About fifteen years ago, an old friend from my teenage years contacted me out of the blue and we arranged to meet for coffee, talk about old times, catch up on the new, and so on. We hadn't seen each other for forty years and, to add to the sense of the distance we were bridging, the circumstances of our original acquaintance were specifically unusual. We were part of a crew of teenagers who hung around a huge navy base in the Far East—I was the son of a diplomat and most of them, including John, were sons of enlisted men, but the camaraderie that came with being part of a semi-delinquent “gang” of sixteen-year-old boys in the late ‘50s, thrown together in this enclave in a foreign land, meant that class distinctions were obscured and solidarity was strong.

And it held. In spite of the dramatic differences in the trajectories of our lives since—John's a retired cop and I'm an adjunct professor at NYU, contributing editor at Harper's Magazine—in spite of that, we fell easily into the kind of bantering companionship we had known as boys.

The second time we got together—for lunch on Long Island, a plan to go fishing after—he asked casually how I was doing as we sat down at the table and, taking a bit of a risk, I said I was actually kind of depressed. He asked why and I said (this was the beginning of March, 2003):

Well, I'm afraid this Iraq thing is going to happen, he (meaning Bush) is just going to do it and it is going to be a disaster for everyone, especially the poor slobs who signed up for this believing that it's payback for 9/11.

I was thinking—I'll test the waters, I wonder what his politics are (he had said, in passing, some insightful things about crime and prisons the last time we talked)—but John wasn't going there. He paused for a long moment, looking quite baffled; finally, he said, as if in disbelief, “You're depressed about—Iraq?”

I missed the nuance and started to go on about the politics of it, when he interrupted and said, in an apparently wondering tone, as if trying to grasp something beyond his ken (but maybe not really), “I can see getting depressed if my kid got really sick or I got fired or my wife left me—but you're depressed about Iraq?”

Got it. His tone and expression remained puzzled, groping—but I caught on to the underlying attitude, the question he really had, the one he was too courteous to put into words. What he was really wondering was, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

I backtracked a bit too quickly—“Oh, of course, I don't mean that kind of depressed, I mean more like discouraged—like these people never learn, they keep sending our guys into these no-win situations (I knew he had fought in Vietnam) for bogus reasons…” But his point had been made, and I was conceding it in my manner. But, once again, courtesy and solidarity prevailed, and he moved smoothly on to bragging about his golf game—a sport he had just taken up last year and already he was shooting in the nineties.

Obviously much of today's skepticism about science reflects a more general resentment of “elites” that's abroad in Trump's America, but well-educated progressives who want to understand this phenomenon need to take a step back and consider some other, less obvious, factors. Least apparent, but perhaps most important, is this: feeling responsible for the fate of the world is profoundly unnatural—in some humanistic/phenomenological sense of the word “natural.” Most people, leading the lives they were thrown into, just don't feel that responsibility (unless aroused by some religious influence). No one blames a peasant in some mountain village in the Philippines if he's indifferent to his carbon footprint. Of course, the first thought on that score is that you can't blame someone who not only doesn't know about such things—but, realistically, couldn't be expected to know. For the well-educated progressive, the problem starts with exactly that—education and, in particular, with people who are in a position to know about such things without a massive investment of time and energy. They choose not to. Willful ignorance—that's the most immediate issue, that's what justifies our attitude toward science deniers in this society.

And that's because, to those of us who do feel that responsibility, it is just a fact that we are responsible. That's why the climate change issue is so central to this crisis of credibility. Unlike skepticism about, say, evolution or the efficacy of vaccinations or even moon landings, climate-change denial actually does involve a threat to “the world” per se, for which we are measurably responsible. And words like “crisis” and “threat” are appropriate because the way a genuine skepticism about science among masses of Americans “without college degrees”—the pollsters favorite rubric for Trump supporters—is converging with the cynical indifference of those who run fossil-fuel industries and buy politicians to support publicity campaigns dismissing the scientific consensus. That convergence is, as a matter of fact, leading to policies that may well be catastrophic—that will be if the whole goddam planet doesn't take action soon.

