released from an institution.”

  How admirably open-minded of him! But what he’s implying is: so could anyone. You can’t take anybody’s word for anything. The discerning thinker disbelieves everything, and then makes up his or her own mind on the basis of looking out to sea. It’s a clever line for him to take, because the Earth being round is a classic example of an issue where, unless you’re an astronaut, you sort of do have to take somebody’s word for it.

  The recent explosion of weirdly unfocused scepticism is, I suppose, a natural response to this nasty, internet-contaminated era. Accusations of fake news abound and are hugely worsened by, for example, Donald Trump’s delusional mixture of lying and denial, and his determination to discredit all the most reliable news sources. Recent revelations that thousands of the accounts tweeting enthusiastically about Brexit were probably malign Russian cyborgs further undermines the credibility of anything but the evidence of our own eyes.

  Unfortunately, this boundless doubting could take us right back to the stone age – and not in a time machine we’ve invented. The accumulation and advance of human learning, and therefore of civilisation, relies on things being written down and subsequently believed. It’s built on trust.

  A safety-first, unquestioning scepticism about absolutely everything could lead to the thoughtless discrediting, and chucking out, of huge swaths of our collective achievements. I don’t really know what we should do about it, but neither can I put a ceiling on how much it’s appropriate to worry.

 
After all, out there somewhere are thousands of people once more insisting the Earth is flat. And they know how to set up a website. And I don’t.

  The Flat Earth International Conference is now an annual event and, at time of writing, the number of subscribers to Mark Sargent’s YouTube channel had crept up to 79,000.

  * * *

  Attitudes to dating aren’t changing as fast as many would like. I must say I’m surprised. Technology is wrecking the established norms of socialising to such an extent that I’m amazed people are bothering to interact physically at all. Much safer, in a world of discontent, war and environmental collapse, to remain at home, surrounded by comforting screens. There we can be entertained and aroused in impregnable isolation.

  I’m sure our species’ breeding needs can be fulfilled by people extracting their half of the genetic code at home and sending it in some sort of medical Jiffy bag to one of several regional spawning warehouses, located on ring roads between mountainous storage units and giant Amazon intellectual property graves. Like that website’s deliveries, the consequent progeny could be distributed by drone – the stork myth turning out, in retrospect, to be a primitive attempt to make sense of a dystopian premonition.

  But it’s not happening. People are still going on dates. They’re still arranging to eat restaurant dinners two-by-two, fashioning an ark from their local Pizza Express to save them from the rising tide of solitude. They’re still attempting to combine the head-pat of obsessing about how they seem with the stomach-rub of working out how they feel.

  More atavistic still, they continue to assume that, on heterosexual first dates, the man should pay. They’re still stuck on that convention, which hasn’t changed since it stopped being de rigueur for the chap to turn up with a dripping slab of freshly killed mammoth and bunches of flowers became popular instead. A recent survey found that 77% of us think that, between a male and a female, the male should foot the bill. Of the 1,000 respondents, 73% of the women and 82% of the men said that it was for the bloke to get his card out.

  What do you think about that then? Terrible? OK? Presumably, about 77% of you agree that the man should pay, but then you may still think it’s terrible that you think that. Is it a harmless remnant of a more sexist age, an adorable antiquated tradition that benefits women and has survived the passing of many of those that disadvantaged them? Or is it a horrible sign of the patriarchy’s continued power? Money, the great capitalist symbol of strength, remains the territory of the penis-bearers (by which I mean possessors, not endurers).

  The most worrying aspect of this is the extent to which research suggests that paying increases men’s sexual expectations. That extent is some extent, not no extent. Which seems slightly grim. Are there really significant numbers of men who believe that any women who agree to dine with them secretly belong to a strange breed of casual hookers who get paid in meals? At the very least they must be wildly overestimating the scarcity of food in western economies.

  Perhaps I’m being unfair. Maybe it’s not that these men believe their dates will shag them because they’ve paid for dinner; merely that, by allowing a man to pay, a woman is signalling that the date is going well. Letting the man pay is a sign of approval. The oddness of human nature is such that I reckon a woman who’s had a tedious evening is much more likely to insist on settling some or all of the bill than one who’s been swept off her feet. That may be illogical. It would probably make more sense if those who’d had a bad time were more inclined to try to get the food for free, so that at least something positive had come out of their evening – but I doubt that’s how it usually works.

  Obviously, that explanation doesn’t mean all this isn’t still sexist: why is a woman letting a man pay a sign of approval, but a man letting a woman pay isn’t? And this can be awkward for the man too. What if he’s had an awful time? It wouldn’t be very polite for him to signal that by refusing to pay – that would be flying in the face of a custom that 73% of women believe in. But, by paying, he sends the same signal of sexual interest that a woman allegedly sends by letting him pay. For a woman, saying “Let’s go Dutch” can be a financially generous way of conveying that the encounter hasn’t been a success. A man doing the same thing is exacerbating rejection with miserliness.

