If We Don’t Fix This, We Can’t Fix Anything
Is There a Way Out of Information Chaos & Cancel Culture? Jonathan Rauch Shines a Light
We are living through a crisis of historic proportions. The stakes could not be higher.
Here’s the problem: we can’t agree as a society about what is true and false. I’m not talking about the deeper questions of life or the mysteries of the universe or matters of religious faith. I’m talking about matters of basic fact.
Here’s what’s at risk: well, pretty much everything. Personal freedom, American democracy, peace & prosperity for the country and much of the world, the lives and futures of our children and their children, the welfare of the powerless and vulnerable.
So that’s the context for my podcast interview with Jonathan Rauch, because he has proposed a set of solutions for society to address to this problem of knowing, and reaching agreement about what we know.
The internet and technological changes of the last 20 years have created a power vacuum. Why do I say power vacuum when the internet has given a voice and the ability to have it amplified to pretty much anyone? If everyone has a voice, doesn’t everyone have power? And if so, why would there be a vacuum?
Well, I think the answer to that is this: when everyone is talking, no one is listening, and that is a form of chaos.
And it’s obvious that we are living through an age of information chaos. Most people don’t know what to believe, or how to figure out what’s true and false.
That is the vacuum: the lack of clarity about what is real, and what is not.
The vacuum will be filled. The question is by whom and by what.
Much of the information chaos is not an accident, but is rather the result of information warfare. In his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, Jonathan Rauch identifies the two main drivers of information warfare:
viral disinformation
cancel culture.
Viral disinformation predominates on the right, and cancel culture on the left, but Rauch says both of them do the same thing:
“[They] share the goal of dominating the information space by demoralizing their human targets: confusing them, isolating them, drowning them out, deplatforming them, or overwhelming them so they give up on pushing back.”
The book is not primarily about media literacy. It’s not a guide with tips about how to tell fake news from real news. It’s a step back or up from that. Rauch delves into the philosophical realm to think deeply about what kind of system can fill that power vacuum in a way that preserves all the things I mentioned at the beginning:
personal freedom
peace and prosperity
democracy
the futures of our loved ones
the welfare of the most vulnerable in society
Rauch argues that we already have this system, and in some ways need to replenish it by becoming newly aware of and grateful for it, and rebuilding it. He draws a parallel between the Constitution of Knowledge and the U.S. Constitution, in that they do something very similar: “They compel and organize social negotiation.”
The Constitution of Knowledge is a set of “social rules for turning disagreement into knowledge.”
“If we care about knowledge, freedom and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: 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.”
This is not, Rauch said, a set of rules for “everything you believe at all times. It’s just governing the public truths that we need to settle in order to govern the country,” Rauch said. But, he added, “if you’re a person of faith, the society that you should want to be in is a liberal society under the constitution of knowledge,” precisely because like the U.S. Constitution it protects and preserves personal freedoms and private lives.
Rauch’s book unpacks these statements, and provides rigorous and extensive support for them. He delves into the social science of human bias to show that none of us is a reliable narrator of reality on our own, because we:
gravitate toward information that confirms what we already think
ignore evidence that might contradict what we want to believe
So we need a system beyond ourselves, and beyond any one person or source. We need rules and we need institutions that uphold them.
He explains how the Constitution of Knowledge is something that has existed for the last few hundred years, and traces the history of how it came to be: the thinkers whose ideas helped build it, and the historical forces that motivated its builders to construct it. Namely, a lot of blood shed over disagreements that were never resolved, most of them religious disputes.
Out of those religious wars in Europe during the 1500’s and 1600’s, a system was built to help government protect rights, rather than trying to coerce belief.
Rauch runs through the way that authoritarians and some right-wingers are trying to overwhelm us with a tsunami of garbage information, and how some, mostly on the left, are trying to intimidate and bully us by saying certain conversations are settled or off-limits. He offers advice to institutions on how to deal with both, and also deals in depth with the ways that social media have redesigned our information space for misinformation, and what can be done about that.
He outlines the core ideas that serve as the basic DNA of this constitution. There are only two, and he wrote about them more than 20 years ago in his book Kindly Inquisitors. He calls them “no final say” and “no personal authority.”
“‘No final say’ insists that to be knowledge, a statement must be checked; and it also says that knowledge is always provisional, standing only as long as it withstands checking. In practice, it embodies the fallibilist principle that everyone can always be wrong, which implies that no one can claim to have settled any debate for good. Which in turn implies that no authority or activist can legitimately shut down inquiry or debate …
“‘No personal authority’ adds a crucial second step by defining what properly counts as checking … The point … is not that I look or you look but that we look, and then we compare, contest, and justify our views.”
He outlines the groups that currently uphold this kind of reality-based system:
law enforcement and the criminal justice system
public administration
empirical science
investigative journalism
democratically controlled intelligence agencies
What are the hallmarks of a reality-based system? Here are a few that Rauch provides:
It prizes facts over feelings
It values evidence over emotion
It elevates observations over opinion
Rauch says that this “open epistemic order … enables an open and liberal political order; one cannot exist without another.”
