Mahered in Doubt

NPR's new CEO is a walking epistemological crisis.

In the weeks to come, you may hear people say that NPR’s new CEO Katherine Maher doesn’t believe in truth. That’s not quite right: she believes in “high-quality information, facts, and data” that “we can know.” For strategic reasons, she doesn’t find it convenient to call these things “truth.” But by any natural definition of the word, that’s what she thinks they are—and she believes in them deeply, with what can only be called blind faith.

I have to say that I have scoured this woman’s public statements for signs of intelligent life and found none. That’s not a criticism so much as an observation: it makes her a valuable case study. Maher’s ideas are interesting because she’s clearly not thinking about them, even for a second—they’re running in the background like an operating system or a script. She provides an unnervingly perfect opportunity to examine the reflexive assumptions that are taken for granted among the sorts of people who can say and hear things like “there are many different truths” and “we all have different truths” with a straight face.

So, for example, in the TED speech that became notorious after Chris Rufo caught her in his headlights, Maher discusses her previous work as the head of the foundation that runs Wikipedia. She says that “we’ve known for a very long time now about the negative impacts of man-made carbon in the atmosphere. But the implications of that data challenge our identities, our industries, our communities in ways that have led and created resistance, and even disinformation.” Consequently, debating the “truth” of climate change is getting in the way of what’s really needed, which is “action.”

Now obviously no one who is thinking thoughts and then using words to express them could possibly say such things. Maher’s not fitting ideas together into a logical sequence: she’s grinding them into a fine-grained powder and then inhaling them, because they do something for her. It’s worth asking what. If “truth” is “what happens when we merge facts about the world with our beliefs about the world,” what’s the status of those “facts” and “data” that we can supposedly “know”?

If Maher were being honest with herself or us, she would say what she’s really saying, which is that certain “facts” are securely known to be “true,” and they’re not up for debate—our interpretation of them is. But the whole point is that she’s not thinking hard enough to be honest. Because the very “facts” about man-made climate change that she wants to take as settled are actually what’s under discussion, what people want to debate.

Since she wants to forbid that debate, she has to perform a sleight-of-hand act in which she describes “truth” as a matter of interpretation. Then she can position “facts” imperviously outside the realm of interpretation altogether, in an exterior nether region where questions of “true” or “false” don’t even apply. It’s so definite that it should serve as the premise, not the object, of all reasoned discussion. Nothing to see here!

My hot take is this: Maher’s programming represents the final stages of an epistemological crisis that has been going on for oh, about 500 years. The Hellenistic philosophers of Ancient Greece would have called it a problem of the kritērion, the sure and stable touchstone of definite knowledge. No serious thinker would deny that the kritērion actually does pose difficulties. How do we know anything?

Epicurus thought it was the immediate experience of our sense perception that could be counted on, and he carefully worked out procedures for drawing inferences out of what we can see and touch. Unfortunately for him, as the Stoics pointed out, even our sense perceptions already come layered with pre-formed ideas that condition how we experience the world. I can’t help seeing a square as a square, even if I tell myself I’m just looking at a sea of variously colored pixels (what’s a “pixel”? what’s a “color”? I need working models of these things to experience anything, even if I’m not aware of the models). So maybe some ideas are so basic, so natural, that they are the criterion of truth.

These sorts of thoughts became newly troubling when—for innumerable reasons, including maybe just “because it was time”—the Aristotelianism of the Medieval church started to fray around the edges. What we now call the “scientific revolution” and the “Protestant reformation” were really two throbs of one dramatic convulsion, accelerated by the technology of the printing press, surging like a great wave across the troubled spirit of man. It was all about what could be known.

One possibility—and this is where the science of it all comes in—was to return to Epicurus’ fundamentals. Just the facts, Jack: if you can measure it and observe it, it’s real. Something like this was Galileo’s position, and Francis Bacon made an elaborately sophisticated case for resurrecting sense experience as the touchstone of all knowledge. But even he worried that it was impossible to get truly raw data, without any interpretation: “On waxen tablets you cannot write anything new until you rub out the old,” he wrote. But “with the mind it is not so; there you cannot rub out the old till you have written in the new.”

So you get Descartes looking for “clear and distinct ideas,” the way the Stoics did: if something like God’s existence, or ours, can be necessarily and self-evidently known, that’s a good place to start. We can use our experience and our ideas in a feedback loop and arrive together at stable knowledge. Run this spin cycle a couple times, and what comes out—among other things—is the Enlightenment, which works pretty well for a while. Until it doesn't.

Empirical observation coupled with mathematical reasoning is really good at producing certain kinds of knowledge—the kind we’ve learned to call scientific. But it also came, from the jump, with the whiff of a suggestion that this is the only kind of knowledge there is. Because that was the whole point of the debate at the outset: what’s real knowledge, and what’s just your opinion, man? The more material benefits we achieved by studying the material world, the more disputes and doubts raged about all things immaterial, the more the assumption took hold that matter, perceived through the senses, is all there is.

And that is bananas. It’s incoherent, for reasons that by now should be obvious. But it’s also impossible to live by in a practical sense. Everything that matters most to us—including the human purposes and goals that would inspire us to do science in the first place—is spiritual or at least ethical. Living and thinking inescapably require us to engage in forms of reasoning that aren’t limited to physical reality.

So we need to invoke not just “facts” and “data” but also concepts like “goodness” and “virtue,” which are implicit when Katherine Maher uses words like “action.” Except that she—like many of us—has been forbidden by her programming from including moral reasoning within the realm of knowable truth. So at this point the system locks up, and she has to redefine her convictions about climate change as “facts” and “data,” rather than what they actually are, which is moral propositions subject to rational scrutiny (under which they would not fare well).

What’s making itself forcibly clear—for innumerable reasons, including “because Internet” but also maybe just “because it’s time”—is that we do actually need different ways of knowing different kinds of truth. But not in the sense implied by Katherine Maher’s warmed-over Pomo claptrap. Rather the opposite: we’re smacking up against questions of justice and God that require reference not to “data” but to tradition, experience, wisdom, meditation, and prayer.

That operating system won’t spit out cut-and-dry answers, but it also won’t mire us in a sludge of creepy authoritarian anti-thought, which is what zombie pseudo-empiricism is doing for the kinds of TED junkies that nod along to Katherine Maher. Truth is indeed a blend of fact and belief—a meeting of the human soul with the realities of the world around us. That means we have two choices: we can despair of ever knowing the truth, which isn’t exactly working out for us. Or we can take the truth seriously enough to consider—with fear and trembling—just what it is we believe. Worth a shot.

Rejoice evermore,
Spencer

Listen to the latest from Young Heretics:

Image from Blossom Ozurumba, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.