I couldn't' agree more that "I’d like to think that our facts are not governed by whether we sit at the judge’s bench or in the defendant’s chair." Debates over the role of post-modernist academic trends on "post-truth" politics aside (which were all the rage the first time he won back in 2016), it is clear that as a country the interpretation of facts is wildly different. For me -- somebody who's first premise is that social life is not so distinct from nature as to be immune from the same scientific inquiry we apply to the rest of nature -- it is really hard to fathom how such seemingly basic perceptions are so radically different. A correspondence theory of truth is philosophically quaint in some corners, but for most basic inquiry about "what" type questions, it serves pretty well.
So just to be crystal clear: I think Trump is a shyster and clown; I think he's mean spirited and narcissistic and lies at every turn, saying whatever he thinks a crowd wants to hear. He's demonstrably criminal, and found so by judges and a jury, and unfit on any moral dimension to serve as president. While reasonable people can disagree, his stated policy preferences are not mine and, I think, more damaging than good.
I also believe this belief is well justified empirically - based on my memory of his first term, reading/hearing the stuff he says, the long string of obvious untruths, reports of his own close-confidants and in-depth reporting and court cases. I think the things he says are patently self-contradictory and obviously bad.
And yet, so many others see something entirely different. I think there's an obvious range -- from hard-right proud-boy types who actually want the worst of what he says (I think a small minority), to others who see him as saving America from an evil left that "wants to destroy America," to those who champion him the same way they do a sports-team regardless of what he says. Plus a host of enabling "leaders" who support out of plain political self-interest (which then creates the future they fear and reinforces the need to support him). And a group of nominally undecideds who are not paying much attention and vote on whim?
So how do we explain radically different perceptions of the same things? Information exposure is clearly part of it. But are those bubbles so tight as to really not let anything else in? Feels like, in this case, access to the revelations about Trump's character are pretty easy to find, and explanations that turn on the people you disagree with being dolts always seem suspect. So I remain at an honest loss.
At a deeper level, more people need critical self reflection -- I love your "SMELL" test for that, and I fear that's not happening much.
I am a fan of long posts, Jim. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don't think many of my readers know they're listening to a Duke professor!
A few thoughts...
* The Proud Boy types have their mirror images on the left. Neither political party seems capable of calling those extremists on their shit. That troubles me.
* John Ellis published a book, "Literature Lost," in 1997 that said something prescient. I'm paraphrasing, but my recollection is that he saw postmodern relativity as a mask for extremely didactic agendas. That is, there was a false unity among those leveraging deconstruction theory to destabilize power structures, and that once those structures collapsed there would be fierce competition between identity groups rather than the solidarity they claimed. I think that's mostly held true. I am appalled by Christopher Rufo's vision of what higher ed should be and puzzled by the relatively recent infatuation with the liberal arts among conservatives. But I'm equally aghast at arguments for decolonizing the university that frame writing conventions (the scholarly method itself) as expressions of white supremacy.
* I've been listening to people who I think of as thoughtful and smart who are Trump supporters. Some of their claims sound like conspiracy theories to me, but a lot of them just want to be left alone to do their jobs. They are tired of oil/gas being labeled as evil, they don't like being scolded for private beliefs, they want to work hard and build things they can be proud of. I don't know why Trump is necessarily their standard-bearer, but they seem to feel that he expresses things they feel that no one else can get away with saying. And they do have a point about how his statements get carved up and framed in inaccurate ways, such as the Liz Cheney reference. But some of these people are just voting on a feeling, too, not on any facts, and that's part of what I was trying to write about today.
* It should matter, for instance, that the economy is a big and slow-moving ship that can't be easily turned around, and that nearly everyone inherits some mess or benefit from their predecessor. But I think Chris Murphy is right that people aren't really placing faith in Trump, they are voting from a more visceral place. And liberals have to own their responsibility in pushing people into that corner.
* What I've come to realize is that there is virtually no news source that I really trust. The business model has so thoroughly come to imitate Murdoch's for Fox that the profit motive trumps truthtelling. MSNBC is the most ridiculous example on the left. But even NPR has been exposed for pushing conservatives away, explicitly leaning into a certain ideological slant. There was no hint -- almost none -- of what was to come in the coverage I followed on NPR and the NY Times. So those bubbles might be much tighter than we've thought or than we'd like to believe.
I do plan to write on the scholarly method in an upcoming post, because there is a new kind of relativity afoot. It's not postmodernism, it's more like that Hutchinson's immediate revelation. "I'm no expert, but I can only share my opinion..." "Who is the judge of what is true anymore?" We have destroyed nearly every structure for curating knowledge. This is hurting higher ed, but it is having devastating consequences in the public sphere, because many people are living with a double standard. They don't want their surgeon or bridge engineers sharing "opinions," but they're more than willing to question other kinds of expertise.
Scholarship is supposed to be built on critical reflection, a check on hunches and hypotheses, and a source of common knowledge, even if some subjects remain intractably debatable. I'm not sure anyone is waiting to hear any of this from me. I am a kind of ridiculous caricature of authority now as a 49-yr-old emeritus professor. But I'll still add my brick to the wall.
Good points; and yes - the left has clear culpability / mirror on much of this as well. For that, it is not surprising that the left has alienated many - and rejecting that is sensible and not problematic. It is precisely the choice of this particular standard bearer that's so befuddling (to me).
