From
An Equal Say: Where does truth fit into democracy? by David A. Bell. A book review of
Democracy and Truth: A Short History by Sophia Rosenfeld which sounds excellent and will go on my list.
Both Bell and Rosenfeld sound like they are solidly of the academic left and yet are treating some very interesting ideas.
From Bell's review. He is commenting on the mainstream media's obsession with fact-checking Trump and keeping a running tally of his "lies". "Lies" in quotes when half and more of the "facts" being checked are his opinions or his rhetorical flourishes. Bell is rightfully disdainful.
Take, for example, Michiko Kakutani’s recent book The Death of Truth, which cites a figure for Trump’s lies (2,140 in his first year in office) on its third page. His questionable attitudes toward truth are, Kakutani tells us, “emblematic of dynamics that have been churning beneath the surface of daily life for years.” The goddess of truth has fallen mortally ill, her book charges, and a dizzying list of perpetrators are responsible for poisoning her: Fox News; social media; the New Left; “academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism”; the narcissism of the baby boomers; and “the selfie age of self-esteem.”
Kakutani and the many pundits and critics who have offered up a similarly broad cultural diagnosis have obvious incentives for doing so. It lets them pose as serious public intellectuals who can see beyond the froth of the current news cycle. It gives them the chance to display their wide-ranging and eclectic reading (in a single paragraph, Kakutani name-checks Foucault, Derrida, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Thomas Pynchon, David Bowie, Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch, and Frank Gehry). And, not least, it exonerates them from the charge that they are nothing but liberal ideologues by allowing them to assign blame to both sides in the ongoing American culture wars. Yes, the responsibility for the death of truth may lie, in part, with Fox News and the GOP, but it also lies with the New Left and those dreadful postmodernist academics. “Postmodernist arguments,” Kakutani explains, “deny an objective reality existing independently from human perception.” And since one perception is as good as another, anything goes. Michel Foucault and Donald Trump: brothers-in-arms.
Mainstream writers like Kakutani have repeated this last argument so often that it is easy to forget how strange and unconvincing it actually is. First, it reflects a misunderstanding of the most prominent “postmodern” philosophers. The radicalism of an author like Foucault, for instance, lies not in any supposed denial of objective reality but in his insistence that the way we know, understand, and speak about reality is always a matter of power relations. Second, it also assumes, bizarrely, that an abstruse current of thought which has attracted few readers outside the academy, and which mainstream publications have roundly and repeatedly denounced, has somehow infected the entire culture and come to define our political moment. Has academic postmodernism really had an appreciable influence on the Trumpian right, whose ideologues rarely miss an opportunity to denounce academics in general and humanists in particular?
The real problem with these arguments, however, rests in the very notion of a “post-truth era,” which presumes the existence of a previous golden age in which self-evident, objectively verifiable truths were for the most part acknowledged. The history of ideas, in fact, suggests the opposite: that truth, and the authority to determine it, has always been deeply contested, and that philosophers from ancient Greece onward have wrestled in profound and troubling ways with how to distinguish objective reality from human perception. Nor have anything like clear and authoritative standards of truth prevailed in political life. The assumption that the last 50 years or so have marked some unprecedented break with a previous age of truth reflects both an inattention to history and an attitude that might be labeled “pessimistic narcissism,” since it yet again focuses attention on the generation that came of age in the 1960s and ’70s.
I agree. Most the critics are barnyard fowl, quacking away their criticisms with a complete absence of integrity, moral or philosophical consistency or contextual knowledge of science, history, or many other relevant domains of knowledge.
I especially like these following passages which capture the too often ignored radicalism and revolution in thought of the Age of Enlightenment.
Against this backdrop, it is a relief to open Sophia Rosenfeld’s brilliantly lucid Democracy and Truth. Not only does she make short work of the “postmodernism is to blame” argument; she provides the historical background necessary to understand our current truth crisis. That a crisis does indeed exist, Rosenfeld has no doubt. But it is not one that came upon the Western world from nowhere, like a meteor strike vaporizing a peaceful pastoral landscape. Instead, it broke along an epistemological fault line that has existed in modern democratic regimes since their founding: Who has the authority, in a democracy, to determine what counts as truth—an elite of the supposedly best, most intellectually capable citizens, or the people as a whole?
As Rosenfeld shows us, conflicts along this fault line are nothing new. Elites and experts have long sought to impose their epistemological authority over a broader public, even at the risk of constraining democracy. And popular movements have long insisted on the people’s right to judge the world on their own terms, denigrating elite opinion in the process—and, sometimes, expertise and learning more broadly. The current crisis represents a drastic ratcheting up of these conflicts thanks to a host of factors—including, Rosenfeld suggests, some of the most dynamic forces in our rapidly changing capitalist economy, which have profited directly from such developments as the rise of social media and the flourishing of right-wing talk shows.
