Let’s start with definitions. We humans have senses. And so, the beginning of sense-making is always located in our five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. Most of us have heard and uttered the phrase, “that doesn’t make sense to me,” which means, literally, that my senses tell me things such as ‘the earth is not round but flat.’ And so, for most of human history, the way we understood our planetary home (we didn’t know it was a planet, of course) was as an essentially flat surface on which life unfolded. It made sense. We also understood the sun and the moon in the same way: they were discs we could see moving across the sky, their point of rising and setting shifting south or north along the horizon in a more or less regular way. An eclipse of the moon likewise, seemed to our senses to indicate that the sun was eating the moon, or perhaps that it was a marriage of the two (which now turns out to simply be the alignment of the two that blocks out our view of one of them). And when the ancient Greeks tried to make sense of the most critical object in the sky, they saw a god like Phoebus Apollo riding the sun’s chariot across the heavens. In other words, they personified natural phenomena to make them “sensible.” The ocean was a god, the wind was a god, earth was a god, the moon was a goddess, and so on. Since the gods were like humans, the often-puzzling behavior of these entities made sense because, like humans, they all had quirks.
Then came science, the (more or less) objective observation of such phenomena, and with it, concepts about the natural world that did not “make sense.” The earth is a sphere, not a flat surface. The sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, but just the opposite: the earth, while itself rotating, revolves around the sun. Nor is the earth the center of the universe, but a relatively insignificant dot in an almost infinite gathering of stars and galaxies, an observation that nearly cost Galileo his life. And the sun looks like a disc in the sky not because it’s small but because it’s 93 million miles away, whereas the moon, actually orders of magnitude smaller, simply reflects the light of the sun, not its own. All these are simple notions now, which any 4th grader “knows” and takes for granted. But if there were to be an instance in which the moon disappeared, or the sun stopped emitting its rays, that would be hard to make sense of. And our sense-making equipment would be sent into overdrive. For that is how sense making is defined:
Sensemaking is literally the act of making sense of an environment, achieved by organizing sense data until the environment “becomes sensible” or is understood well enough to enable reasonable decisions.
And these days, sense making usually comes into play when our brain responds to “novelty or potentially unexpected stimuli as it integrates new information into an ever-updating model of the world” (both quotes from R. J. Cordes, “Making Sense of Sensemaking,” www.atlanticcouncil.org).
So, we make sense of our environment (which we literally must do to feel secure) by either relying on data we’ve already learned, or by “integrating new information” into our model of the world. That is, our rapid-fire brains operate, and enable us to negotiate outside environments, by constantly updating that world model we have with which to accommodate new data. And of course, this is where our problems enter. For some of those models we rely on are very much fixed. We like them; depend on them; even cherish them because they make our world sensible, which is to say, survivable. And we don’t take kindly, often enough, to new data which demands a radical restructuring of our model’s way of interpreting things or, in the most radical situations, seeing things—literally. Pathbreaking artists and thinkers are doing this all the time. Picasso forced people, with his cubist paintings, to see reality in a new way. And many condemned him for it; ridiculed his inability to see or draw straight. The reception met by Stravinsky’s ballet music for Rites of Springwhen it was first performed in Paris on May 29, 1913, is a dramatic instance of this—the audience actually rioted and jeered its outrage at what it considered the desecration of musical form. In short, what the audience expected was something more in line with the classical ballet and music they had come to love and expect. When they heard loud, primitive, cacophonous music, and seemingly soulless dancing by puppets, rather than the human emotions they wanted and expected and had paid for, most simply could not tolerate it. It was too jarring; too wide a gulf between their model of what ballet was, and what they were seeing and hearing onstage. It made no sense, and that made them violent.
In many ways, that is what has been happening in our time to many people on a more pedestrian and widespread level. The world we are operating in no longer fits the model which has served us humans so well for so long. Communication now takes place at almost instantaneous speed. Where once we had to be in physical contact with others to communicate with them, or write letters which took days or weeks to reach them, or even hear them via telephone wires over the phone, now we can email them almost instantly, or, faster yet, text them instantaneously. No matter how far away they are. We can also talk and see them on screen via facetime or skype or zoom. None of this requires the wires that once made communication sensible to us. It’s all wireless. We say we “understand” this; but do we really? Or do we simply accept what is clearly taking place via our computers, which most of us don’t truly understand either? The same is true of diseases. We say we understand that viruses are these microscopic creatures that are not really alive, but somehow manage to hijack our cells into manufacturing their DNA so that they, the viruses, can multiply and make us sick. But do most of us really understand this? Do we understand; that is, can we make sense of an organism that is far too tiny for our human sensory equipment to feel or taste or smell or see? No, we can’t. And we must take the word of scientists, who have access to equipment like electron microscopes, that these creatures exist, and infiltrate our bodies in this way. And that there are more creatures like this—billions of them actually—that make possible our digestion of food, and a host of other functions that we couldn’t perform without them. And it all makes sense—if by “making sense” we now mean what others, whom we trust, assure us is true.