I'm suddenly reminded of an old friend—Paul Ryan, videographer and environmental activist—who loved to intone at appropriate moments, “The environment isn't an issue among others; it's the context for all the issues.”

So this is undeniably an urgent matter, and all the more so because autocratic/populist identity politics seems to be ascending or ascendant all across the world. It isn't just the Trumpistas. And the tone and tenor of movements led by the likes of Marine Le Pen in France and Vladimir Putin in Russia, of course, but also Sebastian Kurtz in Austria, Recep Erdoğan in Turkey, Victor Orban in Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Narendra Modi in India is not encouraging. If you want to see science play a significant role in describing the realities political leaders have to deal with, you should be very worried, because this is more than just short-sighted self-dealing; this is active opposition, indignant rebellion.

Ironically, though, the fact that climate change implicates “the world” so uniquely actually makes those who claim to know the truth, and who righteously assign responsibility on the basis of that knowledge, all the more inviting as targets for the skeptics. You can't look more elite than you look when you assert your personal responsibility for the whole world. I guess you know everything; who do you think you are? God?

In a CVS line a few months ago, I vaguely overheard a couple of amiable working class folks behind me, chatting about the weather. My ears perked up when I heard one of them, the woman, say—“That's why I don't believe all this global warming stuff. They can't even tell what the weather's going to be for the weekend.” Her companion chortled appreciatively and said something about how they have to pretend to know because that's how they make a living. More chortling, knowing chortling—we've got your number.

I came within a hair of turning around and talking about sample sizes and statistics, but prudence prevailed. At the time, I thought the prudence was built into the etiquette of the situation. It would be plain rude to interrupt strangers in casual conversation and deliver a stern lecture of correction from a suddenly assumed podium of authority. On thinking back, though, I wonder if the prudence wasn't more deeply rooted. Suppose—wildly unlikely—but just suppose that I had managed not to be obnoxious and they had responded with something like open-minded interest? This was in a small town—suppose we ended up sitting in the diner, with me explaining the difference between weather forecasts and predictions of climate change? In that moment, looking back, I realized I wouldn't have done a very good job. I mean, I'm no expert.

Which leads to another complicating, yet essential, factor: people who really don't know anything about science, people who never read those astonishingly good New Yorker articles about this or that scientific enterprise—for them, scientists are lumped into the general “experts” category. And that's a real problem, because, as everybody knows, you can always find some credentialed “expert” who will say just about anything about anything. Especially “economists.” They're scientists, right? I mean, all those formulas and graphs are right there, for all to see? And what about doctors? They're scientists too, right? And who doesn't have their favorite doctor-makes-hideous-blunder story? Probably one so dramatic that the fact that your blood pressure medication has been working for twenty-five years in spite of your poor lifestyle choices gets lost in that most ingenious of all hiding places—the utterly familiar. If you are a person “with a college degree,” you likely know that there is huge difference between physics, or microbiology, or even geology—and economics. You don't need to know the actual science to know that; it comes with the degree, by a sort of osmosis.

So the problem isn't really with knowledge, expert or otherwise—the problem is with believing. And beliefs—in the age of Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter—are just resources that people use to fashion their identities. And there are so many beliefs to choose from! So you tend to go with the ones that make you feel good about yourself. And notice, by the way, that this principle applies to educated believers in science and not just to deniers. Think of the satisfaction you take in knowing that you aren't one of those idiots who doesn't “believe in” evolution but instead accepts an account of speciation based on scripture. It feels good to know that you are possessed of more elevated intentions informed by a better understanding of how things really are—where, once again, that doesn't have to mean that you know the actual science of chemistry, like a chemist, but just that you have a sense of the kind activity it is, of the kind of people and institutions that produce that kind of knowledge on an ongoing basis. It's a lot like the satisfaction you take in being astounded at the latest idiotic “alternative fact” being promoted in Trumpland.