"It is precisely the choice of this particular standard bearer that's so befuddling (to me)." This probably requires an explanation by other experts. I wonder if some of it has to do with the perception of other GOP leaders as being elites in the same way that Democrats are perceived. George W Bush was someone that the average guy wanted to get a beer with; Trump's coarseness conveys a similar affect, even though both are elites. There may not be a rational explanation. I could understand my pious grandparents voting for Reagan, because he kept up a respectable front. I could not understand how the people who taught me so much of what I knew about character and respect could have supported him. Behavior that would get a child expelled from school, as another reader put it, does not belong at the top of national leadership.
I am reminded of my debater son, who is a pretty conservative right-winger, but who still have several friends from high school who are liberals. They all get along, and tease each other about their beliefs. Anyhow, it used to just irritate the heck out of my son when he would win a debate when he argued the side he disagreed with. On the other hand, in college he had an extremely liberal professor, but would answer each exam question something like "Here's the point of view we learned in class (etc.) And here's the opposing view, however. He did get an "A".
Tiny Rhode Island has always been a harbor for contrary thinkers. Put together, their voices ring like a discordant free jazz composition, but if you listen carefully your hear jewels among the riffs.
One thing I did this weekend was pull out one of my books on American history... Still not exactly sure why, but I think to understand the context for today's current environment. Maybe not the best book but it was A True History of the United States by Sjursen. I had bought it awhile ago but hadn't cracked it open. Started with the "founding" and some of it was eye opening. The discussion on the "City On the Hill" self-given mandate in particular gave me a different take on the American mythology. Poked some holes I knew were there but added a few tears. I work in Roxbury, MA (basically Boston) down the hill from the First Church in Roxbury where the (in)famous John Eliot preached. He and one of the founders James Morgan are part of my family tree. I delved into the history of both individuals a few years ago, finding an association of Morgan family members in CT. The mythology about how amazing these people were runs deep and blinds people to searching for other narratives to get a fuller picture. I'm a fuller picture kind of person so I appreciate your post! That was my main point of this note but I wanted to tell you why I appreciated it instead of just leaving a one liner!
How interesting, Emily! Big picture people are my kind of people :). It is galling to me how many politicians think they need to invoke the Shining City trope. I think that started with Reagan, but Harris did it in one of her speeches, too. The reality was that the City on the Hill was a theocracy with an extremely rigid border. People were banished from it frequently and it required strict conformity. Nothing like the democratic standard-bearer that people think they are referencing now.
But in a way the Puritans also fell prey to "it's the economy, stupid." William Bradford laments, near the end of his lengthy "Of Plymouth Plantation" that prosperity killed their spiritual community. So even then people cared more about their pocketbooks than about any unifying narrative or purpose.
My own feeling is that the more secular founding is the real inspiration and that any greatness we can claim comes from collective efforts like that. But there haven't been many truly unified chapters in American history. I've thought about that quite a lot while visiting Czechia, where part of my family is from. The sad truth is that nations with a strong sense of kinship and unity often have a history of oppression or occupation. That, too, was the galvanizing principle for the American Founders. But perhaps that's a story for another time!
A fact of human nature is that humans are governed largely by their feelings (see, e.g., the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt; also millennia of art and literature). Liberals have been appealing mostly to the feelings of moralistic technocrats over the last decade or so. It would be as if your doctor started lecturing you about the latest trends in medical school curricula instead of addressing your feelings about your cancer diagnosis. Even if the doctor was factually correct, you'd look for a different doctor. Maybe even a quack.
That's essentially what the American electorate just did. Part of an effective response will be remembering, like a good physician, to build solid emotional relationships with fellow human beings. Empty BS like identity politics actively sabotages that effort. Kamala tried to disown that stuff, but the GOP reminded the public, successfully, that it still forms the soul of the Democratic Party base. It shouldn't.
Smart discourse, Ed. I know that feelings produce defensive reactions when facts don't fit, and this has particularly complicated progress on climate. But the tactics used by activists like DiAngelo and Kendi are spectacularly good at triggering the same response.
Your doctor metaphor is a good one, and it reminds me of my dissertation topic. I set out to explain how doctors could have been so thoroughly vilified in nineteenth-century American literature and then heroized in early twentieth-century novels. Roger Chillingworth is a terrifying figure in "The Scarlet Letter," largely because he reflects Hawthorne's fears of scientific medicine. Lewis's Martin Arrowsmith is almost an unthinkable reversal of those tropes. Oliver Wendell Holmes's public intellectualism helped bridge that gap between a fearful public and scientific physicians. Long way around of agreeing with you that there has to be an ongoing conversation with the public. Takes a long time to rebuild that trust when it's been lost.
Where I'm less optimistic than you is about the infrastructure beneath the public conversation. I'm still mulling this, but I think the rise of activist scholars and the corporatization of the university have both conspired to break peer review. If you don't have a stable system of curating knowledge, where real experts vet one another, then you're still selling snake oil. We once had a mostly intact science-based, evidence-based, rational approach to history, climate, and education. That's been lost. It's a decades-long project to rebuild.
Good essay Josh. You use historical references to pose unanswerable questions about today.
I go slowly from my brain down to my heart to tell me what is true. It may not be facts I seek but rather what brings me peace. For my own heart is one of the few things I can trust.🙏❤️
Thanks for reading, brother. I agree with you in the realm of relationships and other more private realms. What I'm writing about here is more about public claims and judgments about reality that affect others or the common systems we inhabit. I don't trust my heart about the bridges I drive over or the surgeon that cuts me open.
