Make Bullshit Embarrassing Again: Toward Enlightenment 2.0

A liberal stance on misinformation

(Audio version here)

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A Tragedy That Tests the Freedom To be Wrong

Paloma Shemirani, the 23-year-old daughter of conspiracy theorist, Kate Shemirani, died after declining medical treatment for a cancer doctors believed she had 80% chance of surviving. Recently, Coroner Catherine Wood ruled that Paloma’s mother had influenced her to reject chemotherapy in favour of juices and coffee enemas which ultimately led to her death. Wood called Mrs. Shemirani’s care of her daughter “incomprehensible but not unlawful killing.” Paloma’s brothers, Gabriel and Sebastian, have responded angrily, testifying that their mother was entirely to blame for their sister’s death. The brothers had been so concerned for their sister that Gabriel had started a legal case to try to force an assessment of her treatment options. .

The brothers’ fight for their sister is over, but they remain dedicated to raising awareness of the risks to the children, including adult children, of conspiracy theorists. Sebastian said,” My sister has passed away as a direct consequence of my mum’s actions and beliefs, and I don’t want anyone else to go through the same pain or loss that I have.” For Gabriel, education is key. He describes having grown up being taught bizarre beliefs including that 9/11 was an inside job and the royal family are shape-shifting lizards as true. He came to question these when he entered secondary school and such claims were challenged.

This deeply distressing case speaks to a consistent concern for liberals who care about both truth and freedom. These two values can come into conflict. Central to liberalism is protecting the freedom to be wrong. This is essential both as an individual liberty and as a practical safeguard against giving any dominant orthodoxy the power to define truth for everybody. Academic freedom, scientific discovery and the freedom of everyday people to discuss and debate even controversial and seemingly outlandish ideas depend upon our willingness to defend the freedom to be wrong. Paradoxically, this protects our ability to obtain truth. When it is those in power who are wrong but insisting that it is people dissenting for good reason who are spreading misinformation, protecting the freedom to be wrong enables those who are actually right to convince others of this and facilitate correction.

Yet allowing people to be wrong can have harmful, even fatal, consequences. The coroner was right, I think, to hold Mrs. Shemirani morally but not legally responsible for the influence she exerted over her adult daughter. Paloma’s death was tragic and unnecessary. She appears to have been psychologically vulnerable and easily influenced by her mother. Nevertheless, she was an adult with mental capacity to make her own decisions, and beyond ensuring she was fully informed, little more could ethically have been done in the way of intervention. Her brothers’ anger is understandable and the direct line they draw between their mother’s beliefs and their sister’s death seems undeniable. Yet, the standards to determine that someone lacks the mental capacity to make their own health decisions have to remain very high.

Truth and Freedom in Conflict?

How do we, liberals, reconcile potential conflicts between a commitment to truth and a commitment to freedom, particularly when untruths, if accepted as true, can lead directly to harm?

Defenders of individual freedom are typically very wary of the concept of ‘misinformation’ and especially of attempts to regulate or ban it for the good of society. It is not that we doubt that many truth claims presented as “information” are false, misleading and even dangerous, but that we cannot consent to allowing authorities to decide for us all what is true. It is all too easy for such power to be abused in the interests of ideological bias. This may not even be intentional. Confirmation bias makes us all prone to accept information that supports our existing beliefs and reject what challenges them. Even the most well-intentioned authority is not exempt from this.

History is replete with examples of people in authority banning and penalizing certain ideas on the grounds that they are not true and will lead the citizenry into harmful error. These were the grounds for coercing everybody into certain denominations of Christianity and persecuting Jews, Muslims, atheists and members of other denominations of Christianity. It was the reason that Galileo’s writings were banned and he was subjected to house arrest and forced to recant his accurate position that the Earth revolves around the sun under threat of torture.

But today’s heretics are rarely Galileos. Many who reject well-established truths are not brave empiricists but conspiracy theorists, partisan ideologues, or frightened, disillusioned people looking for certainty in confusion. Some are good-faith, well-informed researchers working rigorously on hypotheses that will ultimately turn out to be wrong and which they will accept to be wrong. A handful of people currently questioning things we currently hold to be true will turn out to be correct and provide valuable correction that will benefit us all. It is for them we must protect the right to question and challenge any truth claim at all, no matter how well-established it appears to be.

