The Fallacy of Relying Upon Lived Experience When Dealing with Societal Issues
by Don Hall
It’s all the rage.
Relying upon lived experience over increasingly manipulated media and the thoughts of experts to form tiny individual world views. “Listen to my truth,” say those who refuse to rely upon data and science to guide us. “My truth is illustrative of all truth.”
After a few months of economic shutdown and what I’ll call mild American quarantine (you know, the kind of extreme measures that allow for going outside pretty much any time you want and access to grocery stores and gas stations), it was time to cut the hair. I have a fairly nice beard trimmer, so Dana and I didn’t look like throwbacks to Woodstock, but it was time.
A Supercuts appointment, now necessary, is made. I sit, getting shorn, and am forced to listen to two women (one cutting my locks) wax on about how the pandemic is a hoax.
“Hmmmm.” I interrupt their whining for a moment. “Why do you think it’s a hoax?”
“Well,” she says with the air of someone speaking to a six-year old with a toy car up his nose. “I don’t know anyone who has it. I’ve never met anyone who knows someone who has it. All I know is that they shut down the world for something no one has seen.”
“I could be wrong but my guess is that at least 100,000 people know someone who has had it and died from it.”
“They could’ve died from anything. They’re just inflating the numbers to control us.”
For her it was easy. Her lived experience dictated that no one had the virus and, thus, the virus didn’t exist.
A few weeks later as the protests raged in the streets of every major American city, on the casino floor:
“The police in this country are monsters. All they do is kill black people like they were animals. I mean, its just gotten worse since the Civil Rights movement in the sixties.”
“It’s gotten worse? I could be wrong but according to the numbers I’ve seen, police shootings of unarmed men — both black and white — have consistently decreased every year since 1970. In fact, I read that since 2015, police killings of unarmed black men has decreased by 75%.”
“No. Did you see the videos? All the brutality? I don’t care what your numbers say, it’s way worse now. Have you listened to the personal stories of black people who have been traumatized by microaggressions and continue to live the generational trauma of 400 years of slavery?”
Common sense would tell you that anecdotal evidence or lived experience is by far the most accurate form of information. These people lived it so how could it not be on point? Common sense would be, as it often is, dead wrong.
The claim that eyewitness testimony is reliable and accurate is testable, and the research is clear that eyewitness identification is vulnerable to distortion without the witness’s awareness. More specifically, the assumption that memory provides an accurate recording of experience, much like a video camera, is incorrect. Memory evolved to give us a personal sense of identity and to guide our actions. We are biased to notice and exaggerate some experiences and to minimize or overlook others. Memory is malleable.
Memory doesn’t record our experiences like a video camera. It creates stories based on those experiences. The stories are sometimes uncannily accurate, sometimes completely fictional, and often a mixture of the two; and they can change to suit the situation. Eyewitness testimony is a potent form of evidence for convicting the accused, but it is subject to unconscious memory distortions and biases even among the most confident of witnesses. So memory can be remarkably accurate or remarkably inaccurate. Without objective evidence, the two are indistinguishable.
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Lived experience relies on memory and the new culture of the narrative is a shift away from objective fact or even the search for it to place the individual experience as the top of the truth hierarchy.
Simply put, the move to position personal experience at the top is to say ignore what the experts tell us, ignore what data says, go with your gut and believe everyone at their word.
One of the most interesting catchphrases of the latest in a long history of mass protests sparked by the visible murder of a black man by police is the white ally phrase “I understand I can’t understand, but I can stand.” It’s sticky like a good song lyric written by Pete Townsend but it is mired in the concept that unless you have lived with marginalization and discrimination, you are unable to comprehend it. Bullshit.
A more accurate and responsible version would be “I can’t understand how it feels but I can understand the science behind your pain and would like to help with potential solutions.” I mean, it doesn’t resonate on a t-shirt but it is by far a smarter, less blindly religious approach. The Enlightenment was a turning point in Western Civilization that disputed the superstitious adherence to dogma and elevated humanism, reason, and scientific study. This about face to ignore facts for feelings is like switching that light off and stumbling around in the dark.
As odious aspects of society come under the scalpel of progressive change, the mushier the defining elements, the more difficult they are to pin down. As bigotry, something definable and recognized by most blurs into implicit bias (which, contrary to notions to the contrary, is not the same as unconscious bias) it becomes harder for society to see bigotry. We suddenly have to take into account eye witness testimony and the feelings of those suffering it without any corroboration.
Feelings matter. Personal experience matters. Individual decisions made are more often decided due to personal failures, slights, perceived wrongs than because of undeniable facts. It has become the worst part of the Left’s communication style toward the Right in that we love nothing more than to spout facts to demonstrate the wrongness of their position yet double down on our feelings and lived experience when the facts are in conflict with our own perspective.
Is it any wonder that the Right resists our logic when we resist logic ourselves?