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4.15 AVERAGE
4.15 AVERAGE
A calm, deliberate analysis of truth in public discourse. Rauch provides a solid foundation in the basics of the "reality-based world", which is to say rational thought and liberal thinking (not to be confused with political liberalism). From there he shares his thesis: that adherence to a Constitution of Knowledge with 3 core tenets is vital to modern society. Finally, he explores modern phenomena including misinformation, trolling, and cancel culture, dissecting each and explaining how strict adherence to the Constitution of Knowledge would undermine them. It's a sobering yet inspiring read that will by turns be both invigorating and uncomfortable, depending on your political persuasions. Rauch pulls no punches in calling either side on their bullshit.
My only demerit on this book is that Rauch seems sort of idealistic in his solutions. He asserts that as long as we all play by the rules the best ideas will come out on top, while simultaneously recognizing that there are bad actors who actively seek to undermine those very rules or twist them to their purposes. Rauch is clearly an advocate of free speech, and makes a compelling argument that it is the foundation of a fair, intellectually healthy society. Still, I'm left wondering if there is cause for deplatforming bad actors in situations where Rauch suggests we all simply close our ears and ignore them.
In summary, the book was all I wanted and more. It's intellectually honest, forcing introspection and reconsideration. Society would be better if everyone read it.
My only demerit on this book is that Rauch seems sort of idealistic in his solutions. He asserts that as long as we all play by the rules the best ideas will come out on top, while simultaneously recognizing that there are bad actors who actively seek to undermine those very rules or twist them to their purposes. Rauch is clearly an advocate of free speech, and makes a compelling argument that it is the foundation of a fair, intellectually healthy society. Still, I'm left wondering if there is cause for deplatforming bad actors in situations where Rauch suggests we all simply close our ears and ignore them.
In summary, the book was all I wanted and more. It's intellectually honest, forcing introspection and reconsideration. Society would be better if everyone read it.
informative
medium-paced
I picked up Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge hoping to hear a epistemological angel on the current issues with truth in America. Unfortunately I found this book to be suffering from a bad case of bothsidesism, as well as aging quite poorly in only five years time. Part of this I don't blame on Rauch, how could he predict that social media companies would backpedal on their promise to fact check information, or that Elon Musk would purchase Twitter, turning it away from any attempts to stem misinformation. Even the bothsidesism is a product of the company Rauch keeps (he is clearly friends with Jonathan Haidt and quotes him quite frequently) and his experiences as a first amendment advocate, resulting in a prevalence of anecdotal data in the final few chapters. But let me discuss a few things I did like in this book.
I was mostly interested in epistemology, and therefore I found Rauch's concept of the Constitution of Knowledge interesting and helpful. What he means by this is that modern society's process of knowledge production is guided by shared values, rules and institutions which "do for knowledge what the U.S. Constitution does for politics: they create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways." He then proceeds to explore two major rules of a reality based community, which are 1) The fallibilist rule: all truth must be able to be debunked, meaning that "everyone can always be wrong." and 2) The empirical rule: that a knowledge can be checked by anyone regardless of identity, and reach the same results. Finally, I think his description of truth as a social phenomenon is compelling, as he describs truth as a communal project instead of one based on individual discovery.
After describing how the Constitution of Knowledge functions Rauch focuses the remainder of the book on two existential threats he sees facing this system: right-wing trolling and left-wing cancel culture. Here is where I see the bothsidesism really coming into full force, as it seems clear, both in this text and in how things turned out in reality, that one of those threats are much more dangerous than the other (hint: cancel culture didn't make RFK Jr Secretary of Health and Human Services). In particular I found the following quotes particularly chilling and relevant to today's crisis in knowledge.
I was mostly interested in epistemology, and therefore I found Rauch's concept of the Constitution of Knowledge interesting and helpful. What he means by this is that modern society's process of knowledge production is guided by shared values, rules and institutions which "do for knowledge what the U.S. Constitution does for politics: they create a governing structure, forcing social contestation onto peaceful and productive pathways." He then proceeds to explore two major rules of a reality based community, which are 1) The fallibilist rule: all truth must be able to be debunked, meaning that "everyone can always be wrong." and 2) The empirical rule: that a knowledge can be checked by anyone regardless of identity, and reach the same results. Finally, I think his description of truth as a social phenomenon is compelling, as he describs truth as a communal project instead of one based on individual discovery.