Oh but you must—it’s all in God’s hands anyway. Despite all the best research, and trust in the “facts,” and stressing about it you can manage in advance, you control zero of the outcome. 🙏
This was a very interesting piece. The first one I've read on my phone, I think, and it read better than on my computer, for some reason. Anyhow, I'm not the philosopher, etc. that y'all are, but I am a church-goer (RC). When I taught at UNO, the colleague in the next office was a staunch Lutheran. I don't remember how we got on the topic, but she made the statement that your good works have nothing to do with your salvation; it was all the work of Jesus. I don't think I answered back, but thought about it. Yes, I agree, no salvation without Jesus. But yet, somewhere in the Bible it says, "By their works you shall know them." And my what-if mentality said, "Yeah, but what if someone is saved, and they say that they can do whatever mischief they want, because the Lord saved them, but I'm not quite sure that's what God would expect of us."
Anyhow, it sure looks like those who were against Anne Hutchinson were dreaming up logic based on their desired manipulations, rather than on prayerful consideration of what they heard in the word of God. At least they didn't burn her at the stake or hang her.
I am not a faithful consumer of politics or media as it is challenging to sort through the talking heads of various sources. I used to enjoy the CBS Morning Show's "Your World in 90 seconds" as it read through the top headlines; that was all I felt I needed to be aware of current events. As I believe there are so few things that boil down to hard truths or solid evidence of fact.
Statistics may provide evidence that may prove one hypothesis over another, but data collection and method of analysis still leaves room for interpretation. There are anomalies in science, our human anatomy lab had nine cadavers demonstrating that even our basic biology has variations and adaptations. Historical events are facts, but the how and the why are left open to perspective of the author. Was Anne Hutchinson guilty of sedition or was she similar to Jesus in calling out the pharisees for misleading their people, but since she is a woman, she was not able to have the impact that the Son of God had? Women have been screwed since Genesis and the Creation story; many give no thought that indigenous people across many cultures hold women with a higher regard that approaches more gender equality than Christians. Race continues to divide us, one example being women rallying on the basis of sex, however the cry isn't always as loud and clear when the basis of skin color is added.
I may tend to agree with your wise student that there are different sides to a republic each essential for its progress, positive and negative, yin and yang; I believe it is important to take them all in and decide what our own truths shall be. Where do we want to fall as history takes shape? Unfortunately, I think you are correct that so many are only hearing one side of the tale, their preferred side, which locks them into judge or defendant. The algorithms that continue to feed us our narrow perspective are not allowing for a spark of compassion for others nor the critical thinking skills that allow for thought and growth.
Thank you, Traci. I recognize some element of risk in considering the ambiguity in Hutchinson's case, given that so many women are hurting right now, feeling devalued and more invisible than ever. I do take some pains to show how both Hutchinson and Winthrop are two sides of the same coin. Where the line between conscientious objector and cult leader falls I'm not sure. But I find each of them to be cautionary tales in their own way. There's nothing reassuring to be found in the colonial period, in my view, even though some conservatives trace their vision for America to those 17th-century religious strongholds.
This may be too theoretical, but I have been thinking about these things in comparison to the body's self-regulation through homeostasis. There is room for adaptation and flux within certain parameters for health. Never perfect balance, more like a dynamic equilibrium. But push the body too far outside those boundaries of health, and the consequences are swift and severe.
I think we've destroyed most of the boundaries we once relied upon to curate knowledge, and so there's no surprise in our body politic suffering as a result. Universities are in freefall still, though they were once the bulwarks against industry abuses and lazy conventional thought. As I said in response to Jim, the business model for news media has thoroughly discredited it as a source of reliable fact. The market seems to dictate everything, but the market is fickle and not interested in humanitarian results.
There are times when I think I'm stating the problem with no clear answer, other than a return to some of what we've lost. But the prospect of such a return feels positively quaint. Nothing changed in New England until that model got pushed to a point of unacceptable extremism during the Salem trials. People decided then that they wanted better models for government and justice, and not long after that we got the separation of church and state and other pillars of freedom. I don't like to write anything off as lost, but sometimes institutions have to crumble to be rebuilt. That seems to be where we are.
The business model has discredited many institutions where it had no business being applied-- news media, healthcare, higher education. The quest for knowledge and fact seems largely outplayed by the moment's viral video or recent extreme. But we all have the ability to use the POWER button on our devices and read or talk to someone with a perspective that differs from our own. However, many don't seem to have the motivation, preferring to keep their blinders on.
With regards to the human body, I may have to politely disagree; the body is amazingly tolerant of all the crap we put in it. That is how a man can fill his diet with fast food for his entire life and not exercise and still "grow-up" to become President without any swift or severe consequences;)
I am hopeful that we aren't on the "precipice of hell", but I can agree that sometimes rock bottom is essential for stimulating actual change.
My "BS" test for authority figures is how they use science. If they say things such as there are two genders or masks don't work when there is plenty of evidence contrary, I write off most of what they say.
Is there really such little debate among scientists about gender? Public health feels like a different arena. Unfortunately, we're rolling back many of the gains that we saw from vaccines, sanitation, and other preventative measures. I know the cost of this firsthand, since I was not vaccinated against whooping cough and got it in college (it is awful).
I will spare everyone the lengthy aside, but this question of how much the public trusts science is actually the point of my dissertation. Scientific medicine was deeply distrusted until Oliver Wendell Holmes and other public intellectuals made a persuasive case for it. I don't think the need for making that case, and doing so in a way that doesn't write anyone off, ever goes away. People feared physicians because they were robbing graves to study anatomy. It took some time realize why autopsies mattered so much. But we don't make that case once and for all. It needs to be updated, to grow with the times.
Interesting! There isn't much debate about it among scientists but of course the public will only work from their experience. This has recently been exploited. And the idea of sewing doubt about science these days came from companies seeing the tobacco industry called out for their role in cancer. It began in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1980s and here we are today. I should add that my father-in-law hated and feared doctors. Some came from John Birch Society materials. He died from skin cancer that could have been treated if he had gone to a physician earlier. Instead, he treated it himself with some sort of "cancer zapper".
