Post-Truth and the Epistemological Crisis

ABSTRACT

The polarization and charges of “post-truth” that mark contemporary politics may have its source, ultimately, in a crisis of epistemology, which is characterized by a tension between different forms of naïve realism—the view that reality appears to us directly, unmediated by interpretation. Perhaps too schematically, those on the right tend to be first-person naïve realists in treating economic and social realities as accessible to the ordinary political participant by simple common sense, while those on the left tend to be third-person naïve realists in treating credentialed experts as forming a consensus—a new common sense. In treating reality as transparent enough to be legible either to oneself or to a group of experts, both sides tend to treat disagreement as a motivational problem—a problem of bad faith, motivated reasoning, perversity, and refusal to see the truth—rather than as an epistemic problem caused by the possibility that each side may hold a different set of interpretive frameworks that determines how and what it sees of reality. In obviating the possibility of genuine disagreement, the epistemological crisis is quite naturally transformed into a political crisis.

Keywords:

• disagreement
• epistemological crisis
• expertise
• media bias
• naïve realism
• polarization
• political crisis
• post-truth

Suddenly, in the present political crisis, matters of political epistemology have become nearly universal concerns. Think of the crisis of misinformation, the crisis of disinformation, the crisis of people’s polarization into self-confirming epistemic bubbles. Think of the tendency of many citizens to go down informational rabbit holes such as QAnon, and the tendency of many others to try to “cancel” those who express ideas with which they disagree. Think of the pernicious effects of social media (a concern mainly of the left) and the pernicious effects of mainstream media (a concern mainly of the right). Think of parents’ resistance to what children are being taught in school (a concern mainly of the right) and teachers’ resistance to banning books and topics deemed inappropriate by parents (a concern mainly of the left). Think, most of all, of the contempt shown, by people in the grip of various political ideologies, for those who hold alternative ideas; think of the rage and fear they feel when contemplating a transfer of power to people with ideas they oppose. Each of these crises boils down to a charged disagreement about what is true. These disagreements combine to produce an escalating sense of mutual alienation, hostility, and terror.

At bottom, I think it can be demonstrated that the present political crisis is nothing but an epistemological crisis. This demonstration, however, would require a book-length treatment. What I will do here is lay out some considerations preliminary to such a treatment, with a particular focus on the roles played by disagreement and expertise.

An Epistemological Crisis Without Epistemology

While I am calling it an epistemological crisis, to be more precise, the crisis stems from a widespread failure to think epistemologically. This is to say that political actors routinely fail to understand themselves and their political opponents as making fallible knowledge-claims—fallible knowledge-claims about who won the 2020 election, for example, fallible knowledge-claims claims about the effects of climate change, fallible knowledge-claims about the existence of systemic racism or the multiplicity of genders, and fallible knowledge-claims about every other issue that divides them. Instead, each side in these disputes assumes that their own knowledge-claims are infallible: obviously or self-evidently true. In their minds, then, their opinions are not based on “claims” but on “truths.” Thus, the other side, in disagreeing with my side’s claims, is “ignoring the truth” or, more pointedly, “peddling misinformation” or even “disinformation.”

The premise here is that the truth is self-evident rather than being fallibly perceived and interpreted. Thus, there is no need for epistemological reflection, which is to say deliberation: if we know the truth with certainty, we can proceed straightaway to action. And if other political actors impede us, we can immediately deduce that, since they are standing in the way of what should self-evidently be done, they are not only wrong but evil. That is, they must know that they are wrong, since the truth is as self-evident to them as it is to us. Or, at best, they are delusional, and fail to see what any sane person would recognize as the truth.

Following psychologists Lee Ross and Andrew Ward (1996, 111), I call this anti-epistemological mindset “naïvely realistic.” In “Naïve Realism in Everyday Life: Implications for Social Conflict and Misunderstanding,” Ross and Ward defined naïve realism as the assumption that one’s opinions are direct reflections of reality. The chief tenet of naïve realism is “that I see things as they are, that is, that my beliefs, preferences, and resulting responses follow from an essentially unmediated perception of relevant stimuli and incorporation of relevant evidence.” The key term here is unmediated. It is in the mediation of the truth by fallible human beings that mistakes can occur. We all rely on mediation, both internally when we observe and theorize about the external world, and socially when we learn about the external world from others, such as journalists or experts. For the naïve realist, to whom the fallibility of mediation processes is invisible, this is unproblematic, but to the epistemologist, it is the root of many evils. Yet mediation is unavoidable.