After describing how the Constitution of Knowledge functions Rauch focuses the remainder of the book on two existential threats he sees facing this system: right-wing trolling and left-wing cancel culture. Here is where I see the bothsidesism really coming into full force, as it seems clear, both in this text and in how things turned out in reality, that one of those threats are much more dangerous than the other (hint: cancel culture didn't make RFK Jr Secretary of Health and Human Services). In particular I found the following quotes particularly chilling and relevant to today's crisis in knowledge.
"The point is not that only conservatives lived in echo-chambers or believed fake news; plenty of progressives did, too. Nor is the point that conservatives media were biased and other media were not. There was plenty of bias and bias-confirmation all over the ideological map. Rather, the point is that the conservative and non-conservative media universes were displaying different and asymmetric systemic behaviors. Research by Pew and others picked up one such asymmetry: although both liberals and conservatives tended to rely on bias-confirming sources, consistent liberals relied on and trusted a wider variety of sources...By contrast, consistent conservatives were "tightly clustered around one main news sources," namely Fox News, and they distrusted most other sources.176-7
Were conservatives nuttier than liberals? More gullible? Although some liberals might have warmed to those explanations, a more likely cause was something else: mainstream media and right-wing media were increasingly in entirely different epistemic businesses. They were not ideological counterparts in the same knowledge-seeking enterprise. Mainstream media, whatever its ideological priors, was in the bias-disconfirming business. It remained grounded in conventional journalistic norms, such as checking information and correcting errors. Conservative media did some of that, but increasingly it was in the bias-confirming business. It was more interested in telling its audience what they wanted to hear. 178
Both quotes I think help explain the epistemic crisis currently facing America today, that half the country is consuming "truth" from institutions that do not prescribe to Rauch's Constitution of Truth, and instead operate under different epistemic rules entirely.
Rauch of course also has many words to say about cancel culture, and for the most part I think his point is pretty uncontroversial (he evens points that out at the end of the chapter). People should not be shouted down for their opinions, words (for the most part) are not violence, and perhaps college students are over-coddled. This chapter seems to more come from a personal place, as he brings up fears of colleges of his, and much of the evidence he cited is anecdotal and I found to be hardly representative. Regardless, he just does not make a compelling case for the existential threat to truth that cancel culture presents, especially after making such a damning case for the threat of epistemological trolling in the previous chapter. Again, perhaps it is slight unfair, as I now have the privilege of hindsight, and in 2021 it is not unreasonable to think Trump and his band of lairs may be on the decline. But I think Covid in particular has made very clear where the largest threat to knowledge is coming from.
To conclude, I found The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch to be quite the mixed bag. I did find its musing on epistemology and the Constitution of Knowledge concept enlightening, and he also manages to correctly highlight some its worse threats. But in the end this book just reeks of enlightened centrism/classical liberalism, in that it strives to appear balanced more than it strives to be accurate. I really wish the author made clearer his stances on free speech absolutism, and where he sees limits, if any, are to be placed on speech. This ambiguity in particular made the final two chapters quite difficult to get through for me, but I still found much to value in the earlier chapters.
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
Rauch begins with Plato and ends with Plato, but he is considerably more optimistic about the possible success of Truth than Plato is. More often than not, Socrates leads his students into aporia, a dead end, and this is a key element of Platonic epistemology. Rauch's Constitution of Knowledge understands this, but it also believes that it can rise above it by a process of what Nietzsche and Kierkegaard call "levelling." The existentialists view this as a kind of subjective obliteration and a clear threat to human significance. Through a process of compromise, individual existence is watered down and attentuated into a socially mediated homogeny. And so with knowledge.
The conceit of this "constitution" is that there is a Republic of knowledge, a system of checks and balances that governs what Truth ultimately is. And in a practical sense, this is the way that the knowledge factory works -- the institutions of knowledge process conjectures and opinions the way that governments process policy. But I think Rauch should make a finer distinction between the Truth and what are merely facts. Facts can certainly be adjudicated in an institutional fashion. I doubt Truth can be. This is Plato's point, and it's one that Rauch doesn't entirely acknowledge. Plato's Republic ultimately fails and the argument falls into aporia. The Republic ends with a myth, not the Truth. There's a very human reason for that. (Rauch does acknowledge that "reasonable" people can also be religious, but he does this in a way that brackets religion and irrationality. This is like dismissing Book X of the Republic as a spurious afterthought.)
Where Rauch is undoubtedly right is that the conversation must continue, and that censorship and "cancel culture" are inimical to knowledge of any kind, subjective or institutional. True enough. This is a thoughtful and well-reasoned book, and while I have my quibbles with it, it promotes and advocates for a conversation that must continue.
