There is really no idea that was widely held in the past that has not had to be radically modified by later generations. This is true of how we understand empirical facts about the world, using science in general: physics, chemistry and mathematics.
Newtonian physics, taught in all secondary schools, is a wonderful thing. And is incidentally never quite as it should be in the real world! Pythagoras was, it is reputed, killed by the other members of his sect-like group when he showed with an easy proof that irrational numbers exist, irrational numbers being those that cannot be written as fractions. His irrefutable proof went against one of their most cherished beliefs, leading them to kill the messenger, rather than deal with the message.
The concept of imaginary numbers was strongly resisted in mathematics, despite their elegance. Although Greek mathematician and engineer Hero of Alexandria is noted as the first to have conceived these numbers, and Rafael Bombelli first set down the rules for multiplication of complex numbers in 1572, they did not really take off till the 1800s, but with many influential detractors. Nowadays, the study of electronics depends on them.
The Catholic Church tends to be anathema to scientific knowledge. Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 – c. 230 BC) was an ancient Greek astronomer and mathematician who presented the first known heliocentric model that placed the Sun at the center of the known universe with the Earth revolving around it. Galileo's findings were thus not entirely new but ran against the Catholic Church imposed widely-held belief that the Earth was the centre of the universe, the maximum exponent of God's creation.
We are still, in the West, encouraged to believe without reflexion that we are at the top of God's creation, that there even is a God, and one interested in our personal lives to boot. This belief system encourages us to accept without question that our values, ideas, use of language, interests, etc are the only ones worthy of intellectual and ethical consideration. We believe in a food chain, with us at the top, rather than a virtual circle, where we too are eaten, often alive, by bugs, fungi, bacteria...
Organised religion has a huge problem with scientific knowledge, ranging from the Theory of Evolution, where God ends up being a sort of watchmaker that sets things in motion and then leaves the rest to evolution; to the idea of multiverses, where there most likely exists a possible infinity of life forms, and where it is even probable that whole civilisations appear on a planet, gain in technological knowledge and sophistication, and then provoke their own extinction; and thus have never been known to find each other. In the one case, God has no ostensible power nor significance beyond pushing the start button; in the other there is no reason to believe that Man is made in God's image and, worse still, humankind only exists for a minuscule moment in all eternity.
We give up other childish beliefs, like the Tooth Fairy, or Father Christmas, but it is considered heretic to suggest that belief in God is equally irrational, despite there being no empiric, scientific reason for religious faith. This very year, in Spain, a EU country, an actor was taken to court by a group of Christian lawyers for blasphemy against God and the Virgin. A year ago, a twitter joke about one of Spain's Ministers during the violent and repressive dictatorship the country suffered until 1975 landed Cassandra Vera in prison, for supposedly insulting victims of terrorism in general. There is an underlying supposition that repressive regimes do not encourage terrorism and to challenge that idea, even with a mild joke, should put one in prison; and that God is a real thing, not akin to the Tooth Fairy and Father Christmas, and not to be joked about.
On a political level, people only got universal suffrage after a long, often violent struggle. The first countries in modern times were Spain in 1933, followed by Greece in 1952. Spain's universal franchise was quickly eliminated by a brutal dictatorship, following a civil war instigated by the wealthy classes, together with the Catholic church. Greece later had its own dictatorship, although less long-lived than that of Spain, both regimes being characterised by right-wing cultural policies, restrictions on civil liberties, and the imprisonment, torture, and exile of political opponents.
Prior to universal suffrage the argument was that non property owners had no real stake in the country's well being and should therefore not have the vote. The modern version of this is the idea that the corporations should only have to respond to their shareholders (owners), rather than other stakeholders who live in the area and are, thus, affected by pollution, for example; or workers, who both live nearby and also depend directly on company policy; or the community in general, which is affected by tax regimes that benefit large corporations to the detriment of smaller companies and to the community's infrastructure and services. Why are tax payers not informed in detail how their money has been used? This would be really easy to do now that the internet and computers are available for one and all.
The vote for women was generally denied using the argument that women's brains are smaller or that women are more emotional than rational, thereby permitting that the most idiotic man be allowed to vote while the entirety of womanhood could not.
We now accept that, even if someone has the economic power and another does not, slavery is wrong and should not be allowed. This was not the case for thousands of years, and would not be the case if the "markets" were allowed free reign in everything. Shockingly, many forms of slavery are well and alive, but hidden from our gaze, such as overt slavery in many countries that have been destroyed by war, very often war from the liberal West. Libya, once the richest African country, now has since Nato's 2011 invasion open-air slave markets. We are also currently normalising the basest of uses of women's bodies, calling it surrogacy, forgetting that the women used and abused are de facto slaves. Calling prostituion 'sex work' is another form of whitewashing slavery.
In the field of animal welfare, a large part of the population has - against all evidence - wanted to believe that animals, specifically mammals and other vertebrates, are not sentient creatures who have their own personal interests. Animal consciousness is a proven fact, in as much that anything can be proved. We could argue that you do not really exist and are merely a figment of my imagination, and yet we both know that you do.
