The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts
"In what could be the timeliest book of the year, Rauch aims to arm his readers to engage with reason in an age of illiberalism."
--NewsweekA New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America's ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.
In 2016 Russian trolls and bots nearly drowned the truth in a flood of fake news and conspiracy theories, and Donald Trump and his troll armies continued to do the same. Social media companies struggled to keep up with a flood of falsehoods, and too often didn't even seem to try. Experts and some public officials began wondering if society was losing its grip on truth itself. Meanwhile, another new phenomenon appeared: "cancel culture." At the push of a button, those armed with a cellphone could gang up by the thousands on anyone who ran afoul of their sanctimony.
In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the "Constitution of Knowledge"--our social system for turning disagreement into truth.
By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do--and how they can do it. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.
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Community Reviews
Quotes
"But here an obvious question arises. Given humans’ innate tribal wiring; given our natural facility for hypocrisy and self-serving belief; given our many cognitive biases and our need to conform: how, then, could we possibly have created the advanced and generally peaceful world we occupy? How is it that the reality-based community not only exists but has gone from triumph to triumph? If anything is striking about the modern age in advanced democracies, it is how rare creed wars are, not how common."
----
"Thomas Hobbes’s vision of society is dark. Peace and prosperity are possible, but only under the reign of an absolute sovereign who can forcibly impose order and suppress the war of all against all. But who will rule the sovereign? No one: necessarily, the sovereign reigns supreme, her power neither divided nor limited. Nor can the people change the form of government, or rebel against it;
their grant of authority to the sovereign is irrevocable. As with Plato’s philosopher-king, and then emperors and monarchs and popes for two millennia, the sovereign must be wise and good. And if she is not wise and good? Then we must live with her abuses, for the alternatives—anarchy and war—can only be worse. There can be room for some differences, but not for dissent on fundamental civic matters such as religion: “for words can be a crime,” wrote Hobbes, “and can be punished without injury with whatever punishments the legislators wish—indeed, with the ultimate penalty.”
----
"Rousseau is a controversial figure. Some see him as the forebear of today’s progressives, championing social equality and personal emancipation; others, as a utopian social engineer who inspired the totalitarian impulses of Robespierre, Lenin, and Pol Pot (the murderous Cambodian dictator). Both views contain truth, but at a minimum his philosophy raised problems akin to the ones which backed Hobbes into an authoritarian corner. The idea of a single general will seems to allow room for only one legitimate ruler or viewpoint; how, then, can pluralism be accommodated?"
Who exactly can discern the general will when individuals disagree (as they are bound to do)? Once certain leaders or factions lay claim to the general will, how can their power be bounded? What if reformers decide to do a good deal of destroying and oppressing in order to enforce the transcendent public good, as so infamously happened in the French Revolution? Today, Rousseau’s thinking remains influential: dangerously so among populists—of both the right and the left—who assert that they, and only they, speak for the will of the people; more benignly, but still often mischievously, Aa
among idealists and ideologues of many stripes who claim that their insights and doctrines empower them to speak for the public interest."
----
"Of course, there were breakthroughs and advances before the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, and the scientific revolution. What was lacking, though, was a social order capable of generating and then cumulating advances systematically. And systematic social orders require constitutions: formal, political ones, or informal, culturally embodied ones—but, in either case, systems of rules which channel human energies in pro-social directions. All three of the great liberal social systems—economic, political, epistemic—are traceable to breakthroughs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All were pioneered by men who followed each other’s writings and doings and who sometimes knew each other personally. They and their works were flawed with the inequities and blind spots of their eras (one of which is reflected in the fact that all of them were men). But the founders were not just blundering along; they self-consciously sought to create an alternative to the failed regimes of the past. The greatest of them—especially John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison, the big three of modern liberalism—were men of genius, whose acuity and sophistication remain astonishing even today."
----
"In today’s polarized climate, people tend to think of compromise as, at best, a necessary evil: a baby-splitting process which bends principles and impedes progress, leaving everyone unhappy. That is unfortunate, because Madison’s view is much closer to the truth. Compromise is a positive good: a balance wheel which keeps the government moving forward instead of toppling, and a source of constant pressure for innovation and adaptation and inclusion. Compromise, in other words, is Madison’s answer to the seemingly impossible conundrum of how a democracy can be both dynamic and stable."
----
"By the same token, the Madisonian system does not assume, expect, or even desire that every person should be a deal-cutting moderate. In fact, it assumes the opposite: that people are naturally inclined to hold strong beliefs and usually enter into negotiations reluctantly. They compromise not because they want to but because they have to, and their firm convictions ensure that multiple views receive energetic advocacy. Political zeal is to Madison’s political system what the profit motive is to Adam Smith’s economic system and what strong opinions are to Locke’s epistemic system: an energy source. Like all energies, ambition and zeal can be destructive; compromise contains, channels, and exploits them."