The conceit of this "constitution" is that there is a Republic of knowledge, a system of checks and balances that governs what Truth ultimately is. And in a practical sense, this is the way that the knowledge factory works -- the institutions of knowledge process conjectures and opinions the way that governments process policy. But I think Rauch should make a finer distinction between the Truth and what are merely facts. Facts can certainly be adjudicated in an institutional fashion. I doubt Truth can be. This is Plato's point, and it's one that Rauch doesn't entirely acknowledge. Plato's Republic ultimately fails and the argument falls into aporia. The Republic ends with a myth, not the Truth. There's a very human reason for that. (Rauch does acknowledge that "reasonable" people can also be religious, but he does this in a way that brackets religion and irrationality. This is like dismissing Book X of the Republic as a spurious afterthought.)
Where Rauch is undoubtedly right is that the conversation must continue, and that censorship and "cancel culture" are inimical to knowledge of any kind, subjective or institutional. True enough. This is a thoughtful and well-reasoned book, and while I have my quibbles with it, it promotes and advocates for a conversation that must continue.
Jonathan Rauch is a talented journalist and thinker, and when I ended up with a copy of his latest book I was happy to give it a read, even though I rarely agree with how Rauch gets to his conclusions, as reasonable as they often sound to me. My experience with the arguments he makes in this book about how we've gotten ourselves into a situation where people with political disagreements seem to inhabit alternative realities, and what we can do about it, fit my past experiences with his writings: I thought the philosophical claims he advances were weak (though somewhat admirable all the same), and I thought his practical recommendations were mostly wise (though with some predictable gaps).
The primary thing to understand about Rauch is that he is a journalist who has drank deeply from the establishment liberalism which shaped the journalistic institutions where he found his vocation in the 1980s. The Washington Consensus had already begun its slow crack-up by then, but the demographic shifts, technological changes, and legal and regulatory unwinding necessary to fully undo it wasn't present yet: talk radio networks and cable television and the internet were all in the future. As it was, he came to view all social problems and political causes through a rigorously empirical and secular small-l liberal lens: 1) no one ever has the final say (every story has another point of view); and 2) no one can ever claim an authoritative take on any story just because of their own personal experience or witness or perspective (everyone needs to bring evidence and/or additional witnesses forward if they are to be taken seriously). It is this lens which he still embraces decades later, and what he elaborates in this book as a "Constitution of Knowledge" which must be defended if online trolls and Twitter mobs and a Republican party mostly given over to Trumpist falsehoods are not to make the alternative information realities which characterizes so much discourse in America today permanent.
Many of Rauch's practical reflections on how publicly reliable knowledge is achieved and what it means for how we handle propaganda and lying and disinformation and intellectual intimidation are really quite thoughtful. The middle section of the book, where he is most frank about how establishing usable knowledge claims necessarily involves exclusion, standards, and controlling institutions ("the reality-based community...cannot depend on individuals to know the facts....[but] it does require an elite consensus....on the method of establishing facts"--p. 116), and how the digital media revolution, over a period of twenty years, mostly wrecked all of those, was the section that I found most persuasive, but there is good stuff throughout. (The point when he's talking about "cancel culture" and then challenges his own definitions, leading him to thoughtfully lay out the sometimes unclear line between criticizing someone you disagree with and attempting to shut them down, was actually quite wise.) Unfortunately, I found all that good stuff mostly disconnected, as the history and philosophy through which he attempts to weave all his observations together didn't persuade me at all, and sometimes didn't even make sense.
I'm not his target audience for such historical and philosophical narratives, of course: I've read a great deal of this stuff, and have rather complex and critical opinions about a lot of it, so his sometimes rather potted descriptions of the intellectual achievements of his heroes John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison (particularly that last one, on which he imposes a Whig reading which ignores all the best historical scholarship that's been done over the past half-century on the man and his intellectual debts to classical republicanism, realist statecraft, and the Virginian slave aristocracy he was born into) occasionally made me roll my eyes. To his credit, though, he doesn't stop there, but really doubles-down on the (to my mind) most boring and unambiguously pragmatic and elitist liberal epistemologies imaginable--he spends whole pages talking about Charles Sanders Pierce and Karl Popper, for heaven's sake. Pragmatic, because truth is a process and an orientation, not a thing, and elitist, because it is vital that people believe (or at least act like they believe) the institutions which ground those processes and orientations really are determining the truth, not matter what the real Big Brains out there say behind closed doors.