Let me distinguish between two types of naïve realism. We can call the type described by Ross and Ward, concerning one’s own opinions—“I see things as they are,” unmediated—naïve first-person realism. But one might also assume that others’ beliefs are unmediated reflections of reality: naïve second- or third-person realism. Naïve first-person realism is the posture taken by naïve realists toward their own knowledge claims, which they perceive as simple statements of the truth because they fail to recognize that their perceptions of the truth are mere fallible interpretations of fallible perceptions, often retailed to them second- or third-hand (from other fallible interpreters and perceivers). Naïve third-person realism is the posture taken by naïve realists toward those whom they consider “experts”—for example, scientists or people with doctorates from prestigious institutions. Like naïve first-person realism, naïve third-person realism is anti-epistemological: it fails to recognize that even people with doctorates from prestigious institutions are fallible interpreters of fallible perceptions.

A Left/Right Asymmetry in Forms of Naïve Realism

My thesis is that the epistemological crisis stems from the widespread adoption of naïve first- and third-person realism.

To make this thesis more intelligible and concrete, let me begin by painting a picture of naïve first-person realism as the besetting epistemic sin of the right, where all too many things are treated as matters of “common sense.” On the left, in contrast, Marx and a host of sophisticated successors have taught us that “common sense” may be ideological. In the same spirit, though, the narrow sense of the term ideological that Marx used may itself be ideological. Marx meant by “ideology,” roughly speaking, ideas that serve to naturalize or otherwise legitimize an illegitimate economic system. A broader, more neutral definition would equate ideology with any self-reinforcing web of interconnected beliefs, potentially including Marxism. Thus, Marx’s convictions (1) that the status quo is illegitimate and (2) that the “ideological” function of common sense is to legitimate this illegitimate system may themselves function as ideological dogmas that blind us to other reasons to object to “common sense.”

From an historicist point of view, for example, “common sense” is objectionable whenever it takes as givens institutions, practices, or norms that are contingent historical developments. However, the fact that something is a contingent historical development does not automatically render it illegitimate. Thus, while it is always objectionable to defend institutions, practices, or norms on commonsensical grounds, as givens, this does not entail that all contemporary institutions, practices, or norms are indefensible on other grounds. Similarly, from an epistemological point of view, “common sense” is objectionable across the board because, given the fallibility of our mechanisms of perception and interpretation, we can never be sure that what we think of as “obviously true,” or as a matter of common sense, really is true. (It may, of course be true, but we cannot be certain of that.)

If naïve first-person realism is the abiding epistemic sin of the American right, naïve third-person realism is the abiding sin of the moderate American left, particularly among experts employed by universities—the group that formed the main alternative, since the beginning of the twentieth century, to the naïve first-person realism of the right.

For contingent historical reasons, American universities at the beginning of the twentieth century became dominated by a Progressive ideology that attempted to solve the social and economic problems of a modern society through government programs whose efficacy would be validated by social science. Social science would discover the causes of social and economic problems; social scientists would investigate how to cure them. This is not to deny that leading Progressive politicians, such as Theodore Roosevelt, the first Progressive presidential candidate, weren’t enamored of common sense (Friedman 2007). But academic Progressives, such as the founders of the American Political Science Association and the American Economic Association, effectively rejected common sense on the same grounds that natural scientists do: science is a process of going beyond first appearances to study a more complex reality than is visible on first inspection. This skeptical disposition flies in the face of naïve first-person realism. On the other hand, experts tend to treat science as a source of clear, inarguable truths. Even experts who are epistemically modest about their own opinions, which they do not view as the final word, tend to be naïvely realistic about the output of their field, other fields, and the academy as a whole—that is to say, the opinions of experts writ large. This is naïve third-person realism. One of the fundamental dynamics of the epistemological crisis, I will suggest, is a conflict between these two forms of naïve realism, in which each side treats its own conclusions as self-evident, and therefore can neither understand nor condone how anyone could disagree with them. A self-evident truth is evident to everyone, so those who claim to disagree with it must either be deluded or evil.

The Golden Age of Consensus and Its Downfall

Third-person naïve realism about science grounds the increasingly popular “post-truth” explanation of the epistemological crisis (e.g., d’Ancona 2017; Baker and Oreskes 2017; Cosentino 2020; Flatscher and Seitz 2020; Hyvönen 2018; Lichtenberg 2021; McIntyre 2018; Mirowski 2020; Newman 2021; Prozorov 2018). According to this narrative, the problem is that we have left behind the golden age of “shared truths” that we enjoyed in the middle of the twentieth century: today, millions of people, such as Trump and Brexit voters, seem to have rejected the very idea of truth.

It is often said that the decline of the Golden Age began when tobacco companies tried to throw sand in people’s eyes about the scientific consensus about the dangers of smoking. Then oil companies threw sand in their eyes about the scientific consensus about global warming (Oreskes and Conway 2010). This confused people about scientific truth and weakened their appreciation for the epistemic authority of experts. If even scientists may disagree with one another, after all, the question of what constitutes “the science” must always remain open and prevailing opinion should always be subject to critical review, impeding science-based political action in the public interest. Bad corporate actors, in short, by encouraging skepticism and doubt about scientific consensus, undermined the deference and obedience to epistemic authority that had reigned in the golden age.

