In conversation with Jonathan Rauch
“If you want to clear the room at a cocktail party” writes Jonathan Rauch, “say epistemology”. It is one of those horrible words, lengthy, a mouthful of enunciation, and isolating with its polish of professional jargon. It is also, largely, redundant! That poor guy next to you at the party, speed drinking his martini for an excuse to walk away, might otherwise pause mid-gulp, turn to face you, even lean-in for a closer listen with the light returning to his eyes, if you only replaced epistemology with truth or knowledge or information…
Philosophers build careers around ‘ologies’, and with every tweak of language (every ‘ology’ of this kind) comes a little refinement, a little more accuracy, and a new corner of academia that can build upon itself. But for the unfamiliar, the uninitiated, or the simply forgetful amongst us, these words only bring frustration, a stroke-like numbness, and quickly emptying rooms.
Which is a shame, because in many ways epistemology is also the catchphrase of our day… albeit expressed a little differently, and couched in a thick layer of doom and gloom. Browse the shelves of any surviving bookstore and titles like these will stare back at you with Best Seller stickers across their covers: “The Misinformation Age”, “Truth Decay”, “Post Truth”, “The Death of Truth”. A completely new genre of publication: The Epistemic Crisis Book!
Everywhere you look, people are obsessed with the question of knowledge, and seemingly distraught at the fiasco it now finds itself in.
The first thing that must be pushed back upon here is that hinge-word “now”. It is always tempting to imagine that what we are going through is unique, a special case of pain and difficulty from what has come before, or from what will come after. However you try and pinch things though, there is nothing particularly new about dealing with deceptive leaders, with the lies of our fellow citizens, with the overriding interests of tribal loyalty; with discerning truth from falsity. In fact, it is the perpetual challenge of our species and of all others: either discover what is true about the world and so be able to adapt, and even thrive; or fail to discover truth, stagnate as a result, and then eventually die.
Still, it would be much too uncharitable to say that all these Epistemic Crisis authors are simply conjuring-up an emergency in the hopes of making some quick cash. They are not idiots, and most of them are not callous. They are on to something – a feeling, a sense, an unpleasant tingle in the bones that things are different this time around. And just what that something is, is an area that Rauch has a well-trained ear to.
In the 1990s, decades before most people began noticing that the soft, embracing kindness of modern social justice movements were morphing into the poisonous, intolerant inquisitions that we often see today, Rauch was publishing a foreshadowing book on what was to come. He also had a painful memory, and a shared history (of a kind), with this new generation of witch-hunters.
As a young, gay man of a slightly different era, Rauch grew-up with the worst of things. All around him were laws and prohibitions against who he was: against marriage, against employment, against businesses, against sex, against affection, against biology… So the gay rights movement was born from this sin, this public and open discrimination. Rauch watched as people marched against this injustice, as they filed petition after petition, as they demonstrated, launched legal battles, and “confronted the psychiatric profession with the irrationality of its pathologising of homosexuality”.
Above all it took bravery. Every one of that early generation of activists suffered. As did everyone who joined later! In 1996 Rauch allied himself with the public battle, fighting for the legalisation of gay marriage and, though hoping for more, was resigned to the fact that “I might see some success in two or three generations, if ever.” Eight years later gay marriage was first legalised in a single state, Massachusetts. By 2015 it was legal across all fifty. And Rauch was left with the happy, and impossible to ignore thought that, “I should have had more confidence in liberal science. You cannot be gay in America today and doubt that.”
But writing back then, as gay-rights turned a fast corner towards victory, Rauch could sense that his “confidence in liberal science” wasn’t so widely shared amongst his fellow travellers; that there were plenty of doubters in Gay America. Their liberal society had given them the freedom, and the right, to call-out prejudices against them. To loudly challenge those prejudices – and to defeat them. But it also gave their enemies the same freedoms and rights to fight-back against those defeats – to try to step society and its laws into bigotry once more.
So with their personal slice of salutary progress in the bank, many of these activists decided enough was enough. That liberalism – those freedoms, and those rights – which had been so useful to them, was suddenly a problem, a weapon that needed to be destroyed, lest it prove useful to someone else. “Today I fear that many people on my side of the gay-equality question are forgetting our debt to the system that freed us.”