The problem enters when millions, perhaps billions of people no longer accept as fact what scientists are telling them. Many people, indeed, have never even heard of the most puzzling “facts” of our time, like “spooky action at a distance,” that even Einstein did not believe. That is, in the quantum world, we are informed, experiments have proven that subatomic particles can simultaneously exist in two separate places. And also, that they can communicate important data to each other instantaneously, without any intervening matter or known force carrying that data. These phenomena violate all the classical, i.e. sensible, laws of physics that most of us have been taught. This and other puzzling phenomena in this unseen quantum world violate these laws routinely—though none of us can “sense” this—except for the physicists who can “make sense” of it through elaborate machinery, and infer it via elaborate experiments.
So how do we poor humans not in the scientific community “make sense” of the world as it is now structured —so we are told—at the most basic level? Do we simply choose our particular specialist(s) and believe what they tell us? Or ignore the whole thing? Here is where sense making becomes really problematic in our time.
We can, for example, take some really humble (from humus) phenomena. Dirt: arguably, the most humble material we can think of. And yet, we are now informed by science that simple dirt is one of the most complex and precious materials on Earth. Created by the eons-long breakdown of rock, a were spoonful of it is inhabited by millions of critters all performing the indispensable work of digesting and converting indigestible matter into life-giving soil. And that soil is, in turn, the indispensable substrate upon which our entire human existence is based, being the source for all the life-giving plants that we depend upon for food, not just for us, but for the livestock that provides our protein nourishment. We have also recently been made aware of the communication that goes on between trees and the soil and plant life around them—the same trees which are also indispensable for much of our human existence. None of us can “sense” this on our own. We need the time-consuming experimentation, the sophisticated instruments, and the devotion of scientists to inform us of what they find. The same is true of mundane things like our own blood distribution and the workings of this body that we can sense, but whose inner workings—the communication that goes on between billions of cells and nerve endings and chemical neuro-transmitters, the functioning of lungs, liver, kidneys, heart, stomach lining—we have no way of discerning except via either illness and breakdown, or the experiments of science. In short, this need to rely on specialists for almost everything we now “know” is what makes sense-making so problematic in our time.
The problematic goes way beyond just having to rely on others to make sense of our world, moreover. It goes to the necessity for each of us to choose whose opinions and which experts to believe. This is not only because people vary so tremendously in what they choose to pay attention to for making sense of their world; it is also because in a “free” society, people are free to choose which science they believe. And many people, especially in our time and nation, choose to ignore conventional science and what used to be called ‘received standard opinion’ to follow the doubters and conspiracy theorists who claim much conventional scientific opinion is all a fraud designed to rob ordinary people of their freedom. This has come to fruition in the deniers of the truth of the Covid-19 virus. Mostly followers of Trump, these people have decided that the virus story is all a hoax meant to frighten people into ceding their freedoms to an all-consuming government. And so, the admonitions of scientists to take simple precautions like mask-wearing and social distancing are made sense of by the most roundabout and generally discredited mechanism: the government conspiracy. It is government that wants to circumscribe our freedoms, they believe, by exaggerating and distorting the dangers of a virus that is no worse than the common flu. And can be cured by easily-available drugs like hydroxychloroquine. This lunacy “makes sense” to an astonishing number and array of otherwise ‘normal’ people. The same applies to “making sense” of climate disruption. Huge percentages of Americans refuse to believe the science—or in fact, the evidence of their own senses in warmer temperatures or more frequent, increasingly-destructive storms. And this, in turn, is due to the fact that these large events take place on too slow a timescale to be really ‘sensed.’ We need to rely on the painstaking measurements of climatologists and hurricane specialists and glaciologists and those who can measure carbon concentration in the atmosphere to really gauge how much is changing, and how rapidly over time, due to increased carbon levels. And, as with the virus, that which people cannot see or feel or touch can be dismissed as “making no sense.” Increasing this hazard is the rise of social media, and platforms which people can choose to confirm their own biases and misperceptions. One such platform recently financed and sponsored by right-winger Rebekah Mercer is Parler.com—a website devoted to the disinformation (they call it free speech—where you are free to choose what to follow and believe, no matter how preposterous) promoted by Trump and his MAGA zealots. Another is the astonishing rise in the popularity of QAnon, and its bizarre conspiracy theories about baby-raping and -eating cults centered in Hollywood.
To sum up, sense making in our time has become even more precarious than usual in a world “where we humans are poorly adapted to the environment we’ve created.” That is to say, not only are we non-specialists unable to make sense of the most basic modern science on our own, i.e. through our evolved senses; those who wish to can literally choose what makes sense to them and fits with their already-formed opinions. No need to try to understand what reputable scientists are telling us. No need to be disturbed by dire predictions of what could happen if we ignore those predictions. Those millions who wish to can simply ignore the evidence that is supported by observation and experiment, and believe that which “makes sense” to them in their more comfortable and predictable bubble. Can choose to ignore that the real disinformation, the real conspiracy is that perpetrated by those who stand to profit from mass ignorance—the wealthy, the purveyors of fossil fuel and trash consumer products, the ones who stand to lose their fortunes if masses of people were to actually wake up to what is actually happening. And it takes no particularly rare insight to see that if the susceptibility of millions to this disinformation conspiracy continues, more people will end up in ICUs dying of Covid, and millions more will perish as the climate continues to worsen—all while singing their anthem of “Ain’t nobody gonna take my freedom from me.”
Because that, against all the evidence, is apparently what makes sense to them.
Lawrence DiStasi