Viewed from an epistemological perspective, however, the corporate interests merely pointed out, if for their own self-interested reasons, what every philosopher of science knows: that the truth is not self-evident to scientists. This not only explains scientific disagreement and scientific revolutions; it explains why we need science in the first place: to penetrate beyond what only seems self-evident to “common sense.” It also explains why we should not equate scientific consensus with “the science.” The fallibility that may lead to dissensus does not go away when scientists of a given time happen to agree with one another.

Some versions of the post-truth discourse suggest that after the ground had been laid by bad actors who undermined faith in science, postmodern philosophical questioning of the accessibility of the truth led masses of non-philosophers to question the very existence of the truth. Hence these masses’ acceptance of Trumpian “bullshitting”: they know he isn’t telling the truth but they don’t care about the truth (e.g., McIntyre 2018; Lichtenberg 2021). This indifference to the truth is supposed to characterize the post-truth era, although, of course, it does not characterize everyone in the post-truth era. It does not characterize the post-truth scholars themselves, for example, or the scientific community; it solely characterizes those who question the self-evidence of scientific and other truths with which post-truth scholars agree. For practical purposes, this means people on the right.

An epistemological perspective suggests a different and more balanced take on what happened.

There was indeed a golden age of political consensus (in the United States): the post-New Deal consensus. After World War II, the Republican party was occasionally able to elect a president due to the personal popularity of their nominee (Eisenhower), or to economic oscillations and other contingent factors that sometimes made the Democratic nominee unpopular. But for the most part, liberals were in control, as indicated not only by the popularity within the GOP of liberals such as Nelson Rockefeller, but by the long Democratic domination of Congress from the 1930s through the 1970s. On the cultural front, too, the three television networks were all safely in the hands of establishment (Cold War) New Deal liberals. And although there was some variation among local newspapers, with a few outlets, such as the Chicago Tribune, the Phoenix Sun, and the Orange County Register departing from the liberal orthodoxy on their editorial pages, for the most part newspaper reporting participated in the post-New Deal consensus. Likewise, non-political culture, high and low, was homogeneously liberal, from mass-circulation books to movies and TV entertainment. Wherever one looked, one found virtually no prominent conservatives. When William F. Buckley started National Review in 1955, the main reaction was to the novelty of it: there are conservatives, and at least one of them is literate?

Of course, for Buckley and the readers of National Review, and for the writers in and readers of more extreme right-wing publications, this was not so much a golden age of consensus as a golden age of conformism and the suppression of conservative dissent. However, with most of the media, the universities, and all other cultural institutions in the hands of consensus liberals, there was nothing the conservatives could do but complain about the uniformity of opinion in these institutions; and criticize the claims to objectivity of the liberals (liberal ideologues, in the conservatives’ opinion) who staffed these institutions, and who more often than not viewed themselves as disinterested, scientifically neutral experts. Few listened to this critique, though. Conservatives were too marginalized for them to receive serious attention. But from an epistemological perspective, they must have been right, logically speaking: no human being is free from bias, not even disinterested experts.

The Problem of Bias and the Paradox of Epistemological Sophistication

I am using the term bias, like the term ideology, in a neutral sense that does not carry any condemnatory implications about a particular bias; any particular bias may coincide with reality, and so may a given ideology. But as epistemologists we must recognize, I think, that human perceptions and interpretations are mediations of reality, not direct, unbiased reflections of reality itself. Human perceptions and interpretations, in short, are fallible, and may contain errors small or large. Moreover, I think that a truly sophisticated epistemology has to recognize that the mix of truths and errors in which each of us believes forms an interconnected web that, as it grows in breadth and depth over a lifetime, comes to function increasingly like an ideology in the neutral sense of the term: a self-perpetuating worldview. The self-perpetuation stems from the fact that we continually screen candidates for entry into each of our webs of belief, and the primary screening criterion is whether the candidates seem plausible in light of what we already believe. Those candidates that do not seem plausible, or even legible, are rejected or ignored (Friedman 2019, ch. 5). The screening process takes place because, contrary to empiricism, we are faced with far too much information and interpretation to process. We have to be selectively attentive to the infinite universe of information and interpretation, and the only way to do this is to compare incoming “data” to the interpretations already formed by our web of beliefs at a given time—ignoring, for the most part, all data that do not map onto the contents of our extant web.