How do we tell the difference between these people? It must ultimately come down to their methods and their epistemology – their ‘ways of knowing’ - and how they determine what is true. All ways of knowing are not equal. In the case of Galileo, his empirical, scientific, observations of the movement of planets which led him to say that the Earth orbits the Sun came into conflict with the scriptural, faith-based claim of the Church authorities that the Sun orbits the Earth. This was a conflict between evidence-based epistemology and narrative-based epistemology. We now accept that the Earth orbits the Sun because historical intellectual developments, most significantly, Enlightenment empiricism and rationalism have led us to accept that ‘truth’ is ‘that which corresponds with reality’ and that reality can be best established by evidence.

This development has been hugely beneficial and resulted in the development of life-saving medications, increased longevity, radically decreased infant mortality and technologies that enable us to travel into space, communicate with people on the other side of the world instantly and access information on anything we should want to know about with the tap of our fingers. This does, however, come at a price. We can easily find ‘information’ tailored to our own biases and pre-existing beliefs and a community of people who share these beliefs and will tell us that we are right. We are seeing considerable incentive to return to favouring a narrative-based epistemology over an evidence-based one.

Why Humans Proliferate Bullshit

In Cynical Theories, James Lindsay and I wrote about the evolution of postmodern thought into current Critical Social Justice (woke) activism. Postmodernism is defined as a ‘skepticism towards metanarratives’ and a favouring of diverse, local mini-narratives specific to groups. It advocated paralogy of legitimation - multiple ways of knowing which could all be accepted as legitimate. It challenged science, reason and modernity itself.

Jim and I identified a postmodern knowledge principle - radical skepticism as to whether objective knowledge or truth is obtainable and a commitment to cultural constructivism and a postmodern political principle - a belief that society is formed of systems of power and hierarchies, which decide what can be known and how. That is, postmodernism is defined by a rejection of evidence-based approaches to establishing what is true and a commitment to believing that knowledge is a construct of power, and it is the powerful in society who get to decide what is true and that they do so in their own interests. This is textbook conspiratorial thinking.

This type of thinking is not limited to left-wing academic theories. When ‘post-truth’ became the word of the year in 2016, many commentators (including me) were quick to note the similarity of the right-wing ‘post-truth’ phenomenon to the left-wing postmodern phenomenon. Defined as a preference for emotionally-resonant narratives over objective truth, post-truthers were equally likely to be radically skeptical of objective truth and believe that knowledge is a construct of power and serves the interests of the powerful. Donald Trump was quickly dubbed America’s first postmodern president.

For Critical Social Justice activists, the “privileged” control truth; for populists, the “elites” do. Both attack Enlightenment rationalism from different directions. Both believe that science serves the powerful. And both fuel a return to narrative over evidence.

This development does not, of course, indicate that right-wing figures or even left-wing ones, necessarily, have been reading Lyotard, Foucault and Derrida. Rather, they share a Counter-Enlightenment ethos that has its roots in the least rational aspects of human psychology. Humans are very invested in knowing. It is, of course, highly beneficial to our thriving to know things. However, if that were the only purpose our drive to know served, we would all be natural empiricists, rationalists and scientists, striving to make sure our knowledge corresponds with reality as closely as possible. Instead of having an inner scientist, as Jonathan Haidt describes it, we have an inner lawyer or inner public relations firm. Knowledge to humans is intrinsically tied into our reputations and status within our group. Being able to conform to our group narratives has likely been much more important to our survival than being right.

Building our status and taking a leadership position within our groups is also tied to our relationship with knowledge. It carries social capital to be someone who knows and we are incentivised to compete with others for that position. It also brings a sense of security and control to feel one has a clear understanding of what is going on. When the group narrative is conspiratorial and not connected to reality, this can get harmful and dangerous very quickly. We saw this in the CSJ movement where adherents competed to find more and more things ‘problematic’ that had not previously been recognised as such leading to a rapidly increasing menu of utterances for which one could be cancelled. We see it in right-wing conspiracy theorists as they compete to be more radically sceptical of things held to be well-established to be true. A joke that exemplifies this attitude goes: “What’s the best way to win an argument with someone who says the moon landing was faked? Say “Wow, you still believe in the moon?”” This is the process by which ideological movements rapidly become increasingly unhinged and detached from reality.

