If you have not read the first two articles of this series, I encourage you to. They are introductory to some of the concepts I am going to discuss here.
The Foundation: The Question of Universal Truth
The Band-aid: How Humans Survive Without Knowing
As a brief refresher, remember that Western epistemology falls into roughly three time periods/categories: premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism.
In premodernist espistemology, truth is objective and obtained from sources that are typically supernatural and Christian-influenced.
Modernism introduced the idea that truth can be ascertained by rationalism and science, and one should rely on experts in various disciplines to determine truth.
Postmodernism rejects objective truth in religion and also asserts that experts cannot be trusted (making all opinions relatively equal). The keystone belief of postmodernism is that truth may be relative to a culture. In postmodernism, various truths can coexist, and no truth is necessarily superior to others.
So where are we now? That is the question of the hour, and it is an important question. As I am writing, we are on the eve of the 2020 Presidential inauguration. It is a time where multiple perceptions of truth are clashing in a violent way, and our culture is highly stressed, if not on the verge of collapse.
There are two important questions I want to discuss:
- Is this dark time just temporary or are we at a point where no recovery is possible and a spiral into destruction is inevitable?
- Is what we are seeing simply postmodernism or have we graduated to something worse than postmodernism?
Remember that Western civilization has cycled through many, many cycles of violence and peace. Even in the United States, we have seen many such cycles. Violent protests are nothing new, and by historical standards, today’s violence is not even extreme. Even when you throw out all the wars including the Civil War, today’s violence is not extreme. For example, here is a brief history of labor disputes in the United States.
When in a troubled time, it is easy to get pessimistic and assume that the current situation is permanent and fatal to our society, but thankfully, it never has been. We have always recovered. Sometimes there has been a lot of pain, but we have always recovered.
I suspect we will recover this time as well. On the other hand, I suspect we are only at the beginning of this trouble, and only at the beginning of the pain. I actually think things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better, and I think we as a culture are going to come out very different on the other end.
To explain why I come to that conclusion for the first question, I want to talk about the second question. There are a lot of thinkers right now thinking about that second question.
Let us consider what seems to have changed.
The fact that people have different perspectives and worldviews is nothing new of course. Our country has had battles over ideas since its founding. In fact, our battles have always been pretty much about the same things: individualism vs pluralism, freedom vs security, populism vs elitism, and big government vs small government. Sometimes, those fights have been intense, but they are also healthy. There are two valid sides to all of those arguments.
However, what we see today is different in a very important way. Before I get into that, let me define a few concepts that I am going to borrow from philosopher Bertrand Russell. This is going to get a bit tedious and technical, but it is necessary to set up future discussions.
Russell differentiates between two different kinds of knowledge:
- Knowledge of things: the knowledge of objects that exist outside ourselves. We get knowledge of things either by personal acquaintance with those things OR by descriptions of those things that include objects with which we are acquainted.*
- Knowledge of truths: value judgments, convictions, and opinions that exist within ourselves.
Until recently, most of the fighting in the United States has been over the second category. We fight over ideas, but typically, we do not fight over facts and evidence of facts. To put it in Russell’s terms, our society has generally agreed on the knowledge of things but not the knowledge of truths.
Here is what that looks like:
Now, over the past few years, we have seen a big shift. Fairly suddenly, we no longer have consensus on the knowledge of things. While our differences used to be only in the realm of knowledge of truths, now we cannot even agree on facts or the evidence of facts. In other words, here is where we are today:
I am reminded of a quote: You have the right to have your own opinion but you don’t have the right to have your own facts.
I have heard that quote my entire life, but it no longer applies in 2020. It is more of a 1990s thing.
That in a nutshell is what is new and quite possibly a fatal problem for the society that we currently know. While it quite clear that a society can survive disagreement in the knowledge of truths, it is somewhat doubtful that it can survive an inability to agree in the realm of the knowledge of things.**
This is what has so many concerned. What we see today feels new, because while postmodernism has always accepted the possibility for relativity in the knowledge of things, it has been more focused on the knowledge of truths. To put it another way, postmodernism has generally not challenged underlying data, but rather focused its concern on the interpretation of data.
This relatively sudden shift in the battleground for truth is why you may have started hearing new terms being used to describe current epistemology. The two most prevalent ones I hear are post-truth and post-postmodernism.
So have we really exited postmodernism for something more sinister? I don’t know for sure, and I am not sure it matters what we call the current state of affairs. However, at the very least, we are in a dark place where postmodernism is off the rails, mostly untempered by pragmatic influences that historically balance it out and allow us to function as a society.
As I wrote in an earlier article, it is impossible for a person to function as a true postmodernist. A level of pragmatism is necessary just to get out of bed in the morning. Similarly, pragmatism is needed in a society in that people have to choose to generally agree on facts and evidence even when that truth is hard to ascertain.
Without that pragmatic choice to find agreement on knowledge of things, I am not sure how the society can agree on much of anything. It is simply impossible to find common ground on the knowledge of truths when there is no agreement on the underlying knowledge of things. If you have tried to argue with people that disagree with you lately, you have probably seen that futility. You probably felt like you lived in a different world than them. Their facts were different than your facts.
Sadly, not only is pragmatism in short supply these days, but there are forces working overtime to make things worse. Technology to postmodernism is like gas on a fire. In particular, social media and entertainment news are wreaking havoc. I am going to discuss these two things in detail in due time.
That being said, things are a bit more complicated than I portrayed them in the charts above. As it turns out, it is not so easy to disentangle the knowledge of truths from the knowledge of things. That has become a big problem that has been exploited remarkably well by bad actors. In the next article, I want to start talking about how the attacks are happening and why suddenly, facts and evidence of facts are under siege.
* It is not relevant to this article to know about the difference between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. However, in future articles, this distinction becomes very important. If you are curious and want to get ahead of where I currently am, here is a brief summary.
Let us use the example of a kitchen table. You almost certainly have knowledge of a particular table by acquaintance because you have personally experienced the table. You are personally acquainted with the table through sense data your body has collected about the table.
On the other hand, you probably have no experience with the table in the personal residence of the queen of England. However, even though you have no acquaintance of that table, you can still have knowledge by description of that table because a description can be provided to you using terms of which you are personally acquainted. For example, if someone tells you that the queen’s table is large, black, round, and six-legged, you can have knowledge of the table because you have personal acquaintance with the concepts of “large, black, round, six, and legs.”
The key takeaway is this. You can only know a fact if you have personal experience/acquaintance with the fact OR you have a description of the fact that only contains terms with which you have experience/acquaintance.
** Obviously, an inability to agree on the knowledge of things is not entirely new. People have always struggled to determine the truth at the factual level. Even when access to facts is readily available (and it often is not), perspective and bias have always made truth gathering hard. However, due to certain forces in society, this problem is getting much worse.