The two-fold conclusions he comes to in these weighty matters aren't in the least bit coy; on the contrary, unlike some hypothetical Straussian code, he's utterly straightforward. First, he thinks that all the postmodern and Marxist and religious and homeopathic and whatever arguments you can imagine should be perfectly legal and even encouraged in liberal society, but must not be allowed to operate on the same argumentative plane as evidence-based "liberal science" (because if people start to take them seriously in the public sense--that is, if we no longer "resolve to conduct ourselves as if reality were out there and objective truth were possible" (p. 108)--then the institutions of liberal science will be threatened, and the next thing you know we'll have President Trump falsely claiming that the crowd which attended his inaugural speech was larger than it was, and the National Park Service will be so cowed and hesitant and confused that it will stop doing something as perfectly reasonable as publishing official estimates of crowd size on the basis of actual photographs, because hey, that's "political."). Second, while Rauch admits it is important to be aware and even sympathetic to the fact that the evidentiary requirements and institutional biases of the reality-based community are always going to make it hard for ideological and religious and racial and sexual minorities to be heard and taken seriously, as far as he's concerned you must, for their own sake, never compromise on these rules, but rather must tell the trans woman that, yes, she absolutely should come up with evidence-based arguments to rebut the bigot who denies the legitimacy of her existence, because if she doesn't come up with such arguments, but instead sticks with "feelings," it'll be worse for her in the long-term. (Interestingly, Rauch doesn't actually come up with a systematic, evidence-based argument that the unrestricted marketplace of ideas is actually good, in the long run, for oppressed minorities, but rather throws out a bunch of quotes and anecdotes which supposedly prove it, the most touching of which is his own story of learning to live with hatred and abuse from the good people of Arizona as he grew up there gay in the 1970s and 1980s. His description of his moral triumph is profoundly Whiggish: "Every demonstration of hatred or ignorance was a chance to show love and speak truth. Every encounter, every explanation, moved the social needle a little bit toward justice"--p. 257. The man is a frustratingly confident--dare I say...privileged?--20th-century liberal to the very end.)
In summary, Rauch's book is filled with some smart, practical recommendations about how we should adjust internet platforms, assess journalistic sources, and basically fight back against all the flood of misinformation which surrounds us. But philosophically, I don't think it achieves anything more than that; he never addresses in any remotely substantive way any of the philosophical critiques of liberalism which he accuses the Trumpists of having learned from the postmodernists to use against us all. Frankly, I'd love to put him alongside some of thoughtful conservative anti-liberal thinkers out there: folks that think liberalism is a bankrupt philosophy, but also have total contempt for both Trumpian trolls on the right and "emotional safetyism" (Rauch's term) on the left. Would they grant the value of his arguments, or think because he gets there through good old-fashioned 20th-century American pragmatic liberalism, that his arguments won't do the trick? I wonder.
The primary thing to understand about Rauch is that he is a journalist who has drank deeply from the establishment liberalism which shaped the journalistic institutions where he found his vocation in the 1980s. The Washington Consensus had already begun its slow crack-up by then, but the demographic shifts, technological changes, and legal and regulatory unwinding necessary to fully undo it wasn't present yet: talk radio networks and cable television and the internet were all in the future. As it was, he came to view all social problems and political causes through a rigorously empirical and secular small-l liberal lens: 1) no one ever has the final say (every story has another point of view); and 2) no one can ever claim an authoritative take on any story just because of their own personal experience or witness or perspective (everyone needs to bring evidence and/or additional witnesses forward if they are to be taken seriously). It is this lens which he still embraces decades later, and what he elaborates in this book as a "Constitution of Knowledge" which must be defended if online trolls and Twitter mobs and a Republican party mostly given over to Trumpist falsehoods are not to make the alternative information realities which characterizes so much discourse in America today permanent.
Many of Rauch's practical reflections on how publicly reliable knowledge is achieved and what it means for how we handle propaganda and lying and disinformation and intellectual intimidation are really quite thoughtful. The middle section of the book, where he is most frank about how establishing usable knowledge claims necessarily involves exclusion, standards, and controlling institutions ("the reality-based community...cannot depend on individuals to know the facts....[but] it does require an elite consensus....on the method of establishing facts"--p. 116), and how the digital media revolution, over a period of twenty years, mostly wrecked all of those, was the section that I found most persuasive, but there is good stuff throughout. (The point when he's talking about "cancel culture" and then challenges his own definitions, leading him to thoughtfully lay out the sometimes unclear line between criticizing someone you disagree with and attempting to shut them down, was actually quite wise.) Unfortunately, I found all that good stuff mostly disconnected, as the history and philosophy through which he attempts to weave all his observations together didn't persuade me at all, and sometimes didn't even make sense.