Thus, the growth of our webs of belief is path dependent and is controlled at each moment by the prevalent biases generated by the web. In this sense, everyone is biased, and the only question to be asked of social scientists, journalists, or other political actors in a given time and place is precisely which biases are at work—not whether any biases are at work. A human being without biases would be like the newborn who, according to William James, would, lacking any interpretive framework to screen out the sensory chaos, see the world as “a blooming, buzzing confusion.”

Needless to say, however, this analysis is not what motivated the conservative critique of liberal bias in American institutions. Theirs was solely a first-order objection to the liberal content of the bias, not a second-order reflection on the nature or necessity of bias. Unlike the epistemological analysis of bias, the conservative critique of bias was simply based on the fact that the liberal consensus contradicted the commonsensical beliefs of conservatives. But the epistemological analysis of bias, unlike the conservative critique of liberal bias, would suggest that commonsensical beliefs, as well as all other beliefs, are fallible mediations of reality, not direct, unmediated reflections of it. The epistemological critique is politically symmetrical, while the conservative critique was one-sided.

Thus, the conservative opposition to the pretensions of mainstream expertise created a paradox. Despite the fact that the conservatives lacked a second-order, epistemological justification for their critique of liberal bias, the fact that this critique took political disagreement seriously rendered the poorly educated conservative partisans of common sense—the naïve proponents of faith, flag, and the free market—more epistemologically sophisticated than their political adversaries. All the conservatives had was a gut-level conviction that mainstream institutions and culture, being liberal, were wrong. The sheer fact that conservatives were marginalized meant, for them, that the mainstream had to be biased as a first-order matter. But the hidden presupposition was that people can be biased (even though conservatives failed to apply this critical insight to their own set of commonsensical, self-evident truths), which is a fairly sophisticated epistemological point. Meanwhile, their political opponents included the most morally and culturally sophisticated elements of American society, including virtually every intellectual heavyweight of the middle decades of the twentieth century. Yet across this liberal cultural mainstream, naïve third-person realism toward expertise was the default posture, and intellectual self-satisfaction replaced the smidgen of epistemological sophistication that emerged, in the form of the critique of liberal bias, from conservatives’ cultural marginalization. When mainstream thinkers occasionally turned their attention to conservatism, they did not consider it an alternative point of view, an ideology, or a bias, but a mere “irritated mental gesture” as Lionel Trilling said;¹ or a psychopathology, as expressed in the title of Richard Hofstadter’s most famous work, The Paranoid Style in American Thought (1964).

Liberal complacency was crucially undergirded by the rough political consensus among experts, which stretched across not only major institutions but academic fields. The only counterexample that comes to mind is the discipline of economics, in which, toward the end of this golden age, the University of Chicago’s Milton Friedman (no relation) began to rival in prominence the standard bearer of neoclassical Keynesianism, MIT’s Paul Samuelson. During the 1970s, Friedman and Samuelson even alternated weekly columns for the country’s second-biggest newsmagazine, Newsweek. This was a rare case in which experts were shown regularly to disagree. For the most part, however, the highly sophisticated cultural whole was built on a foundation of epistemological complacency. It is this complacent epistemology that the post-truth discourse mourns, for post-truth scholars mistake agreement—agreement among experts, and agreement with experts by nonexperts—as a sign of truth. Therefore, they cannot accept the possibility that experts might legitimately disagree with one another (as opposed to illegitimately disagreeing because some of them are in the pay of oil companies), let alone that sane non-experts can legitimately disagree with a consensus of experts. Disagreement, however, is the hallmark of our putatively post-truth age. The golden age of “truth” came to an end when disagreement about what constitutes the truth (in particular cases) manifested itself.

The Spread of the Critique of Liberal Bias

The mere fact that two leading economists disagreed with each other in public did not break the impression of expert consensus. Survey data gathered during the presidential election campaign of 1980, for example, showed that, contrary to much overheated commentary when Ronald Reagan unexpectedly prevailed, there had been no shift at all in public opinion toward the role of the New Deal state (Schwab 1991). Instead, Reagan appears to have won because the incumbent, Jimmy Carter, had presided over the Iranian hostage crisis, a serious energy crisis, and an economic crisis that combined double-digit inflation, double-digit unemployment, and double-digit interest rates.

Therefore, I date the beginning of the end of the Golden Age to 1987, when the FCC repealed the Fairness Doctrine. This made it possible for radio and television stations to air political opinions without offering equal time to the other side(s). Rush Limbaugh may have been the first broadcaster to take advantage of this new policy on a national scale. His syndicated radio program carried conservative ideas to millions of people who had surely never heard them before—especially people in rural areas who spent many hours in their cars, trucks, and tractors with little else to listen to; and people who lacked the higher education that would have inoculated them from Limbaugh’s marginalized, lowbrow beliefs.