It is an old and worn metaphor, but one that is useful and clear. It pushes to the heart of things, and to why those activists were making such an enormous error. That metaphor is the “marketplace of ideas”. A place of widely discordant views and opinions, all swirling around in competition. A place not of chaos (though it can often look that way) but of constant criticism. Rather than being a license for hatred (though it is also that by default), this marketplace is a mechanism for the discovery of truth. Somewhere in which ideas rise and fall on the strength of their arguments, and the quality of their explanations. A world where people talk directly to each other, and change their minds once – and only when – they are convinced to do so…
But in the years since, Rauch has begun to have his doubts. And it comes back to epistemology, a critical eye on those Epistemic Crisis authors, and a long, unpleasant gaze at the modern landscape of fake news, of misinformation, of relativism, of cancelling, of shaming, of trolling, of weaponising news, of normalising lies and falsehood, of the siloing of communities, of politicising truth, of Donald Trump:
Long before Donald Trump began his political career, he explained his attitude toward truth with characteristic brazenness. In a 2004 television interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, he marveled at the Republicans' successful attacks on the wartime heroism of Senator John Kerry, the Democrats' presidential candidate. "[I]t's almost coming out that [George W.] Bush is a war hero and Kerry isn't," Trump said, admiringly. "I think that could be the greatest spin I've ever seen." Matthews then asked about Vice President Dick Cheney's insinuations that Kerry's election would lead to a devastating attack on the United States. "Well," replied Trump, "it's a terrible statement unless he gets away with it." With that extraordinary declaration, Trump showed himself to be an attentive student of disinformation and its operative principle: Reality is what you can get away with.
George Orwell imagined a shadowing and nosey government. One that branded free thought as traitorous, that made individuality impossible to the point of death, and which slowly suffocated its citizens into passivity, compliance and adoration. Thomas Hobbes saw us all in terms of our animal origins, fighting to bloody ends over limited resources… unless restrained by a powerful and controlling state. When most people think of social suppression they have something like this in mind: a Leviathan stomping them into silence and conformity. And that without such a structure, we could – and would – all flourish in new and beautiful ways; letting our full range of cognitive abilities off the leash.
What is too often missed is the internal mess of recurring errors that we have within us: biases. We tend to overestimate our chances of success; we overestimate the probability of eye-catching (but rare) events such as terror attacks; we like to extrapolate familiar data points from our lives, believing they are therefore universal to everyone else; we tend toward conformity within the groups we belong to; we notice evidence that confirms what we already think, while ignoring evidence that might contradict us… Studies have documented well over a hundred such identifiable biases/errors of these kinds, and this doesn’t take into account the whole category of meta-biases – those biases that blind us to our other biases.
All of this is a long way around to saying that reasoning is hard… very hard. And that to get anywhere with it, we first need what Charles Sanders Peirce called “network epistemology”. With truth being so elusive, we need a community around us – people who hold everything that we say to account with criticism and error-correction. Whenever knowledge creation isn’t a social behaviour, the enterprise is doomed! “It will appear”, Peirce wrote, “that individualism and falsity are one and the same.”
Science – when done well – is just such an escape from individual falsity. A process of constant trials and errors, of conjectures and refutations. An institution that doesn’t just find mistakes, but which revels in their discovery; hoping to find as many as possible, as quickly as possible, so that they can be just as quickly error-corrected.
The professional ranks that Rauch joined out of college looked a lot like this. As a young journalist hoping to tell “enlightening” and “true” stories (in a stereotypically solitary occupation), he couldn’t possibly have imagined how little space he would have to himself:
Apart from the lonely process of writing a first draft, I could do nothing on my own. Facts were gathered from interviews and sources; analysis was checked with experts; every sentence was edited, copy-edited, and often fact-checked; tipsters suggested story ideas, sources waved me off bad leads, and challenges to my claims percolated in conversations within the newsroom and outside of it. The sense of having joined something much greater than myself, and of swearing allegiance to the exacting standards of a great tradition, made the enterprise of journalism appealing and compelling to me even on the days when the practice of journalism seemed grinding and routine (which was often).
Today it is the changed and changing nature of the media environment that has Rauch doubting what he once believed: whether an open space for reporting and opinion and information gathering and data storage and publication and fact checking and second sources and third sources and of transparency, of evaluation, of interviews, of witnesses, of cross checking, of investigation, of trusted sources, and of critical feedback, is enough. Instead, we all need to be paying a lot more attention to the structure of the “knowledge-making business”.
