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Commentary By Andy Smarick

How Societies Arrive at Truth

Culture Culture & Society

Decades from now, there will still be a market for Jonathan Rauch’s new The Constitution of Knowledge. Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings, offers an insightful way of understanding how reliable information is developed. This is a timeless topic, and his analysis and argument are novel, so it will be valuable to those interested in social and political matters regardless of when it’s read. But it is also a period piece; future students will learn a great deal about this era from the fact that one of the sharpest analysts of his generation felt compelled to write a book about reliable information.

Epistemology — the study of knowledge, including its methods, potential, and limits — is a well-trod but winding, brambly path. Rauch begins by providing a user-friendly map of centuries of often complicated thought on passion, reason, wisdom, and power. You will get your fill of Bacon, Hume, Locke, Montaigne, Popper, and Rousseau. But Rauch’s innovation is in demonstrating how Adam Smith’s approach to economics and James Madison’s approach to governing are similar to an ideal approach to knowledge.

Smith and Madison understood the appeal of centralizing power in order to generate desired outcomes. But they also understood the risks of consolidated authority. So they found ways to distribute power, respect liberty, and foster competition such that well-functioning markets and smartly designed systems of government would direct our instincts and energies toward the common good. Importantly, capitalism and constitutional-liberal democracies not only provide official rules; they also foster the develop­ment of beliefs, customs, and institutions. In total, then, free people in these systems — morally and professionally shaped by an array of entities and constrained by law — naturally go about the business of maintaining a vibrant economy and healthy state.

For Rauch, knowledge is accumulated through a similar process. In a “reality-based community,” there is no centralized information dictator. Power is dispersed among the community’s members, who — guided by evolved norms, mindsets, rules of thumb, and institutions — collectively generate, test, evolve, and synthesize ideas.

Our hard-wiring might compel us to prioritize loyalty to our tribes and ignore information we find bothersome, but the Constitution of Knowledge — this system of information-processing — helps us outsmart our biases and think well. It causes us to encourage innovation, appreciate diverse opinions, act with humility, demonstrate skepticism, and accept validated information. Rauch argues that this model contributed to, among other things, huge gains in medicine, the development of modern universities, and the proliferation of academic journals. He also shows how various fields have translated its premises into industry standards. Good academics, for instance, develop hypotheses, cite the relevant literature, submit articles for peer review, and publish. Good journalists gather facts, cultivate sources, review documents, seek varied viewpoints, respond to editors, and make necessary corrections. In each of these fields, Rauch argues, professionals can disagree about many things, but to lie or fabricate is verboten.

Much of the book is dedicated to two great threats to the Constitution of Know­ledge: troll culture and cancel culture. Though one is about lying, goading, and confusing and the other is about chilling, silencing, and coercing, both are ultimately types of information warfare. Rauch seems to attribute the former primarily to the worst elements of the contemporary Right, particularly Donald Trump and his most servile enablers, and the latter primarily to the worst elements of the contemporary Left, particularly bellicose social-justice illiberals.

Rauch makes a compelling case that today’s disinformationists follow in the footsteps of previous propagandists, aiming to influence public opinion with little regard for truth. Fueled by social media and given direction by a preternaturally mendacious president, trolls spread lies on a massive scale, culminating in the “coup de grâce” of the false story of a stolen 2020 presidential election.

Part of Rauch’s argument is that such large-scale disinformation campaigns are especially threatening to a healthy system of knowledge-generation because they don’t merely mislead; they also cripple a population’s capacity to know what is true, obliterating our shared sense of reality. I found myself convinced that the worst elements of public discourse over the last several years amount to the antithesis of the Constitution of Knowledge — the inversion of how information should be developed, assessed, and shared.

Equally demoralizing is Rauch’s list of public cancellations and his explanation of their galling cumulative effect. In recent years potentially offensive books have been pulled before publication, and authors have been attacked by those who hadn’t read ostensibly problematic articles. Pro­fessors have grown afraid to teach, students self-censor to avoid the wrath of fellow students, careers have been ruined as punishment for engaging in wrongthink, and those under attack abase themselves to appease the mob.

This modern censoriousness is founded on an ancient combination of conformity and intimidation, and it undermines knowledge-generation. Absent viewpoint diversity, good ideas don’t surface, and bad ideas thrive. Without anyone to raise an objection, radical political positions appear to be mainstream. Equating differences of opinion to violence makes the citizenry neurotic, encourages over­reactions, and excuses violence against dissidents.

The Constitution of Knowledge’s two great contributions — a shrewd understanding of society’s system of information-production and today’s organized attacks on such systems — leave a chilling question. What becomes of culture, academia, and politics in a few years if we don’t get this under control?

