A Case for Objective Reality
First posted on October 15, 2018 at 1hundredsixty8.com
As I’ve grown older, I have made an effort to base my thinking on the principles of objective reality, empiricism, healthy skepticism, and reason. This requires self-awareness and focus. It is not only valuable to me alone but to the majority of people who desire to live in peace and harmony. I believe the historical antecedents of The Enlightenment are still important guidelines in human affairs. I believe respectful disagreement is how we grow, both as individuals and as a society. Curiosity and inquiry must be regarded as virtues, and so must the ability to change one’s mind when new facts are brought to light.
We live in a time where information proliferates but critical thinking is rare. Confirmation bias is at epidemic levels, especially in politics. We accept ideology over principle. We inject rancor rather than civility into public discourse. We disparage those who do not agree with us. We eschew personal responsibility and blame external forces for our circumstances. We exchange the difficult work of acquiring knowledge for the facile espousal of opinion. The democratic nature of the Internet and its various social platforms enable anyone to present themselves as an expert, and to promulgate misconceptions that are often indistinguishable from fact-based conclusions.
It is now common for the discontented to attack the very institutions which created a cohesive but free society rather than work to improve them and correct their flaws. A dangerous combination has evolved into a real threat to the American experiment: On one side, there are the failures of various elites best manifested in the financial crash of 2008, the dysfunctional Congress, and the divisive political environment. We can trace the roots of distrust of government back to the unpopular Vietnam War and the realization the nation’s leaders were not forthcoming about the military situation. The decline in the number of Americans who identify as members of a particular religion correlates to the moral decay infecting some of our religious institutions (sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, the scandals of evangelicals like Ted Haggard and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, and many more). The business sector is equally complicit in malfeasance: Before the 2008 collapse, there was the savings and loan scandal of the 1980s, the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in the 1990s, Enron in the 2000s. Before the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010, there was the Exxon Valdez. Before the Flint, Michigan water pollution scandal, there was Love Canal. The costs of industrial pollution, problematic product safety, and corporate conglomeration are neatly hidden by business and passed onto the public.
For the mass of us who comprise the American public, we have contributed to this circumstance by a combination of obstinate obliviousness and careless apathy. Our boast of being the greatest nation on earth is belied by data in a number of fields, from education to healthcare*. We have substituted the talk for the walk- we no longer do those things that did make the US the world’s greatest nation after World War II, but we continue to cling to that image. In no part of American life is the lack of knowledge and general apathy more telling than in politics. In a democratic republic, a system that requires the people to regularly “hire” through the ballot the persons who will do the work of governing, some modicum of knowledge of public affairs, and widespread participation by voting is necessary for a vibrant and responsive political society. Yet, according to Pew Research, “the 55.7% VAP [Voting Age Population} turnout in 2016 puts the U.S. behind most of its peers in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), most of whose members are highly developed, democratic states. Looking at the most recent nationwide election in each OECD nation, the U.S. placed 26th out of 32 (current VAP estimates weren’t available for three countries)”.
Several years ago, I posted a clip of retired Supreme Court Justice David Souter speaking in 2012. In response to a question from the audience, Souter replied that he didn’t “believe there was any problem of American politics or American public life which is more significant today than the pervasive civic ignorance of the Constitution of the United States and the structure of government”. To affirm Souter’s point, there are polls showing that some Americans believe the US spends large amounts of money on foreign aid (it doesn’t), that the Supreme Court is a part of Congress, that crime is on the rise. An uninformed citizenry is an easy mark for ambitious seekers of power.
In turning away from objective reality, in accepting vapid slogans over ideas, in replacing reason with emotion, America has made itself vulnerable to cynics and demagogues. For the plutocrats who resent the impositions placed upon them by democracy, this is a situation ripe for exploitation. Obscuring the sunlight of truth is the real threat to the American experiment. This is a nation that has its basis in ideas, not in ethnicity, or religion, or even language. We have forgotten that the goal of politics is to attain the greatest good for the greatest number. The methodology of politics is pragmatism, not ideology. "Politics," Bismarck said, "is the art of the possible".
With this in mind, I decided not to squander whatever bandwidth I have thinking about child sex-trafficking rings in the basement of Washington pizzerias, kneeling football players, or inane online arguments. Instead, I will continue to learn things, to listen to the viewpoints of people with whom I do not reflexively agree, to fight to be open-minded enough to have my opinions changed by evidence.
And I will strive to live up to my display name on Twitter, “Reasonable Discourse” (@nicasaurus).
Recommended reading: Several books which present more detailed looks at the issues I raised here:
Chris Hayes’ excellent study of the failures of elites, Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012).
Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters (2017) discusses the latest iteration of America’s anti-intellectualism.
Richard Hofstadter’s masterwork, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) is as relevant today as it was fifty-five years ago.
*In 2016, the CIA ranked the US 43rd in life expectancy. According to a 2018 report by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the US health care costs are twice that of other developed nations. Various rankings of countries by quality of education over the last 5 years have consistently had the US out of the top ten.
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The problem, Nick, is that facts are just the beginning of conceptualization. Some people have only a limited set of facts around a given topic. Some people have distorted the importance of certain facts. ALL of us inevitability filter, sort, and combine the facts according to our personal world views. So most historians, political scientists, and, yes, even literature critics and philosophers reject the possibility of an "objective reality." Fifty of us can begin with the same indisputable facts and we end up putting them together in fifty different ways. All you have to do is teach a class of fifty students to watch the dispersion of meaning semester after semester.