Limbaugh would soon be followed by a host of imitators on the radio and, eventually, by Fox News Channel. Anyone who had a chance to listen to Limbaugh and his epigones, as I did during ten years living in the south of Texas, will confirm that their primary target was liberal media bias. Indeed, they turned conservatism into a movement more dedicated to exposing and protesting media bias than to opposing the New Deal policy consensus expressed by this bias. A commonsensical embrace of God, country, and the free market still animated Limbaugh, Fox, and their many listeners and viewers, but the driving force of their argument was that these commonsensical views were being suppressed or distorted by media elites, against whom they themselves (the conservative media) represented a sort of conservative epistemic populism.

As had been the case during the Golden Age of unheard conservative critique, the one note of epistemic sophistication sounded by the epistemic populists was the recognition that journalists—along with the experts, such as “liberal professors,” whom journalists liked to quote—were (and therefore, logically, could be) biased. This insight, however, was more than offset by the assumption that journalists, experts, and professors went wrong by ignoring the truths self-evident to ordinary people. This assumption led, in turn, to the conviction that epistemic elites were deliberately biased. The media and other elites who got reality wrong, according to the populist conservatives, did so knowingly, as these elites, like everyone else, had access to the self-evident truths that they claimed to reject. The charge of media bias, then, led to the conclusion that liberal elites were engaged in a conspiracy against the truth in the service of self-serving political ends (very much like the charge made by post-truth scholars against scientists whose research was supported by tobacco and oil companies). Donald Trump would merely supply a steady stream of the crassest possible expressions of this populist media epistemology.

As Limbaugh and his followers saw it, each of their political positions was ignored, ridiculed, or distorted by the mainstream media. So, too, were each of the conservatives’ interpretations of the political events of the day. Even the “facts” that conservatives found relevant were often denied or ignored by the mainstream media. The net effect of mainstream media bias was, in the conservatives’ eyes, to paint for the vast majority of their fellow citizens a picture of reality that was diametrically opposed to the truth. Far from not caring about the truth, they cared about it deeply, and were infuriated, even frightened, to see the mainstream media suck their neighbors into what the conservatives saw as a world of lies and illusions. Indeed, conservatives who were at all reflective must have wondered occasionally whether their own perceptions were somehow the result of a gigantic mistake, or whether they themselves were insane for disagreeing so consistently, and insistently, with the hegemonic mainstream picture of the world. This anxiety may account for the popularity of the “red pill” meme on the alt-right, drawn from The Matrix’s portrayal of a reality that is illusory yet totally convincing to those trapped within it, who have not taken the red pill.

For less-reflective populist conservatives, however, a rational response to the radical disjuncture between their perceptions of reality and those of the mainstream media—given that they viewed the real reality as simple enough to reveal itself to common sense—was resentment and anger at the reality-bending or reality-denying tendencies of the media, and speculation about the iniquitous motives responsible for it. If one’s own picture of reality is the marginalized one, and yet is self-evidently true, something truly diabolical must be going on for it to have become marginalized. In this account, then, the conservative populists’ tendencies toward paranoia and conspiracy theorizing, as well as their obsession with and hostility toward the mainstream media—all expressed with numbing regularity by Donald Trump—were manifestations not of a repudiation of the very concept of truth, nor of epistemic relativism, nor of irrational tribalism, but of a naïve, commonsensical epistemology, coupled with the comprehensive repudiation of that common sense by mainstream culture.

The Epistemological Crisis Gets Underway

The development and amplification of conservative media critique did not draw any significant reaction for a very long time. Right through the end of the twentieth century, it continued to be ignored by mainstream journalists (and by political scientists, whom one wishes might have taken the time to study the matter), who, after all, did not tend to listen to conservative talk radio or watch Fox News, and thus rarely even heard about this critique, let alone hearing the details.

However, climate denialism did begin capture mainstream journalists’ attention in the twenty-first century. Consistent with their own naïve third-person realism, journalists tended to accept the most epistemically naïve explanation for it: that the truth, as revealed by an overwhelming scientific consensus, had been obscured by nefarious special interests, whose obscurantism was peddled to the Republican masses by Fox News. Suddenly, then, media bias popped onto the mainstream media’s radar—but only the bias of the conservative media.

Now the factors I have laid out began to come together to create the epistemological crisis.

The mainstream media, which also felt itself burned by the “lies” the Bush administration told about WMD in Iraq in 2003,² added media reporting and fact-checking to their beats, but these efforts were as one-sidedly anti-conservative as the conservative populists’ media critique was one-sidedly anti-progressive. Neither side was able to step back and consider the epistemological implications of sheer disagreement, since neither side viewed the other side as genuinely disagreeing. Rather than allowing that disagreement shows that the truth is never self-evident, so that all sides need to be listened to, both sides treated the truth as self-evident, so that the other side should not be listened to.

