The Epistemic Liberal Order and its Enemies

Senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, contributing writer at The Atlantic, and former journalist at The Economist, Jonathan Rauch has written with his book The Constitution of Knowledge. A Defense of Truth, a passionate defense of the epistemic foundations on which contemporary liberal democratic societies rest. The Constitution of Knowledge (CoK thereafter) provides a valuable account of the principles that regulate how knowledge is produced and disseminated in the society. But obviously, more than providing this account, the main motivation of the book rises from the ongoing attacks on these principles and the institutions that implement them – attacks that sometimes even come from within these institutions.

Rauch’s account of what he calls the “liberal epistemic order” and the “constitution of knowledge” builds on an analogy with another constitution, the U.S. Constitution. Both constitutions, one operating in the domain of knowledge, the other in the domain of politics, serve the same function of creating an order based on rules, principles, and institutions. The epistemic order and the political order constitutive of liberal societies are committed to similar values: diversity, tolerance, peaceful cooperation through compromise, and consensus. The analogy is not perfect of course. The U.S. Constitution is a written document that grounds formal rules and highly regulated political practices. The Constitution of Knowledge essentially consists of informal rules and practices that have progressively emerged, without reference to any existing code. Another important difference is that the epistemic order depends on the key value of truth, which is precisely the feature which is under attack over at least the last couple of decades. Nonetheless, the two orders are ultimately grounding the same liberal forms of life designed to overcome the Hobbesian wars (epistemic and political) of all against all.

The characterization of the liberal epistemic order in CoK makes a systematic and well-informed use of the most recent research in behavioral sciences on how cognitive and social biases affect the way individuals form and revise their beliefs. It is now well-established that individuals, irrespective of their social background, are prone to believe propositions not because there is solid scientific (theoretical and/or empirical) evidence that supports them, but because they conform with beliefs and dogmas solidly anchored within their “tribes”. Though there is nothing original here for persons who have been interested in these issues, Rauch – blending insights from Mill, Peirce, and Popper – usefully and clearly explain how the Constitution of Knowledge permits us to overcome these individual limitations to produce a set of social practices regulated by the idea of truth. The accumulation of knowledge is made possible not because of the intellectual brilliance of some individuals, but thanks to the social scaffoldings that create the right incentives to discard false beliefs as soon as they are identified as such. This is true for all the groups composing the “reality-based community”: academics, journalists, governmental agents, judges, and legal scholars. Here, another analogy comes to mind: the liberal epistemic order transcends individual limitations in a very similar way than market institutions permit boundedly rational individuals to coordinate their plans at a massive scale.

As I said above, CoK is also and foremost a defense of the liberal epistemic order. It identifies two enemies that are currently threatening its foundations and its functioning: the “troll culture” (not Rauch’s expression) and the “cancel culture”. The former perfectly exemplifies and implements the idea of “bullshit” as conceptualized by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in his eponymous essay. Trolls (who range from anonymous folks on the internet to former U.S. President Trump) just disregard truth as a value. As the sixth chapter of CoK vividly demonstrates, the troll culture is regulated by its goal of generating epistemic confusion and disorganization. Assaulted by inconsistent, messy, and oftentimes hard to check (at least without cost) information, many individuals just epistemically retreat and give up any willingness to form true beliefs. The cancel culture proceeds differently. Rather than confusion, it is looking for silencing. For a non-American reader, Rauch’s depiction of what are properly described as censorship and “epistemic lynching” practices in the mainstream press and academia are sometimes hard to believe and anyway worrying. Though they are yet to develop at the same scale elsewhere in the Western world, this is a cause for concern everywhere.

Besides their differences and the fact that – in the American context at least – they tend to belong to two ideological camps (the conservatives for the troll culture, the “progressists” for the cancel culture), the two cultures share the same ability to take advantage of digital technologies. Digital technologies, e.g., social networks, can be used either to overload people with (false) information or to put pressure on persons or organizations with the aim of “deplatforming”. Both cultures are also fundamentally directed against the very epistemic principles constitutive of the liberal epistemic order. They either deny the value of truth or – in the case of the cancel culture – make truth a function of one’s social identities. The idea that truth is objective, even if temporary and evolving, is completely lost.

In the last chapter, Rauch reflects on the strategies that a proponent of the Constitution of Knowledge and of the reality-based community has at her disposal to fight trolls and cancelers. Unsurprisingly, this is the less systematic and convincing part of the book. In the current technological, legal, and philosophical state of the art, it is just very difficult to fight the enemies of the liberal epistemic order, as it is difficult to fight populists who attack the liberal political order. In part, the difficulty is due to the fact that some of the enemies come from within: while they seem to play along with the democratic or academic rules (thus taking advantage of the resources offered by the liberal institutions), they adopt practices and defend principles which ultimately contribute to undermining these very rules. Again, the problem is not new: from the beginning, open liberal societies have been confronted with the apparent paradox that openness also means tolerating ideas and practices directed against this very openness. Regarding the political order, one of the proposed solutions – in the spirit of Rawls’s political liberalism – has been to delineate the domain of the “reasonable”. Not only this solution is difficult to implement in practice, but it does also not seem to be available in the case of the epistemic order. Epistemic liberal principles and institutions are under attack, and their guardians still have to devise an efficient strategy to preserve them.