What an interesting meditation--and history of Anne Hutchinson and her trial. Thank you for this!
I'm not trying to be too radical skeptic here, but....how do we know anything? How do we know what these facts are that I should put above my feelings? It's not like I discovered how gravity works, or do gravity experiments myself. Even if I were, it's not like I developed the scientific method. All that we know, we know from a set of feelings. This seems to work pretty okay when most of these are communally shared. When Anne Hutchinson or I have a special insight that can't be shared with anyone else, that can spell trouble for the whole shared truth of a community. I don't want to take his side here, but perhaps that's what Winthrop is getting at.
I think the modern algorithm-driven internet world exacerbates this by putting us in bubbles of like-minded people, allowing individuals both the thrill of having a unique felt insight, and the fact support of that insight being believed by an apparent community. Another thing that worsens this epistemology trap is that it's virtual: There's nothing more persuasive that you might be wrong than the hard slap of physical reality.
It's not that we're all immune to algorithm bubbles on my idyllic island, but I do think we're more resistant to some of these shared-truth undermining effects because we live closer to nature and have a shared physical reality. Saba folks have opinions on the US presidential election, too, and some disagreements are pretty deep, and point to different sets of facts. But the worst abstract argument can get stopped with a redirect to "good rain we had last night"--because we all have the shared physical experience of rain, and the shared practical concern of using cistern water.
In general, I think that a lot of US culture is increasingly divorced from these lived physical realities, especially among wealthier and more urban/suburban populations. This relegates "facts" to what my shared-beliefs community knows off of the internet, with no way to arbitrate between my community's facts and those of the contrary community. That makes it easy for me to think that my team has facts and the other team has feelings, with increasingly less way of finding common ground.
Hopefully you don't hear any defense of Winthrop here. As I say in one of the footnotes, the salient difference between them was that he had more followers. I don't see much good to come from a return to colonial thinking.
Shared experiences of the physical world are stabilizing, as you say. But my parents know firsthand how climate change has altered the boreal forest where they live -- and dried up the mountain spring that they relied on for decades for gravity-fed drinking water. And they voted for Trump. I still think that food traditions -- gardening, farming, canning -- provide a point of common ground, and I embrace those as conversation starters with my family.
I'll say more about this in the coming weeks, but your point about communally shared ideas is spot on. I'll not rehash everything I said in reply to Traci, but I think there have to be some parameters for reliable discourse within which reasonable people can disagree. Once those guardrails are lost, everyone's offering opinions rather than expertise. And we're now in a place where experts are not valued, not about things like history, so -- as I wrote about "Babbitt" -- we shall have to learn some of those lessons again.
We shouldn't have to rediscover gravity all over again, should we? Science isn't perfect, but it's like our union, capable of being made "more perfect" with better information. The scientific method set the standard for other forms of scholarship, including the method I learned as a literary scholar. But that's not the core of what universities teach now. Peer review is broken. I really do think we have a crisis of credibility in all quarters. And I'm trying really hard not to be so negative all the time!
Good job working at not being negative. It’s really hard sometimes!
To clarify, I’m not saying that we as humans need to re-prove gravity all the time. I’m saying that I, personally, never proved it at all. I just accept that gravity is as physicists explain it, just like I do with meteorologists for hurricanes, or mechanics for how my car should be repaired. We live in a world of facts that were established by the work of others, and that we just accept because that is what one does. Science does get closer to perfect, in my opinion, and I can even be a tiny part of that. But almost all of my truth is based on trusting others—indeed, it’s impossible for me to live my life and have that not be the case.
And what that shows is that we mainly do share the same foundation for what we think is true, even if a gulf in political facts seems unbridgeably large. And whenever I see that kind of overlap in fundamental beliefs it gives me a lot of hope.
"But almost all of my truth is based on trusting others—indeed, it’s impossible for me to live my life and have that not be the case." Exactly -- well said. This is part of what we have lost.
I believe that the overlap of fundamental beliefs is the root of civility, as well. It is what once allowed people to work across the aisle and genuinely respect one another. The colonial mindset breeds binaries that become insuperable.
I have a friend who is a poet who wrote a long narrative poem about Anne Hutchinson. Her name is Penelope Scambley Schott. My memory is that it was very good. You might like to check it out.
It won a prize! This is from Wikipedea - She received the 2008 Oregon Book Award in poetry for "A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth"
Thanks! Looks interesting. I'm wondering now if Penelope's premise is more or less what I was taught: that this was more or less "good trouble." My difficulty now is that I can't see that Hutchinson cared overly much for the commonwealth. It's hard to know sometimes what the difference is between a conscientious objector and a cult leader. If she'd been fighting for abolition or something, maybe I'd feel differently, but I now see that exchange between Winthrop and Hutchinson as essentially two peas in a pod with different power platforms. I'm not really that sympathetic to either.
What a treat. I hope she is not too annoyed. I lost a subscriber today because, I suppose, I did not hew closely enough to the standard line about Hutchinson as a non-conforming icon.
In my view, we lose subscribers because people subscribe to too many things and they suddenly notice that we are not really what they want, so they unsubscribe. Just a hypothesis. BTW, I owe you an email and will get to it. Things have been a bit hectic recently.
Thanks Josh; very nice piece.