I'm not his target audience for such historical and philosophical narratives, of course: I've read a great deal of this stuff, and have rather complex and critical opinions about a lot of it, so his sometimes rather potted descriptions of the intellectual achievements of his heroes John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison (particularly that last one, on which he imposes a Whig reading which ignores all the best historical scholarship that's been done over the past half-century on the man and his intellectual debts to classical republicanism, realist statecraft, and the Virginian slave aristocracy he was born into) occasionally made me roll my eyes. To his credit, though, he doesn't stop there, but really doubles-down on the (to my mind) most boring and unambiguously pragmatic and elitist liberal epistemologies imaginable--he spends whole pages talking about Charles Sanders Pierce and Karl Popper, for heaven's sake. Pragmatic, because truth is a process and an orientation, not a thing, and elitist, because it is vital that people believe (or at least act like they believe) the institutions which ground those processes and orientations really are determining the truth, not matter what the real Big Brains out there say behind closed doors.
The two-fold conclusions he comes to in these weighty matters aren't in the least bit coy; on the contrary, unlike some hypothetical Straussian code, he's utterly straightforward. First, he thinks that all the postmodern and Marxist and religious and homeopathic and whatever arguments you can imagine should be perfectly legal and even encouraged in liberal society, but must not be allowed to operate on the same argumentative plane as evidence-based "liberal science" (because if people start to take them seriously in the public sense--that is, if we no longer "resolve to conduct ourselves as if reality were out there and objective truth were possible" (p. 108)--then the institutions of liberal science will be threatened, and the next thing you know we'll have President Trump falsely claiming that the crowd which attended his inaugural speech was larger than it was, and the National Park Service will be so cowed and hesitant and confused that it will stop doing something as perfectly reasonable as publishing official estimates of crowd size on the basis of actual photographs, because hey, that's "political."). Second, while Rauch admits it is important to be aware and even sympathetic to the fact that the evidentiary requirements and institutional biases of the reality-based community are always going to make it hard for ideological and religious and racial and sexual minorities to be heard and taken seriously, as far as he's concerned you must, for their own sake, never compromise on these rules, but rather must tell the trans woman that, yes, she absolutely should come up with evidence-based arguments to rebut the bigot who denies the legitimacy of her existence, because if she doesn't come up with such arguments, but instead sticks with "feelings," it'll be worse for her in the long-term. (Interestingly, Rauch doesn't actually come up with a systematic, evidence-based argument that the unrestricted marketplace of ideas is actually good, in the long run, for oppressed minorities, but rather throws out a bunch of quotes and anecdotes which supposedly prove it, the most touching of which is his own story of learning to live with hatred and abuse from the good people of Arizona as he grew up there gay in the 1970s and 1980s. His description of his moral triumph is profoundly Whiggish: "Every demonstration of hatred or ignorance was a chance to show love and speak truth. Every encounter, every explanation, moved the social needle a little bit toward justice"--p. 257. The man is a frustratingly confident--dare I say...privileged?--20th-century liberal to the very end.)
In summary, Rauch's book is filled with some smart, practical recommendations about how we should adjust internet platforms, assess journalistic sources, and basically fight back against all the flood of misinformation which surrounds us. But philosophically, I don't think it achieves anything more than that; he never addresses in any remotely substantive way any of the philosophical critiques of liberalism which he accuses the Trumpists of having learned from the postmodernists to use against us all. Frankly, I'd love to put him alongside some of thoughtful conservative anti-liberal thinkers out there: folks that think liberalism is a bankrupt philosophy, but also have total contempt for both Trumpian trolls on the right and "emotional safetyism" (Rauch's term) on the left. Would they grant the value of his arguments, or think because he gets there through good old-fashioned 20th-century American pragmatic liberalism, that his arguments won't do the trick? I wonder.
I generally agree with Rauch’s main argument, that scientists and journalists have a basic job requirement to seek and profess truth, and there are tried and true methods by which to find truth in the world. When Rauch is philosophical and stoically describing the scientific and journalistic method of discovering truth, he is at his best. Unfortunately, this part is only a small part of this book, which is filled with numerous examples of politicians (namely Trump) blatantly lying and having zero respect for truth. While I agree with his outrage, I have no need for the outrage porn he is peddling. Just stick to the much more interesting methodological parts of the book.
informative
medium-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
Loved this book. In this time of misinformation, social media and ideological monoculture, this is the antidote that we need. Unfortunately, too few will read it. It's not a 'fun' or 'entertaining' book, but it is an important one.
Interested in why it seems to be increasingly more difficult for people to understand one another? Read this. Philosophers, you were correct all this time: it's epistemology. It's all about epistemology, and if we don't tackle that issue correctly, the outlook is bleak.