How We Curb Bullshit Without Denying Freedom.

The only way for this competitive/status seeking drive within the realms of knowledge-production not to go insane is for it to be resolutely linked to reality and consequently to evidence-based epistemology. It requires for reputations to depend upon one’s truth claims being well-evidenced, well-reasoned and well…..true. While error is an inevitable part of knowledge-production and being honestly mistaken is no cause for shame and self-correction is particularly admirable, being wrong because one’s epistemology is geared around adherence to political ideology and tribal allegiances rather than correspondence with reality should indeed be shameful.

The development of the scientific method in which knowledge is always provisional and scientists form hypotheses and try to disprove them and also build their reputations by disproving other people’s has been highly productive. This system harnessed that competitive drive to spur the discovery of genuine knowledge that has been highly beneficial to our thriving and survival. When operating optimally, it requires participants to remain humble about their discoveries, to present evidence for them and to accept and respond to disconfirming evidence. This is manifestly absent in the postmodern left or post-truth right.

Producing knowledge through empirical rigour is hard work while spinning emotive stories is easy. There is a tendency now to accuse those pointing out this fact of “elitism” and “credentialism,” and there can be legitimate class concerns when truth-seeking institutions are dominated by those who have been able to access advanced degrees. The solution, however, is not to lower epistemic standards but to broaden access to good education. Truth cannot be democratized by redefining it as whatever people feel is true out of a sense of fairness or ‘equity.’

On a fundamental level, however, the issue of how we determine what is true is not limited to scientists, experts and intellectuals but one that affects us all. We all produce and consume knowledge in our daily lives and the way in which we go about doing this matters, both individually and culturally. It affects how we keep ourselves informed, how we decide to educate our children, how we make decisions for our material lives and relationships, how we understand the world around us and how we evaluate and select our political leaders. Making evaluations and forming conclusions based on evidence, reason and consistent principle serves us well in every domain. Doing so based on ideological narratives and tribal allegiances does not.

The surge of conspiratorial thinking across the political spectrum marks a weakening of our cultural commitment to evidence, reason and consistent principle and a reversion to narrative tribalism. WEIRD societies—Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic—have been exceptional precisely because they built norms that mitigated our tendency to factionalise into narrative-based tribes. They brought people with different ideas together to argue out their cases with a collaborative expectation that their arguments will be evidenced, reasoned and consistent and that failures to be so were undermining of credibility and ultimately disqualifying. We have never achieved ideal manifestations of this aim, but having this as an ideal has been incredibly productive. Losing this ideal to an extent where people feel confident to make demonstrably false truth claims, fallacious arguments and use inconsistent principles in the knowledge that this will not cost them the respect of their ideological tribe as long as their output upholds the narrative is deeply destructive.

The solution cannot be censorship. It not only gives authorities the power to decide what counts as misinformation which is highly vulnerable to ideological bias. Banning misinformation glamorises it and causes ideological tribes to place more confidence in it, bonding together more tightly over the conspiratorial belief that they are the Holders of the Truth They Don’t Want You To Know.

Rather than trying to control what people may think, we desperately need a cultural revolution on how to think. We need, in short, a second Enlightenment. We need a significant mass of people to become so sick of the ubiquitous bullshit coming from all sides that we have a cultural shift towards an increased demand for rigorous methods of research among experts and respect for critical thinking among our peers. We need increased intolerance of emotionally resonant narratives being spun by our political leaders and experts, and for indulging in irrational and conspiratorial thinking to lose us respect among our peers.

Ideally, we need this to happen quickly before we all die of a plague while being cancelled for using transphobic lego.

The Fight Against Institutional Bullshit

Yet again, the pressing issue facing us is not one of partisan politics. It one of people who care about what is true, what is well-reasoned and what protects individual freedom versus those who seek to make reality conform to their ideological narrative, engage in fallacious reasoning and inconsistent principles to achieve this goal and enforce their own beliefs on everybody else.