  Another aspect of society’s sexism is that we generally assume the man will always want to have sex with the woman. By convention, he will have asked her on the first date, and the purpose of the event is for her to see if she likes him. His approval is assumed. That’s not altogether PC. What if she turned out to be racist, or to talk with an interrogative inflection, or constantly say “in any way, shape or form”? Is the man supposed to pay and then make himself sexually available to this harridan, purely out of gallantry?

  The problem here is that actually discussing what a first date is really about is completely taboo. You may not mention whether or not the two of you are finding one another attractive. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely support this. A world in which people baldly discussed each other’s merits would be nightmarish indeed. It’s the stuff of reality TV, but not of reality. The taboo forces us to discuss the issue without discussing it – to send signals through flirtation, for example.

  But that’s hardly a foolproof system. Some people are quite flirty all the time, while others, even in a state of extreme ardour, seem cold and standoffish. People on first dates have had little time to calibrate each other’s behaviour and so don’t know if the amount of eye contact, physical touching or laughter that’s going on is romantically significant or not.

  So we try and communicate using money. We fall back on our knowledge of ancient patriarchal conventions of what it means to pay, or be paid for, as a way of trying to send and receive signals through the fog of mutual ignorance. It’s not a good system, but it’s all we’ve got. Until we get back to our computers and can just click “like”.

  * * *

  A random moment on the morning of Sunday 27 May 2018 that I’m keen for everyone to really try to be in.

  Are you properly experiencing this moment? You know, making the most of it? Here you are, leafing through a Sunday newspaper or browsing articles online on some state-of-the-art device. That’s not too shabby. “Syria, dear oh dear; Brexit, hmm; an exhibition – I shall consider attending!” This is part of who you are – you’re really doing this. You should “own it”, as they say these days, demonstrating capitalism’s colonisation of language itself.

  So how can you most fully know, feel, experience and, indeed, project this fact, this moment that you’re in? How best to consciously, but not self-consciously, inhabit it; to immerse yourself in it, but not let it thoughtlessly pass by, as if it never happened at all, as if you never existed, your constituent carbon already earmarked for different biomass – some worms and beetles and weeds. Plus a couple of rats, if you’re lucky. Or one of those forest trees that doesn’t even necessarily make a noise when it falls down.

  Yes, other people knowing might help. It’s bound to. It’ll prove this isn’t all a delusion – they can confirm it’s genuinely happening. Unless they’re a delusion too, and there really isn’t time to get into that. People say it’s solipsistic, which, from usage, seems to mean “best not thought about”. Unlike all the plastic in the sea, which is very troubling, and let’s hope someone noticed you reading a report on that as you sipped your Fairtrade espresso in an independent coffee shop while shaking your head sadly – no mean feat in itself.

  Perhaps you should take a photo and put it on social media? Not a grinning selfie – that would be tonally wrong for the coffee-house sophistication you want to put across. Put across because you’re genuinely feeling it, of course. How about a sort of POV shot? The coffee cup, the improving book, the open newspaper, a sprinkling of croissant crumbs. Ooh, not the page about the Grenfell inquiry – that doesn’t feel right. Turn that over. One with a nice picture of a sunlit field, or a beach or a castle, and some lighter stories. That’s it – resprinkle the croissan
t crumbs and … is that the time? Quick, you’ve got to go in a minute. And … move the car key out of shot. It’s a Ford, so not … I mean, an Alfa Romeo key would … Anyway, there we go: snap. Hashtag LazyWeekend hashtag chilling. Christ, you’re really late now.

  This urge to self-photograph and upload, to document and publish our every significant experience, was in the news again when it was reported that several holiday companies are marketing “Instagram-friendly tours”, catering for “ego travellers” among the millennial generation. This came hard on the heels of Thomas Cook’s announcement that it’s “exploring options for the future” of Club 18–30, options that include selling it. So millennials would rather pull a duck face in front of Machu Picchu than go to Magaluf for 30 units of alcohol a day and an increased chance of contracting herpes. The message seems to be: young people today are still awful, but in a different way.

  Irritation at relentless holiday photography has its roots in mildly xenophobic 1980s moaning about Japanese tourists with stovepipe cameras, but has greatly intensified in the era of the smartphone. “Why can’t they just experience it?!” goes the middle-aged cry. “If you’re photographing or filming something, you’re not immersed in it. Just look and remember.”

  This view is backed up by research. A 2013 study found that people who went round a museum photographing things, rather than just looking at them, remembered much less about what they’d seen. But of course they’ve got pictures of everything, so they don’t need to. And a 2017 review of research, “Exploring the Links between Mobile Technology Habits and Cognitive Functioning”, found that our brains aren’t bothering to retain stuff if they think we’ll be able to access it through our devices. Certainly, Google Maps is playing havoc with my ability to find my way around town without it. Then again, I also can’t start a fire without matches and have no idea how to skin an animal, so my whole not-relying-on-technology ship has long since sailed.