Two elements of the book, however, gave me pause. First, though it is warranted to criticize the recent behavior of some of the conservative media, the mainstream media must be held accountable for their decades of bias, which has only worsened in recent years. Rauch mostly defends establishment journalism, believing it, despite its flaws, to still serve the Constitution of Knowledge. But after years of Dan Rather, Rachel Maddow, NPR, and “Republicans pounce”; after the errors of the 1619 Project, the tendentious coverage of the Kavanaugh allegations, the breathless coverage of supposed Russian collusion; after the defenestration of Kevin Williamson, Bari Weiss, and Andrew Sullivan, I find it hard to make the case that conservative media are especially guilty of bias confirmation, telling audiences what they want to hear, or advancing conspiratorial thinking. Though Rauch concedes at the end of the book that mainstream outlets are now under pressure from activists and young reporters to bend coverage toward a progressive understanding of social justice, I believe the long-term behavior of elite media institutions is more deserving of censure.

Second, Rauch admirably defends faith, rootedness, and tradition, and he recognizes the dangers of attempting to treat science as dispositive where it should not hold sway. But he wants to keep non­scientific approaches to knowledge in a domain separate from the Constitution of Knowledge. Of the difference between the two approaches, he writes, “Do this here. Do other things in other places. And yes, by all means, do both.” He cites the NIH director Francis Collins as an example of someone who recognizes the distinction between his religious commitments and his scientific work.

In my view, a number of legitimate sources of knowledge are nonscientific and offer much to public deliberation. Natural law and the concept of subsidiarity both have roots in Catholic thought, and both, I believe, add immeasurably to discussions of justice. Long before the scientific method, generations of farming communities in disparate geographies developed rules of thumb for when to plant different crops. Various societies produced similar rules for shaping male behavior long before neuroimaging told us about the development of boys’ brains and before regression analysis demonstrated the social value of fathers. Language, the common law, and rules of civility have contributed mightily to society’s development even though their emergence was unplanned, haphazard, and never subject to peer review.

I suspect Rauch would defend some number of these, perhaps even on the grounds that they’ve survived a Consti­tution of Knowledge–style gauntlet of time and experience. But that is the nature of virtually all customs, practices associated with faith traditions, and crafts’ practical wisdom. They lack geometric proofs, but they contain enormous information that has been honed and passed down over the ages. I worry that clearing such invaluable resources from the territory governed by the Constitution of Knowledge might lead to the dismantling of “Chesterton fences” far and wide.

I raise these two issues not to quibble about whether left-leaning or right-leaning journalism is more to blame or where exactly to draw the line between science and non-science. My point is that these two issues are related and suggest why the Constitution of Knowledge is in danger. The march of disinformation and cancellations should not, I believe, be understood merely as an attack on our system of generating reliable information. It is instead the upshot of the long-term weakening of the Constitution of Knowledge. To put a fine point on it: Some of the people who should’ve been protecting it have been undermining it.

For as long as I can remember, conservatives have been providing evidence that major media outlets are politically biased, and those outlets have ignored or waved away these concerns. As a result, the bias has only gotten worse. We should acknowledge that a reasonable person could now scan the social-media accounts of New York Times reporters or watch CNN’s nighttime programming and conclude, “If this is the Constitution of Knowledge, I’m not interested in the Constitution of Knowledge.”

Likewise, those claiming the mantle of science, objectivity, and rationality have too often abused that power. Behavioral economics, declaring humans to be irrational, has justified “nudging” by elites and governments to “improve” citizens’ faulty decisionmaking. In surveys, a distressingly high percentage of academics admit to having biases against conservatives. Academic journals have been duped by risible submissions that nevertheless play to the political preferences of the field. During the pandemic, many scientists — after warning of the grievous health consequences of gathering in person — signed a letter supporting mass public protests that aligned with their politics. A reasonable person could survey all of this too and conclude, “If that’s the Constitution of Knowledge, I’m not interested in the Constitution of Knowledge.”

To his credit, Rauch acknowledges the dangers of scientism, the progressive monoculture in many academic disciplines, and the leftward pull on today’s mainstream media. I think, however, such things have already done material harm to society’s relationship with truth.

Jonathan Rauch is the kind of writer we need today. His unusual perception led him to explain a phenomenon in a novel way. His confidence and experience produced a tough and compelling narrative without cruelty or snark. Maybe most importantly, though, this book avoids the apocalyptic, hysterical worldview now in vogue among social critics. Though clear-eyed about the challenges we face, he is explicit about his guarded optimism. He notes that today’s attacks on knowledge are tame compared with historical standards. He describes an encouraging array of efforts under way to preserve the Consti­tution of Knowledge, including groups committed to free speech in the public square and ideological diversity on campuses and strategies for curbing disinformation and the dangers posed by social-media behemoths. He explains the importance of republican virtue and how personal courage can be a powerful weapon against those seeking to suppress debate.

In total, The Constitution of Know­ledge is astute, sober, principled, and practical — truly a conservative book for radical times.

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Andy Smarick is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.

This piece originally appeared in National Review