We must acknowledge that experts and institutions have often failed. The ideological bias of academia, especially during Covid, when public health rules bent for political protest, has badly damaged trust. It is not unreasonable for people to wonder what else they are being misled about. Such inconsistencies feed the conspiratorial mindset and undermine confidence in legitimate science, worsening problems like vaccine hesitancy.

We need experts who hold themselves and one another to high epistemic standards. Universities and research institutions must recommit to academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, and falsifiability. Disciplines that reject these, particularly those rooted in postmodern theory and power analysis, should be free to exist but recognized for what they are: ideological frameworks, not knowledge.

The postmodern left has done real damage to epistemic trust within institutions, but the post-truth right is culpable in its own domains. It is bizarre that so many on the right who have become skeptical of expertise seem to have forgotten that politicians are meant to be experts in governance, whose claims must be evidence-based and verifiable. Instead, we appear to have grown resigned to responding to demonstrable and egregious falsehood and fabrication from political leaders addressing issues of health, the economy, employment, national defence, welfare programmes, immigration and more with critical think pieces as though this is an inevitable part of political ‘spin’ that we must live with, rather than our elected leaders lying to us, which we should not tolerate. If we need to demand higher standards in academia and other institutions of knowledge production (and we do), surely we also need to demand them from our leaders. Democracy cannot function on lies.

On an institutional level, we must demand a measurable commitment to truth. In academic research, truth must be a criterion for anything that aspires to be called knowledge. Claims that cannot be falsified or corrected—such as “white fragility” or “gender identity” as inner essence—may be explored as philosophical ideas, but they are not knowledge to be used for social engineering.

Disciplines in the hard and social sciences that do commit to objectivity, empirical measurement, and falsifiability must also be expected to present their findings honestly, with the necessary qualifications and limitations, and to correct errors when they occur. Politicians and government officials who cite expert research must convey those same qualifications, not cherry-pick results or spin data to justify policy.

The right to hold false beliefs does not extend to those presenting information as true in their official capacity. Political leaders are public servants, and their statements must meet the same evidentiary standards we expect from scientists. Speeches should indeed be fact-checked but rather than merely presenting the results of this in articles for public outrage; there should be institutional expectations that leaders directly address them, correct their errors, issue public apologies, and face disqualification for deliberate falsehoods. There needs to be genuine disincentives for deception or shoddiness.

Make Bullshit Embarrassing Again.

On a cultural level, there is a need for a surge of popular resistance not simply to the side which is not our own but to bullshit consistently. This is something we can all take part in, but it does require being willing to go against the narrative of one’s own tribe. We can hold ourselves to high levels of truthfulness, reasonableness and consistency and we can hold our own social circles and political tribes to those standards.

This is difficult on a social level because we are such social animals and the current state of political discourse has driven us more deeply into our tribes for security. It can also feel counterintuitive and, indeed, be argued to be strategically unwise while we are in a state that feels very much like war. Inter-group critique with a view to self-correction is something that happens in peacetime, surely? To do so right now can only divide and weaken our own side and assist the other side. “Don’t punch left” is what those of us on the left concerned about the rise of the Critical Social Justice movement have consistently been told. “No enemies to the right” is what principled conservatives who wish to preserve the principles of conservatism and are concerned about the betrayal of them by the populist right and far-right are being told right now.

I frequently hear from people on the right who have appreciated my criticisms of the Critical Social Justice movement that I am making a mistake now in being critical of the illiberal populist right. They tell me that the time to worry about illiberal elements on the right - which they acknowledge to exist - is when they have control of the institutions. While the CSJ movement is still deeply entrenched there, they think it is foolish for me to divide my energies in this way. Meanwhile, I hear from people on the left who have also appreciated my criticisms of the CSJ movement that my time for criticising that should be past. It was worthwhile my focusing on them when there was still time to hold back the illiberal anti-woke backlash, but it is quite clearly here now. I should not be focusing on silly DEI policies in universities when the illiberal right is in the the US government and is threatening the very foundations of liberal democracy, due process and freedom of belief and speech.