I couldn't' agree more that "I’d like to think that our facts are not governed by whether we sit at the judge’s bench or in the defendant’s chair." Debates over the role of post-modernist academic trends on "post-truth" politics aside (which were all the rage the first time he won back in 2016), it is clear that as a country the interpretation of facts is wildly different. For me -- somebody who's first premise is that social life is not so distinct from nature as to be immune from the same scientific inquiry we apply to the rest of nature -- it is really hard to fathom how such seemingly basic perceptions are so radically different. A correspondence theory of truth is philosophically quaint in some corners, but for most basic inquiry about "what" type questions, it serves pretty well.
So just to be crystal clear: I think Trump is a shyster and clown; I think he's mean spirited and narcissistic and lies at every turn, saying whatever he thinks a crowd wants to hear. He's demonstrably criminal, and found so by judges and a jury, and unfit on any moral dimension to serve as president. While reasonable people can disagree, his stated policy preferences are not mine and, I think, more damaging than good.
I also believe this belief is well justified empirically - based on my memory of his first term, reading/hearing the stuff he says, the long string of obvious untruths, reports of his own close-confidants and in-depth reporting and court cases. I think the things he says are patently self-contradictory and obviously bad.
And yet, so many others see something entirely different. I think there's an obvious range -- from hard-right proud-boy types who actually want the worst of what he says (I think a small minority), to others who see him as saving America from an evil left that "wants to destroy America," to those who champion him the same way they do a sports-team regardless of what he says. Plus a host of enabling "leaders" who support out of plain political self-interest (which then creates the future they fear and reinforces the need to support him). And a group of nominally undecideds who are not paying much attention and vote on whim?
So how do we explain radically different perceptions of the same things? Information exposure is clearly part of it. But are those bubbles so tight as to really not let anything else in? Feels like, in this case, access to the revelations about Trump's character are pretty easy to find, and explanations that turn on the people you disagree with being dolts always seem suspect. So I remain at an honest loss.
At a deeper level, more people need critical self reflection -- I love your "SMELL" test for that, and I fear that's not happening much.
Sorry for the long post...
I am a fan of long posts, Jim. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I don't think many of my readers know they're listening to a Duke professor!
A few thoughts...
* The Proud Boy types have their mirror images on the left. Neither political party seems capable of calling those extremists on their shit. That troubles me.
* John Ellis published a book, "Literature Lost," in 1997 that said something prescient. I'm paraphrasing, but my recollection is that he saw postmodern relativity as a mask for extremely didactic agendas. That is, there was a false unity among those leveraging deconstruction theory to destabilize power structures, and that once those structures collapsed there would be fierce competition between identity groups rather than the solidarity they claimed. I think that's mostly held true. I am appalled by Christopher Rufo's vision of what higher ed should be and puzzled by the relatively recent infatuation with the liberal arts among conservatives. But I'm equally aghast at arguments for decolonizing the university that frame writing conventions (the scholarly method itself) as expressions of white supremacy.
* I've been listening to people who I think of as thoughtful and smart who are Trump supporters. Some of their claims sound like conspiracy theories to me, but a lot of them just want to be left alone to do their jobs. They are tired of oil/gas being labeled as evil, they don't like being scolded for private beliefs, they want to work hard and build things they can be proud of. I don't know why Trump is necessarily their standard-bearer, but they seem to feel that he expresses things they feel that no one else can get away with saying. And they do have a point about how his statements get carved up and framed in inaccurate ways, such as the Liz Cheney reference. But some of these people are just voting on a feeling, too, not on any facts, and that's part of what I was trying to write about today.
* It should matter, for instance, that the economy is a big and slow-moving ship that can't be easily turned around, and that nearly everyone inherits some mess or benefit from their predecessor. But I think Chris Murphy is right that people aren't really placing faith in Trump, they are voting from a more visceral place. And liberals have to own their responsibility in pushing people into that corner.
* What I've come to realize is that there is virtually no news source that I really trust. The business model has so thoroughly come to imitate Murdoch's for Fox that the profit motive trumps truthtelling. MSNBC is the most ridiculous example on the left. But even NPR has been exposed for pushing conservatives away, explicitly leaning into a certain ideological slant. There was no hint -- almost none -- of what was to come in the coverage I followed on NPR and the NY Times. So those bubbles might be much tighter than we've thought or than we'd like to believe.
I do plan to write on the scholarly method in an upcoming post, because there is a new kind of relativity afoot. It's not postmodernism, it's more like that Hutchinson's immediate revelation. "I'm no expert, but I can only share my opinion..." "Who is the judge of what is true anymore?" We have destroyed nearly every structure for curating knowledge. This is hurting higher ed, but it is having devastating consequences in the public sphere, because many people are living with a double standard. They don't want their surgeon or bridge engineers sharing "opinions," but they're more than willing to question other kinds of expertise.
Scholarship is supposed to be built on critical reflection, a check on hunches and hypotheses, and a source of common knowledge, even if some subjects remain intractably debatable. I'm not sure anyone is waiting to hear any of this from me. I am a kind of ridiculous caricature of authority now as a 49-yr-old emeritus professor. But I'll still add my brick to the wall.
Good points; and yes - the left has clear culpability / mirror on much of this as well. For that, it is not surprising that the left has alienated many - and rejecting that is sensible and not problematic. It is precisely the choice of this particular standard bearer that's so befuddling (to me).
Look forward to hearing your thoughts on scholarly method. I like Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy has some nice recourses on the question of scientific authority that I like: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-knowledge-social/ and https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/ .
"It is precisely the choice of this particular standard bearer that's so befuddling (to me)." This probably requires an explanation by other experts. I wonder if some of it has to do with the perception of other GOP leaders as being elites in the same way that Democrats are perceived. George W Bush was someone that the average guy wanted to get a beer with; Trump's coarseness conveys a similar affect, even though both are elites. There may not be a rational explanation. I could understand my pious grandparents voting for Reagan, because he kept up a respectable front. I could not understand how the people who taught me so much of what I knew about character and respect could have supported him. Behavior that would get a child expelled from school, as another reader put it, does not belong at the top of national leadership.
