Episode 427: The Constitution of Knowledge with Jonathan Rauch

Hey friends, this is Rick and I am recording this on Monday, June 21st, and I just wanted to remind you that this coming Friday, June 25th, my latest single, You Are My Salvation, comes out everywhere where music is streamed on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, rickleejames.bandcamp.com. YouTube. You can hear "You Are My Salvation." You can download the single, you can buy the single, uh, however you listen to music, you can get it this coming Friday. Thank you so much in advance for listening to this new single. You can get sheet music, you can just go to my website at rickleejames.com. You can get the music to play and sing along at yourchurchthroughloopcommunity.com on that date if you're interested. But mostly, I just hope it's a song that helps you and helps a lot of people who are maybe in pain and need some encouragement in this time. So, uh, thank you so much for listening, and thank you for listening to this podcast. We've got a great episode for you today with Jonathan Rausch. He has a wonderful new book, and you're going to hear all about it today on this show. So thanks for listening to Voices in My Head.

Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode. Episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head.

Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I'm so glad that you are here with us again today for what I know is going to be a great conversation. The Constitution of Knowledge has been called a book that anyone who cares about truth and democracy needs to read by Anne Applebaum. A Magnificent Integration of Psychology, Epistemology, and History by Jonathan Haidt and An Illuminating Exploration of the Flight from Fact by Jon Meacham. The book's author, Jonathan Rauch, is an IHS Distinguished Fellow and a Brookings Institute Senior Fellow in Governance Studies. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award —the magazine industry's equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. You can follow Jonathan Rauch on Twitter @Jon_Rauch. Jonathan has stopped by today on Voices in My Head to talk about his new book, and I am so pleased that he has. Jonathan Rauch, thank you so much for being my guest today on Voices in My Head. Thank you, Pastor Rick. Well, I am so glad to be with you today, and I promise I'm going to let you do most of the talking today. And as a matter of fact, I I feel a bit nervous today because you have so much wisdom to share. And I've told my wife, I said, I just hope I don't say anything stupid today in your presence because I'm so impressed by everything I've read. I've really enjoyed conversations that I've gotten to listen to by you, especially over the last few weeks as you have been making the rounds, getting ready for the release of this new book, The Constitution of Knowledge. And I've just been so impressed in the way that you have been and laying out so many of the issues around truth. But I do want to start with a bit of a preface today about why I specifically invited you on my show. Your new book is so timely and it's so important, and I wanted to speak with you because, as you know, I'm a Christian minister, and I am greatly concerned about the mass amount of disinformation that is being spread by a lot of the people really around me, specifically majority white evangelical Christians. And I know, as most of us do, that on January 6th of this year, that the U.S. Capitol was attacked and it was invaded by a violent mob driven by what's commonly known as the big lie that President Biden was not legitimately elected. And rioters moved toward the Capitol following a rally held by the now twice impeached former President Donald Trump during during which he repeated that big lie, and rioters say they were compelled to stop Congress's certification of Joe Biden's election, which was happening at the time at the Capitol. And it's very important to me to be clear, as a Christian, it was a Christian insurrection. There were crosses in the yard, music was blasting over loudspeakers that was Christian music, there were signs and banners with scripture verses, there was prayer happening, there was worship happening as the Capitol was violently overtaken. And so the search for truth that you write about is something that I think my people need to take very seriously, and it's something that my audience needs to grapple with. So I thank you for being here today to help us sort out some of these very serious and very important issues that I think many of my people are unfortunately denying. And I, I just so appreciate you and your quest for truth. So I wonder if today you could begin by explaining to my listeners what exactly is the Constitution of Knowledge and how does that relate to the U.S. Constitution?