----
"A few decades earlier, Montesquieu had suggested dividing power in order to contain it; in 1780, when John Adams drafted the Massachusetts constitution, he divided its powers among three
branches. From them, Madison adopted the principle of separated, competing powers, and he placed it at the heart of the U.S. Constitution; but, more than his predecessors (and more than most people
even today), he saw dividing power not just as a way of constraining ambition but also as a way to promote cooperation and compromise by channeling ambition dynamically."
----
"Like Montesquieu, Madison understood that forcing multiple power centers to compete could prevent tyranny. But also, paralleling his near-contemporary Adam Smith, he saw that competition could be an engine converting the anarchic energy of diversity into the coordinated motion of cooperation. The essential ingredient, Madison saw, was compromise."
----
"Make no mistake, the rules are at least as demanding as they are permissive. By protecting criticism and dethroning authority, both rules protect freedom of expression. But both also impose stringent obligations on anyone who purports to advance knowledge. You have to check your own claims and subject them to contestation from others; you have to tolerate the competing claims of others; you have to accept that your own certainty counts for nothing; you have to forswear claiming that your god, your experience, your intuition, or your group is epistemically privileged; you have to defend the exclusive legitimacy of liberal science even (in fact, especially) when you think it is wrong or unfair."
----
"Sometimes hardest of all, you are obliged to be thick-skinned and to tolerate the emotional bruising which is unavoidable in a contentious intellectual culture. If you feel offended or traumatized by something someone else has to say, of course you can object or protest or suggest a better way to talk, and very often you should; but you cannot expect or demand to shut down the conversation. After all, you might be wrong, and they might be right. No final say; no personal authority."
----
"The concept of truth, the philosopher Hannah Arendt remarked, contains within itself an element of coercion. If you believe something is true, you also believe you must believe it. The statement “The sky is blue, but I don’t believe it” is grammatically correct but makes no sense. For a disinformation operative, the goal is to subvert truth’s compulsion. That is difficult to do by changing people’s minds, especially about identity-defining beliefs, as we saw in chapter 2. But making people confused and mistrustful is easier. Arendt “repeatedly called attention to a very particular kind of lying that she associated with the authoritarian governments of mid-twentieth-century Europe,” writes the historian Sophia Rosenfeld. “This was a form of dissembling that was so brazen and comprehensive, so far from standard political fibbing and selective spin, that it left a population essentially impotent.” As Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
----
"Epistemic helplessness—the inability to know where to turn for truth—was the desideratum of the firehose of falsehood. “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda,” the Russian dissident Gary Kasparov observed in a December 2016 tweet. “It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” The goal was demoralization. In a chillingly candid interview in 1983, Yuri Bezmenov, a Russian intelligence defector who had specialized in propaganda and ideological subversion, explained: “A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures.”
----
"Cancel campaigns are not interested in fair criticism or persuasion. They want to isolate, intimidate, and demoralize. If a campaign can drive its targets from polite society, then it can spoof people’s consensus detectors and seed a spiral of silence. Some people will fall for the spoof and accept the apparent judgment of the crowd. Others will remain inwardly skeptical but, as Tocqueville said, “yield and return to silence.”
----
"Together, Mill’s arguments nod in the direction later taken by Charles Sanders Peirce and Karl Popper: knowledge is a social phenomenon. It is a product of human interactions, not just individual reason. It requires comparing viewpoints. Wherever there is only one person or opinion, fact and faith become undistinguishable. “In an imperfect state of the human mind,” wrote Mill, “the interests of truth require a diversity of opinions.”
----
"the Constitution of Knowledge is the most successful social design in human history, but also the most counterintuitive. In exchange for knowledge, freedom, and peace, it asks us to mistrust our senses and our tribes, question our sacred beliefs, and relinquish the comforts of certitude. It insists that we embrace our fallibility, subject ourselves to criticism, tolerate the reprehensible, and outsource reality to a global network of strangers. Defending it every day, forever, against adversaries who shape-shift but never retreat, can be, as the Middlebury students said in a different context, exhausting, upsetting, and deeply stressful. But we cannot afford to be snowflakes. Epistemic liberalism, like political liberalism, is a fighting faith."