Few historians are better positioned to tell this story than Rosenfeld. A professor of intellectual history at the University of Pennsylvania, she has devoted her career to exploring the ways that philosophical conversations during the Enlightenment and the age of revolutions shaped basic modern political concepts and presuppositions. Her previous book, Common Sense, offered a scintillating account of how influential Western thinkers came to believe that ordinary people of limited or no education had the intellectual capacity to participate as equals in political life—a belief that provided crucial legitimacy for democratic regimes based on universal suffrage. While as a scholar Rosenfeld is most at home in the 18th century, she has never shied away from pointing out the contemporary implications of her work.
Marvelous. Yes, who gets to determine truth? I disagree with Rosenfeld in that I do believe that the intellectual corruption of postmodernism has had a real and corrosive influence. In academia it has created in too many places an environment inamicable to the pursuit of truth. I agree that the principal impact has been in academia and has only marginally extended, in a selective and fractured fashion, to other segments of society. Regrettably the establishment mainstream media is one of those select areas where academic postmodernism and its hostility towards truth has penetrated the most.
Like Kakutani, Rosenfeld cannot resist mentioning the Trump lie count at the start of her book. But rather than treat it as a shocking sign of the new “post-truth era,” she uses it to note the obvious fact that truth and democratic politics have “never been on very good terms.” If we are now living in an age of unprecedented mendacity, what was the Nixon administration? For that matter, no less an American icon than George Washington complained, at the end of his presidency, of the “ignorance of facts” and “malicious falsehoods” with which hostile newspapers had tried to destroy his reputation.
Rosenfeld also insists (borrowing, yes, from Foucault) that different societies exist under different “regimes of truth.” Not all truths are self-evident, and not all facts are easily verifiable, so societies need particular evidentiary standards and forms of authority to determine where truth lies. These can change from place to place and from era to era; they are rarely (if ever) stable or uncontested, but continuities are still discernible.
Our own regime of truth dates back to the 18th century, when a host of Enlightenment thinkers challenged established churches and rulers. They insisted that no single individual or institution should “hold a monopoly…on determining what counts as truth in public life” and disputed the idea—long promoted by absolute monarchs—that good rulership involved keeping most information secret and lying when necessary to protect the state. They put a premium on the values of openness, transparency, sincerity, freedom of expression, and unfettered debate. In short, they created the “truth culture of the transatlantic Enlightenment.”
Even for revolutionaries who believed that all should enjoy equal rights, this truth culture was in no sense egalitarian. Many of the Enlightenment’s most influential thinkers had little but contempt for uneducated people and wanted to restrict the pursuit of truth to a learned elite. Rosenfeld quotes Voltaire’s shocking essay on “Man” from 1764, which derided the bulk of humanity as “two-footed animals who live…barely enjoying the gift of speech, barely aware that they are miserable.” For his part, Kant saw the “enlightenment” he championed as the province of men able to function as “scholars.”
Such beliefs, in turn, helped shape the outlook of the men who devised the first constitutions for the revolutionary governments that came to power at the end of the 18th century. The American founders deliberately designed our own government not as a democracy that gave an equal say to all, but as a republic that, in the words of James Madison, would be ruled by “men who possess [the] most wisdom to discern, and [the] most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.” In creating the federal government, they allowed for direct election by the people for only one-half of one branch: the House of Representatives. (The Senate would eventually follow, more than 100 years later.) Many of the republic’s early leaders worried that the press could lead the people dangerously astray, and some of them advocated strong limits on free speech—including the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798.
Here's where we might start deviating somewhat, perhaps more in emphasis but possibly in substance. American Founders certainly had a marked, and well reasoned, concern about direct democracy. They were concerned that the public is easily swayed by emotions and circumstances which contributed to the short duration of democracies up until that time. Living now in the oldest continuing government, it is too easy for us to overlook that democracy had a terrible track record before the modified and carefully calibrated construct put together by the Founding Fathers. They wanted the legitimacy that came from democracy but they needed mechanisms that could constrain the demonstrated tendency of direct democracy to self-destruct. I am not sure that jibes with what Bell/Rosenfeld see as having happened.
Over the last two centuries, even as this revolutionary brand of elitism ebbed, a different form has strengthened immeasurably: In nearly all democratic societies, we have witnessed the rise of the expert. As modern society has grown more complex, it has become far more dependent on people who possess specialized knowledge: economists, statisticians, engineers, architects, lawyers, scientists of every description. We do not defer to their truth judgments because of their wisdom or virtue; we defer because it is practical to do so—we need their expertise. And while they do not rule over us directly, the authority they exercise on the basis of their truth judgments can give them a power comparable to or greater than that of many elected officials.
