War on Reality

6th-grade journalist Sarfaraz, of Jharkhand state, via TribuneIndia. 

A goodhearted little story on NPR the other morning, reported by Pien Huang, about an elementary school in Tampa Bay with a substantial number of unhoused students, and a mindfulness program:

HUANG: Sullivan Elementary School is a public school. It partners with a local nonprofit called Metropolitan Ministries which supports poor and homeless families in Tampa Bay. Principal McMeen says many of the students come from the homeless shelter across the street, and they're dealing with serious stressors outside of school.

[PRINCIPAL] MCMEEN: Students experience these traumas of which sometimes they don't have control over. While we have them, what do we have control over? It's those few moments to say, OK, take that hurt, take that pain, let's figure out how we can release it.

HUANG: Research shows that chronic stress can shrink the brain, especially the parts that play a role in learning and memory, and that mindfulness helps reduce that stress. It's now 8:50 in the morning. Principal McMeen takes us to the second and third-grade classroom, where a mindfulness session plays over the loudspeaker.

UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Breathing in and out. Placing the hands on my heart. Repeating to yourself, I have the power to make wise choices.

UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: I have the power to make wise choices.

HUANG: The transformation is amazing. Seventeen rambunctious kids are now settled at their desks. Their eyes are closed, and today's session is about forgiveness.

I was enchanted with it until an unwelcome thought showed up: that there are people who would want to destroy it, for one reason or another, maybe for the same reason they've objected to school yoga, because mindfulness is the property of a religion that's not "Judeo-Christian" and it might endanger the children's souls; it might be some kind of Satanic plot.

Not that there's anything ostensibly religious, let alone particularly Hindu or Buddhist, in the Inner Explorer platform or other manifestations of a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program; in fact it's fairly dripping with scientific concepts and research publications and empirical claims along the lines of

[a] study showed students who were in the Inner Explorer intervention condition significantly increased their overall grade point averages (GPAs) by 29% in School A and 9.8% in School B, and increased their math grades by 27.9% in School A and 18% in School B. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds, particularly English Language Learners, benefitted from the intervention, which may help ease these students' pressure of growing up with chronic socioeconomic stressors. This study also collected data on teacher stress and well-being, showing a 43% reduction in stress and a 47% improvement in trait mindfulness.

but mindfulness is a meditation technique, and it comes from those places. It's foreign, and it's not how we bring our children up.

And probably leftist. To the folks at NPR, there is absolutely nothing political about this story—it's just about education, and taking care of kids. But to the rightwinger, it's full of triggers: it's a public school spending taxpayer money, for one thing (Inner Explorer materials don't come for free), and it's about lavishing luxuries on the poor and unhoused, people whose lives have been blighted by shiftlessness and indiscipline, that is by their own fault, getting what they deserve, and probably foreigners as well (homeless children in Florida are among the most victimized victims of DeSantis feud with the Biden administration), and as I was saying meditation is foreign too.

Which is why they think NPR, along with all sorts of exceedingly sober and responsible news outlets, is a socialist plot. It's to do with that "reality-based community", as somebody (probably Karl Rove) once called it, of people who believe you can learn what's going on by examining the evidence; to which both the journalists and most of the political left or "center-left" belong, together with all kinds of normal people leading their normal lives, and even some old-fashioned conservatives, but not the bulk of the 21st-century political right, which is committed in the paranoid spirit to "creating our own reality," and letting the evidence take care of itself.

Last time I was weighing in on the subject of the reality-based community, in August, I was most interested in clarifying the class difference within it, between the view-from-nowhere journalists and the politically engaged us, such as garden-variety Biden voters:

The high-end journalists and opinionists think Biden voters are basically the same as them, because they have a very clear idea of why a person might decide to vote for Biden—many of them do it themselves, as I was saying; because they think Democrats sound smart, and foreigners like them, and Republicans sound weird, and Trump is disgusting, and they have lots of gay friends and wish they had some Black ones, and they loved Succession. Probably there’s some particular policy agenda they like, on abortion or the junior high history syllabus, or the preservation of the earth. They’re not exactly ignorant.

But they all went to high-end sleepaway colleges and finished in four years, and did their high-end internships, and got their high-end jobs, and they’re the Coastal Élite Senators Hawley and Cruz keep sneering at, just as much as Hawley and Cruz are themselves, and most of us are really not. Graduates of the top 12 colleges constitute less than 1% of the total number of college graduates in the US, and that’s not enough to elect a president.

On the other hand, we do have important things in common: the journalists really do have that idea that good reporting can discover reality, and reality can make a good story, and they really work on it accordingly, and that leads us to have a certain amount of genuine confidence in the reporting, and a willingness to use it, rightly, in forming our own opinions about reality. We have a good idea of how reporting is done, and fact checking, and it's pretty trustworthy—even in the news sections of the Wall Street Journal.

But to the rightwingers of the create-our-own-reality world, as Colbert said, "reality has a liberal bias," and it just makes them mad: "Why can't you report both sides?" And this upsets the reporters, to think they're suspected of violating the sacred rules of objectivity they learned in J-school, so they work very hard to accommodate them, weakening their stories, and that just makes us mad (and even a little paranoid, as we work to guess who every anonymous source in a given news item is working for so we can calculate how much credence to give it), without appeasing the rightwingers at all. And they'll keep crying "Fake news!" and accusing the papers of belonging to an international conspiracy, as the war on reality continues.