----
Selection of terms:
coercive conformity, confirmation loops, creed wars, demarcation problem, emotional safetyism, fallibilism, grandstanding, identity-protective cognition, "flood the zone with shit", firehose of falsehoods
----
“On the whole,” he wrote, “we cannot in any way reach perfect certitude nor exactitude. We can never be absolutely sure of anything,” at least when any matter involves facts and statements about objective reality. “The scientific spirit,” said Peirce, “requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload of beliefs, the moment experience is against them.” -Charles Sanders Peirce
----
"But here an obvious question arises. Given humans’ innate tribal wiring; given our natural facility for hypocrisy and self-serving belief; given our many cognitive biases and our need to conform: how, then, could we possibly have created the advanced and generally peaceful world we occupy? How is it that the reality-based community not only exists but has gone from triumph to triumph? If anything is striking about the modern age in advanced democracies, it is how rare creed wars are, not how common."
----
"Thomas Hobbes’s vision of society is dark. Peace and prosperity are possible, but only under the reign of an absolute sovereign who can forcibly impose order and suppress the war of all against all. But who will rule the sovereign? No one: necessarily, the sovereign reigns supreme, her power neither divided nor limited. Nor can the people change the form of government, or rebel against it;
their grant of authority to the sovereign is irrevocable. As with Plato’s philosopher-king, and then emperors and monarchs and popes for two millennia, the sovereign must be wise and good. And if she is not wise and good? Then we must live with her abuses, for the alternatives—anarchy and war—can only be worse. There can be room for some differences, but not for dissent on fundamental civic matters such as religion: “for words can be a crime,” wrote Hobbes, “and can be punished without injury with whatever punishments the legislators wish—indeed, with the ultimate penalty.”
----
"Rousseau is a controversial figure. Some see him as the forebear of today’s progressives, championing social equality and personal emancipation; others, as a utopian social engineer who inspired the totalitarian impulses of Robespierre, Lenin, and Pol Pot (the murderous Cambodian dictator). Both views contain truth, but at a minimum his philosophy raised problems akin to the ones which backed Hobbes into an authoritarian corner. The idea of a single general will seems to allow room for only one legitimate ruler or viewpoint; how, then, can pluralism be accommodated?"
Who exactly can discern the general will when individuals disagree (as they are bound to do)? Once certain leaders or factions lay claim to the general will, how can their power be bounded? What if reformers decide to do a good deal of destroying and oppressing in order to enforce the transcendent public good, as so infamously happened in the French Revolution? Today, Rousseau’s thinking remains influential: dangerously so among populists—of both the right and the left—who assert that they, and only they, speak for the will of the people; more benignly, but still often mischievously, Aa
among idealists and ideologues of many stripes who claim that their insights and doctrines empower them to speak for the public interest."
----
"Of course, there were breakthroughs and advances before the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution, and the scientific revolution. What was lacking, though, was a social order capable of generating and then cumulating advances systematically. And systematic social orders require constitutions: formal, political ones, or informal, culturally embodied ones—but, in either case, systems of rules which channel human energies in pro-social directions. All three of the great liberal social systems—economic, political, epistemic—are traceable to breakthroughs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All were pioneered by men who followed each other’s writings and doings and who sometimes knew each other personally. They and their works were flawed with the inequities and blind spots of their eras (one of which is reflected in the fact that all of them were men). But the founders were not just blundering along; they self-consciously sought to create an alternative to the failed regimes of the past. The greatest of them—especially John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison, the big three of modern liberalism—were men of genius, whose acuity and sophistication remain astonishing even today."
----
"In today’s polarized climate, people tend to think of compromise as, at best, a necessary evil: a baby-splitting process which bends principles and impedes progress, leaving everyone unhappy. That is unfortunate, because Madison’s view is much closer to the truth. Compromise is a positive good: a balance wheel which keeps the government moving forward instead of toppling, and a source of constant pressure for innovation and adaptation and inclusion. Compromise, in other words, is Madison’s answer to the seemingly impossible conundrum of how a democracy can be both dynamic and stable."
----
"By the same token, the Madisonian system does not assume, expect, or even desire that every person should be a deal-cutting moderate. In fact, it assumes the opposite: that people are naturally inclined to hold strong beliefs and usually enter into negotiations reluctantly. They compromise not because they want to but because they have to, and their firm convictions ensure that multiple views receive energetic advocacy. Political zeal is to Madison’s political system what the profit motive is to Adam Smith’s economic system and what strong opinions are to Locke’s epistemic system: an energy source. Like all energies, ambition and zeal can be destructive; compromise contains, channels, and exploits them."