To the right, the fact that the climate-change narrative was being pushed by the mainstream media was enough to tarnish its credibility and that of the scientists who supported it. The story arose that left-wing media elites were deliberately obscuring the self-evident truth that climate change is not anthropogenic, that it is not significant, or that it can readily be adapted to. Why would they do this? To justify Big Government anti-climate measures. To this end, the media elites enlisted biased climatologists, whose grant money depended on toeing the government line. In turn, to mainstream journalists, the right-wing media were deliberately engaging in what they knew was false climate denialism in order to satisfy their deluded conservative audience. Neither side could accept that the other side actually believed things that ran contrary to what they took to be the self-evident truth. Each side yelled ever more loudly that the other side was lying, and the louder they yelled, the louder the other side yelled the same thing back. Just as important, these uncivil disagreements led conservatives to withdraw as much as possible from the mainstream cultural environment, restricting their news feeds to Fox and their Facebook friends and, therefore, participating in, and being victimized by, a comprehensive and continually refreshed alternative view of reality from which there is virtually no political bridge to reality as seen by mainstream culture. And any temptation that nonconservatives might have had to investigate what Fox News had to say was now stifled by the repeated accusation that it was one of America’s chief sources of misinformation. Epistemological polarization was complete, so it became extremely difficult for those trapped in the two antagonistic epistemic bubbles to understand the thinking of those in the other one, let alone to respect it.

This dynamic not only continually escalates but continually spreads. When we ask why everything from climate change to Covid to clothing and entertainment seems to be immediately politicized and polarized these days, I think we have an answer if we couple each side’s naïve realism with each side’s dependence on media that echo this naïveté with every new development that arises, indelibly shaping our perceptions of everything in a biased manner that produces nothing but contempt for those who do not share our biases.

Trump and the Acceleration of Epistemic Polarization

There is little doubt that the election of Donald Trump in 2016 poured high-octane fuel on the fire, as did the woke reaction to his presidency, especially after George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

Trump and his supporters were accused of racism as soon as he announced his candidacy. Therefore, his election, coupled with the specter of widespread police violence against black men, solidified the conviction, on the left and in the mainstream, that little or no racial progress had been made since the Civil Rights movement. After Floyd’s death, this conviction led to a veritable anti-racist revolution that swept every major cultural institution, from universities to art museums and children’s book publishing. At the same time, however, the accusation of racism struck Trump’s supporters (who tend to view themselves as colorblind) as a particularly insulting and infuriating example of media gaslighting (e.g., Hessler 2017, McCormick 2020, Saunders 2016, Swarns 2016, and Weaver 2016), further strengthening their fealty to him and their anger at the mainstream culture that constantly reiterated this accusation. Every repetition and defense of woke ideas doubles as a rebuke to Trump supporters, but it also seems to the latter to be incorrect on its face—a massive violation of common sense. The commonsensical view on the right is that racial progress has been substantial and that “reverse racism” is just as bad as anti-black racism.

However, from an epistemological perspective, what has been happening on the left in recent years is more interesting and more counterintuitive than what has been happening on the right. To put these developments in perspective, let us go back to an aspect of the Golden Age that I completely omitted: the fact that it marginalized not only conservative ideas but radical ones. Because of this marginalization, radical leftists tended to be unaffiliated with universities until the late 1950s, when, coincidentally, the postwar boom in American university expansion was reaching its peak. This created a vast number of job openings that were increasingly filled by radicals, especially once opposition to the Vietnam War delegitimized Cold War strictures against hiring “communists.”

The long march of left-wing radicals through the universities is now an accomplished fact, so familiar and comfortable that we may miss its epistemological dimension. While it is safe to say that radical thinkers have produced some of the most sophisticated systems of thought that human beings have ever devised, radical thought, like the scientistic thought that was hegemonic during the Cold War, can easily turn into a kind of common sense once it becomes conventional wisdom. This is a process that those of us who have observed the last few decades of academic life have witnessed at first hand. What were once exciting new challenges to intellectual orthodoxy have now become orthodoxies in their own right.

This explains the collapse of the distinction, which was still very strong when I entered the Berkeley doctoral program in history in 1983, between “scholarship” and “activism.” Even in history, which is the farthest thing from a science, it was thought that the role of the scholar was to patiently probe beneath the surface of common sense to tease out subtle truths, just as it was the role of the scientific expert to do so. This scholarly ethos was seen as the polar opposite of activism, which, after all, can only be sustained by the activist’s conviction that the truth (about justice, for example) is self-evident and demands action on its behalf. One does not attend a rally or demonstration if one is interested in a reasoned, balanced discussion, fair to all sides, that cautiously and carefully attempts to parse the evidence and incrementally approach the truth. One attends only if one thinks that one already knows the truth.