And until neoliberalism took hold some 70 years ago, it was recognised even within capitalism that the rentier, ie the financial sector, was parasitic and not productive within the economy. The modern confusion between freedom from limitations, rather than freedom to be able to do certain things, means that we have convinced ourselves that there there should be no limit to how much money a few individuals should extract from others, be it from having once had a good idea and the means to put it into action, or from having inherited privilege.
People are led to believe that writing off individual debt in the case of poor people is unfair and that writing off corporate debt is a good thing, as is the existence of de facto slavery, whether it be real slavery used to bring rare earth materials to our mobile phones and seafood to our table, or Wall Mart's and Amazon's coercive labour practices in a world where you have no real freedom to decide whether to work or not, nor in what sort of company or job. The UK's Queen Elizabeth's 2022 Platinum Jubilee celebrations forgot in their pomposity and futility that the original concept of a Jubilee was to reset debt to 0.
We accept as fair the fact that where one is born, both geographically and in what sort of household will to a huge degree determine the opportunities life will offer and where one will end up later on. Socioeconomic mobility is by and large a myth, and our societies are anything but meritocracies. The average life expectancy between two Glasgow city areas in Scotland, UK, barely 5 miles apart, is 28 years, and the only difference is wealth. Those who life in the poorer district can be expected to live fewer years than the citizens of Kabul, in Afghanistan.
The idea that you might have to pay high taxes in order to offset the environmental damage caused by taking a flight (maybe being allowed one flight per year with lower taxes) makes many people feel that their right to a cheap fancy holiday abroad is God-given. And, yet, being poor and never being in a financial position to afford that dream trip abroad, let alone decent housing, barely crosses the radar of most people.
Wall Mart, belonging to the US's richest family and the richest non-royal family in the world, is the largest retail store outlet. It pays such low wages that a third of its workers are on food stamps. It costs the US taxpayer (pretty much everyone) an estimated $6.2 billion per year in public assistance including food stamps, Medicaid and subsidized housing. It clearly does not create many quality jobs, and the owners ultimately depend on the state for their own outrageously inflated wealth, as the miserly salaries they pay are subsidized by the state; and, yet, collectively we do not see a problem with an economic model that permits the very rich to get richer still, all the while being subsidized by the rest.
Raising taxes on the very rich is over and over again excluded from public policy, as governments constantly promise to reduce taxes, talking as though someone earning 40,000€, say, were in the same bucket as a millionaire or billionaire. In the 70s taxes were made more and more regressive instead of progressive. Taxes on wealth or income are progressive, more so taxes on financial income (currently below the tax rate on wages - why?).
VAT taxes on basic necessities, like in Spain on food or electricity, are regressive, affecting a much higher proportion of poor people's wealth, or lack of it, than of the rich. Why is taxing the rich so controversial when taxing the poor is not?
A philosophy teacher at the University of Salamanca in Spain often asks his new students who the President of Venezuela or Cuba is. They all know. Then he asks who the President of Portugal is. No one ever knows. Yet Portugal is 250 km from Salamanca. A friend retorted to me that this is because Venezuela is a very big country with a large population. It isn't. (It does have loads of oil though.)
I won't hardly mention the past horrors of medical belief, such as bloodletting, mercury or arsenic to cure syphilis, epilepsy as demonic possession, sow’s dung to relieve labor pains, caesareans to fit in with doctors' schedules (a very modern horror), the medieval Italian advice that keeping weasel testicles near one’s bosom was an effective form of contraception, and lobotomies and electric shock treatment to control rebellious patients. Many of our current drug and clinical treatments for depression have been shown to be counterproductive in so many cases and despite this are widely prescribed.
We all know that some 4% or more of hospital patients are there precisely because of infections they got while in hospital and 11% of those infections turn deadly. The US CDC estimates that some 99,000 patients die every year because of these infections. The real figure is without doubt far higher. One of the most common infections was precisely neumonia.
Yet, here we are with the coronavirus scare, a virus that looks exactly like the seasonal flu, and the loudest medical voices insist on locking people in their homes, despite viruses thriving indoors, and then taking them precisely to crowded hospitals wards and ICUs, if they look even slightly ill - crowded because all non-essential wards have been closed down and all primary medical care has been discontinued. You can see how unhealthy hospitals are in the high level of medical staff who are getting CV-19, with many actually dying from it, compared to the rest of the population. In Spain, where lockdown has been truly draconian, healthcare workers account for more than 13% of the country’s Covid-19 cases. This suggests that hospitals are making the general infection rate worse as their staff spread the infection. The worst part is that this is the entirely predictable outcome for the measures taken.
We are not thinking for ourselves. Who is thinking for us?
The thoughts we think we have, if they are held by almost everybody else, they are almost certainly all false, if history shows us anything. They are not even our own thoughts. If we believe anything that really goes against popular belief, at least we have a chance of getting it right.
Conformism is intellectual laziness and it is time to think for ourselves.
