Week Ten: Discerning and Defending Truth
“… if all you do is open up an unstructured conversation, peer to peer, just people talking to each other, they go right back into their rabbit holes. They talk to people who agree with them. They get online, they look up stuff that they like. They get involved in conspiracy theories. And you’re back where you started.”
Over the past several years, much has been written about Americans no longer being able to agree on even basic questions of fact. A great of that writing has focused on if “truth is under attack” and whether we might now be living in a “post-truth” society. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Jonathan Rauch took a deep look at our present political and social difficulties and concluded that the problem is actually even more profound. He recently spoke with Meghna Chakrabarti for NPR’s On Point, about America’s “epistemic crisis” which he explained thusly, “That’s when a society, small tribe, major nation, whatever, loses the ability to agree on what facts are and how we get to facts for public purposes. And symptoms of that include polarization, forking realities, extreme incivility, hostility, and the strange disorientation.”
Rauch’s new book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings, 2021) makes the case that not just truth has been under attack but, rather, the very process through which we ascertain what is true and what is not true through for public purposes. He calls that process our “Constitution of Knowledge.” The similarity in phrasing was no accident; Rauch sees a healthy process for finding the truth as being not just similar to how we make public but actually rooted in the same Enlightenment thinking as our American system of government. Rauch describes how knowledge is created, validated, and disseminated when the Constitution of Knowledge prevails:
“Well, look, if you want to make knowledge, you're going to have to present that knowledge in a structured way to institutions like academic journals, newsrooms, courts of law, government agencies… And you're going to have to make a case for it, and then those institutions are going to follow a bunch of rules, usually using a bunch of experts to inspect the ideas, pass them on to other institutions. It works like the U.S. Constitution because it's got balance of powers, checks and balances. No one individual can make knowledge. You have to submit it to others. Those others will disagree and refer it to ... others. It's also like the U.S. Constitution, in that it's based on rules and not individuals.”
Rauch’s conversation with Chakrabarti is deeply distressing but nonetheless ends on a hopeful note. He recalls the “self-righting” of the American media that drew the late 19th and early 20th Century era of “Yellow Journalism,” and the public hysteria it too often engendered, to a close. The conversation is available at the link below and runs 47 minutes.