For the moment democracy has been been retrieved and we can breathe a sigh of relief. But the road ahead is steep and the obstacles loom large. Biden won the presidency, but overall the Democrat didn’t do well with down-ballot candidates. It was hoped that the Democrats would increase their numbers in the House and maybe even win the Senate. It didn’t happen. If the Democrats lose the two Senate races in Georgia, Mitch McConnell with enact a redo, gum up the works, and Congress will stall. Needed government programs will fail to be enacted, social pain and frustration will grow, and our democratic institutions and faith will plausibly continue to erode.
There are bigger, more basic problems. More than half of Republicans claim that Trump won the election and Biden’s victory is a product of a rigged process. This is not much different from claiming that the earth is flat. It is denial of a blatant truth that is right before one’s eyes.
Tens of millions of people with whom we share this country, members of our common society, embrace beliefs that are unmoored from facts and evidence. This defines irrationality. In an often cited adage, it was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who said that “you are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.” Sure there can be disagreement about facts. But as long a people are committed to revising their proffered facts on the basis of evidence, engagement in a common search for truth is possible. But if not, an unbridgeable societal divide confronts us. When the stakes become high enough, such divisions can only be resolved through overt power struggles. This is the state we are in. It is not good.
In a long article in the Atlantic, Barack Obama, in advance of the publication of his memoir, stated that we are in an “epistemic crisis,” wherein large swaths of the public have no commitment to the truth. Obama’s view is that this crisis has become more dire in recent years, and the media– talk radio, cable news and the internet, which siloes and intensifies exclusively held beliefs – are major drivers. We have entered the world of alternative facts, flourishing extremist ideologies, and the proliferation of counter-factual and bizarre conspiracy theories. As Obama notes, unless there is an agreement on facts, the “marketplace of ideas,” on which democracy is based, cannot last. Read John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” for the classic defense of this fundamental idea.
Let me get philosophical. The project of the ighteenth century Enlightenment, preceded by the Age of Science, in very general terms was to check and constrain belief based on impulse, feeling and sense experience with the illuminations of reason. Spinoza, who stood on the cusp of the Middle Ages and modernity, opined that ideas and beliefs that emerge from the senses alone and trade in images were often vague, imprecise and led to error. Knowledge and understanding born of reason was the corrective. For Spinoza, who wrote the first major critique of religion, knowledge arising from sensation yielded superstition. Solid, reliable knowledge arising from the processes of reason (think logic and mathematics as the models) give us truth.
It is simplest to believe that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west because our senses tell us as such. But reason, augmented by science, brings us to the corrected conclusion that the sun is stationary (for these purposes) and the earth rotates under it. That the sun rises may bring is more immediate gratification in that what we see straight on is what we get, but it is wrong. In the Middle Ages, it was taken as true that the earth occupied the center of the universe and the sun, moon and five known planets revolved around our world in perfect circles. Why? Because we are the culmination of God’s creation and the center is a privileged locale. Why circles? Because the Creator is perfect and the circle is a perfect form. Beyond the orbits of the planets were the stars embedded in crystalline spheres that like other celestial objects rotated around the earth every 24 hours. And what propelled the stars? It was obvious – invisible angels! With the coming of the Enlightenment and Isaac Newton, angels were replaced by celestial mechanics and the theory of gravitation. Again, the Enlightenment project replaced belief originating from the immediate gratification of satisfying the senses with the more laborious, but more truth-rendering process of reason.
In grand terms this Enlightenment project, vested in the authority of reason, is slipping away to be replaced once more with the tyranny of emotion and feelings as the arbiters of belief. If it feels right and good, believe it!
We live in a time of explosive imagery and the allure of immediate emotional gratification. Contemporary entertainment, bombastic media, digital technologies appealing directly to the impulsive at the expense of sober reflection and thoughtfulness, overwhelm the processes by which reason, and the truths derived from it, are spawned. This is a way of describing our epistemic crisis.
The groundwork for this crisis began much earlier than a few years ago, I believe. America has always had a fascination with strange and outlandish ideas that we can trace back to before the Republic’s founding. For its contemporary manifestation, we need to look for more proximate sources.
As a creature of the 1960s, it pains me to say it, but honesty compels me to acknowledge that the “counter-culture,” or at least parts of it, may be to blame. Then, it was fashionable to hold that intellectualism and cognitive activity were an impediment to “feelings”, which in their immediacy were construed to be more authentic. Being authentic carried a lot of cache. It was the age of “flower power” and a time to “tune in, turn on and drop out.” It was the era of extraordinary musical and artistic expression on popular levels, all of which was explicitly sensate. And, of course, a defining feature of the zeitgeist was to be “anti-establishment,” a moniker that could include rarefied thought as well as stodgy ideas along with the institutions of power and authority. In my own defense, I claim a partial exemption in that I was an exponent of the anti-War movement and the politics of the New Left, and not so much the cultural manifestations that went with the times. And I was too much the intellectual to buy into the notion that ideas were to be subordinate while feeling reign supreme. It didn’t compel me as a productive mantra by which organize society or a life, for that matter. Maybe that was the point. Nevertheless, one should not be too quick to claim one’s innocence, and I must confess that maybe the analysis holds true.
But there were more potent sources for the emergence of feeling over thought which has brought us to where we are. I look to the 1980s and the triumph of capitalism, the divination of the free market and the idolization of the corporate and business culture. Symbolically it began when Ronald Reagan removed the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had installed on the roof of the White House as a symbol of our needsto protect the environment over the expansion of greed.
Hand and hand with the corporate revolution was the valorization of materialism. The accumulation of wealth, consumerism, bling, more entertainment – increasingly adolescent – owning more and more things, was nothing to be ashamed of: It was a virtue. It permeated the culture.
Sorry to be a censorious elitist, but it was a transition in our culture that engendered a superficiality of values. The impulsive, meretricious, superseded the thoughtful, the sober, the reflective. The love of ideas, the cultivation of the life of the mind, education itself, unless it could lead to a job, was of diminishing importance in the collective values driving American life. It was a formulation that embraced immediate gratification at the expense of more serious endeavors.
It was not far from here to a devaluation of expertise, of knowledge, of the authority of truth. In depreciating the authority of knowledge and reason, and opening space for the supremacy of impulse and feeling, such saving and civilizing attributes became relativized. One’s opinion, emergent from impulse, was as good as facts that need to be subjected to laborious test of evidence. Why bother? The easier path feels good. It is an environment that invites extremism and conspiratorial ideas unmoored from the deeper strata of reality.
This is where we have arrived. How to get beyond it is another essay.
joe chuman 