Book Review: "The Trouble with Reality" by Brooke Gladstone

The Trouble with Reality (2017)
Brooke Gladstone
92 pages

As co-host of the program On the Media, Brooke Gladstone provides listeners with a wide-ranging and trenchant analysis of the media landscape, exposing the reality behind coverage too frequently filled with misleading, unsubstantiated, and facile arguments. As a particular example of this, she and her colleagues have so often had to address a variety of commonly repeated media myths and misinformation during coverage of major incidents – natural disasters, say, or mass shootings – that they have developed a series of Breaking News Consumer’s Handbooks for such events, to help listeners navigate to the reality of what has happened.

With the divisive social environment and political partisanship that has consumed the US over the past decade, however, Gladstone has shifted her gaze beyond the media, to a broader concern for the future of our republic. In her essay The Trouble with Reality, she explores what she finds to be at the heart of this dysfunction, our inability to agree on a common reality, a common set of facts.

Our challenge begins, she observes, in that each of us experiences the world differently, while at the same time struggling to comprehend how others perceive it. She describes how we each build our personal model of the world out of a set of stereotypes – simplifications that allow us to quickly make sense of what we experience. The challenge arises in that 

Stereotypes, [journalist Walter] Lippman wrote, focus and feed on what is familiar and what is exotic, exaggerating each in the process: “The slightly familiar is seen as very familiar and the somewhat strange as sharply alien.” (9)

 Thus, even as we create stereotypes out of our individual experiences, these stereotypes go on to color our views of subsequent experiences, in turn reinforcing our existing stereotypes.

The trouble arises from the tendency of this process to spiral into a fixed state, a hardened view of the world which gradually closes our minds to any new information that contradicts what we already feel certain about. Gladstone captures what we need to strive for to overcome this ossification of our thinking in an observation, and recommendation, from neuroscientist David Eagleman, one that struck a deep chord with me:

[We should accept] the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities. Consider the criticisms of policy, the assertions of dogma, the declarations of fact that you hear every day – and just imagine if all of these could be infused with the proper intellectual humility that comes from appreciating the amount unseen. (17) 

Developing this ability to recognize, and accept, nuance in the face of complexity could allow us to avoid the violent divisiveness that seems to accompany discussions on most, if not all, issues these days. Nuance seems to gain little traction in the debates of our day, however; as I’ve written elsewhere in this blog: one of my favorite New York Times front page headlines is Lost in Abortion Noise – Nuance, since it seems a fitting, generic headline that could be used for any fill-in-the blank topic in these days of disagreements filled with strident over-simplification.

(A related theme lies at the heart of journalist Anne Applebaum’s book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (my review linked to at right), in which she references the quite disturbing claim of behavioral economist Karen Stenner, “that about a third of the population in any country has … an authoritarian predisposition … people who cannot tolerate complexity.” (16, Applebaum))

As one such example of a set of stereotypes forming a personal model of the world, Gladstone points to our understanding of how democracy works, and how Donald Trump has split the country in that sense. For half the country, she notes, Trump – whether or not he has formally broken the law – has “shattered their world view … our deep-rooted belief in the infallibility of our democracy,” (21) And it was not that this half of the country necessarily believed that the democratic system was perfect; many, she notes, “knew the system was rigged … [b]ut once the bad behavior was exposed, the guilty were supposed to pay the consequences, at least in the court of public opinion.” (41) That this has not been the case seems inconceivable for that half of the population. For the other half, however, who have largely felt that our rigged system has been rigged against them, it’s unimportant that there have been no consequences; they feel the system itself must be overthrown, at whatever cost.

As she wraps up her well-crafted and engaging essay, Gladstone provides little optimism for our future. She acknowledges and accepts the difficulty in asking each of us to recognize our own, and others, personal models of the world, as well as associated stereotypes, and to be open to working to alter them. “The price is very high [and] it’s rational to conclude it is not worth the considerable trouble and time required to venture forth, to protest, to doubt, to listen, to changer others, or to be changed.” (85) But, for those willing to push back, to attempt to reestablish a new reality in their minds, and so “to repair and improve the nation,” (83) she returns to the critical idea she opens with, the need to recognize that 

[while] our facts are incomplete, our truth limited … [we need to] venture out to take in a few new sights, a few new facts, to start to figure out what’s going on out there. (81)

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Other notes and information:

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, in their fascinating history

The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, provide a detailed examination of how groups interested in biasing our models of the world to further their own power and wealth go about doing so. (My review linked to at right.) Oreskes has also been interviewed by Gladstone for On the Media; their discussion has been aired a couple of times, including once here.

For a completely different exploration of reality, that of the mysteries of our natural world being explored by physicists, I highly recommend Carlo Rovelli’s Reality is Not What it Seems, and Adam Becker’s What is Real?. My reviews of them linked to at right.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf