We hear the questions so often nowadays from colleagues, friends, and family, whether in discussions of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the safety of vaccines: “How can those people ignore the obvious facts?”; “How can they be so lost in their bubble?”; and “Who are their so-called experts?” Of course, I do not mean to imply that it is only one side in the culture wars asking those questions; rather, both sides view the other as living inside a bubble or an echo chamber. Fox News and CNN are “said [to] report as if from alternate universes.” These divisions have legal and policy consequences, as we have seen in the suggestion the Trump administration reflected an anti-scientific bias in appointments to head science-related government agencies, as well as in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, while scholars agree that 21st-century technological growth and the digital age has exacerbated the “tribal” divisions in the US and internationally, the phenomenon of citizens living in “two different worlds,” or in “alternative realities,” is hardly new. A relatively random historical parallel—but one to which I will return as exemplary of our contemporary situation—is the sharp division between Catholics and Calvinists during the Protestant Reformation. Each side was convinced of both the righteousness of their cause—not only of their beliefs, but also of their acts of violence—and the dangerous blasphemy of the other.

More recently, about 30 years ago, Michiel Schwarz and Michael Thompson, focusing on risk assessment in policy contexts, highlighted the role of cultural cognition in ongoing clashes of contradictory certainties and plural rationalities. Drawing on the myths of nature represented by some ecologists (nature as capricious, benign, perverse/tolerant, and ephemeral) and mapping them onto some anthropologists’ representation of two dimensions of sociality (individual versus group and no external restrictions on choice versus external restrictions on choice) and four types of “rationalities” (fatalist, individualist, hierarchist, and egalitarian), Schwarz and Thompson identified four different orientations in technology assessment. Thus, for example, the contradictory certainties held, respectively, by the producer of a genetically modified (GM) food product (that the product is safe) and an anti-GM activist (that the product is unsafe) can be explained by reference to differing perceptions of nature as, respectively, robust and vulnerable.