“THIS IS HOW IT IS”
I imagine that it is as true for you as it is me that almost everything I thought I understood from prior education turned out to be far from the whole story or even entirely wrong. Occasionally this occurrence is innocent and happens because we’ve learned more over time or because the author or teacher felt they needed to simplify for their learners. At other times the person who wrote the book or taught the lesson simply didn’t know what they were talking about or never looked into the matter very deeply. How easy is it to believe you know something or to repeat what you were taught without double-checking or testing it very hard? And how often are we required to do so because we lack the time or resources?
Regardless, as a result of noticing this many of us are accustomed to regularly throwing out the old and adopting the new and seeking to do so. As of late, however, something entirely novel has occurred: the requirement of everyone everywhere to accept a new reality without any explanation of how we arrived at this place nor anyone, seemingly, even entertaining, never mind addressing, any of the inherent conflicts or contradictions imposed. And with this, merely asking questions is also often said to be still a worse violation (of some unspoken taboo which, of course, is itself not to be questioned.)
While impacting everyone’s lives in ways subtle and overt, these revolutions are not coming by way of overturning prior knowledge through discovery. Nor are these overturnings merely a result of popular consensus. Instead, we have a tiny fringe imposing their reworking on everyone and doing so with it a whole suite of costs for non-compliance. Though we've seen this phenomenon springing up for years and across many avenues and in many venues, my favourite example (and the least controversial) came out of the pandemic.
Even if we haven’t acknowledged it, we all learned a lot on a number of fronts during the COVID-19 upheaval. But, of course, we all arrived at 2020 with prior knowledge, too; and yet, little of that was overturned by more information or some kind of new synthesis. For example, in high school biology I learned that the human body overcomes a viral attack by having the immune system seek out and kill infected cells. We were told that the body’s T-cells swarm throughout the body on the hunt to identify, attack, and destroy any cell producing alien elements (proteins, fats, nucleic acids, or anything else.) While it’s probably safe to assume that even an introductory college course in immunology or virology would illuminate a far more complex process, I’ve never come across a meaningfully different simplification of the workings of the immune system.