Thank you for the wonderful introduction. I can't help but wonder how a pastor would have reacted to the video that you may have seen of the so-called religious ceremony, the prayers in the Senate chamber when it had been taken over by the man in the pagan costume and the the other people. I watched that with horror, and I would have— I'm not a believing Christian, I'm an atheistic gay Jew, so I'm very far from your tradition, but the way I felt, I can only imagine how a Christian pastor might have felt. So constitutional knowledge is our way of deciding as a society Who's right and who's wrong about facts? What's the difference between truth and fiction? And that's a really hard problem, but a really essential problem for any society to solve, whether it's a very small tribe or a very large nation or even a global community. For public purposes, you need to be able to figure out, you know, who's right and who's wrong. Like, you know, what are you— what's going to be your policy? A lot of people may think Elvis Presley is alive, but are you going to send him a Social Security check? Are you going to put an investigative reporting team on hunting them down. So all of these decisions about belief and resources need a process. The historic way of doing it for 200,000 years since humans evolved was communities would form around beliefs and those beliefs would be cemented in place by allegiance to a leader. Could be a priest or a prince or a Politburo or could be a totalitarian dictator. Could be an oracle. Could be all kinds of things. The problem there was, first of all, that's a terrible way to stay in touch with reality because you're at the whims of one person or a few people or an ideology. And the second is that then people split because when they disagree, they have no way to settle it. They reject the leader and then they go out, start another sect, society fragments, usually civil war as a result or conflict. It's just a terrible system. A few hundred years ago, some people around the same time as the US Constitution said, let's do it a different way. Let's set up a social network to do it. Let's have processes that are like anybody can participate. No one in particular will make the decision. In order to decide what's true, you're going to have to persuade a lot of people and you're going to have to use methods like experiments or checking that anybody can do. And that's a lot like the US Constitution, which is also a process to decide public policy laws based on no one in particular, you have to go through a process of compromise and subject your, your views and your efforts to impersonal processes like elections. So they're very parallel and they both work extremely well, much better than any alternative because they allow for so many voices and so much creativity and, and they basically stop, stop war in communities that accept them. But they also come under a lot of attack all the time. They have, both of them, since the beginning. So we need to understand them and we need to defend them, and that's what my book is about.

Yeah. Well, you do so much and you cover so much in the book. There's so much history in the book of really talking about psychology and epistemology and history. And it's really magnificent what you have really integrated together into this book. And you have a really great paragraph that stood out to me that I wanted to talk a little bit about and have you talk about. You say, consider a shaggy-haired man furiously scribbling equations and theories in his room in Bern, Switzerland. Perhaps he is Albert Einstein discovering new truths which will rearrange the whole universe, or perhaps he is a madman writing gibberish. Either way, he thinks he is a genius doing great science. Even in principle, however, He is not doing science as long as he works alone. I wonder if you could go a bit further and explain some more of that, because I love that concept of, uh, that he's not really doing science as long as he's doing it alone, because that's actually something that resonates very much with me and even in my faith tradition.

Yeah, and by the way, when I talk about science, I don't just mean hard science like physics or chemistry. I mean any public truth-seeking process, and include journalism, my profession. But yeah, liberal sciences, I call this whole network, constitution of knowledge, it's not based on what you believe or what I believe, it's based on what we believe. The magic only happens when we're forced to persuade each other. It's like in the U.S. Constitution, policies and laws only get made when we're forced to compromise. We don't want to, But none of us can be the government by ourselves, and none of us can make knowledge by ourselves. So, you know, we may think that we're a genius, but the fact that I believe something is completely meaningless until I put it out on this big network, which is science and journalism and academia, government and law. And I subject it to other people who are going to contest it, who are going to compare it with other views, say, is this right? Is this wrong? If they think it is right, if they think it has merit, They pass it along through the system, through the network, and at the end of the day, what comes out of that impersonal, gigantic system, that's our knowledge. Never though, whatever just anyone thinks. Hmm.