As the reference to the Trumpian ethos suggests, this basic situation—this plethora of media-based belief options that defy coherence—has effects that go way beyond science deniers (or believers). Science denial can't be understood apart from that situation, however.

The attentive reader may have noticed that, in addition to expressing genuine distress with the willful ignorance on display among science deniers and their manipulators, this essay is suggesting that responsibility for this willful ignorance is deeply entrenched in our culture and that it implicates all of us in something that goes way beyond the scope of the rubric “without a college degree.”

For starters, admit this, if the shoe fits: like me realizing I wouldn't be able to explain climate science very well if I had to, you very likely don't really understand the evidence behind the scientific consensus on climate change either, unless you happen to have made a special project out of it, for whatever reason. Unless you recently finished a New Yorker article summarizing that evidence the way only the New Yorker can—so that you haven't yet forgotten most of it—what do you really know about the science? Well, ok, let's see: “greenhouse gases,” (I had forgotten until this moment what a clever little trope that is) are like a chemical ceiling that won't let, what?—carbon dioxide, I think, which makes air warmer for some reason?—won't let it escape the earth's atmosphere or, wait a minute, is it just that it won't let heat (which is actually nothing but particles of airy stuff, moving faster?) through the chemical ceiling? Oh, well, if you need to you can always Google it.

Then there's something about “core samples,” I think, where they drill down into the tundra or somewhere with a hollow tube and then pull the tube out and, by looking at the layers in the tube or maybe “carbon dating” samples of the layers (you have no idea what that really is), or maybe examining certain traits of fossils in the layers—anyway, a lot of stuff like that—then they can tell what the climate was in these different time periods, going way back. And then, using statistical techniques you don't really understand either, they can tell how fast natural climate change happens and that tells you that now, thanks to those insidious greenhouse gases (air conditioners are bad; and spray deodorants, are they still bad?), things are heating up way faster than would be statistically likely otherwise.

What's really going on here, of course, is that you trust the science (as opposed to knowing it) and you trust (most of) the scientists so you choose to believe them. This is not to say that you aren't justified in trusting them, I think you are, I know you are—my point here is no way relativist. But the rather elaborate philosophical argument explaining why (which I do know!) would take us too far afield; for now, just entertain this thought: thanks, as it were, to your college degree, you choose to believe the science you don't really understand.

Which leads, finally and I think most importantly, to attitudes characteristic of the educated elite, attitudes that are—thanks to ubiquitous media—now constantly on display, inviting linking and re-tweeting the world over (Hilary's “basket of deplorables”). Those elites radiate feelings of infinite superiority over those who have simply accepted the world they were given, just like their parents and grandparents did. It's a point that can't be made too often: these people may be ignorant, but they aren't stupid. They can tell when they are being disdained. On the other hand, we who are so habitually disdainful are more or less unaware of how inflated our sense of our own importance actually is.

I teach a philosophy elective for seniors at a prestigious prep school and I remember one young man, a brilliant fellow, especially gifted at mathematics and deeply invested in the hard sciences, physics above all. He enjoyed the class but found a lot of it a bit too “soft” for his taste, a bit too much like a history course or, God forbid, the poetry course he had been required to take in tenth grade. But he liked an early essay by Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” especially the first few pages where Nietzsche bears down ferociously on the place of Man in the great scheme of things—the immensities of time and space that obliterate by comparison that utterly inconsequential creature whose moment of existence is bound to pass in the blink of a cosmic eye. Nietzsche (his mouth full of irony) cites Kant approvingly for his description of how humbling it was to him personally, and mankind in general, to absorb the lessons of the Copernican revolution.

This budding young scientist ate that up. And he had much to say on how salutary that particular effect of science ought to be for the human species, out of humility might come concern for the general well-being and, yes, for the planet…

But I couldn't help but notice something (that Nietzsche missed, could it be?) about the boy's manner as he was talking. So I interrupted him in the middle of his description of how humbling it was for humans to be told that the earth was not at the center of universe and that they were a species of animal, like any other, and so on—I interrupted him and said, “You know what Russell, you don't sound very humble right now? I mean, you sound like you are riding pretty high, you sound like you are getting quite a kick out of being in a position to put mankind in his place—that is, down?”