And when he speaks of an “open epistemic order” he is referring back to those two rules of “no final say” and “no final authority.” He is speaking of a world in which statements and claims must be vetted through a system with specific rules. But a society must recognize that the system exists, and agree that it is the best way to come to consensus.
It is a community of
error-seeking inquirers
who are accountable to each other but never to any particular authority
That focus on inquirers who seek error is important. It means those who want to join the reality-based community have to be committed to examining their own thinking and assertions for error.
“We all outsource our interpretations of reality, and even our perceptions of reality, to our social groups and personal networks … But replacing a personal or tribal network, one which is small or local or familial or private or affiliative, with a liberal network, one which is large and global and impersonal and public and critical, changes the game.”
Rauch then he runs through the modern challenges to this system, which stem in part from the way that social media has taken over our information space and actually turned the constitution of knowledge upside down and constitute what he calls “misinformation technology.”
Here’s his analogy for how modern journalism, science, law, and other truth-seeking professions form a system that filters out bad information, not perfectly, but efficiently, most of the time.
[This system] is a “network of nodes: publishers, peer reviewers, agencies, courts, regulators and many, many more” who are like “filtering and pumping stations through which propositions flow .. a poorly supported claim might have a 50 percent chance of passing through one filter, but then a one in four chance of passing two filters and only a one in sixteen chance of passing three. Eventually, usually quickly, it dies out. A strongly supported claim will fare better, and if it is widely accepted it will disseminate across the network and enter the knowledge base. Working together, the pumps and filters channel information toward truth.”
“Now imagine them running in reverse” and you have social media, Rauch writes.
“Instead of straining out error, [social media] pass it along. In fact, instead of slowing the dissemination of false and misleading claims, they accelerate it.”
Here are some hallmarks of social media that make it accelerate bad information:
Social media shares claims rather than validate them
Social media disguises sources rather than identify them
Social media rewards self-promotion rather than persuasion
This is a big reason why we have seen the rise of conspiracy theories, because the standards for what can be spread far and wide have been destroyed. In the past, something had to pass through many levels of verification before it could be seen by many people. Now, there is little to no quality control to make sure that things that spread widely are accurate.
This is why the issue is not about free speech, so much as it is about amplification, spread, and reach. Anyone can say pretty much anything under the First Amendment (though of course there are limits to this), but the First Amendment does not protect the right to have one’s speech seen by hundreds or thousands or millions of people. That is a privilege, and a well-ordered society only awards that privilege to information and opinion that is reality-based and based on facts that have been rigorously tested.
Rauch also shows how right-wing media have for decades been moving away from the Constitution of Knowledge.
In 2009, talk radio host Rush Limbaugh argued, Rauch said, that “only conservatives could reliably grasp and report the truth.”
“Science … the media … Academia … none of what they do is real. It’s all lies,” Limbaugh said. “The other universe is where we are, and that’s where reality reigns supreme.”
This was a violation of the “no personal authority” rule.
If you’ve followed conservative media at all over the past few decades, you know this idea has been central to its core messaging: that the mainstream media is corrupt and not trustworthy.
But Limbaugh’s claim here is greater than to simply say that the media sucks. He is saying that only those who have a certain political point of view can know the truth.
Rauch, in contrast, is saying that only those who are part of a system of rules for knowledge-making — a system forged in the fires of European religious wars — can find a way to work with others in their society.
For Limbaugh, to know the truth you must adopt a set of beliefs about the world. This is a priori thinking. For Rauch, to know reality you must recognize your own bias and buy in to a system of knowledge-making that has established standards. Under that system, anyone of any point of view can know the truth about things that are knowable.
Trump came along and “encountered … a conservative media establishment which was already seceding from the Constitution of Knowledge.”
“Together with his troll army and the conservative media establishment, [Trump] was able to to bring about something no ordinary troll, not even Vladimir Putin, could accomplish: an epistemic secession. Together, they created not just confusion and disorientation but a cultic alternative reality, anchored by the premise that Trump was never wrong but always the victim of conspiracies and lies.”
Rauch’s prescriptions are varied.
For social media, he says the big companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google and others need to think of themselves as having more of a responsibility. Rauch is less skeptical of them than others, such as Tristan Harris.
As for the media, he says news organizations need to be more diverse, both ethnically but also in terms of viewpoint. Most newsrooms are still too white and too liberal, he says. They should be more non-white and there should be more conservative, moderate, and idiosyncratic points of view.
Rauch also has several pages of suggestions for how institutions should stand up to attempts to bully them or those who work for them, when cancel mobs come for them. Much of what is needed, he says, is simply preparing ahead of time for how the leadership will respond.
The challenge of this book is translating it, making it more specific, and making it shareable, in a way that it can be engaged with by the average person. It seems to me that is a project of many years ahead of those of us who care about this topic.
You can listen to my full interview with Rauch here.