Well, and I think that is very important, and I think what a lot of people in my faith tradition often miss, and this is one reason I really wanted to have this conversation with you today, So often in the Christian tradition, one thing that drives me crazy is people will say, well, the Bible says it and it's settled, and that's it. And what is often missing from that conversation, especially if they've lost connection to like ancient Judaism— and I have, I have lots of friends who are of the Jewish faith, and one of my good friends who is a rabbi, he has told me time and again, he said, you know, you think that Scripture is almost like set in stone as a tablet and it's done. He said, but we come to it and we argue over it and we wrestle with it and we try to work it out together and we come to it as a way, as a community, because we are actually wrestling with these things and we want to find out together where we are going as a people. And it was never intended to be this sort of thing that is so concrete that we can't be moved on it. And it's interesting because there's even some some old faith textbooks, which don't get shared a lot, that I actually find those same very similar conversations to things that you're writing about that I think is often lost in the faith tradition. And I just found it very fascinating. I thought it's very— I don't know, I guess I wanted to say amen in some ways as I was reading what you were writing about not doing it alone and not trying to do this thing alone, that we really do need each other, and we need these kinds of conversations that can be sort of wrestled over and debated with, and these channels that can go through, and in these sciences. And, and really, that's the heart of epistemology, which you also write about. This is how we come to know things. It's how we come to know things together. It's how we know what we know. And yet we're in this culture of, of what you talk about as as troll epistemology. And I wonder if you could explain to us what you mean by troll epistemology and kind of where we are in this kind of full-blown epistemological crisis right now.

Troll epistemology is my term for when people undermine the constitution of knowledge by manipulating our psyches So that instead of paying attention to the good ideas that really need to be hashed out, you know, the promising hypothesis that really demands our time and attention, it shifts our attention, it hijacks our attention, and it does that by trolling us, by so outraging us, insulting us personally, insulting our group, or insulting the ideas that we hold dear. Humans are vulnerable to that because we're wired to rush to the defense of our truths and our sacred beliefs. And the trolls know that. And so by playing these games online, by trolling, they divert attention to themselves instead of focusing on more productive things. And that's great for them for a couple of reasons. One, they love the attention. They would never earn it in real life. They have nothing important to say. But second, that also disables this other process, the constitution of knowledge, so that they can start inserting their own ideas, you know, whether it's that the election was stolen by Democrats or vaccines don't work or all kinds of other things. So, you know, think of it as a kind of mental hijacking.

Speaking of this sort of mental hijacking, You also write that when facts challenge the belief, the congregation will defend its faith by defying the facts, not defending the facts, but by defying the facts. And that's kind of what I wanted to speak with you about today too, because I have been puzzled over the last, really more than 4 years, but especially over the last 4 or 5 years as we lived through the whole Trump presidency and the way that I saw people in congregations go from, from, well, I'm going to hold my nose and vote, to just full-on absolute undying loyalty to almost deification of, you know, Donald Trump, you know. And I, and I've always wondered, you know, how did that happen, you know? How did we get to this place, you know? And I keep thinking it definitely wasn't from the Constitution of Knowledge, for sure, as I read about in your book. Because otherwise we wouldn't be deifying a, you know, a compulsive liar and a serial adulterer and someone who is an irreligious con man, you know, like Donald Trump. And you write about in your book the way that the zone was flooded, you know, with things that were untruth, and the way that the lies, it doesn't necessarily matter what the facts are, and you can even show the facts to someone and it doesn't matter because of the way that the zone is flooded with the lies. And I wonder if you could maybe have any sort of hypothesis on, like, how does this happen? Because I know you write quite a lot about it in your book, about even the sort of the genius of Donald Trump. And the way that he would just kind of flood the zone with the false information, fully knowing what he was, was doing. But maybe explain for my listeners a little bit kind of how this kind of information can happen to where people start believing the false information. I'd love to.

