THE DEATH OF FACT, NUANCE AND DETAIL

Ideologies, optics, and reductionist thinking have made human relations raw and unforgiving.

For causes too deeply lodged in the recesses of my psyche, since I can remember I have sustained a powerful yearning for truth. Perhaps it boils down to not much more than a personal aesthetic, a desire to live my life with integrity, and the sublime gratifications that a life so lived bestows.

But its sources are irrelevant. We all develop our characters and live out our lives as we do, finding sources to sustain our happiness when we can and coping with frustrations and problems as we must.

Placing a high value on truth brings profound epistemic problems. I have come to believe (perhaps under the influence of the post-moderns) that there is no magisterial “Truth” out there. No supernal, unchanging, absolutes that flow above the changing sludge of mundane events as Plato or believers in the Divine would have it. Though temperamentally, I must admit that at times I romantically yearn for such a transcendental realm, perhaps to infuse the tedium of life with a magisterial uplift.

When it comes to truth, I have come to accept what John Dewey referred to inelegantly as “warranted assertibility.” We may not have access to unchanging truths, but prolonged human experience does give us ideas that are so dependable that we can hang our credibility on them. They work, and as such, are worthy of our belief. But whatever one's theory of truth, and philosophically they can become very complex, I am firmly committed to the notion that what we believe needs, as tightly as possible,to conform to facts. If not, we entertain nonsense, and when such epistemic sloppiness becomes normative, society erodes. With tribalism entrenched in American society, it seems to me that we are dangerously veering toward this precipice.

This brings me to a phenomenon that is becoming increasingly apparent in public life, which I find highly disturbing. Clearly, society has always been prone to prevailing trends that catch the public imagination for a multitude of reasons, whether in areas of culture, art, fashion, politics, or ideology. Many prevailing ideas are like fads. They catch the public imagination, achieve temporary hegemonic importance, and then inevitably fade.

With regard to the latter, several at the moment prevail. I have written about this before, but I remain extremely perturbed by how cancel culture has captured the minds of many. It is too frequent that an unverified allegation can destroy a career or a reputation. The reality is that anyone can assert anything about anyone, true or false, and social media amplifies such allegations exponentially with merciless destructive power.

The content of said allegations can take many forms. I am focused at the moment on these circumstances wherein a person makes a statement or takes a position construed by others to be ideologically or politically "incorrect.” The alleged offender may be a peer who shares a common worldview with others, yet differs or dissents on a particular issue. Often the putative infractions take place over issues concerning race, sex, or gender, subjects that have become especially fraught in our times. Criticism emanates from both the political right and left, and those who find themselves condemned are often rebuked for lending putative ammunition to the opposing camp. What is determinative in these judgments ultimately are not facts, the overall views of the one excoriated, or their character. What matters is conformity to broad ideologies and often optics. The one alleged mistake becomes absolute and nothing else seems to matter. Judgment is abrupt. All facts, details, and nuances are canceled. My concern is not remote nor abstract; I have friends and colleagues who have fallen victim to it.

All are vulnerable, but people in positions of authority are especially so: professors, teachers, ministers, journalists, lawyers, psychotherapists, social workers, physicians. Today such professionals often find themselves walking on eggshells. 

I teach in the university and I am aware that a casual remark made by a professor, perhaps foolish or in bad taste, but in no way motivated by ill intent, can land a decent person in hot water. In the professions, there are often internal mechanisms in place to investigate and resolve these conflicts. But given the tenor of our times and the power of populist opinion, amplified by prevailing tropes and biases propounded on social media, too often proceedings that should be governed by due process alone fall sway to overwhelming public pressure. That people so accused become prey to Twitter mobs or au courant fashionable intellectual trends I believe is not a good thing. As cohorts of people have become tribalized, so have the bare-bone beliefs and ideologies that define the identities of those persons in those groups.

In July 2020, Harper's Magazine published a letter that received a lot of buzz decrying this phenomenon and signed by 153 notables reflecting various shades of the political spectrum. Among them were Noam Chomsky, Todd Gitlin, Gloria Steinem, Nadine Strossen, Wynton Marsalis, and Cornel West. The Letter on Justice and Open Debate said as follows:

“Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides”

“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.”

The letter was met with a rejoinder in the form of another letter signed by critics claiming that the original statement was crafted by elite professionals who themselves had been in the position of canceling others marginalized by the culture at large. This seemed to me be an ad hominem argument that sidestepped the truth the original statement was highlighting, a position I obviously confirm.

This brings me to epistemic values I hold dear, and in my view are severely lacking. As noted, facts, details, and nuances too often are snuffed out and disregarded as an avalanche smothers all beneath it. Reality is almost always more complex than it initially appears. Disparaging persons for their dissenting ideas because they allegedly violate the “correct” position is a form of reductionism. It is simplistic and bluntly anti-intellectual. It may enable those pointing excoriating fingers to feel virtuous, but such “virtue” is garnered at the expense of truth, intellectual rigor, and integrity.

Context matters. Facts are informed by the milieus in which they occur and are articulated. The use of the “N-word” has a far different significance if a professor employs it to describe students in his class, or is reading it as cited in a legal brief in a law school class (as has happened much to the misfortune of the professor). Or it may be uttered in reading aloud Martin Luther King Jr's use of the word as it appears in his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” as I have done in my human rights class. To censor it in these latter situations is to convert merely hearing the word into a fetish. One can argue that lawyers cannot be effectively educated unless though know the substance of the cases at hand. In my situation, I did not feel it was my place to censor Martin Luther King Jr., especially if one seeks to convey the impact of the abusive term within the context of racist hate that consumed King's environment in the segregated South. Context is crucial to establishing meaning, as is intent.

A second major problem with the cancel culture phenomenon is that those passing judgment implicitly claim an absolute truth they cannot have. What we hold as true or correct should almost always be open to correction and critique. If we are intellectually sophisticated and mature, we should be less committed to certainty (often a prelude to self-righteousness) and open to conversation, discussion and dialogue. How much better society would be if when a person proffers a point of view considered “incorrect” that those concerned engage in dialogue. Open debate and discussion may end in finding common ground and restoring the human bond.

Moving from the epistemic to the ethical, most destructive in the imperious yen toward judgment is the abandonment of forgiveness. Forgiveness has become almost a lost value in our culture. But without forgiveness, society becomes harsh, cold, and ultimately cruel. Our current age seems to have too readily forgotten that we are all fallible and we all make mistakes. As human beings, we ineluctably possess our vulnerabilities. This existential reality makes forgiveness necessary. Without it, human relations become too brittle to sustain.

Reclaiming our capacity for forgiveness is a step toward reclaiming our humanity. It is something we can all work on. And if we do, we will be providing a necessary step toward breaking down the walls of division that so characterize American society in the current moment. It will be a necessary advance toward social healing.