The ‘marketplace of ideas’ metaphor implies – and needs – a lot more than a raucous, unguarded, unpoliced, unimpeded space where true theories survive and bad ones die. In much the same way as governments need constitutions and institutional arrangements to ensure their proper function, our Marketplace needs delicately tuned social settings for it to work; an agreed-upon collection of rules, a constitution of knowledge.
Some of this is merely a problem of bandwidth. Popperians can talk endlessly about the free flow of conjectures and refutations, of love-inducing problems, and of beautiful solutions, but only a very small fraction of the swirling thoughts, philosophies, notions, concepts, designs, and criticisms are ever likely to be noticed. So rather than imagining the open spaces of a Market, with all the available produce labelled and displayed for your careful inspection, a more apt metaphor might be what Rauch calls the “social funnel” – a place where, even if the persuasion of an opponent were possible, the battle to first grab his attention is near-hopeless.
The modern media landscape – with its targeted reporting and endless variety – appears to drive this social funnel ever narrower. Take a quick glance at the viewing habits of the average citizen, and you are likely to feel that all is lost; that we are all splintering into epistemic tribes, communities that talk across each other, but who never meet to hash-out their issues. “The commercial internet was born with an epistemic defect” writes Rauch, “its business model was primarily advertisement-driven and therefore valued attention first and foremost.”
And perhaps it is here where things take their worst turn. For all its promise and undoubtable good, today’s internet appears to be accelerating untruth at dizzying speed. With such a solitary focus on attention and ad sales, outrage becomes the ugly cousin, belatedly let out of the cupboard after the party is over and the guests have left; running around the already messy living room, burning pent-up energy and making an already unpleasant scene look a whole lot worse.
When a quiet news day means a loss of profit, the temptation to play upon an audience’s impulsivity is hard to ignore. A sprinkling of fake news and disinformation might just be the way to spice things up, and keep eyes on your channel. But so might a little “troll epistemology”, whereby you poke at conspiracy theories, at desecration, at insult, and at shock value, with the single-minded hope of winding people up. Call it a “firehose of falsehood” or “flood[ing] the zone with shit”, it is the type of tactic that has no interest in creating knowledge, in settling disagreements, or building trust. It only wants people off their seats, red-hot, and ready to fight.
Way off in the distance, but still visible, is another – but just as troubling – world of news media that bathes each day in “emotional safetyism”. These are often the traditional bastions of good journalism, the large shining lights of the industry who turned against pluralism, diversity, and value-rich disagreements, instead deciding that such things were abruptly too dangerous for the average listener to handle. Filtering their content through prudish self-censorship, they look down upon their readers, listeners, watchers, with a child-rearing concern: Sure, I can handle the truth of the world, but most people aren’t built like me. I am special. And they need protecting, from worry-inducing knowledge, and from themselves.
So Popper’s model needs new settings, for a new world. But what are they? What should this constitution of knowledge look like? It begins with a minimalist compromise, a balancing of simple, easily agreed-upon rules – something that ensures the dynamism that knowledge creation requires, but which also hinges heavily around stability. An accommodation that cuts through the inherent antagonisms of the current system, and which produces a much more functional institution (akin to the medical or legal establishments). A place with slightly more procedures, hierarchies and restrictions, but only insofar as better, more positive, and more reliable outcomes are achieved: a Madisonian epistemology to compliment the Popperian incumbent.
But of course, as much as anything, culture matters here! This all starts with people pushing back, unmuting themselves, finding their courage, speaking-out… and in doing so “remember[ing], you are never as alone as silencers want you to believe.” Still all this talk of cultural change and institution building can be a little overwhelming, and a little too isolating – much like all that previous talk about epistemology was. So how does one go about this without clearing the room at the cocktail party? Start small, with things that are easy to follow, easy to recall, easy to understand, and easily consented to, yet which will have disproportionately large downstream effects (a lesson that many new Popperians should take to heart).
So take two stone tablets, and carve into them the following maxims:
* No one gets the final say!
* No one has personal authority!
*** The Popperian Podcast #12 – Jonathan Rauch – ‘The Constitution of Knowledge’ The Popperian Podcast: The Popperian Podcast #12 – Jonathan Rauch – ‘The Constitution of Knowledge’ (libsyn.com)