It, it takes a minute because there's a lot to unpack there, but sure, I'll do my best to to do this fast and then we can drill down. Human beings are not structured to seek dispassionate truth. That's not what our brains are for. Our brains are to help us survive in small social groups. And that means that we look to believe things that will improve our status, our standing within the group, and that will cement our own identity within the group and that will persuade others in the group to be our allies. And that's not necessarily what's true. That's what we can convince ourselves and other people to believe. That's very different from what's true in many cases. Well, the amazing thing, the surprise, is not that humans sometimes go in for conspiracy theories and tribal falsehoods and other forms of groupthink. It's that we ever don't. Because those theories, you know, conspiracy theory helps us explain the world, why something bad happened to us, and tribal thinking cements us with our tribe. It's even been shown in psychology experiments going back to the '50s that how the people around us think and what they think, it not only influences our opinion, it actually changes our cognition. Our brains are more receptive to things that other people believe. Well, that leaves us open to this phenomenon that we call information warfare. And that's okay. So you have the Constitution of Knowledge. It's specifically designed to protect us from all of these manipulations because it forces us to subject our own opinions to criticism and examination from people all over the world who don't look like us. And they're going to spot it if we're going down a rabbit hole and they're going to tell us, but we don't like that. So information warfare says, so how can we defeat those safeguards? Well, what you can do is you can manipulate the social and media environments for political advantage, specifically to divide, dominate, disorient, and ultimately demoralize the target population. And that's what Vladimir Putin is doing in, in 2016. When he's using bots and trolls in St. Petersburg to actually stimulate political rallies, opposing political rallies, opposing each other across the street. That's what Donald Trump is doing when he uses outrage and conspiracy theories to divide us. There's a tactic called the fire hose of falsehood that the Russians perfected, but then that Trump and his followers, for the first time ever in American history, adapted to the United States. And that's a tactic where you just pour out so many untruths, conspiracy theories, half-truths, exaggerations at such a fast rate with no regard for whether they're consistent with each other or even plausible. But you just pour them out so fast that you don't have to censor someone. You can just confuse them. They throw up their hands. The media can't keep up. They can't fact-check fast enough. They can't stop talking about it. So now you're dominating the dialogue. The people out there go, I don't know who's telling the truth anymore. I'm just hearing all of this stuff. Well, that's never been done in America before. That's what epidemiologists call here in America a naive population. We had no defenses against this tactic when Trump started it in his campaign in 2016. PolitiFact found that that year, 70% of his checkable claims over the course of his presidential campaign 70% were mostly or entirely false. No one's ever run a campaign like that before. Hillary Clinton was rated 25% mostly or entirely false, and that's way too high. But no one's ever run a fire hose of falsehood on the American public. And he continued that on inauguration day. He blatantly lied about whether it was raining and the size of the crowd. He altered weather maps. Well, he's doing this for a reason. This is not just being crazy. He's flooding the zone with disinformation, and that works, and that leaves us helpless and confused, and it divides us and polarizes us. It makes us more ready to believe the kinds of conspiracy theories that you're now encountering in churches.

Wow. That's a huge amount to take in. I appreciate you— Yeah. I'm sorry. It's amazing.

It's kind of a filibuster there, but it's—

No, it's, it's great, and it's amazing the way that you lay it out. So it seems effortless, actually, the way that you tell it. And I— and it's amazing when you tell it that way, and it helps us, I think, to understand exactly what's going on. The other part of that, though, is even when people hear that that is exactly what's going on, and the way that you lay it out, it helps me to see exactly what's going on I think part of what was so frustrating to me for years is I would go, what is going on? I feel like I'm going crazy. I don't know why people are taking this in, you know, because it's just lie, lie, lie, lie, one after another. And then I realized that in my circles and people who I love and people that I am friends with, not only in person, but many people that I know on social media, there are a lot of people in my life who absolutely will not believe it if it doesn't come from Fox News or Newsmax or One America News Network or a, you know, a website that is similar to that like Breitbart or media like that. I wonder in this question if you have any advice for people like me who want to actually have conversations with people Um, how do we help others to wise up to the lies? Um, how do we begin to come back to the truth when the only sources of information that many people will believe seem to be maybe propaganda news sites? And, and a lot of those seem to specifically be that anymore these days. I, I just wonder if you have any good advice for us.

There are two ways to take that question. One would be personal advice on how to deal with, you know, friends, people in your life, parishioners, colleagues, and the other would be social advice for how do we fight this as a democracy, as a society. Do you want one or both, and in which order?

I would take both, actually. If you have time to do it, I would love to hear from both angles.

