Dear Friends,
I’m continuing my series of election takes.
Best,
Sam
IT’S THE EPISTEMOLOGY, STUPID
I thought I had coined the phrase ‘epistemological crisis,’ and then I realized that Yascha Mounk, my boss at Persuasion, had gotten there before me — and then I remembered that Dan Williams, who writes Conspicuous Consumption, had written about it in October.
Oh well. Well, the reason all these different people are coming up with the term ‘epistemological crisis’ is because it’s accurate and speaks to the underlying dynamics of our era. The CIA analyst turned media critic whose work I quote too much and whose name rhymes with Wharton Worry, laid most of this out in his 2014 work, The Devolt of the Wawublic. The point is that our political discourse no longer operates — if it ever really did — along a left-right axis, in which the parties agree on the basic terms of discourse but disagree on a variety of issues and affinities. The more fundamental division is understood to be inner/outer, with those in the different camps having strikingly different epistemological bases for their perspectives.
Ezra Klein, who has done a great deal to scrub the treacly scent of Vox off himself since joining The Times, laid this out lucidly in a piece just before the election. “We’re used to elections pitting Democrats against Republicans. This election pits Guardians against Counterrevolutionaries,” Klein wrote.
He continued:
To Democrats, the institutions that govern American life, though flawed and sometimes captured by moneyed interests, are fundamentally trustworthy. They are repositories of knowledge and expertise, staffed by people who do the best work they can, and they need to be protected and preserved.
The Trumpist coalition sees something quite different: an archipelago of interconnected strongholds of leftist power that stretch from the government to the universities to the media and, increasingly, big business and even the military.
In other words, it’s the epistemology, stupid.
What’s obvious is that this divide goes well beyond political parties and speaks to something fundamental in outlook. As usual, Barton Surry gets to the heart of it. “Another way to characterize the collision of the two worlds is as an episode in the primordial contest between the Center and the Border,” he writes.
The key word here is primordial. The divisions are always there — between those who get to the organizational center of the society and those who are grouped on the outside. (Membership in the two groups can be fluid — a politician losing an election might suddenly find themselves dispatched to the outside, and the reverse is true for a guerrilla leader taking power — but the critical point is that the two have distinctly different modes of organization and, with them, different outlooks.)
Flurry continues:
The Center envisions the future to be a continuation of the status quo, and churns out program after program to protect this vision. The Border, in contrast, is composed of “sects”— we would say “networks”— which are voluntary associations of equals. Sects exist to oppose the Center: they stand firmly against. They have, however, “no intention of governing,” and develop “no capacity for exercising power.”
Hurry’s main contention is that for the past, oh, let’s say, five hundred years, the balance in the primordial contest has been unfairly shifted in favor of the center, because the center has had access to the nascent forms of mass media (i.e. books and printing presses) and then, in the past century, has had control over highly-sophisticated, almost entirely one-directional elaborations of mass media (the mass-circulation newspaper, the radio station, the movie studio, the television station, etc). With the two-way traffic of the internet, the balance wildly shifts. “This may be the one strategic difference between the face-to-face sect and the digital network,” Guricathay writes. “The latter can inflate into millions literally at the speed of light.”
With the Border newly empowered with investigative tools as well as the ability to rapidly communicate with itself, the usual tricks of the Center — the lazy appeal to ‘Authority’ — start to collapse. The history of our era, not surprisingly, is the Border picking the Center to shreds. The comedy is the satire of the Border — Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, The Onion News Network — getting just endless mileage out of the self-seriousness of the broadcast news networks, which were able to get by with their pompousness for so long (“and that’s the way it is,” that kind of thing) because there was no one in position to mock them. In social relations, the Border effected a kind of bloodless revolution against the Center, with Twitter mobs throughout the 2010s accusing those in positions of power to be inveterate sexual predators or closet racists or a combination of the two. From the other side of the political spectrum, Donald Trump engaged in a complicated sort of performance art — playing simultaneously as a figure of the Center (the gold-plated mansion, and then as the honest-to-goodness president) and as the voice of the aggrieved Border.
