“We don’t collect news to inform us. We collect news to affirm us.”
– Frank Lutz, Republican pollster
Frank’s observation isn’t new, of course. Centuries ago, Goethe said “each see in the world what is present in their heart.” But it’s been a minority point of view until recently. The traditional model of truth held that true beliefs and true statements must actually correspond to how they relate to the world and whether they accurately describe that world. Accurate maps were the goal and a scout type mentality the norm. Beliefs had to be justified (see previous blog post) and narrow was the path to that justification.
But then the world shifted and a new truth sheriff rode into town. The world, they said, was too complicated. Ordinary people didn’t have the time to sort through flawed journalism and find the truth. People needed a shortcut, a more pragmatic approach to truth. They said: find a trusted authority or just shoehorn into existing beliefs. Coherence is the goal, with trust leading the way.
Lippman Dewey Debate
These two worldviews held a famous showdown at truth’s corral nearly a century ago. On the one side was Walter Lippman who saw the complexity of knowledge, flaws in the media, and the penchant for stereotypes to be insurmountable. Instead, he asserted that “What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge but on pictures made by himself or given to him.”
Hence, one’s beliefs and actions arose from one’s values, said Lippman: “for the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define and then see.” We then naturally pick and choose our facts so that “what is alien will be rejected, what is different will fall upon unseeing eyes…sometimes consciously, more often without knowing it, we are impressed by those facts which fit our philosophy.”
On the other side was John Dewey who sided with centuries of tradition by asserting the power of reason and human observation to sort out complexities in facts and arguments. He placed his faith in the power of process, that through civil and rational discourse, our posteriors could be aligned, bringing consensus through shared collective values.
Note that both approaches depend upon trust. Either in the applicability of a prior set of propositions often expressed through the views of a trusted ally, or in the achievability of objective judgment, where reality is knowable through an unprejudiced analysis of facts. Both approaches involve judgement: one about our intuitions and preexisting beliefs and the other about the trustworthiness of evidence. And both approaches involve choice: likeminded people or facts.
Its hard work making decisions by weighing valid evidence, expert judgement, and accepted observations. It’s much easier to rely upon trusted friends or authorities, especially given the explosion of information which makes discernment all the more difficult when traditional authorities are lacking. With the media, institutions, and other long-standing guardrails of truth now presumed to be in error, truth becomes subjective and facts lose their mooring. Instant judgements then take over arising from woven fabric of partisan attachments, social identities and familial ties.
The Making of a Soldier
Phillip Tetlock calls this process of instant judgements intuitive epistemology where our intuitions determine what’s true. We know by how we feel and those feelings are an outcome of our prior values and sensibilities. As John Zaller once said, “every opinion is a marriage of information and predisposition” with our predispositions driving any conclusion about that information causing “the fragmentation of society into particularisms that command more loyalty than the center.” Translation: we live in a post truth world, something the Oxford English Dictionary declared in 2016 given the triumph of emotion and personal belief over objective facts.
The world around us exerts a powerful influence. Friends, trusted information sources, and political associations all rub off on us. They exert influence on our identity, values, and beliefs creating a particular worldview that serves as a foundation for what we know. And the more we’re connected to them, the more our viewpoints become aligned and our predispositions formed.
Marietta and Barker in a remarkable book called “One Nation, Two Realities” show through an integrated set of studies how our beliefs arise from these cultural associations. Our differences of beliefs reflect differences in values rather than a difference in understandings or knowledge. We do this by projecting values onto our perception of facts and then encapsulate them through “critical thinking.” Education provides no corrective nor does fact checking make a difference. The outcome is a realignment in authority from a trust in traditional knowledge-generating institutions to a trust in any personal knowledge consistent with prior beliefs.
We exchange “what is” for “what it ought to be” in our establishment of facts, from what we observe to what we want to see. Our cognitive biases reinforce this exchange by giving selective attention and then selective acceptance to any evidence or arguments supporting our priors while reserving our skepticism to any evidence which challenges our priors. At the back end of this process, a one-sided remembrance sharpens this selectively while the repeated telling of these selectively-driven stories sharpens it again.
Combining Galef and Tetlock’s language, we are intuitive politicians, scout-like within our groups, with a goal of building accurate maps. But our maps are less about truth than about the dynamics of our group so we can best advance our reputation and approval like soldiers. Our desire to fit in creates a powerful incentive to conform as we find it more important to be accepted than correct.
We become principled theologians where we instinctively protect sacred values from compromise or competing beliefs. William James again, “the greatest empiricists among us are only empiricists on reflection; when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like popes.” It turns us into intuitive prosecutors, on the lookout for norm violators as we set boundaries of acceptable thinking. We easily assign blame and assess penalties, seeing such prosecution as a virtuous upholding of the “social order.”
The world shrinks down into just two dimensions: us and them. Populism sets in, pitting us as “we the people” against our judgement of a corrupt and self-serving “elite.” A dichotomous worldview is formed defined by “we the good,” and “they the enemy.” Through such a highly divisive lens the world is seen, judged, and convicted. It opens the door to conspiracy theories and extreme motivated reasoning through a play on people’s fears. And with historic institutions of societal truth, like experts, the media, or judiciary now the enemy of “the good,” it’s no wonder our societal foundations are failing.
Final Thoughts
Values are a two-edged sword. They act as an internal compass, providing direction in our lives. They serve as beacons or lighthouses, to help us determine right from wrong. They can guide us toward civic virtue, mindful of what Martin Luther King once said: “This is a moral universe. It hinges on moral foundations. If we are to make of this a better world, we’ve got to go back and rediscover that precious values that we’ve left behind.”
But watch out for when our intuitive prosecutor kicks in, on the prowl for those violating our moral code. Especially when amplified through a culture war fueled by media-driven outrage where malice and distain become the norm. It creates a binary world that turns us into soldiers with the goal of defending our team’s beliefs. And when you see yourself in a dualistic fight with the unholy Forces of Darkness, the first causality of that war is truth and the second causality our heart. As James KA Smith once said: “It’s because our loves are informed by what we are devoted to and our devotions are drawn to the battle.”
I usually resist a “both sides” viewpoint as nuance matters and the world is seldom binary. But our intuitive epistemology is truly a “both sides” phenomena and a growth area in recent years with the rise of cancel culture on both the left and right as well as within the Christian faith community. Time has vindicated Lippmann’s side in the debate and I’ll give him the last word. For he clearly saw this post-factual world coming and feared it because of its logical outcome of intense polarization. His statement 100 years ago when compared to our present time is eerily prescient: “He who denies either my moral judgments or my version of the facts is to me perverse, alien, dangerous.”