Alun Salt (of archeoastronomy fame), has written an interesting and well presented article on the history news network, which opens the discussion on the way that historical “facts” can easily be misrepresented (even completely made) up to suit the prevailing needs of the speaker.
It is not just history which suffers from this, although the “woolly” nature of the subject lends itself readily to pseudo-ist ideas. (Should I copyright that phrase?). People are bad enough when it comes to talking about things which happened in recent memory so there should be no surprise at how atrocious people are when it comes to things even further back in time.
Common examples of this are the “it was never like that in my day” conversation. This becomes exponentially more common as you get older and is certainly a sign of aging. Every day I hear people bemoaning how “standards” have dropped and people aren’t getting as “good an education nowadays.” Generally nonsense.
Add to this the “golden times” from beyond possible memories and it gets much wierder. Thanks to the crackpots in the 19th century we are now burdened with all manner of myths and legends which have been shoe horned into a new status as “real.” (For example, King Arthur, Robin Hood etc.).
Combine this with recent trends in media and education which appear to give people an incentive to jump on what ever uban myth bandwagon passess by (I suspect this is more to do with the amount of information people are given today, not any decline of standards or the like) and you can see that sites like Badscience are unlikely to run out of content any time soon. Good examples of the way myths become real are things like the media hyped reaction to the MMR “scare story” (which was mostly the media re-interpreting the published data…) and things like Glass windows “Sagging.” With the increased penetration of the internet, things can only get worse.
I suspect that given the limited amount of data a person can process each day, there has to be a point at which you think “ok, I dont have the time / facilites to investigate this, I will take it on the authority of Person X.” The problem is, often the cranks and crackpots in our society now manage to demonstrate Status. In the UK we suffer people who are famous for all manner of reasons sounding out on issues of climate change and global politics. Really. Our media-driven obsessions with fame have created all manner of insane “Authority Figures” who are so desperate to get another few minutes of TV time, they will spout out nonsense on anything.
A couple of days ago, I was idly watching a chat-type show and some soap star is going on about issues of global politics as if he was the Professor of International Affairs at St Andrews. However, from his comments it was obvious he could barely point to a foreign country on a map – let alone discuss their geo-power related desires. Pure madness.
The scary thing is the number of people I interact with daily who think that these “self educated” (For want of a less flattering term), self appointed heroes of the cause actually know what they are talking about. Shame on everyone.