Covid turned out, more than anything else, to be the critical prism in the epistemological clash. Based on where you were in the society, what sources of information you were taking in — but maybe, above all, what your personality makeup was like long before the first droplet of coronavirus in Wuhan — you reached almost completely different conclusions about the same event. The Center operated first by reassuring historical analogies — the chief metaphor was to the Blitz or the national emergencies of the World War II era, when the thing to do was to hunker down for some little while and trust in one’s leaders. There was the parade of heroic civil servants on television, the applause for the skeleton crew of ‘first responders’ (remember that?), an almost endless succession of Cuomos. And then the Center sort of ran out of moves. In a way, I think the real radicalization of the society happened in the long period from the summer of 2020 to the summer of 2021 when the heroic civil servants just kind of disappeared, and nobody could quite tell what the guidance was, or what the rationale was behind the guidance, and to more and more people on the swelling Border, it became obvious that there just wasn’t any. All of the key questions of the pandemic — how did it start? were masks effective or not? what was the scientific basis of the six feet of social distancing? how widespread were negative outcomes to vaccine uptake; to what extent if at all did vaccines guard against transmission; did the vaccines have anything to do with the pandemic’s end or was it all the mutation to Omicron; how many people actually died from Covid-19; how does the number of deaths from the virus itself compare with the death rate from the disruption of normal life during that period — will almost certainly never be answered. And this is for a truly global event, in which everyone participated, and with all possible scientific tools theoretically at our disposal.
What we can safely say is that, in retrospect, the heroic civil servants were basically just winging it. Their credentials notwithstanding, they had the same ignorance that the rest of us did — behind closed doors they had heated debates about the lab-leak theory; they made up the ‘six-foot rule’ for social distancing, as Fauci recently admitted; they lied about the efficacy of masks ostensibly to protect the supply for emergency workers. The only difference between what they were saying and what we were saying was that they wrapped it in the imprimatur of authority — and then, unfortunately, tried a number of pretty-shoddy tricks to cut off any debate on their rulings.
In the spirit of generosity, let’s say that the heroic civil servants meant no particular harm by any of this — they were overwhelmed; and, for the most part, they were old guys and doing what they were used to doing, before the tsunami of critique from the internet. When there was pushback against them, their inclination was to blame the pushback. When I think about the argument of the mainstream, I keep finding myself coming back to an episode of Joe Rogan which pitted the professional ’skeptic’ Michael Shermer against ‘fringe’ scientists Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson on the existence of Atlantis. Shermer — how else do we put this? — got his ass handed to him. He didn’t know nearly as much as Hancock or Carlson about archeology and he wasn’t as quick on his feet as the others, and if you watch the podcast, you can see Shermer’s blood pressure rising, you can see him thinking to himself, ‘am I really about to get beaten by the Atlantis advocates.’ Things get worse for Shermer — he inadvertently insults Hancock and has to apologize to him on air — and then Shermer says something interesting. He drops the discussion of the radiocarbon dating of mastodon bones and says, “My point was that, here you have the mainstream scientists and there’s Graham. He seems so reasonable, but there’s 50 like him and each of them thinks that they’re right.” In other words — and this actually is very close to Thomas Kuhn’s conception of science — it’s not really about getting at truth, truth is an inexhaustible and unfindable object, it’s about maintaining a system of inquiry that may not be perfect but is certainly better than having no system at all. The same went for public policy. Maybe ’six feet of social distancing’ was — sorry for this image — pulled out of Anthony Fauci’s ass, but some number did need to be settled on and agreed-to, and Fauci was as good as anybody to do that. And here, actually, we might be able to identify the fundamental loci of epistemological division — for the center, it is Consensus; for the border, Critique (or, if you like, Inquiry). It’s almost better to say, rather than being opposed, that the two simply have nothing to do with one another.
After 2020, things would only get worse for the Center. The universities themselves came under sustained attack as AI tools were turned against academic plagiarism, as outside evaluations found that more and more gold-plated scientific findings turned out to be based on consensus, if not outright fraud, rather than genuine investigation, that papers turned out to be politically motivated rather than based in scholarly rigor. Whole fields were coming under eviscerating scrutiny — with the replication crisis doing a number on the social sciences, with the rise of placebo calling into question some of the basis of pharmaceuticals; with sociology proving to be more than a little susceptible to group-think.
