(note: I'm currently working on a book bearing this title, and while I don't intend to blog about every minute part of it along the way I am not above the occasional trial balloon to make sure that the premise is neither flawed nor irrelevant.)
Imagine, if you will, a committed Catholic arguing with an atheistic fratboy about pre-marital casual sex. Assuming that all practical arguments would be refuted (i.e., "You'll get an STD" is met with "No, I'll use a condom") the dispute, if given enough time to play out, would eventually boil down to morality.
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Catholics believe it is a sin. Fratboy, neither believing in God nor sharing the Catholics' values, would have no context for such an argument. It would be rejected out of hand. If these two people cannot agree on a fundamental premise – God exists – then the religion-based issue of something being a sin or immoral simply can't take place. The believer and the atheist simply have two entirely different sets of facts underlying their decision-making and judgment. They will talk directly past one another.
These disagreements are common in the political sphere when we have to deal with inherently subjective issues. We can't really debate social welfare policies if we can't agree on the fundamental premise that government should do something to assist the poor. But this isn't a problem. After all, things like social welfare, abortion, gay marriage, and so on are "should" questions. There are no objective answers. Neither you nor I can definitely "prove" that society should or should not help the poor. One faction will make a stronger argument than the other, but that doesn't prove anyone right or wrong. Politics exist to peacefully and productively hash out disagreements about these unanswerable questions.
So here's the problem. Prior to the advent of CNN in the mid-1980s, Americans got broadcast news from exactly three sources: ABC, NBC, and CBS (discounting local or public-access programming). One could argue, and right-wingers have made a multi-billion dollar industry out of doing so, that those three news behemoths were biased. They leaned to the left. I'll accept that premise. They may have had a bias, but everyone was seeing the same news and getting the same sets of facts. That is crucially important. When people disagreed, they disagreed by diverging from a common point. Some people wanted to stay in Vietnam and some wanted to leave, but they had the same basic set of facts about how the war was going and what was happening.
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Now we have a bifurcated media and, predictably, a bifurcated public. People do not disagree about Iraq by diverging from a common understanding of the facts.
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They simply have different versions of reality – different facts about the same events. We do not have a simple disagreement about Staying vs Leaving in Iraq; there is a deep, fundamental, and unbridgeable gap in what different Americans "know" about the war and the run-up thereto. We cannot debate the rightness or wrongness of the invasion if, as surveys show, 30-40% of the public thinks we found WMD and that Sadaam was personally responsible for planning 9/11. A productive debate about right and wrong can only take place in the context of one set of facts. But Americans have self-selected (based on their existing biases) a source of information. There's the NPR/Blogosphere camp with one set of facts and the Fox News/Talk Radio camp with another. In between are the CNN/Big Three Networks camp with a confused porridge of correct and incorrect "facts."
And that's why we'll forever be talking past each other – we've abandoned the idea that there are such things as facts. We've introduced the kind of disagreement I mentioned in the Catholic vs Fratboy example into every area of politics. Everything is treated as subjective. Moral issues are subjective, but many other issues are not. Either Hussein did or did not plan 9/11. It is not possible to say "Well, we'll just have to disagree about that." It is either true or false. Period. Instead we've let lassiez-faire ideology and free-market worship redefine the way we are informed as a society. Each person is a demographic, and each demographic has a news source to tell them exactly what they want to hear and, in most cases, what they already believe to be true.
My lovely sister, who happens to be a Real Catholic, once told me that from a religious viewpoint, the biggest problem with our society is that it tells each individual "You are your own God." Therefore people no longer operate from a shared, common set of moral values. Each person defines his or her own. We can't say whether or not we "should" all be operating from a common set of Christian religious values because such issues are inherently subjective. But I do know that her logic applies very well to the way Americans consume the news today. The message is loud and clear – whatever you decide is true becomes the truth. There are no Facts, only Opinions. If someone proves you wrong, you don't have to admit it because it's all subjective. If the news won't agree with you, keep flipping the channel until you find the network that will.
Jeff says:
Damn. I have to say I like it. I would very much like to read a book about that.
mike says:
Re: differing people talking past each other at a certain point: From Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity:
"All human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs and their lives…I shall call these words a person's 'final vocabulary.' It is final in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse. Those words are as far as he can go with language…[examples are] "true", "good", "right", "beautiful"…"Christ", "England", "professional standards", "decency", "kindness", "the Revolution", "the Church", "progressive", "rigorous," "creative." "
Good stuff. Playful and hopeful about extreme relativism and Pragmatic Truth.
Book sounds promising. Some critiques I'm sure you know you'll hit:
a) I really think you are overplaying the homogeneity of news sources pre-Cable/internet. Even during the Consensus-Era late 1950s, you had huge differences and contradictions in "facts" about the threat of the Soviets, the desirability of the integration of African-Americans, Keynesian Economics, the relative power of labor unions and large corporations, etc etc. And much richer social networks (the proverbial Bowling League, the original blog?) in which like-minded people negotiated their realities. (this isn't necessarily necessary for your argument, the state or desirability of the news media pre-CNN.)
b) You'll need a really robust definition of "facts" in this context. Besides the power/knowledge problem with facts as isolated Truths, the statement: "Nationwide, black men are incarcerated at 9.6 times the rate of white men" won't generate the "everyone for himself" news situation because it has an empirical nature to it – people ignore a consensus opinion on its meaning and decide to listen to an echo chamber of moveon.org or Sean Hannity because of its implications.
j says:
Excellent! Thought-provoking. (Which is the highest compliment one can give, imo.)
