Our three lead articles continue examining our current crisis in America. Evident throughout the tumultuous year of 2020 and early 2021, from our skeptics’ viewpoint we see far too many people unable (or unwilling) to separate fantasy from reality, see through obvious conspiracy theories, and make decisions based on evidence rather than emotion.

In our cover article “How to Repair the American Mind,” Guy P. Harrison offers his lessons from “such an extraordinarily eventful year” in which “irrational beliefs have reached crisis levels in America.” The common thread he sees is lack of critical thinking. “The reason our problem of mass delusions and rampant disinformation can exist to the degree it currently does is because too many American minds are incapable of handling close encounters of the irrational kind,” he says, noting that the key problem is too many people are believers rather than thinkers. He urges we focus not on the few who sell lies and fantasies but “the many who eagerly buy them.” Harrison, who has written thoughtful books on this very subject, notes that critical thinking can be taught and argues it should be taught in our schools at all levels. He emphasizes that critical thinking, far from being elitist and intellectual, is open to anyone, at any age—it is in fact the ultimate populist, democratizing activity.

In part two of her examination of QAnon, Stephanie Kemmerer looks even deeper into the dark recesses of that attractor of conspiratorial ideas, no matter how unhinged and crazy. Some QAnon followers may have had their worldview shocked when their disinformation-fueled beliefs about the election failed to materialize, but the movement is still dangerous and is not going away, Kemmerer says. We again commend her for her insightful reporting. And in “Down with Science—but Why?” Peter Lantos laments an increasing tendency to distrust and even reject science and its institutions. He stresses the many strands of thought that lead people to science denial, including politics, religion, and vested interests. Trying to understand their positions is the first step.

Now I want to offer some cautionary, even contradictory, thoughts about such matters. They come courtesy of Stephen Hilgartner, J. Benjamin Hurlbut, and Sheila Jasanoff in a recent Policy Forum article in Science (February 26). They see the current antiscience movement as legitimate “dissent” and say that labeling it “antiscience” is bad social science and bad politics. “What looks like an attack on science may simply be the pursuit of politics by other means,” they write. “The division is not between those who march for science and those who march against science. It is between competing understandings of how to balance collective responsibility and individual liberty.” Further, “In America, factual controversies in policy contexts are less about the credibility of the science than they are proxies for disagreements about competing ways of life. … The ‘antiscience’ label conflates normative dissent about which values matter with epistemic dissent on matters of fact.” It is a sobering cautionary note for we pro-science skeptics who exalt evidence, facts, and science above all. I appreciate what Hilgartner and colleagues are saying—competing values are what are often really at play in such discussions—and we all need to better understand that. But I nevertheless argue that scientific thinking is a high value in itself and that selective repudiation of inconvenient scientific findings is a deplorable impulse even if the intent is not to denigrate the science but to reinforce one’s personal values.

—Kendrick Frazier