The Limits of Knowing in MAGA-land

I’m thinking a lot these days about knowledge and its limits. Of course, this has always been a problem, and it will always be a problem. Scientists and philosophers and theologians and artists have wrangled forever over the problems of knowing.

But it seems to be a heightened problem these days, because political, social, religious and cultural rifts mean that there are very few things that are widely agreed upon. And even moreso because knowledge has become so weaponized that even when it isn’t, there is suspicion that it is. There is hardly anything of importance that you can assert nowadays that won’t be challenged if you say it loudly and beyond your immediate circle.

When I think about it, the splintering of what used to be called “common knowledge” into partisan factoids isn’t entirely without a bright side. Because there is always some part of common knowledge that is false. And it’s so much harder to challenge established lies when they are uniformly agreed upon. To cite what may be the most obvious example, two hundred years ago (Do I hear a hundred? Do I hear fifty? Do I hear twenty?) it was common knowledge that women simply weren’t equipped to reason, to problem-solve or to lead like men were. Imagine trying to argue otherwise in America in 1820. And this, despite the fact that everyone must have known at least a few really intelligent, forceful, dynamic women and a few really stupid, weak and ineffectual men.

These days, because of the fracturing of the monolith of truth – and the ethics of free speech and of multiculturalism play a role in this – one can probably find fellow travelers and have some of the comfort of numbers, no matter what idiotic nonsense one believes, even that the Earth is flat. So this is one of those two-sided coins, both a blessing and a curse.

A piece of the problem is that having the right answers doesn’t necessarily correspond to intelligence. All sides of just about any good argument are going to have intelligent proponents as well as its fools. Which means that there will be plenty of circumstances in which an idiot, representing the truth, with horrible arguments, flawed evidence and no skill at presenting them, will face off against a genius who represents the falsehood, but armed with great arguments, overwhelming data and the gift of eloquence. The ‘winner’ of the argument will never be in doubt. And yet….

It's obvious that there were plenty of early adapters of the notions that the Earth is round, that germs exist, that mechanical flight is possible, that Blacks are equal to Whites, etc. who weren’t equipped to argue these propositions very effectively, and who had their metaphorical asses handed to them on platters when they tried to argue these positions against the most highly educated and eloquent members of their societies. And when they were up against the authority of the status quo, many of them had their asses handed to them literally!

So can we be so secure and smug when the experts align and tell us that something is so? There may be a consensus on the point now, but in 1960, there sure wasn’t a consensus that global warming was real.  It probably seemed a pretty cuckoo notion at the time. I wonder what the consensus will be about UFO’s and ESP in another hundred years?

But coming back to today, how do we convince anyone of anything anymore?

I’ve had to realize that despite my very strong feelings about quite a few things – such as, that Trump is a witless Fool! - there is hardly a single fact about anything outside of my immediate world that I can verify directly through my own experience and research. That includes COVID-19, the Federal budget, whether eating meat is healthy, if the people of Afghanistan want a continued US presence, and whether that exercise machine guaranteed to “melt off the pounds” really work. I don’t personally have the facts or the experience of any of these things. 

Yes, I could research it all, but even then I’d have to trust my sources (Wikipedia, anyone?). And I could actually buy the exercise machine and try it out. Then, I would know!

But I’m not going to buy the exercise machine. Why not? Because though the occasional risky purchase has met my expectations (yes, I admit to buying the odd such ‘miracle’ gadget/herb/self-improvement program over the years) most of them have disappointed. And I’ll never have the time or the money to invest in everything I’d like to believe is legit, even if I wanted to. And I’m also not going to research all of the dozens of questions that arise everyday about events and conditions around the world, or right under my nose. Because I’m lazy, I don’t like doing research. And there would never be enough time anyway.

And so, I’m left to trusting my sources. But because I’m lazy and don’t like to do research, I’ll choose most of my sources with very little vetting. I’ll accept that the New York Times got it right because…well because of its impressive appearance, and the intellectual quality of the writing, and because it’s cited by other sources I respect (for the same reasons) and… out of habit. And because the sum total of what I know and accept and believe supports the world I live in and – to a large extent – the stability and ease of my life. Because, when we no longer know, accept and believe the common knowledge truths in our lives, it presents us with huge challenges. Because then – if we pretend to any integrity – we have to challenge and resist and work for change.

One of the very best things about having been born Black in America is that it provided me with a constant experience of dissonance which served as an antidote to this easy belief and acceptance that I refer to. It was clear to me from childhood – as it must be, overwhelmingly, to most minorities around the world – that the common knowledge was very flawed, that my schools, the New York Times, and the President all presented very skewed and partial realities, at best. At worst, they presented outright lies and deceptions and fabrications.

Of course, as a child, I was in no position to become a revolutionary – not then, anyway. And so I learned that path of compromise that most of us learn (Most who don't wind up dead, incarcerated or psychotic). How much of the lie do we accept, simply to be able to get on and get along. And what personal lines do we draw and hope never to cross.

I didn’t expect this little piece of writing to get anywhere near this deep. What started me on this progression is the problem of truth in Trump’s America. Because I believe that one of the greatest misdeeds of Trump is that he’s put America as a whole into this position of mistrusting common knowledge. From the start, he has nudged the entire country toward distrust of the media, of the judiciary, of the government as a whole, and of science. He’s made us all, on both sides of the Red State – Blue State divide, incredibly suspicious of what we read and see and hear, except what comes from our personally trusted sources.

How can I say this is such a bad thing, when in this essay I’ve been attacking the sanctity of the known, the accepted, the believed? Well, it isn’t entirely a bad thing. Americans as a whole could stand to be more cynical and less gullible about many things - including how great America is. What I so detest about Trump is that he’s nourished this cynicism in support of such a narrow and short-term self interest, and that there is no morality behind it, and that he doesn’t seem in the least concerned about the costs. Even the Black and Native American revolutionaries of the past, after all, despite being full of bitterness about how their people had been oppressed and degraded, maintained some awareness of the cost – to their own people and others – of tearing it all down. They were driven by concern for more than themselves. Many of them recognized – despite the gross hypocrisy of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – that they contained values that were capable of more than what had so-far been achieved, and they looked toward a future of betterment in which they knew Community would be essential.

I’ve rambled here, and I’m rambling again. Where I’m coming from is my despair about the state of the United States and what it’s allowing itself to become. I despair over the difficulty in knowing, naming and championing the truth, in a way that isn’t just about getting what we want. I detest Trump, but it’s his followers who frustrate me. There will always be fools, but fools don’t have to have followers. And I wonder why the hordes in their MAGA hats cannot see what is so plain. (And yes, I must remind myself that, to at least some of them, they hold truths that I refuse to see!) Is it possible in America anymore to identify truths that no side can deny, and to build from there?