In any human society, a foundational problem is
how to resolve conflicts of belief.
—Jonathon Rauch
It will appear that individualism and falsity are one and the same.
—Charles Sanders Peirce
This past Christmas, my mother gave me a T-shirt with a somewhat unique message on it, and when I wore it to school on one of our “dress down” days this past spring, it evoked the following response from one of my students: “Oh, Mr. Brock! That is SO you!!”
The message?
“That’s what I do: I read & I know things.”
Well, I’ve been reading again, and from what I’ve been learning recently, I have started to wonder just how far into irrationality our society can sink and still survive. In just this past month, a meteorologist has had to resign his broadcaster position due to death threats for educating about climate change; the governor of Texas has signed a law prohibiting mandating water breaks for people who work outdoors (during the most catastrophic heat wave in state history!); and a young woman in Arizona has created an AI “clone” of herself to sell as an on-line “girlfriend” for anyone interested.
It is enough, frankly, to leave this member of what Jonathan Rauch calls the “reality-based community” shaking my head. What’s more, it leaves me shaking my head in a mixture of consternation and despondency because at the same time I have been reading these headlines, I have simultaneously been reading Rauch’s latest book from the Brookings Institution about the need for us to be defending the rational pursuit of objective truth, wondering if that’s even possible anymore.
Part of the challenge for me, personally, is that I know too much brain science not to know that while reasoning is one of the brain’s capacities, it is not the chief one in charge. The limbic system with its emotions and intuitions is. Or as Rauch so eloquently phrases it, “evolution selects not for the ability to reason in a way which leads to truth, necessarily, but for the ability to reason in a way which persuades” (p. 23; original emphasis). The bottom line is that as a social species, our brains care more about looking like we know what we are talking about than determining the veracity of what we are talking about—just recall what happened to Socrates for insisting on the truth!
Yet when the rational and the irrational do butt heads, how do we resolve the conflict successfully in favor of the rational? How do we get to at least some semblance of agreement about the objective truth of a given situation? That’s essentially the focus of the first half of Rauch’s book, and he argues that for most of human existence, we simply have not. When conflicts of belief have arisen, humans have traditionally either created isolated enclaves and ejected the heterodox, employed authoritarianism to maintain order, or resorted to violence—something Rauch calls “creed wars”—to destroy those who harbor “wrong” ideas.
But with the rise of liberal science, he argues, based on skepticism and fallibilism, knowledge about the world acquired a communal nature that transcended individual beliefs. When all propositions had the potential to be wrong and potentially disproved, no one person could claim certainty about the truth, and it was these checks and balances of the scholarly community, Rauch claims, that enabled humans to start resolving conflicting beliefs about the world in favor of a rational understanding of reality—even though (as any good philosopher of science will tell you) truly 100% objective knowledge is never possible. Thus, humanity could now grow ever closer to truth through this “evolutionary epistemology” (as Karl Popper called it) without having to resort to physical force: you could kill the hypothesis without killing the hypothesizer.
Rauch calls those who pursue knowledge in this manner, the “reality-based community,” and he calls the epistemic structures that support it, the “Constitution of Knowledge.” He uses this notion of a constitution as a very deliberate analogy to how the U.S. Constitution provides for the governance of our society with its separation of powers, arguing that the principles of fallibilism and empiricism prevent no one individual or institution from dictating what is or is not true. Likewise, he suggests, just as the U.S. Constitution guides a network of people to generate laws through persuasion and compromise in a process that no one person can control, “the reality-based network [of communities] behaves like an ecosystem, producing a body of validated propositions whose composition humans can influence but not control” (p. 87).
Rauch also uses this analogy because he wants to assert strongly that just as declaring something unconstitutional in our society means it is illegal, period, then so too, “anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community” (p. 87). Only propositions about the world which have been repeatedly put to the test of falsification using empirical means and continue to pass such testing can claim any status as objective truth. Everything else is subjective mysticism, falsehoods, or outright lies.
Which Rauch acknowledges:
goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions (p. 87).
But Rauch also grasps that what can go down badly even with members of the reality-based community is that just like the U.S. Constitution, the Constitution of Knowledge bestows not just rights, but responsibilities as well, and:
as between the two, the rights are the easier to grasp and defend…of all epistemic orders, only liberal science is premised on free inquiry and intellectual pluralism. Yet the responsibilities are heavy and tempting to shirk. We can believe as we like privately, but in making public policy, we must privilege the reality-based community’s judgments about facts…we can question and criticize to our heart’s content, but we must also endure being questioned and criticized ourselves…accepting that we might always be wrong…[Furthermore,] if we wish to be part of the reality-based community, we behave as if truth exists and evidence matters [and we recognize that] failing to persuade means losing the argument, period. You cannot prevail by majority vote, by being divinely inspired, by being historically oppressed, by having justice on your side, by silencing the other side, or any other way. Those are the republican virtues of the republic of science—and they require just as much discipline and commitment as do the republican virtues of politics (pp. 112-113).
That is why Rauch recognizes that as with any constitution, “if the people or their factions seek to win by lying, breaking the law, fostering extremism and demagoguery, or wiping out the other side, then no constitution will endure, however strong it might look on paper” (p. 112). Today, he asserts, the Constitution of Knowledge is under just such attack from both without and within, and he posits that social media, cancel culture, and what he calls “troll epistemology” are collectively chipping away at the reality-based community. His is a call to defend against these three forces (as the book’s subtitle implies), and that is where I’m no longer sure we have the necessary social ecosystem to succeed—especially given the preponderance of the types of news items with which I started this essay.
Something I will explore in my next post.
References
Chow, D. (July 7, 2023) Backlash Brews Against Texas Law that Eliminates Mandatory Water Breaks. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/backlash-brews-texas-law-eliminates-mandatory-water-breaks-rcna92961.
Contreras, B. (June 27, 2023) Social Media Star’s AI Clone Charges a Dollar Per Minute for Chats. The Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-06-27/influencers-ai-chat-caryn-marjorie.
Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
Trisman, R. (June 27, 2023) A Meteorologist Got Threats for His Climate Coverage. His New Job is About Solutions. NPR Morning Edition. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/27/1184461263/iowa-meteorologist-harassment-climate-change-quits#:~:text=Iowa%20meteorologist%20quits%20after%20death%20threat%20over%20climate%20coverage%20Chris,tackle%20climate%20change%20head%2Don.
Light a Candle 