Knock, knock!

There will be a happy band of readers, I know, who will find the above “knock, knock” joke not simply unfunny, but entirely incomprehensible. These will be those who have never heard of the “Birther conspiracy” -- a belief that the president of the United States cannot be Barack Obama since in order to qualify for the job you have to have been born within American boundaries and, as every flushed-cheeked Republican activist knows, Mr. Obama’s mother snuck off to Nairobi to deliver her misbegotten son and the perfectly normal birth certificate which documents that young Obama was born in Honolulu is a palpable forgery.

There have been any number of legal attempts to cast Mr. Obama as a false pretender to his throne, and all of them to date have been laughed out of court. The Birther movement has been dismissed by a spokesman for the Republican Party as an “unnecessary distraction.” Yet it is a conviction its diehard supporters will not disavow. According to one survey cited in a recent edition of The New Yorker magazine, some 28 percent of Republicans refused to accept that the president was born in the United States, and another 30 percent still needed to be convinced.

That these doubters will never be persuaded is the whole point of The New Yorker article, a review of a book by Cass R. Sunstein titled “Rumors in an Age of Unreason.” The book’s unchallenging thesis is that a vigorous exchange of ideas and information is the stuff on which democracy is built. And it goes on to argue that though we live at a time when access to information had never been less constrained, reasoned debate is a flower struggling to root in an arid desert. The main contention is that we filter the flow of information to allow through only the things which confirm what we believe we already know. And nothing works quite so well to reinforce our belief systems as spending time with people who think and behave exactly as we do ourselves. The more determined the prejudice, the more hits it gets on the Internet.

Even those living in Turkey and who find the idea of casting aspersions on the legitimacy of the president of the United States as outrageously silly will recognize the phenomenon. It is at the source of the polarization of Turkish society. A source of the great divide between radical secularists and religious conservatives is that each side knows the absolute truth about the hidden intentions of the other; each side understands the other as a threat. No amount of information can convince one side that what they hold as truth about the other may not be supported by the facts. And to display a genuine openness to dialogue is to admit to weakness. Whether one can waltz with the Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir or Tel Aviv, accept a leaked document from the General Staff as genuine or a photocopied hoax, believe in evolution or even the right to spell your name with a Kurdish looking “x” depends on which newspaper one reads and on which side of the fence you sit. The idea that there might be a rational way to work these things out sometimes seems a utopian idea.

Of course, societies disagree about important things, and intolerance to an opposing point of view is nothing new. But things like whether it is wise to be inoculated against swine flu you would think could be settled outside the political arena. But even this subject risks being politicized. “It’s all a plot by America to sell more vaccine,” my taxi driver earnestly explained to me the other day, although he did confess he had a pathological fear of needles. To which one can only say:

Knock, knock

Flu’s there?

(the whole thing is snout of control)