Now, as I say, this was a fine young man—completely honest—and we had talked a lot about the sneaky ways Nietzsche's “will to power” finds to express itself, and his eyes glanced away for a few seconds as he looked within, for just as long as it took to realize that I was right; he lapsed immediately into a sheepish grin, but pleased as well—for he had learned something, and that would always have value for him.

So the expert, the scientist, and well-educated New Yorker readers have the courage to live with their “Copernican” understanding of man's negligible place in the universe and so, in all humility, forsake the illusory centralities and consolations of religion, which they leave behind for those “without college degrees” to cling to, along with their guns.

Really? Does it still take courage to live without God? Well, no doubt we note in passing now and then that we can make do without the “crutch” of religion. Does the thought of the immensities of time and space still provoke humility? Well, awe is a more likely response nowadays, I think—although even that is likely tinged with the merely “awesome,” for such is the effect of seeing so many amazing movies and museum installations about the immensities of time and space. But humility? Not typically, surely; after all, it was us insignificant humans who developed the theories and technologies that have disclosed those immensities, that turned them into exhibits, as it were, exhibits of our own prowess as much as of the immensities themselves.

No doubt there is attitudinal variation here, person-to-person differences. But, if all that modesty is still an effect of science's revelations of our place in the great scheme of things, it is also a veneer that never quite succeeds in masking the enormous pride that attends the mastery of a science and technology capable of penetrating nature's deepest secrets—the pride of the God-killer.

I used to teach an anthropology course for seniors at that same prestigious prep school and, during the second semester, I organized students into research teams. We were trying to understand the origin of moral relativism in the school. By the time the kids reached their senior year some kind of relativism was the default position—but how did it emerge, how did it take shape in earlier grades? How did it come to be taken for granted that ethics comes down to personal opinion and social upbringing and there's an end to it?

One group of researchers worked with fifth graders, a pivotal transitional group. They borrowed techniques from Lawrence Kohlberg, who had taken Jean Piaget's basic ideas about cognitive development and applied them to moral reasoning. One of the researchers used this scenario in his interviews: “You find a paper bag on the sidewalk and in it is a lot of money. There are no hints as to its source, no sign of the original owner. Just the bag and the money. What do you do—and how would you justify your decision?”

Answers varied. Some said: put an ad in the paper; take it home to parents; take it to the police; give it to charity; and, of course, there was just keep it. One of the boys who said “just keep it” introduced his decision by saying that he knew others could make a different decision based on their opinions of what was right, and that's what he was doing—and who could say otherwise? The researching senior was inspired to say, “What about God?”

To which this precocious eleven-year-old, after a moment's thought, replied, “Well, I personally am an agnostic but, hypothetically, if there was a God, I can see that he might have a different opinion from mine.”

This story gets a big laugh when I tell it to groups of parents at the school. They all recognize that sense of entitlement. Most students from these families, in these schools, develop that sense. Adults have been attending rapturously to their darling little pronouncements since they cooed their first gurgles and have continue to attend, often with genuine fascination, to their expressions of opinion on anything and everything throughout their childhoods. It's part of the way people “with a college degree” express their love.

Of course, it's funny to hear an eleven-year-old place his own opinion on a par with God's opinion. We adults—having misjudged so many things for so long—know better. In fact, in that laughter, I detect a rueful note, a hint of “if only…” But, however that may be, science deniers (who are often religious) find in the demeanor of the expert, of the scientist, a reflection of that boy's assumption of the worth of his opinion. Except they don't think it's funny. They think it's arrogant and condescending.