I am reminded of my debater son, who is a pretty conservative right-winger, but who still have several friends from high school who are liberals. They all get along, and tease each other about their beliefs. Anyhow, it used to just irritate the heck out of my son when he would win a debate when he argued the side he disagreed with. On the other hand, in college he had an extremely liberal professor, but would answer each exam question something like "Here's the point of view we learned in class (etc.) And here's the opposing view, however. He did get an "A".
I would have loved teaching your son. What a clever way of framing his response. Not every teacher welcomes that, but I surely would have.
Tiny Rhode Island has always been a harbor for contrary thinkers. Put together, their voices ring like a discordant free jazz composition, but if you listen carefully your hear jewels among the riffs.
Yes -- that, too, is America.
One thing I did this weekend was pull out one of my books on American history... Still not exactly sure why, but I think to understand the context for today's current environment. Maybe not the best book but it was A True History of the United States by Sjursen. I had bought it awhile ago but hadn't cracked it open. Started with the "founding" and some of it was eye opening. The discussion on the "City On the Hill" self-given mandate in particular gave me a different take on the American mythology. Poked some holes I knew were there but added a few tears. I work in Roxbury, MA (basically Boston) down the hill from the First Church in Roxbury where the (in)famous John Eliot preached. He and one of the founders James Morgan are part of my family tree. I delved into the history of both individuals a few years ago, finding an association of Morgan family members in CT. The mythology about how amazing these people were runs deep and blinds people to searching for other narratives to get a fuller picture. I'm a fuller picture kind of person so I appreciate your post! That was my main point of this note but I wanted to tell you why I appreciated it instead of just leaving a one liner!
How interesting, Emily! Big picture people are my kind of people :). It is galling to me how many politicians think they need to invoke the Shining City trope. I think that started with Reagan, but Harris did it in one of her speeches, too. The reality was that the City on the Hill was a theocracy with an extremely rigid border. People were banished from it frequently and it required strict conformity. Nothing like the democratic standard-bearer that people think they are referencing now.
But in a way the Puritans also fell prey to "it's the economy, stupid." William Bradford laments, near the end of his lengthy "Of Plymouth Plantation" that prosperity killed their spiritual community. So even then people cared more about their pocketbooks than about any unifying narrative or purpose.
My own feeling is that the more secular founding is the real inspiration and that any greatness we can claim comes from collective efforts like that. But there haven't been many truly unified chapters in American history. I've thought about that quite a lot while visiting Czechia, where part of my family is from. The sad truth is that nations with a strong sense of kinship and unity often have a history of oppression or occupation. That, too, was the galvanizing principle for the American Founders. But perhaps that's a story for another time!
A fact of human nature is that humans are governed largely by their feelings (see, e.g., the work of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt; also millennia of art and literature). Liberals have been appealing mostly to the feelings of moralistic technocrats over the last decade or so. It would be as if your doctor started lecturing you about the latest trends in medical school curricula instead of addressing your feelings about your cancer diagnosis. Even if the doctor was factually correct, you'd look for a different doctor. Maybe even a quack.
That's essentially what the American electorate just did. Part of an effective response will be remembering, like a good physician, to build solid emotional relationships with fellow human beings. Empty BS like identity politics actively sabotages that effort. Kamala tried to disown that stuff, but the GOP reminded the public, successfully, that it still forms the soul of the Democratic Party base. It shouldn't.
Smart discourse, Ed. I know that feelings produce defensive reactions when facts don't fit, and this has particularly complicated progress on climate. But the tactics used by activists like DiAngelo and Kendi are spectacularly good at triggering the same response.
Your doctor metaphor is a good one, and it reminds me of my dissertation topic. I set out to explain how doctors could have been so thoroughly vilified in nineteenth-century American literature and then heroized in early twentieth-century novels. Roger Chillingworth is a terrifying figure in "The Scarlet Letter," largely because he reflects Hawthorne's fears of scientific medicine. Lewis's Martin Arrowsmith is almost an unthinkable reversal of those tropes. Oliver Wendell Holmes's public intellectualism helped bridge that gap between a fearful public and scientific physicians. Long way around of agreeing with you that there has to be an ongoing conversation with the public. Takes a long time to rebuild that trust when it's been lost.
Where I'm less optimistic than you is about the infrastructure beneath the public conversation. I'm still mulling this, but I think the rise of activist scholars and the corporatization of the university have both conspired to break peer review. If you don't have a stable system of curating knowledge, where real experts vet one another, then you're still selling snake oil. We once had a mostly intact science-based, evidence-based, rational approach to history, climate, and education. That's been lost. It's a decades-long project to rebuild.
Sigh. I don't know if I'm optimistic, really. The way you put it here does give one pause.
Good essay Josh. You use historical references to pose unanswerable questions about today.
I go slowly from my brain down to my heart to tell me what is true. It may not be facts I seek but rather what brings me peace. For my own heart is one of the few things I can trust.🙏❤️
Thanks for reading, brother. I agree with you in the realm of relationships and other more private realms. What I'm writing about here is more about public claims and judgments about reality that affect others or the common systems we inhabit. I don't trust my heart about the bridges I drive over or the surgeon that cuts me open.