This reign of experts, however, can threaten democratic governance just as much as restrictions on suffrage. The epistemological authority that experts enjoy can lead them to retreat into a bubble in which they are insulated from public judgment and criticism, and over time they can devolve into a privileged interest group as scornful and condescending toward ordinary people as the most snobbish of the founders. Perhaps the most visible example of this has been the European Union, where regulation-generating technocrats have multiplied while remaining at a greater distance from the electorate than their counterparts in most democratic nation-states.
Worse, while experts base their authority to make truth judgments on their supposed objectivity, in practice this objectivity is easily compromised. Some think tanks that claim to conduct impartial research are in fact thoroughly partisan. Others, while pretending more convincingly to independence, still remain dependent on corporate sponsors. Experts routinely dance through the revolving door connecting government or think-tank positions to industry and associated lobbying groups. All of these practices undermine the Enlightenment culture of truth on which democracy rests. And the more that ordinary people become aware of these practices, the more likely they are to denounce expertise in general as a fraud, an ideological hoax, or fake news, undermining the culture of truth still further.
Whether you date the modern era from the Industrial Revolution or the rise of urbanism or WWI or WWII, whichever starting point you take there is a rising degree of specialization in society and the economy and that has fostered a rising degree of reliance in experts.
One of our challenges in the past couple of decades is that we have substituted credentials for expertise to our great detriment. Credentialism fosters the guild mentality of the Mandarin Class, especially in academic and media circles and have driven a wedge between the incestuous circle of academia-press-politics where Mandarin Class players circulate among one another, and the rest of society who wish to live freely of the dictates and nagging of the Mandarin Class.
The Mandarin Class guild fear the autonomy and resistance to their ministrations by the populace and are, therefore, mortally afraid of the age old systemic response to sclerotic, unaccountable and unresponsive governance - populism. Reflecting that fear, Bell goes on for a bit about the evils of populism without really acknowledging that it is only and almost always just a response to bad governance. If the Mandarin Class fear populism, the solution lies with reforming themselves, not bewailing the obvious excesses and potential evils of populism.
Populism is always the canary in the coal mine which the Mandarin Class choose to ignore or misinterpret.
The closing many paragraphs of the review focus on a splitting of hairs between Bell and Rosenfeld. It feels like both are starting from an untenable position - How do we the Mandarin Class exert control over the barbarian populace without them noticing or objecting? Instead of the more obvious question - How do we acknowledge the legitimacy of the concerns and interests of our fellow citizens by reforming our own self-destructive behaviors so that we all advance beneficially together?
This circling of the Mandarin Class wagons comes across clearly in the following passages which read as a lamentation of a credentialed guild of the barbarian interlopers who threaten their sinecures and luxury purchased at the cost of well-being and freedoms of the populace.
Instead of belaboring the point, she concentrates on two other recent phenomena that have led conflicts over what counts as truth—not to mention the sheer amount of mendacity in public life—to increase exponentially in recent years: the rise of a news machine that thrives on outrage and the advent of social media. Both of these may be well-known suspects where the “death of truth” is concerned, but Rosenfeld has interesting points to make about them. In both cases, she argues, these developments are especially dangerous because they call into question the very idea of common standards and authorities for truth-telling. The power of conservative talk radio and Fox News does not only come from their relentless propagandizing for hard-line Republicans and their even more relentless demonizing of the left. It also comes from their ability to delegitimize, in the minds of their audience, mainstream sources of information which, despite the liberal bent of their personnel, generally make good-faith efforts to report facts impartially and objectively. Rush Limbaugh rarely lets a single broadcast go by without repeated attacks on the “lamestream,” “drive-by” media and academia, caricaturing them as liberal propaganda operations.
Meanwhile, social media, by turning every individual user into an author and publisher of sorts, drastically lowers the perceived difference between The New York Times, scientific journals, or the federal government, on the one hand, and a dyspeptic relative expostulating at his keyboard. In short, the ability of democratic societies to maintain common, authoritative sources of truth in the face of reactionary demagogues and media provocateurs has drastically withered, producing vastly destabilizing consequences.
And from there it is a short downhill slide into neo-Marxist blathering starting with
Rosenfeld hints at the role of contemporary capitalism in driving these changes, but she might have said a bit more on the subject.
Oh, capitalism - that heinous system which has lifted the world out of poverty, illness, debilitation and short lives into prosperity and hope and realized dreams. What a monstrosity. And most tragically, done without the gentle guiding hands of the Mandarin Class but through the brawny insight and spirit of the teaming masses. Lenin's vanguard are so regretful at this dreadful turn of events.
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