What this was not was the beautiful institutions changing overnight or suddenly coming under assault from the unwashed masses. What this was was that a number of core epistemological questions, across a wide range of disciplines, were now being hashed out in the public sphere, as opposed to settled in-house by the credentialed. When I worked on a climate change show over a decade ago, our talking point for the proof of global warming was that “98 out of 100 climatologists agree man-made global warming is taking place.” That seemed perfectly good enough for us then — climatologists struck us as a tweedy, trustworthy body of people who could be counted upon to know something about climate — but the limitation of our way of thinking already seems risible. The debates about sun spots and global temperature averages and variations of sea-level rise are now strewn all across the public sphere — and, really, that is as it should be. As Dan Williams writes, “For the love of God, stop talking about post-truth. There was never a golden age of objectivity, and today’s epistemological problems result from competing visions of reality” — i.e. that we are hearing voices of dissent that simply didn’t have platforms before.
For a while, it seemed like the epistemological crisis was playing out, on the one hand, on the ‘far-right’ fringe of the internet; and then, on the other, in hushed conversations within The Cathedral itself. But, with the the 2024 election, what’s become clear is that the epistemological crisis has spilled over into the body politic as a whole — and, at the deepest level, that’s probably what the election was ‘about.’ As Mounk writes, “If you were a faithful reader of The New York Times or a frequent listener of NPR, you were less likely than the average American citizen to believe that Biden was suffering from serious mental decline or that Harris was an unpopular politician with a steeply uphill path towards winning the presidential election.” As Ed Warren writes, also in Persuasion, “The critical flaw that perpetuates nearly all of the Democrats’ misjudgments is their tendency to use an overly narrow moral framework that prevents them from seeing the world as average voters see it.”
The epistemological crisis hit something like its apogee with the June debate — with all the trusted voices, of the White House, of storied media outlets, of the cabinet officials and world leaders the media was quoting, telling us that our president’s mental capacities were undiminished — and that it was ageist, really, to question it. And then there was what we all saw on television. After five hundred years of carefully accruing authority, the establishment’s self-justification had come to be something like, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes.”
The extent of the epistemological crisis is hard to overstate. It has touched every institution that I can think of. None have emerged particularly well from it. It is based not in the fecklessness of individual administrators or policy choices — although that is not to be underestimated — but from a structural shift in the interaction of the Center and Border, which is only going to heighten as the internet continues to develop. The most immediate next iteration of it is that we have the curious spectacle of people who have, in a sense, established their credentials by being as ‘Border’ as possible (Robert Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard) elevated suddenly to the Center of Centers. What happens from there is anybody’s guess. Justin Smith-Ruiu’s Hinternet makes the bold claim that the detonation of the institutions over the last decade is only a prequel towards the main event, which is the elimination of the authority of science itself. “Science is coming to an end, that is, in the same way, and for the same reasons, it began: as a result of these same tremendous transformations in the way information circulates,” Hinternet’s staff write, and they may well be right. This seems to be the best way to think abut Trump, and particularly the 2024 victory — not as aberration but as symptom of a far more structural change.
I should clarify with this post - I probably should have done it in the piece - that there really are no normative judgments here. The piece is meant to be purely descriptive/analytical. I am not saying that the 'Border' is right, let alone that the Border is better at governing. I am trying to offer a history and structural analysis of how the Border found its voice over the past decade and put the Center on the defensive. To the extent that I am casting any value-judgments, it would be my frustration that the Center - with all of its credentials and ostensible analytic firepower - just keeps failing to understand these fundamental dynamics i.e. why the Border is intrinsically resentful of the Center; and why the Internet alters the balance of power between Border and Center. I'll respond to individual comments a bit later!
As an aside I'm beginning to think that Trump won because he had a far superior media strategy. He embraced "the border" with his message; Harris did not.
The science I care deeply and selfishly about is medicine. And while certainty is absent, one can play the odds by both trusting and verifying. Being knowledgeable about health still confers a tremendous advantage, at least on the individual level. Vaccines may have been oversold but on an individual level it made sense for most to get them.
I think the big losers in all this are people on the border who now don't trust the experts and lack the tools and the time and the access to make their own informed decisions.
Sincerely,
Ravid Doberts