Oh but you must—it’s all in God’s hands anyway. Despite all the best research, and trust in the “facts,” and stressing about it you can manage in advance, you control zero of the outcome. 🙏
This was a very interesting piece. The first one I've read on my phone, I think, and it read better than on my computer, for some reason. Anyhow, I'm not the philosopher, etc. that y'all are, but I am a church-goer (RC). When I taught at UNO, the colleague in the next office was a staunch Lutheran. I don't remember how we got on the topic, but she made the statement that your good works have nothing to do with your salvation; it was all the work of Jesus. I don't think I answered back, but thought about it. Yes, I agree, no salvation without Jesus. But yet, somewhere in the Bible it says, "By their works you shall know them." And my what-if mentality said, "Yeah, but what if someone is saved, and they say that they can do whatever mischief they want, because the Lord saved them, but I'm not quite sure that's what God would expect of us."
Anyhow, it sure looks like those who were against Anne Hutchinson were dreaming up logic based on their desired manipulations, rather than on prayerful consideration of what they heard in the word of God. At least they didn't burn her at the stake or hang her.
Thank you, Mary. I suppose some of these debates are as old as Protestantism itself. Glad you found it interesting :)
I am not a faithful consumer of politics or media as it is challenging to sort through the talking heads of various sources. I used to enjoy the CBS Morning Show's "Your World in 90 seconds" as it read through the top headlines; that was all I felt I needed to be aware of current events. As I believe there are so few things that boil down to hard truths or solid evidence of fact.
Statistics may provide evidence that may prove one hypothesis over another, but data collection and method of analysis still leaves room for interpretation. There are anomalies in science, our human anatomy lab had nine cadavers demonstrating that even our basic biology has variations and adaptations. Historical events are facts, but the how and the why are left open to perspective of the author. Was Anne Hutchinson guilty of sedition or was she similar to Jesus in calling out the pharisees for misleading their people, but since she is a woman, she was not able to have the impact that the Son of God had? Women have been screwed since Genesis and the Creation story; many give no thought that indigenous people across many cultures hold women with a higher regard that approaches more gender equality than Christians. Race continues to divide us, one example being women rallying on the basis of sex, however the cry isn't always as loud and clear when the basis of skin color is added.
I may tend to agree with your wise student that there are different sides to a republic each essential for its progress, positive and negative, yin and yang; I believe it is important to take them all in and decide what our own truths shall be. Where do we want to fall as history takes shape? Unfortunately, I think you are correct that so many are only hearing one side of the tale, their preferred side, which locks them into judge or defendant. The algorithms that continue to feed us our narrow perspective are not allowing for a spark of compassion for others nor the critical thinking skills that allow for thought and growth.
Thank you, Traci. I recognize some element of risk in considering the ambiguity in Hutchinson's case, given that so many women are hurting right now, feeling devalued and more invisible than ever. I do take some pains to show how both Hutchinson and Winthrop are two sides of the same coin. Where the line between conscientious objector and cult leader falls I'm not sure. But I find each of them to be cautionary tales in their own way. There's nothing reassuring to be found in the colonial period, in my view, even though some conservatives trace their vision for America to those 17th-century religious strongholds.
This may be too theoretical, but I have been thinking about these things in comparison to the body's self-regulation through homeostasis. There is room for adaptation and flux within certain parameters for health. Never perfect balance, more like a dynamic equilibrium. But push the body too far outside those boundaries of health, and the consequences are swift and severe.
I think we've destroyed most of the boundaries we once relied upon to curate knowledge, and so there's no surprise in our body politic suffering as a result. Universities are in freefall still, though they were once the bulwarks against industry abuses and lazy conventional thought. As I said in response to Jim, the business model for news media has thoroughly discredited it as a source of reliable fact. The market seems to dictate everything, but the market is fickle and not interested in humanitarian results.
There are times when I think I'm stating the problem with no clear answer, other than a return to some of what we've lost. But the prospect of such a return feels positively quaint. Nothing changed in New England until that model got pushed to a point of unacceptable extremism during the Salem trials. People decided then that they wanted better models for government and justice, and not long after that we got the separation of church and state and other pillars of freedom. I don't like to write anything off as lost, but sometimes institutions have to crumble to be rebuilt. That seems to be where we are.
The business model has discredited many institutions where it had no business being applied-- news media, healthcare, higher education. The quest for knowledge and fact seems largely outplayed by the moment's viral video or recent extreme. But we all have the ability to use the POWER button on our devices and read or talk to someone with a perspective that differs from our own. However, many don't seem to have the motivation, preferring to keep their blinders on.
With regards to the human body, I may have to politely disagree; the body is amazingly tolerant of all the crap we put in it. That is how a man can fill his diet with fast food for his entire life and not exercise and still "grow-up" to become President without any swift or severe consequences;)
I am hopeful that we aren't on the "precipice of hell", but I can agree that sometimes rock bottom is essential for stimulating actual change.
My "BS" test for authority figures is how they use science. If they say things such as there are two genders or masks don't work when there is plenty of evidence contrary, I write off most of what they say.
Is there really such little debate among scientists about gender? Public health feels like a different arena. Unfortunately, we're rolling back many of the gains that we saw from vaccines, sanitation, and other preventative measures. I know the cost of this firsthand, since I was not vaccinated against whooping cough and got it in college (it is awful).
I will spare everyone the lengthy aside, but this question of how much the public trusts science is actually the point of my dissertation. Scientific medicine was deeply distrusted until Oliver Wendell Holmes and other public intellectuals made a persuasive case for it. I don't think the need for making that case, and doing so in a way that doesn't write anyone off, ever goes away. People feared physicians because they were robbing graves to study anatomy. It took some time realize why autopsies mattered so much. But we don't make that case once and for all. It needs to be updated, to grow with the times.
