Once the dust has settled on the St John’s museum fiasco, we’ll be able to see things more clearly. I rather suspect that the first thing that’s going to occur to us – if we have any sense – is that there is a marked and significant difference between fact and opinion. That, and how it’s invariably wise not to sign petitions when you don’t know what nutter’s name is going to turn up on the list next to your eminent one, or what nutty comment is going to be put down next to your sensible one.
The idea has grown of popular suffrage in as many areas of our lives as possible, even on matters of fact. Many people have come to believe, or have had the idea planted in them somehow, that because they have a vote, this gives them the right to interfere directly in the running of the country, vetoing or approving things from the largest project to the most insignificant piece of legislation. It is pointless, at this juncture, to explain that one has a vote precisely to allow one to elect a representative to make decisions on one’s behalf. We do that every five years. In between, we leave it up to them. We make our opinion known, of course. We shout and we scream. Sometimes, we might even applaud. But when it comes to the crunch, they decide.
In some cases, they don’t decide, and that’s when there are legally-constituted public bodies which take the decision out of the hands of parliamentarians. But the situation remains the same: the man with the ballot paper does not take the decisions. The man with the ballot paper voices an opinion, and that opinion may or may not be taken on board.
Once in a lifetime, we might get to use our vote between elections, when a referendum is called on a matter of tremendous importance, like whether or not Malta should join the European Union. But it stands to reason that we are not going to have a referendum on everything or anything else: whether to put Christ on our euro coin; whether to have an opera house or parliament; whether to have a museum under St John’s Square; whether pigs will fly or have their ears clipped.
Yet a referendum is precisely what some people think they are entitled to. Reading between the lines of much of the nonsense that has been written over the last few days, this is what they seem to be demanding. Only they’re not – what they are in fact demanding is that the powers-that-be – and the identity of those powers is not quite certain given what happened last week – take note of public opinion.
Their definition of public opinion is ‘who shouts loudest’. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that public opinion, as in the infamous incidents of the last few days, is not represented by what used to be called pillars of society, mixed in with a particularly loud crowd from Sliema or thereabouts. For the government – and the opposition, for that matter, if it has changed its policy on referendums – to take note of public opinion, it would have to conduct a referendum. Otherwise, the silent majority find themselves railroaded over by a tiny minority with a good publicity machine and an effective misinformation campaign. I might add something else, too: referendums are held after intensive campaigns by both sides of the divide. They are not held after solely a misinformation campaign by the No camp.
There is another point, and it is an important one. Votes are taken on matters of opinion, and not on matters of fact. You can’t vote a fact out of existence, nor can you blot it out by claiming it is an opinion. Last Saturday, The Financial Times carried an excellent leading article on this matter. It so perfectly summed up what happened in Malta over the last few weeks that I found myself hoping that Astrid Vella and lots of her friends and associates take that newspaper. The article was called Wisdom of nerds. “Any attempt to turn mob opinion into the test for truth is pernicious,” it went. “That a thought might be popularly believed does not make it true. The earth did not stand still because Galileo fell out of favour, and evolution has not been disproved by the faith of believers. The wisdom of crowds can only be conventional.”
This growing inability to distinguish between fact and opinion, and to believe that opinions can be turned into facts if enough people share them (Astrid Vella and the FAA being a case in point on the matter of the museum), has been blamed on what is being called the Wikipedia phenomenon. There is no better place to find trivia than on Wikipedia, and it is a useful first stop in the search for the basics. But it is at once a cause and a symptom of a dangerous new pandemic: the belief that we can create facts out of opinions, or dismiss facts as opinions, and that the two are interchangeable. Notice how quickly the opinion that the cathedral would fall down if a hole is dug before it became a fact. And to compound the confusion, the original opinion was not based on fact. Rather the opposite – those who manifested this opinion also manifested another: that they wished to stop the process by which the facts are drawn out through a long and complicated process of scientific investigation.
The article in The Financial Times referred to this problem, too. Wiki-enthusiasts, it said, cite the “wisdom of crowds” in claiming that just as a market finds prices for goods based on differing opinions of what they are worth, so a crowd can establish what truth is. Doesn’t that describe what we saw happen with Astrid Vella and her followers? They believed that they created the truth out of their opinion with the help of a lot of noise and a seriously flawed petition – and some rather noisome behaviour from a couple of government backbenchers and a geologist who found him drawn into an imbroglio. The Financial Times made a comment which I have made myself several times over the last few days, but because I am not taken seriously by certain people, and The Financial Times is, I will quote it for their benefit: “Whereas prices are reliant on opinions and values, facts are either true or false.”
Every scientist knows this, which is why it was so odd to see people with a scientific background drawn into the mess. You don’t even have to be a scientist. You just have to be one step up from the intellectual level of gossips round the greengrocer’s van.
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