----
"A few decades earlier, Montesquieu had suggested dividing power in order to contain it; in 1780, when John Adams drafted the Massachusetts constitution, he divided its powers among three
branches. From them, Madison adopted the principle of separated, competing powers, and he placed it at the heart of the U.S. Constitution; but, more than his predecessors (and more than most people
even today), he saw dividing power not just as a way of constraining ambition but also as a way to promote cooperation and compromise by channeling ambition dynamically."
----
"Like Montesquieu, Madison understood that forcing multiple power centers to compete could prevent tyranny. But also, paralleling his near-contemporary Adam Smith, he saw that competition could be an engine converting the anarchic energy of diversity into the coordinated motion of cooperation. The essential ingredient, Madison saw, was compromise."
----
"Make no mistake, the rules are at least as demanding as they are permissive. By protecting criticism and dethroning authority, both rules protect freedom of expression. But both also impose stringent obligations on anyone who purports to advance knowledge. You have to check your own claims and subject them to contestation from others; you have to tolerate the competing claims of others; you have to accept that your own certainty counts for nothing; you have to forswear claiming that your god, your experience, your intuition, or your group is epistemically privileged; you have to defend the exclusive legitimacy of liberal science even (in fact, especially) when you think it is wrong or unfair."
----
"Sometimes hardest of all, you are obliged to be thick-skinned and to tolerate the emotional bruising which is unavoidable in a contentious intellectual culture. If you feel offended or traumatized by something someone else has to say, of course you can object or protest or suggest a better way to talk, and very often you should; but you cannot expect or demand to shut down the conversation. After all, you might be wrong, and they might be right. No final say; no personal authority."
----
"The concept of truth, the philosopher Hannah Arendt remarked, contains within itself an element of coercion. If you believe something is true, you also believe you must believe it. The statement “The sky is blue, but I don’t believe it” is grammatically correct but makes no sense. For a disinformation operative, the goal is to subvert truth’s compulsion. That is difficult to do by changing people’s minds, especially about identity-defining beliefs, as we saw in chapter 2. But making people confused and mistrustful is easier. Arendt “repeatedly called attention to a very particular kind of lying that she associated with the authoritarian governments of mid-twentieth-century Europe,” writes the historian Sophia Rosenfeld. “This was a form of dissembling that was so brazen and comprehensive, so far from standard political fibbing and selective spin, that it left a population essentially impotent.” As Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
----
"Epistemic helplessness—the inability to know where to turn for truth—was the desideratum of the firehose of falsehood. “The point of modern propaganda isn’t only to misinform or push an agenda,” the Russian dissident Gary Kasparov observed in a December 2016 tweet. “It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth.” The goal was demoralization. In a chillingly candid interview in 1983, Yuri Bezmenov, a Russian intelligence defector who had specialized in propaganda and ideological subversion, explained: “A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures.”
----
"Cancel campaigns are not interested in fair criticism or persuasion. They want to isolate, intimidate, and demoralize. If a campaign can drive its targets from polite society, then it can spoof people’s consensus detectors and seed a spiral of silence. Some people will fall for the spoof and accept the apparent judgment of the crowd. Others will remain inwardly skeptical but, as Tocqueville said, “yield and return to silence.”
----
"Together, Mill’s arguments nod in the direction later taken by Charles Sanders Peirce and Karl Popper: knowledge is a social phenomenon. It is a product of human interactions, not just individual reason. It requires comparing viewpoints. Wherever there is only one person or opinion, fact and faith become undistinguishable. “In an imperfect state of the human mind,” wrote Mill, “the interests of truth require a diversity of opinions.”
----
"the Constitution of Knowledge is the most successful social design in human history, but also the most counterintuitive. In exchange for knowledge, freedom, and peace, it asks us to mistrust our senses and our tribes, question our sacred beliefs, and relinquish the comforts of certitude. It insists that we embrace our fallibility, subject ourselves to criticism, tolerate the reprehensible, and outsource reality to a global network of strangers. Defending it every day, forever, against adversaries who shape-shift but never retreat, can be, as the Middlebury students said in a different context, exhausting, upsetting, and deeply stressful. But we cannot afford to be snowflakes. Epistemic liberalism, like political liberalism, is a fighting faith."
----
Selection of terms:
coercive conformity, confirmation loops, creed wars, demarcation problem, emotional safetyism, fallibilism, grandstanding, identity-protective cognition, "flood the zone with shit", firehose of falsehoods
----
“On the whole,” he wrote, “we cannot in any way reach perfect certitude nor exactitude. We can never be absolutely sure of anything,” at least when any matter involves facts and statements about objective reality. “The scientific spirit,” said Peirce, “requires a man to be at all times ready to dump his whole cartload of beliefs, the moment experience is against them.” -Charles Sanders Peirce
----
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