But what is so great about facts anyway? Facts become dogma. Dogma is bad.
Rather than teaching facts to kids, maybe you should teach them to be skeptical about things they hear so that they don't become dogmatic little Limbaugh drones.
Brandon says:
Very interesting post, and interesting comments from Mike. I had thought about posting something like this in response to your post last week about presidential rankings, in the sense that such evaluations will always be influenced by our inability to agree upon a set of objective criteria. I think the whole topic of the proliferation of "information" sources (blogs, online magazines, etc.) and its potential impact on ideology is fascinating. Are the positive effects of having so much more easily accessible information offset by the propensity of people to seek out information that confirms their beliefs? If anybody knows of books or scholars that rigorously explore these issues, please share!
Just a note to "j" on the importance of teaching skepticism. I agree, but a predisposition to skepticism without an understandig of logical argument and the scientific method doesn't take us very far. Many people equate skepticism with disagreeing with prevailing opinion. For example, the intelligent design and global warming skeptic communities get much mileage out of their contention that they are in the "skeptical minority," in that their beliefs diverge from mainstream scientific opinion.
BK says:
Very interesting premise for a book. Most of the arguments I have with my wife can be boiled down to a disagreement regarding facts.
I am not sure the idea that all/most people will talk past one another is completely accurate. I would even submit that at some level a subset of people are predisposed to two things- – being opinionated and having a need for attention. In my experience in state and local government, these people become politicians and obnoxiouis religious zealots.
This small – but loud – group of people need 'their' facts and the subsequent arguments in order to put food on their tables.
Thankfully, we have a large (although I wish it were larger) group of people who are committed to working to find solutions to the social problems the politicians and zealots bloviate about (crime, poverty, education and health disparities).
This group of people comprises the non-profit sector. It's social workers, health care professionals with consciences and other professionals who see what is going on and get out there and do soemthing about it.
Unfortuantely, the media decides to cover political races and our elected "leaders."
Rob says:
That is a very good premise for a book. Good luck with it. Just to add my two cents: I think the disintegration of the separation of church and state could be integrated into the discussion. Historically, a strong argument can be made that religious zealots have been committing this sin for ages. Whenever some fact contradicts their religious beliefs, they fall back on the crutch of ignorance. It would seem that this kind of mindset is merging into the "state" side of church and state – and in the context it isn't real surprising. The republicans are now facing the same fate as the BC tours people you plugged earlier – faced with facts that advertise how mindless they are, their only recourse is to ignore fact and pretend that it is nothing more than opinion.
Having said all that, I'm not sure I really added anything that wasn't already said… Ah well!
Michael says:
Very nicely put. I, too, will eagerly await your book.
Samantha says:
I’m not a social scientist or anything, but I believe there is a similar societal result in granting every human being equal civil rights and in shattering the perceived solidarity in what a society views as “fact.”
Once dissemination of public information is no longer controlled (either by limiting the number of available news sources or by limiting a news source’s access to reliable information), then, with so many sources to choose from, as your sister put it, “you are your own God” when it comes to what you choose to believe is true or false. This is not to discount your point about facts being either true or false, but is to say that it just doesn’t matter that much. Public opinion can move mountains, but without a unified belief in what is “true,” whether it really is or not, a society will ultimately fall apart, like a colony full of queen bees.
Likewise, as fascist as it seems, clearly defined social stratification seems necessary to the continued success of a society. Once the "lowest" group of citizens obtains enough information to leads them to believe they are entitled to civil rights, an equal vote, whatever, the structure of society begins to unravel. It’s not that I don’t believe in democracy, but I just don’t think it is compatible with world domination, and that seems to be what the U.S. has been striving for almost since its inception. Obviously, then, it is in our government’s interest to control what its people believe to be “fact,” not so much in uncovering what is actually factual.
So, I have this mental picture of a high mark in the parabolic rise and fall of our society between the domination and oppression of certain groups by certain other groups which helped to create the society in the first place, and the eventual descent of that society into complete egalitarian populism (is that even a real term or did I just make it up?) resulting in its collapse. The high mark is that tenuous point of near perfection where we are on our way to civil rights for all, but identification of ourselves as small parts of a unified whole is about to splinter into a cacophony of individuals – ideal but unsustainable.
In the light of that mental image, it seems almost esoteric to talk about the importance of facts. Maybe I'm just thinking far too conceptually and/or being too cynical.
Anyway, I can’t wait to read more from someone who actually knows what he’s talking about and explains it in language I can understand. Looking forward to the book.
Kati says:
Honestly, you and other professors I've had were the first people to introduce to my mind that what the media reports might be wrong. As silly as that may sound, it's like you said – most Americans don't understand that our outlet of information today is polluted. I think that this post really helped me understand your point about this – in class it wasn't 100% clear. Politics is moving to a place where ideological arguments are really the only ones we can make, and we simply do not have reliable facts to back up our ideological arguments. I mean, I wrote a paper about how fucked up Fox News is, but I'm sure that some other student in Y200 had an equally well written paper with reliable facts saying that Fox News is unbiased. What's a young poli sci student to do?!?!?
Ed says:
No one has ever written a good or remotely persuasive paper about Fox News being unbiased. Trust me.