For years, I’ve gone out for a ramble with my dog each morning. Some years back, when we lived deep in the country, I squinted across a meadow during our walkabout and thought I saw a wolf. Now, there are no wolves in our part of Upstate New York – I know that to be true – but humans sometimes aren’t good at recognizing reality. Reality, in this case, is that I was looking at a coyote. They’re sociable creatures, you know, and quite unlikely to attack if you’re bigger than a rabbit.
I didn’t stop to consider that. Nope, I turned and ran away from the wolf. And, of course, my dog followed me.
At the nearest good-sized tree, I leapt for a branch just overhead and hauled myself up. This left my loyal but unobservant dog on the ground, staring curiously up the trunk at me. This was untenable – that wolf is going to come eat my dog, I thought! – so I dropped out of the tree and tore back toward our house. My dog bounded happily ahead, no doubt eager for breakfast.
Once I caught my breath at home, I felt foolish. Coyotes weren’t unexpected in our parts, while wolves disappeared from the Northeast in the 19th century. But beyond that slip into unreality, this was true, too: As my dog and I fled toward our cabin, I had been quite comfortable turning my back on what I thought was imminent danger.
It reminded me of the first time I had found myself confronting barracudas while snorkeling in the Caribbean. Barracudas don’t actually attack swimmers, but I didn’t know that then, and the fang-like teeth and ominous stare terrified me. Yet when I poked my head above water, I saw only a gorgeous day. Who could believe that there was terror lurking below the surface?
Those experiences match two ways in which, according to psychologists, we find it easy to delude ourselves: when fright leaves us unable to cope with reality, or when that reality conflicts with our experiences and biases.
So, a thought, first, about bias: We all have it, bigtime. For example: My own judgment surely is impaired by the comfort of my life experience, by and large. You know, as a white male born in mid-20th-century America, I’ve gotten a lot of breaks. So one of my biases is toward optimism.
And beyond biases, we delude ourselves because some things are by their nature hard to believe – like the World Trade Center collapsing in 2001, or that moment in 2016 when networks projected Donald Trump as president-elect. Wow.
Yet sometimes we turn away even when reality smacks us in the face. Take climate change, for example. The United Nations has warned of a disastrous future of hunger, drought and disease, as oceans rise and deserts expand, and we’re already seeing the effects: The Southwest this spring has experienced an awful heat wave and cantaloupe-sized hail, and we’re told we are headed into one of the worst hurricane and tornado seasons in recent history.
Yet millions of Americans still don’t believe it — and a majority of Republicans who serve in Congress still refuse to acknowledge the reality of human-caused climate change – they’d rather just see sunny days ahead – and this leaves us marching toward global climate disaster.
The great 20th-century Canadian novelist Robertson Davies once wrote, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” And some of us cannot comprehend just now that democracy is at risk in the United States. It is a real threat. Most of us are turning the other way – ignoring it.
The threat grows whenever a politician claims, with a straight face, that America’s justice system isn’t fair, because it convicted the former president of felonies.
Democracy is weakened when politicians insist (though they know better, believe me) that Joe Biden didn’t win the 2020 election fairly.
It is imperiled when we suppress the voting rights of many Americans because of false fears that foreigners will vote.
Democracy is threatened by Donald Trump’s promise to get even – that is, his vow to prosecute his political enemies if he wins another term, and rip apart the civil service system to purge the government of anybody insufficiently loyal to him personally.
As a longtime journalist who cares about fairness and balance in reporting, and being predisposed to optimism, I’ve found it hard to accept what seems to be an emerging and inescapable reality: that one of our two major political parties is actively subverting democracy – and that the effort has a good chance of success. The democracy that we have cherished is therefore at risk – a reality that is hard to square with our history.
It’s quite easy to look away from this, and imagine that it’s not true. And maybe it’s like the coyote I saw, or the barracuda that scared me: perhaps what’s going on is something less dangerous, than what my eyes are telling me. If you think my conclusion is wrong, please say so.
But at the moment, I think there’s actually a wolf lurking on the horizon – and it would be irresponsible, friends, for any of us to turn away from that reality.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
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