But there is another dimension to this situation that also implicates people “with a college degree.” It is an historical dimension, one that contributed fundamentally to the overall culture of optional belief that we all live in today, even as our anxiety about the dangers of science denial is making some of us realize that it may not always be a good thing for beliefs to be quite so optional. This particular feature of the situation demands special attention—and a special reckoning—from people who were there, back in the day, creating the counterculture at Woodstock, occupying the campus during the Cambodia bombings. I extend this anecdote a bit because it is, I believe, especially revealing. For those who remember, but also for younger people who didn't live through that era and might profit from a glimpse of the world that made their world:

The scene: a glorious summer day on Cape Cod, circa 1975. A dear friend of mine and her mother (lifelong bonds between us) are sitting on a screened-in porch, sipping lemonade. They have just returned from a three-day retreat at an ashram in the Berkshires and are telling me all about it. I was curious about meditation. I knew it was correlated with measurable physiological effects, and I had heard a lot about it from trustworthy people—I was thinking I might try it. So I was listening with genuine interest. But it soon became apparent that this particular retreat had ventured way beyond meditation. Apparently, the Maharishi (the one who hung out with the Beatles) had achieved a breakthrough. He and his closest disciples at the central ashram (in Geneva, was it?) had embarked upon a radical new phase of enlightenment. They had achieved something very special, soon to be revealed to the world at a mass meditation event that would channel peace vibes across the planet. But some of these highly secret new techniques had been shared with the fortunate participants at this particular retreat in the Berkshires, by way of preparation for the big day.

And what was this achievement? I asked.

Levitation.

I expressed a certain—ah—skepticism, shall we say? And they turned on me. These two extremely intelligent, Ivy League–educated women turned on me and proceeded to rake me over the coals with considerable vim. How could I be so arrogant and close-minded? How could I know that levitation wasn't possible?

As a general rule I make a practice of avoiding discussions of this kind; I smile and nod (no doubt a bit condescendingly) and wait for the subject to change. But this time I just snapped. I launched into a lecture on probability (I was reading a lot in philosophy of science at the time). I set up a scale to illustrate degrees of unlikelihood. At one extreme, logically impossible—a round square, given our definitions. Next, utterly, wildly unlikely, breaking established laws of physics at the Newtonian level—levitation. Next, very, very unlikely, given known laws—say, clairvoyance. And so on, through ESP and alien abduction and, toward the other end of the scale, the probability that Hitler and Eleanor Roosevelt were living together in Argentina.

All in vain. They believed.

Apparently they had been shown videotapes from the ashram in Geneva, and, though the tapes were rather grainy and shadowy for some reason, you could make out enough to tell that those yogis were…hovering.

Plus, my friends had practiced some of these techniques themselves in the Berkshires, don't forget, and, though they never actually got airborne, they could definitely feel themselves getting…lighter.

They wanted to believe. That's the key to this whole phenomenon, the thread to keep track of.

Exasperated, hoping to jolt them out of their post-retreat trance, I proposed a bet. Five hundred dollars each (a lot of money in those days, but I wasn't worried) that in two years levitation would be a universally acknowledged fact. Squadrons of levitating gurus floating down Fifth Avenue, on the Johnny Carson show, evidence like that.

And they took the bet!

Time passed, and no levitators materialized, but my dear friends were remarkably undisturbed. They weren't embarrassed into reassessing their worldview from the ground up, not at all, far from it. It was as if they had lost a bet on a sporting event. They had been wrong about the specifics on this one, but what did that prove? Maybe next time, who knows?

Who really knows anything?

Just recently I happened to tell one of my best graduate students that story. I was chortling as I went along, confident that she would share my point of view, but as I reached the end of my tale I noticed a little frown on her face—and she said, guess what?

“How do you know levitation isn't possible?”

It's this business of choice, you see, and it's not always a good thing. The irony of our time is that it is no longer “us,” the radicals of yore, who are indulging in an orgy of choice. It is the populist forces of willful ignorance who carry the banner of transgression, who feel free to say anything, to believe anything. It is they who are challenging norms, violating categories, upending governance. We are the establishment, and science, perhaps more than any other institution, entitles us to whatever authority we have. But first, if we expect to get anywhere with that, we will have to learn how to talk to people who don't know as much as we do (which isn't that much). And we better figure out how to do that fast—there's a hard rain gonna fall.