"Trust No One"
- The X-Files
It should be clear that ‘trust no one’ is a miserable principle for life, and also that the opposite principle - ‘trust everyone’ - is just as disastrous. Trust, however, we want to approach it, requires discernment. We do not want to give it too easily, such that others can take advantage of us, but nor can we afford to be too miserly with our trust. To literally trust no one is to abandon any kind of shared world and to accept in its place a kind of unravelling insanity. Still, ‘trust no one’ works in the context of The X-Files because the narrative of the show is about conspiracies and betrayals, and the phrase signals to us: ‘suspect everyone, doubt everything’.
The format of The X-Files depends upon the pairing of opposites. A well-informed conspiracy theorist who believes in all manner of weird and terrible things (Mulder), spars against a sceptical medical doctor (Scully), portrayed as embodying scientific rigour and doubt in the paranormal. Of course, in the fictional world of these stories it turns out that all the conspiracy theories are more-or-less true, and it is the sceptic’s disbelief that is constantly challenged by what they witness. Still, balancing paranoia with scepticism, challenging suppositions with evidence… these are not bad principles for life, certainly less disastrous than ‘trust no one’.
Dana Scully represents a grounded, scientific-informed worldview. As such, Scully is treated as a scientist, even though professionally she is a medical doctor. Despite a very common misunderstanding, very few doctors are scientists in any shape or form. ‘Scientist’ literally means ‘researcher’, yet many of the worlds we live in foster an oddly inflated degree of trust in what is generally a rather mundane job. I have known people who try to obscure this bias by saying that it is science that they trust, not scientists - but of course this merely means that they trust networks of scientists. There is no ‘science’ beyond the practices of scientists.
Neither are those who place their trust in science half as sceptical as they wish to believe. I have heard it said that you should verify everything - but this is beyond anyone’s practical capabilities. Just take one small example: the planet Pluto. Everybody trusts that Pluto is an astronomical body in our solar system, and most will now claim that it isn’t a planet. Yet I’ll wager nobody reading this reflection will have verified this. In the first place, the steps required to reproduce Clyde Tombaugh’s blink microscope technique are not that easy to perform. As a former astrophysicist myself, I can report that most astronomers have never done so, and I know several that attempted to do so unsuccessfully. We merely trust that ‘the ninth planet’, Pluto, was discovered in 1929.
But then, why do we also trust that Pluto is no longer a planet? What evidence, what experiment, overturned this aspect of the 1929 work…? Well, nothing at all. Because the withdrawal of the status of ‘planet’ from Pluto was not a scientific judgement at all, but merely a communal pact by those academics working in the field of astronomy. They decided, in the light of the discovery of other celestial bodies like Eris (which is larger than Pluto), to exclude all such objects from planetary status by reclassifying them as ‘dwarf planets’ and arbitrarily declaring that dwarf planets are not planets. But this is not like determining the atomic mass of hydrogen, or performing orbital calculations for Halley’s comet. This is not a scientific judgement at all. It’s merely an agreement to describe things in a particular way.
It is a characteristic of our time that people trust scientists, but as the example of Pluto exposes, this trust shades into a blind faith that is far less critical than the tenets of scientific investigation require. There are good reasons to trust that Pluto, like the truth in The X-Files, is ‘out there’. But there are few good reasons to accept that it is not a planet. The main reason the doctrine that ‘dwarf planets are not planets’ has been accepted is that it allows astronomers to defend their own claim to knowledge. ‘We still know how many planets are in our solar system’ is psychologically preferable to admitting ‘we now have no idea how many planets are in our solar system’.
The moment we forget that scientists are just as human as anyone else, we place our trust in something as outlandishly paranormal as anything Fox Mulder believes in The X-Files. There are far greater dangers on this path than the simple question of whether Pluto is or is not a planet...
I wonder if some of this trust in science is a reflection of how little we understand humans, ourselves not the least. Therefore a desire to reach for people who seem to follow rules and be more stable than us poor fleshy drop outs.
Personal:
Chris, I just discovered you. I did so my googling “philosopher blog”, choosing to link to David Chalmers resources page and clicking on the first name in his “Nonphilosophers with Philosophy-Related Weblogs” sub list. I’ve been searching for some place on the web where there are truly on-going thoughtful discussions on fundamental matters. This site looks like it might be one such, so I have signed up for a minimal subscription. If this is truly a site for meaningful discussions, I hope I have a chance to switch to a more economical introductory subscription.
Comment:
Science [scientists] attempts to construct logically valid and complete models that “explain” the mind-chimera in the nervous systems of a group of humans. Generations of philosophers have noted that these mental constructions are just that, models, not reality itself.
Logically, there is always the possibility that signals from what’s-out-there will stimulate a human consciousness to construct a model that will be at least partially at odds with a prevailing scientific model. [1] Such an event appears to be highly unlikely for models that have been constructed and refined by many people over centuries, e.g., our current model or our solar system. But logically this possibility exists.
I strive to hold in my brain-mind models that are at least logically valid. To do so I must use the assertions other humans have placed in social reality. I use various information processing strategies to give higher or lower credence to every assertion I consider and accept only those that pass some vague, idiosyncratic threshold of veracity.
Plea
The extent and veracity of my model building is greatly enhanced by comments from others. Thank you for your comments.
Definitions:
objective reality – that which causes electrochemical signals to appear in my nervous system
physical reality -- that part of objective reality that exists irrespective of the activities of humans
social reality – that part of objective reality that humans have created, e.g., the US Declaration of Independence
mental model – A set of assertions (possibly encapsulated in image-chimera) about objective reality
Note
[1] The social process by which sensory data ultimately trumps human imagination is messy. The history of the development of our current model of our solar system is a good example. Simon Singh’s Big Bang – The Origin of the Universe gives an entertaining and illuminating synopsis.