When I began graduate work in political science at Yale in 1992, the dichotomy between scholarship and activism was still in place. But around the turn of the century, this started to change; radical thought had now become hegemonic across so many departments and subfields (although not in political science) that a new set of activist orthodoxies arose, which constituted a new type of common sense. (Call it “insurgent common sense.”) This development, in principle, created a latent clash between younger activists and the old guard of scientistic experts, as the doubt and deliberation prized by the latter impedes the political action prized by the former, if only temporally and temporarily. Nevertheless, the latent conflict between these two modes of thought never materialized. One thing that may explain this is the very fact that over time, radical thought had become stamped with the expertise of credentialed professors, and scientistic scholars naïvely tend to equate the consensus of experts with the truth.

Similarly, a political epistemologist might have expected that as activists moved into positions of academic power by participating in a culture of expertise, they would have abandoned their commonsensical stance toward their own ideas—that is, the left-wing version of naïve first-person realism. But this, too, failed to occur. Instead, what seems to have happened is that activist professors treated their newfound status as experts as an argument for their own intellectual authority; and their colleagues, as naïve third-person realists, accepted this argument (as did their students). Thus, activism-oriented scholars who acquired academic positions experienced an all-too-easy transition from naïve first-person realism to naïve third-person realism: the naïve third-person realism that treats the opinions of experts writ large as equivalent to the unmediated, infallible truth.

The resulting identification of academic expertise with an activist left-wing orthodoxy, which is now officially proclaimed on university websites, in college admissions materials, and in first-year orientation programming, only serves to confirm, on the right, the suspicion that “expertise” is an ideological sham. Left-wing academics regularly appear (in conservative eyes) to confirm this critique by intervening ever-more-prominently in political controversies, particularly by providing expert validation of claims about systemic racism and gender fluidity—claims that flagrantly transgress right-wing “common sense.” This dimension of the epistemological war, if I can call it that, is reflected in the dramatic polarization of the two major parties according to educational status. Those who have some college education or graduate education now overwhelmingly favor the Democrats, while those who lack higher education overwhelmingly favor the Republicans. Each type of common sense, conservative and insurgent, now finds a home in one of the political parties. This portends even further escalations of the epistemological crisis in the future, involving attempts by Republicans to intervene politically against institutions, such as universities and public schools, that they see as having declared war on the truth by teaching insurgency, rather than conservatism, as common sense; and by treating academic credentials as equivalent to true expertise despite the perception that they really signify adherence to left-wing political orthodoxy.

No Way Out?

Regrettably, I see no way out of this situation, or at least no easy way out.

One could (and many do) demand that one or both sides simply stand down. Stop calling those with whom you disagree “liars” and “enemies of the people,” stop labeling their claims “misinformation” or “fake news,” stop attributing their stated beliefs and their actions to bad motives, such as self-interest, racism, or misogyny; soften the language of public discourse to make the other side feel respected enough to participate nonviolently.

The problem with this type of solution is that epistemic polarization is not caused by overheated rhetoric alone. The deeper cause is the anti-epistemological assumption that justifies this rhetoric in the minds of the believers. Assumptions cannot be willed away. They themselves are the involuntary products of the streams of information and interpretation we have each received over the course of our lives, as processed through the webs of belief that these streams form inside our minds. People who call each other mendacious, self-serving elitists or peddlers of misinformation tend to believe that the other side really does consist of mendacious, self-serving elitists and peddlers of misinformation, because they themselves have been involuntarily led to believe, by the streams of information and interpretation to which they have been exposed, that the truths with which they agree are so self-evident that every sane person knows it; that those who claim to see things differently must be lying. Such naïve realists will not be inclined to hold their tongues in the interest of civility, as they see the other side as being at war with the truth.

However, the history I have narrated suggests another possible solution: an enforced return to the Golden Age of consensus. This is the solution that logically if unwittingly follows from the post-truth discourse and from calls for government action against misinformation—so that we might, as Kevin Roose (a New York Times reporter) put it last year, put an end to our “national reality crisis,” for which “something like a reality czar” might be the only remedy (Roose 2021).

As a political epistemologist rather than an ethicist, I have nothing to say about the moral objections that have already been raised against the revival of state censorship.³ But certain types of this objection might be called into question on epistemological grounds. Once we recognize that our beliefs are determined by the streams of information and interpretation to which we have been exposed (Friedman 2019, ch. 3), it no longer makes much sense to speak of “freedom” of thought or speech—except as an inaccurate label for a certain type of regime in which control over thought or speech is exercised by plural sources of information and interpretation rather than by one single source, the state. One of the difficult questions raised by ideational determinism, however, is whether plural ideational determination is necessarily preferable to unitary ideational determination. If there were some guarantee that the unitary source of ideational control would know and propagate the truth and only the truth, it would be easier to answer this question. But I don’t see what this guarantee, or guarantor, might be.