Well, the first thing to say is that there's, there's no magic bullet solution. People need to understand these tactics we're talking about— conspiracy bootstrapping, firehose of falsehood, trolling, cancel culture is another one, comes predominantly from the left, that one, but that's a way of manipulating false consensus. These things are really sophisticated. They're tried and true. They've been used by dictators, you know, famous dictators for 100 years. They're not easy to deal with. So it's not like there's one thing you can do to sort this out. In people's personal lives, the research suggests that confronting people with a barrage of facts never works. In fact, often it makes people defensive, so they dig in even deeper. What does work is to listen. To try to understand where they're coming from, to try to gently question if they believe the conspiracy theory that the election was stolen. Well, so who exactly did that? Like, in what state? How would they have hid a massive conspiracy to steal the election? How would they have coordinated and, you know, sort of lead people on so that they begin to maybe question some of their logic? But it's important to try to build some trust, not to come at people from a place of you're wrong, you're stupid, That never works. There's a wonderful saying which goes back to Dale Carnegie, Power of How to Win Friends and Influence People, which is, you can't make people agree with you, but you can make people want to agree with you. So try that. Try the trust building. Try some listening. It's slow and it's gentle. It doesn't always work. Remember, people get very heavily invested in their alternative realities. But not everyone and not all the time. So that's some personal thoughts. On the social level, so this is a systemic attack, a systematic attack on the constitution of knowledge as a public system. It's attempting to organize, sorry, to undermine all of the institutions that we rely on to keep us anchored to reality. That's everything from academia and journalism to law and the courts, which are very much about finding facts and, you know, requiring people to present their evidence. So we need a social response, and that's going to be many levels. This is the hardest part about talking about this book. It's not just like the three things, but it's going to mean that we're going to have to have responses across societies in a lot of different ways, and that's going to include, and already is including, Redesigns of social media platforms to make them less friendly to trolling and more friendly to truth. Some of that's going to be changing policies like, you know, content moderation, but more of it's actually going to be changing the functionality so that, for example, it's crazy that if I tweet something out, it's published internationally instantly. There should be a pause period so that I should have to think about that. I mean, what if we all said the very first thing we thought of and it was published to the the globe. So lots of design changes. Twitter, Facebook are already doing some of those. We're going to need to build institutions and guardrails that protect us from these bad behaviors. And Facebook has started doing that with the oversight board, which is a very important experiment, you know, trying to say what are the principles for governing behavior on the internet? Let's make them transparent. Let's see if we can reach some agreement. You're going to need— and we're already seeing a lot more sophistication from the media about disinformation. In 2016, they swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Much better in 2020. Journalists now have people covering disinformation, giving us that context. You're going to need better education, more media literacy in the schools, more critical thinking instruction in the schools. Other countries are doing that with some success. And you're going to need to, to give your population more immunity by getting people wiser. About these manipulative tools. It's harder, it's still possible, but it's harder to manipulate a population that knows it's being manipulated and understands how it's being targeted. And there's more, I could go on, I won't, but it's that kind of thing. Sure.

Well, you've been so generous with what you've offered us today, and I really do appreciate it. There's so many places that you could have been today, I'm sure, and I'm I'm very excited for this new book, and I hope that many people will, will read it and that this will help hopefully expand the audience just a bit, maybe from some that wouldn't have read it before. I wanted to just, in my closing question today and in our final moments here together, I know this isn't your typical audience who you always get to share with, and I'm so excited to have you here with us today, and I wonder if you had a moment just to share a message from your heart with evangelical Christians who may be listening right now. I wonder what you maybe would like to say to them today.

Well, this is going to sound strange and maybe even inappropriate coming from an atheistic homosexual Jew, but I would say follow the teachings of Jesus Christ and not the teachings of Donald Trump, and that's a big difference.

Wow, I think that is one of the most appropriate things that we could actually hear today. I want to let all of our listeners know that we're going to have links to Jonathan's website, to his new book, and, and the many places where he writes on my website at voicesinmyheadpodcast.com, as well as my Substack pages. This has been a real treat for me today. I, I love your writing, and I hope that you you will continue to write many more books in the future for us. You are doing a great service, and I appreciate so much the time that you have taken to be with us today. The new book is called The Constitution of Knowledge, and it is just recently published at the time of the, the publishing of this podcast, actually. So congratulations, and I'm very proud of the work that you are doing, and, and I wish you all, all the continued success in the world, Jonathan. Thank you for being one of the voices in my head this week.

Well, I'm just so grateful to have a chance to talk to you and reach your audience. Thank you.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule Schedule me for a concert or speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, the more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction. May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head.