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.

Mom

My mother would have turned 70 years old today. Spending the evening listening to one of her old albums.

Why I'm in favor of anti-vax stigma

AP has a piece today questioning the "pandemic of the unvaccinated" storyline that has emerged amidst the Delta-fueled COVID surge. Some hospitalized people are vaccinated, after all, but the broader concern seems to be that some medical observers worry about stigmatizing the unvaxxed.

“It is true that the unvaccinated are the biggest driver, but we mustn’t forget that the vaccinated are part of it as well, in part because of the delta variant,” said Dr. Eric Topol, professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. “The pandemic clearly involves all people, not just the unvaccinated.”

Branding it “a pandemic of the unvaccinated” could have the unintended consequence of stigmatizing the unvaccinated, he added. “We should not partition them as the exclusive problem,” Topol said.

Instead officials should call out vaccine disinformation, said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. A sketchy stream of dubious arguments continues to undermine public confidence.

“We can say that the virus has reemerged in the southern United States, primarily among unvaccinated people, but it doesn’t mean we have to blame the unvaccinated,” Hotez said. “The people we have to target are the purveyors of disinformation, and we have to recognize that the unvaccinated themselves are victims of disinformation.”

Well, yes and no.

I'm all for calling out the purveyors of disinformation, but it's probably important to recognize there's an audience out there for the disinformation. People make choices not just based on correct information, but how they feel about things, and one of the factors that shapes those feelings is whether something is broadly understood -- by the culture, by community, by neighbors and friends -- to be good or bad. 

What's more, the medical community understands this and has used it to further public health goals in this country. Have you seen an anti-smoking ad in the last few years? They can be gruesome beyond belief. 

There is information being conveyed here, yes. But some of the information is designed to make smoking seem, frankly, unnattractive. You don't just see this ad and want to protect your health. You want to make sure you don't end up looking or sounding like this poor woman. The point here is to create visceral disgust -- to create a stigma against the act of smoking.

And these efforts, along with increasingly stringent regulation over decades, has worked.

Adult smoking rates dropped from 42% in 1965 to 14% in 2019, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC has not released last year's data but the Quitline report cited U.S. Treasury Department data showing cigarette sales increased 1% in 2020 after dropping 4 to 5% each year since 2015.

"Pandemic of the unvaccinated" is admittedly a broad description, but it also seems to capture the heart of the problem facing the United States: 

By late July, a total of about 26 adults per 100,000 vaccinated people had been hospitalized for COVID-19. That’s compared with about 431 hospitalized people for every 100,000 unvaccinated individuals — a rate roughly 17 times as high as for those who were vaccinated. The data come from 13 states, including California, Georgia and Utah.

So I'm fine with continuing to use the label, despite AP's objections. I don't love "stigma" generally. But sometimes it has its uses. 

The New York Times, theology and the death penalty

This NYT podcast featuring David French and Elizabeth Bruenig debating the death penalty is more loaded with theological arguments than just about any supposedly secular thing I've heard in a long time. 

Everybody Hurts

A few years ago, when we were leaving Philadelphia to return to Lawrence, I did something that still hurts today: I gave away almost the entirety of my CD collection, which I'd spent decades building. There was a rational reason for this -- we had very limited room in the "cube" that was going on the moving truck, and had to make a lot of snap decisions about what had to go and what we'd keep. 

I've spent the last couple of years buying albums I'd already bought 15 or 20 years ago, that I've missed.

This week, I got a package in the mail from eBay: REM's "Automatic for the People." I'm listening to it now. It remains beautiful and dirgelike, in the best way. Event the peppier songs, like "The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite" can't dent the overall effect of the album, which puts me in an almost-meditative state.

The killer track on the album, though, is "Everybody Hurts" -- a universal anthem if ever there was one. The video is killer, too.

Back when we made mixtapes, my roommate put that song on a mix he made for a relative who was grieving -- not to strong a word, I think -- a lost relationship. Too on the nose? I don't know. I don't think so. Everybody does hurt at some point or another, and Michael Stipe and company acknowledge that, but they also don't wallow in it -- the end of the song features and triumphant orchestral swell, a reminder that (often, hopefully) better days are ahead.

But it's ok to sit with the pain a bit, too, consoled by the fact you're not the only one who has ever felt these feelings. 

Common Book: These minds are made for rationalizing

Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge:

Think of it this way: 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. We have hundreds of thousands of years of practice at believing whatever will keep us in good standing with our tribe, even if that requires denying, discounting, rationalizing, misperceiving, and ignoring the evidence in front of our nose.

Common Book posts are quotes from whatever I'm reading. Sometimes you'll get lots of them. Sometimes not so many. 

Book No. 19: 'Twilight of Democracy'

I have finished my 19th book of the year, "Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism" by Anne Applebaum -- a closeup survey of the rise of nationalist movements in the U.S. (Trumpism), Poland, Hungary and Spain, and the cultural and technological developments that hasten their rise. When I say "close up," I mean to say that Applebaum is former friends and colleagues with many of the people involved. No longer.

Key quote: "Because all authoritarianisms divide, polarize, and separate people into warring camps, the fight against them requires new coalitions. Together we can make old and misunderstood words like liberalism mean something again; together we can fight back against lies and liars; together we can rethink what democracy should look like in a digital age." We have to keep fighting, in other words, to make the world we want.