Seeking Power and Seeking Truth
Greetings,
It’s been a while since I sent out one of these, but after some very flattering nagging from subscibers Dave Hoffman and David Trichler, I thought that I would inflict some more of my thoughts on you this week.
One of the more disturbing things about social media is the ease with which it allows you to see what other people think or at least what they say they think. One of the striking things to me is that among my politically and intellectually motivated friends (and given my background and interests, I have a lot of these folks) it’s pretty easy to pick out what is the narrative du jour for “their side.” Given any major public event, it’s amazing to me how quickly the approved story emerges. If you are on Twitter you can see this narrative emerge in hours, sometimes in minutes.
This is remarkable if you think about it. Once upon a time I wrote a regular column for the Deseret News, a Salt Lake City-based newspaper. I eventually gave it up, in part because I was busy with other things but also in part because I just thought too slowly. I would send in columns and the editors sometimes would tell me that they couldn’t print what I’d written. “That happened two weeks ago,” they’d say. “Nobody cares now.” The problem is that sometimes it would take me two weeks (sometimes even longer) to figure out what I thought. I’ve thought about that experience a lot as I watch the speed with which standardized ideological narratives get churned out. Our collective narrative-making machinery has formidable power.
Power, it seems to me, is the central issue here. As near as I can tell, the primary purpose of ideological narratives is not to get at the truth. Political narratives of events don’t exist to explain how the world works. Rather, they exist to serve political goals. Sam Adams reportedly said that the secret to politics is to put your opponent in the wrong and keep him there. When Adams set about explaining the Boston Massacre, for example, his main goal was to put the Crown on the defensive, not explain why the soldiers fired their guns. In the narrative he created bloodthirsty soldiers fired on peaceful towns people while being urged on by their officers. Everything about this narrative other than the fact that the soldiers fired on the townspeople was false, but that wasn’t the point. Adams had been handed a political tool, and he was going to use it.
Narratives that are created to get power aren’t necessarily pernicious. One might be using the power to pursue noble ends. One might be trying to chip away at the power of bad people. There are important things at stake (at least occasionally) in our political discussions, and who wields power is important. It’s naïve to imagine that public discussion in a democracy couldn’t, at some level, always be about power.
At this point, it’s possible to get really dark and Nietzschean. With a bit of hermeneutic ingenuity any kind of discourse can be shown to be about power. Foucault has been around long enough that this move isn’t even daring or original anymore. It’s cliched, and like all cliches it has a grain of truth that must be respected. However, I confess that I have little patience with discourse-is-power-all-the-way-down nihilism. First, I don’t believe that anyone believes it. At the end of the day, the Nietzschean and Foucauldian move is always in the service of some political agenda that rests on claims to well… truth. If I am using my interpretive cleverness to show that some way of talking is really about white supremacy or what have you, it’s because I think that such power is unjust and wrong. I believe it is the case that the world is a better place if it is more egalitarian. That’s a belief that I think is true, and it was produced by intellectual machinery that I’m not willing to dissolve in the acids of some Nietzschean genealogy or reduce to Foucault’s hermeneutics of suspicion. Nobody (including Foucault or Nietzsche) can do this for everything. Psychologically, I rather doubt that human brains work that way. Our minds, at some level, seem to be truth-seeking mechanisms. Highly imperfect mechanisms to be sure, but we can’t seem to think even about power without also thinking about truth. Conceptually, if we pursue Nitezche or Foucault all the way down, we fall into the Liar’s Paradox.
Which is just my way of saying that I think that there are some ways of talking and thinking that are aimed at truth rather than power. To return to social media, my Twitter feed consists mainly of law professors. I have noticed one phenomenon over and over again. When my professor friends talk about their areas of technical expertise, they tend to be incredibly nuanced and sophisticated. They are careful. They treat opposing arguments responsibly. They are willing to follow arguments through to their conclusions, even at the risk of novelty. This, along with professional gossip and geeky law-prof humor is why I am on Twitter.
On the other hand, when some big political event – including a political event that is mainly “legal” – pops up, the law professoriate (including me!) is often collectively really pedestrian. When a major abortion case comes before the Supreme Court, some of the full-time SCOTUS nerds and con law people will say interesting and useful things, but on the whole what you get from the law professoriate are just whatever happen to be the standard progressive talking points on the issue. Sometimes, it seems to me that these talking points get at something that is true; but often they don’t and at times they shade into what seems to me to be unhinged nonsense.
I like to think of the Jeckyll-and-Hyde characteristic of my Twitter feed as manifesting two kinds of discourse: one that is aimed at truth and one that is aimed at power. I don’t mean here to pick on law professors or progressives. (At least not too much.) I think that everyone does this. I think that I do this a lot. I also don’t think that it means that people can’t make reasoned judgements that one “side” is better than the other “side.” However, by and large I think that the public narratives that rapidly get entrenched are mainly about power not truth. If I had any piece of advice it would be, “Just don’t trust them.” The chances that intellectual machinery that isn’t supposed to generate truth will give you an accurate picture of the world is remote.
Until next time.
Nate
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