Interesting! There isn't much debate about it among scientists but of course the public will only work from their experience. This has recently been exploited. And the idea of sewing doubt about science these days came from companies seeing the tobacco industry called out for their role in cancer. It began in the 1960s and accelerated in the 1980s and here we are today. I should add that my father-in-law hated and feared doctors. Some came from John Birch Society materials. He died from skin cancer that could have been treated if he had gone to a physician earlier. Instead, he treated it himself with some sort of "cancer zapper".
What an interesting meditation--and history of Anne Hutchinson and her trial. Thank you for this!
I'm not trying to be too radical skeptic here, but....how do we know anything? How do we know what these facts are that I should put above my feelings? It's not like I discovered how gravity works, or do gravity experiments myself. Even if I were, it's not like I developed the scientific method. All that we know, we know from a set of feelings. This seems to work pretty okay when most of these are communally shared. When Anne Hutchinson or I have a special insight that can't be shared with anyone else, that can spell trouble for the whole shared truth of a community. I don't want to take his side here, but perhaps that's what Winthrop is getting at.
I think the modern algorithm-driven internet world exacerbates this by putting us in bubbles of like-minded people, allowing individuals both the thrill of having a unique felt insight, and the fact support of that insight being believed by an apparent community. Another thing that worsens this epistemology trap is that it's virtual: There's nothing more persuasive that you might be wrong than the hard slap of physical reality.
It's not that we're all immune to algorithm bubbles on my idyllic island, but I do think we're more resistant to some of these shared-truth undermining effects because we live closer to nature and have a shared physical reality. Saba folks have opinions on the US presidential election, too, and some disagreements are pretty deep, and point to different sets of facts. But the worst abstract argument can get stopped with a redirect to "good rain we had last night"--because we all have the shared physical experience of rain, and the shared practical concern of using cistern water.
In general, I think that a lot of US culture is increasingly divorced from these lived physical realities, especially among wealthier and more urban/suburban populations. This relegates "facts" to what my shared-beliefs community knows off of the internet, with no way to arbitrate between my community's facts and those of the contrary community. That makes it easy for me to think that my team has facts and the other team has feelings, with increasingly less way of finding common ground.
Hopefully you don't hear any defense of Winthrop here. As I say in one of the footnotes, the salient difference between them was that he had more followers. I don't see much good to come from a return to colonial thinking.
Shared experiences of the physical world are stabilizing, as you say. But my parents know firsthand how climate change has altered the boreal forest where they live -- and dried up the mountain spring that they relied on for decades for gravity-fed drinking water. And they voted for Trump. I still think that food traditions -- gardening, farming, canning -- provide a point of common ground, and I embrace those as conversation starters with my family.
I'll say more about this in the coming weeks, but your point about communally shared ideas is spot on. I'll not rehash everything I said in reply to Traci, but I think there have to be some parameters for reliable discourse within which reasonable people can disagree. Once those guardrails are lost, everyone's offering opinions rather than expertise. And we're now in a place where experts are not valued, not about things like history, so -- as I wrote about "Babbitt" -- we shall have to learn some of those lessons again.
We shouldn't have to rediscover gravity all over again, should we? Science isn't perfect, but it's like our union, capable of being made "more perfect" with better information. The scientific method set the standard for other forms of scholarship, including the method I learned as a literary scholar. But that's not the core of what universities teach now. Peer review is broken. I really do think we have a crisis of credibility in all quarters. And I'm trying really hard not to be so negative all the time!
Good job working at not being negative. It’s really hard sometimes!
To clarify, I’m not saying that we as humans need to re-prove gravity all the time. I’m saying that I, personally, never proved it at all. I just accept that gravity is as physicists explain it, just like I do with meteorologists for hurricanes, or mechanics for how my car should be repaired. We live in a world of facts that were established by the work of others, and that we just accept because that is what one does. Science does get closer to perfect, in my opinion, and I can even be a tiny part of that. But almost all of my truth is based on trusting others—indeed, it’s impossible for me to live my life and have that not be the case.
And what that shows is that we mainly do share the same foundation for what we think is true, even if a gulf in political facts seems unbridgeably large. And whenever I see that kind of overlap in fundamental beliefs it gives me a lot of hope.
"But almost all of my truth is based on trusting others—indeed, it’s impossible for me to live my life and have that not be the case." Exactly -- well said. This is part of what we have lost.
I believe that the overlap of fundamental beliefs is the root of civility, as well. It is what once allowed people to work across the aisle and genuinely respect one another. The colonial mindset breeds binaries that become insuperable.
I have a friend who is a poet who wrote a long narrative poem about Anne Hutchinson. Her name is Penelope Scambley Schott. My memory is that it was very good. You might like to check it out.
It won a prize! This is from Wikipedea - She received the 2008 Oregon Book Award in poetry for "A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth"
Thanks! Looks interesting. I'm wondering now if Penelope's premise is more or less what I was taught: that this was more or less "good trouble." My difficulty now is that I can't see that Hutchinson cared overly much for the commonwealth. It's hard to know sometimes what the difference is between a conscientious objector and a cult leader. If she'd been fighting for abolition or something, maybe I'd feel differently, but I now see that exchange between Winthrop and Hutchinson as essentially two peas in a pod with different power platforms. I'm not really that sympathetic to either.
I can't remember any more. I just remember enjoying the poem! I will send her your post (she subscribes to mine).
What a treat. I hope she is not too annoyed. I lost a subscriber today because, I suppose, I did not hew closely enough to the standard line about Hutchinson as a non-conforming icon.
In my view, we lose subscribers because people subscribe to too many things and they suddenly notice that we are not really what they want, so they unsubscribe. Just a hypothesis. BTW, I owe you an email and will get to it. Things have been a bit hectic recently.
Smart view 😊