The answer that has been presenting itself in recent years is, of course, expertise. Experts would, in Roose’s scenario, staff the office of the Reality Czar; experts are those to whom fact checkers turn to tell them what The Truth is; experts are those who propagate “the science” we are supposed to trust; and now experts are the ones who tell us that our society is a white supremacist, heteronormative patriarchy. Experts are now embraced by the center, the center-left, and the radical left, and for just that reason they are rejected on the right.

At this point, however, we must ask: What if the experts are, in this case or in most cases, right? After all, they are experts. Even if experts, being human, are not always right, because the truth is not self-evident, they may nevertheless tend to be right. Would it really be so terrible, then, to be subjected to a consensus that is fundamentally sound because it is based on expertise?

This is not a question that can be answered here; an answer would require an examination of the very concept of expertise. What can be said, however, from the perspective of political epistemology, is that even an orthodoxy that is fundamentally sound is not self-evidently true. What is self-evidently true would be universally apparent to all sane people everywhere and at all times. The fact of disagreement, then, falsifies the assumption that any set of ideas should be treated as self-evidently true.

We also know that orthodoxies are not self-evidently true from the possibility of disagreement, even when there is empirical agreement. We infer the ever-present possibility of disagreement from the possibility of error, which in turn is entailed by the fact of disagreement. When two people disagree with each other, at least one of them has to be making a mistake. Whatever cognitive limitations account for the possibility of mistake render disagreement possible even when it is not actual. This is why we should not fetishize scientific or scholarly consensus, as if the absence of disagreement indicates the presence of a truth visible to all. All theories are theories, i.e., fallible mediations of a complex reality, not direct, unproblematic reflections of it. This makes all theories potential objects of disagreement, regardless of whether they are currently accepted, consensually, as self-evident truths. If one person can make a mistake, so can groups of people, even entire academic schools and disciplines. Thus, if there is a rationale for imposing a new consensus, it cannot be found in its validation by an expert consensus around any particular conclusion. Nevertheless, it might be validated by a successful argument for the overall tendency of experts to be right.

However, if we are looking for a way out of the epistemological crisis that does not involve imposing a new consensus, political epistemology might be able to offer some pointers.

First, we might all be advised to recognize that both we and our political opponents are fallible. Most obviously, heeding this advice would bar each of us from naïve political realism, which I take to be the proximate cause of the crisis. Nearly as important, however, this advice entails that even when, despite our own recognized fallibility, we conclude that a certain political opinion is justified, we will also understand, at least in principle, that other fallible reasoners, to whom the truth is equally non-self-evident, might reach different conclusions than we have reached. Therefore, we need not impugn the motives of those with whom we disagree, as if they see the same truths we see but nefariously refuse to acknowledge these truths. The likelier possibility is that they see something different.

A second bit of advice is congruent with the first: we should attempt, in practice, to understand with sympathy the ideas that might lead our political opponents, in good faith, toward different conclusions than we have reached. This will mean attempting to put ourselves into the streams of information and interpretation that shape our opponents’ webs of belief, rather than demonizing our opponents as malign or eliding their ideas altogether by ascribing them to psychological disorders or socioeconomic forces. Nor should we accept at face value what politicians, activists, journalists, or experts with whom we agree politically, even our own colleagues, tell us about the content of the ideas of those with whom we disagree politically. Each of us, insofar as we are citizens of a democracy, needs to try to find that out for ourselves, drawing close to the political other by entering into the ideational currents that constitute the other as other.

Despite themselves, because they were all subjected to roughly the same ideational currents, this is what people did during the Golden Age. Because they all watched the same television programs and movies and read newspapers that said basically the same things, they could all understand where each other was coming from. This is why, to the extent that there was disagreement within the New Deal consensus (and there was), it did not spiral into epistemological warfare. Our task is more difficult. It is not natural, easy, or cheap to go out of our way to find out what our political opponents think or why they think it. But this is the only way to avoid naïvely otherizing them, which is the first step toward turning those with whom we disagree into those we hate.

Notes

1 “The conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas” (Trilling 1950, ix).

2 There was no evidence that the Bush administration lied about WMD rather than being ignorant of the desuetude of Saddam Hussein’s WMD programs, which had been discovered by the UN after the Gulf War. (See the Robb-Silverman Report, the Duelfer Report, and Jervis 2010.) However, journalists accepted the most naïve epistemic explanation, which assumed that the truth about Iraqi WMD had been self-evident to the Bush administration; this led the media to focus energy on guarding against and calling out future “lies.”

3 I don’t mean to suggest that the mid-twentieth-century Age of Consensus was enforced by state censorship, which it wasn’t. I am referring to the era, prior to the twentieth century, when state censorship was the norm, the era in which Marx, for example, often found himself one step ahead of the censor.