Bag O' Books: 'The Constitution of Knowledge'

When I first started Jonathan Rauch's "The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth," I was preparing to arm myself with information and thinking to battle with Trump-style con artists and their followers, the kind of people who believe the 2020 election was stolen and that COVID vaccines are deadly. I got a tiny bit of that. But I also came away with a bit more sympathy for the people who believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that COVID vaccines are deadly.

It's not that I think they might be right. They're emphatically not. But as Rauch tells us in this book, there is a lot of research telling us that human beings -- not just conservatives -- have a tendency to filter knowledge through the lens of their tribes. And once a view is adopted by the tribe, it's hard to make its members accommodate contrary facts. "Once a belief becomes important to the way we think about ourselves or important to the group we identify with, changing it becomes very costly," Rauch writes, citing the psychologist Dan Kahan. "Humans are equipped with some of evolution’s finest mental circuitry to protect us from changing our minds when doing so might alienate us from our group." When people believe stupid things and keep believing stupid things because all their friends believe stupid things, that's profoundly human.

Honestly, it makes me wonder what I believe fervently because the people around me believe it too.

This isn't to say that Rauch lets the Trumpian grifters off the hook. The book exists in large part because of them. "Trump and his media echo chambers were normalizing lying in order to obliterate the distinction, in the public realm, between truth and untruth." But it also exists in large part because of Rauch's concerns about progressive "cancel culture," citing a number of incidents on college campuses. "Are the organizers recruiting others to pile on? Are you being swarmed and brigaded? Are people hunting through your work and scouring social media to find ammunition to use against you?" he asks. "The Constitution of Knowledge relies on independent observers; cancel culture relies on mob action."

This book works best as a primer on liberalism and its achievements. (One caveat: Rauch repeatedly refers to the informal structures of knowledge creation and debate as "the Constitution of Knowledge" -- hey, that's thename of the book! -- a punchy but ultimately tiresome rebranding that becomes an overused tic.) Rauch celebrates the virtues of truth-seeking, fierce debate, free speech, thick skins and keeping an open mind to the possibility that you might be wrong about stuff -- and that somebody else might be right. And yes, it would be nice if we could return to the days of "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll defend your right to say it."

But Rauch's weakness comes when offering ideas about what to about the present crisis of disinformation and epistemic closure. The bulk of his "what now" chapter focuses on countering cancel culture and sticking up for your right to explore controversial ideas on campus. There's nothing wrong with that, but from where I'm sitting the more urgent threat to liberalism comes from the Trumpist right. "There are state and local local laws in Republican-led states and communities on the books and being passed RIGHT NOW that are restricting what can be taught and what ideas can be discussed in schools," Nikole Hannah-Jones observed on Twitter recently. Those laws aren't being passed by woke undergrads. Readers probably come to Rauch's book already convinced -- more or less -- of the merits of truth and liberalism. They'll leave even more convinced those ideas and institutions are worth saving from the forces that most endanger it. I'm just not sure they'll have much of an idea how.