I understand these objections and I am particularly sympathetic to those coming from the liberal left. I am much more worried about the rise of the illiberal right at this time. It does not follow, however, that I would be of most use in combating that were I to cease to care when my own side cares nothing for truth or reason or freedom; if I were to lose my integrity and principled consistency. Instead, I would lose any credibility I have with conservatives and any influence with those who are concerned about current developments but hesitant about pushing back against them. At the same time, I would cease to be of any use in fixing the problems on the left which is something that desperately needs to happen if we wish swing voters to vote for it again. Most importantly, I would be contributing to the narrative-based, postmodern/post-truth approach to politics which is driving increasing radicalism and polarisation and further undermining the liberal, empirical and rational principles underlying our liberal democracies.

I maintain that we all do best to hold to those principles and use them to address the problems on our own side. We can and must criticise the problems on the other side, but everybody is always good at spotting the flaws in positions they don’t agree with and our ability to meaningfully effect change is very limited. Among our own tribe, we have some measure of influence and we can work with the human need to be respected within our tribes. We can use this to push for establishing criteria of honesty and integrity, concern for truth and reason and consistent principles as essential to earning and maintaining that respect.

We are all well-aware of the problem of “audience-capture” in which someone who has built a reputation among their political group is then incentivised by positive feedback to become more narrative-driven and radical and thus, typically, more further away from what is true. We have all seen people who used to make reasonable, evidence-based and consistently principled arguments succumb to this and fall off a cliff into ideological extremism. We can choose not to be part of incentivising this, but instead disincentive it by criticising it and reducing the respect we have for that individual. We each choose where to bestow our respect and we can choose to bestow it upon those who maintain their integrity and commitment to truth.

We can refuse to reward those who seek to build reputations via competitive status-seeking in the form of becoming more radically committed to ideological narratives and conspiracy theories than everybody else. Quell those with a narcissistic drive to present themselves as a superior knower within a tribe by being more ‘woke’ ‘red-pilled’ or generally enlightened to systems of power than the average pleb who is allegedly still sleepwalking through it. Do not regard this posturing as a sign of purity or commitment or enlightenment and do not give it status. Radical interpretations of how our social systems work and how the ‘privileged’ or ‘elites’ are deceiving people might be correct, but, if they are, this will be determined by calm, sane and reasonable presentation of evidence to this effect, rather than radical fervour and scorning the ignorance of anyone who does not uncritically accept these claims.

We can regard those who seek to shock and impress with radicalism, “edginess” or vice signalling as adolescent thinkers who are best ignored until such time as they can contribute seriously and thoughtfully to grown up conversation.

Resist the temptation to succumb to these adolescent incentives yourself. The most effective way to push back against irrational, illiberal, conspiratorial thinking is to pierce the self-image its adherents depend upon—the notion that they are the uniquely enlightened “cool kids” who see through what the rest of us allegedly cannot. That illusion only survives if enough people collude in it. If you are on the left, resist the “peer pressure” to affirm the postmodern narratives and if you are on the right, the post-truth ones. Don’t fear accusations of naivety, privilege, ignorance, or insufficient radicalism for declining to endorse unevidenced claims. There is no shame in demanding evidence, coherence, and principled reasoning. The shame lies in abandoning them. Ultimately, the cultural goal is clear: we must make adherence to narrative-based epistemologies and conspiracy theories a source of embarrassment rather than prestige.

History shows us that neither truth nor conflict resolution can be achieved by adherence to tribal narratives, no matter how satisfying they may be or how much more easily they lend themselves to simple answers, fightable enemies and a feeling of control. They can only be achieved by maintaining respect for evidence, reason, and open debate. That expectation has been under threat across the political spectrum for some time, and its erosion is already harming individuals, institutions and culture. The solution cannot lie in giving authorities the power to decide what is misinformation or in circling the wagons around our own tribal narratives and engaging in a war of bullshit, irrationalism and situationally-malleable principles. We must use the influence we each have in our circles to bestow our respect on those who care about what is true, what is reasonable and what upholds consistent principles and deny it to those who betray those values.

Make bullshit embarrassing again.

Bring on Enlightenment 2.0.