2021 publication
Prelude: I ended up writing this review over a longer period of time than I normally take. I reviewed my highlights quite thoroughly. Because of this, I can provide you an executive summary of my review if you're pressed for time. You should read this book! Everyone should read this book! It's terrific. It's timely. In the end, my review says this: I enthusiastically endorse what this author has written. He's confirmed many of my beliefs and hunches. And he's sharpened my thinking. He's gotten me excited about fighting the good (informed) fight. Given the nature of Rauch's argument, I should perhaps be more measured in my tone. I could be wrong. But he wouldn't have written this book if he thought its arguments wrong, and I wouldn't praise it if I found Rauch headed down the wrong track. If anyone thinks he (and I) are wrong about his contentions, but all means say so. But first, read the damned book!
If Oprah or the American Library Association or some such, were to make a book recommendation for a national civics lesson, The Constitution of Knowledge would be a perfect choice. This book is well researched and moves along quickly with the benefit of a flowing narrative voice that is insightful but not pedantic. Rauch carefully constructs a case for liberal (as in open and learned) institutions. Rauch argues that like the U.S. Constitution, knowledge, as discovered and developed by law, science, journalism, and government, depends upon a constitution, albeit unwritten. This constitution of knowledge governs the discovery and creation of knowledge based on facts. This constitution allows the creation of a measure of reliable truth. Could there be a more important topic for us (around the world) to stop to ponder and appreciate?
In 2020, former President Barack Obama stated the matter starkly: “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.” Loc. 249, Kindle edition.
Rauch opens his book with a consideration of the sorry state of the state of knowledge and truth in public discourse. As Rauch notes--and as anyone paying the least bit of attention knows--the quality (as accuracy and truthfulness) of our public discourse has been in free-fall for a long time. (And it certainly was never all that good.) With the rise of the man from Mar-a-Lago, disinformation, lies, and fantasies received the imprimatur of authority that followers and minions soon aped. In a sense, this assessment of our sorry state is needed. I doubt that anyone reading this book doesn't know all of this already, but to frame what follows Rauch needs to state the obvious and thereby ground his message and his concerns.
After his opening assessment of our current sorry state of affairs, Rauch begins building his argument by looking a what we might call our native set of dispositions. Drawing upon history and social science, which he quotes and cites without getting lost in academic jargon or excessive detail, Rauch establishes that we humans are given to tribal conformities and limited frames of knowledge that often serve immediate needs and ends but that don't readily facilitate sophisticated ideas about knowledge and society. Primitive humans existed in small groups that operated with limited horizons and limited forms of technology. For instance, agriculture is only ten-to-twelve thousand years old. As agriculture, cities, trade, and conquest developed, more reliable and sophisticated forms of knowledge were required to meet the needs arising from the challenges associated with expanding horizons of activity. But still, humans have this anchor in archaic experiences that we can't shake, including, perhaps most importantly, the need to maintain good relations with our group, our tribe. As social scientist Jonathan Haidt puts it, we humans are "groupish."
Rauch draws on Plato's Socratic dialogue with Theaetetus to mark the beginning of a careful, patterned tradition of thought about the nature and reliability of knowledge. (Note that Rauch here and in the remainder of his book draws only upon the Western tradition, beginning with Plato. Other civilizations certainly have gone through a similar process but this book isn't a comparative intellectual history, and, for better and for worse, the Western traditions of thinking about science, technology, and industry as well as about how to organize societies have established a dominance throughout the world.) Rauch moves on quickly from Plato to the early modern age and its thinkers who give us liberal politics, market economics, and scientific thinking. Thinkers like Montaigne and Francis Bacon, make appearances, as do later thinkers about the scientific enterprise, such as the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Sanders Pierce, and the Austrian native Karl Popper. Each of these thinkers refines our understanding and appreciation (of the strengths and weaknesses) of the scientific enterprise. But the highest places of honor in Rauch's pantheon go to the triumvirate of John Locke, Adam Smith, and James Madison. Smith for this appreciation of the operation of markets; Locke for his identification and promotion of epistemic virtues (including his defense of tolerance), his emphasis on politically protected liberties, and the idea that government depends upon the consent of the governed; and Madison for his design of a political system that seeks to check the arbitrary use of power and to promote a government based upon a system of checks and balances that weed out distorting interests and faulty claims of knowledge.
After reviewing the history of these novel institutions for creating knowledge and making decisions, Rauch delves more deeply into the values and principles that make these institutions unique in history. Openness to new ideas, limitations on authority, dedication to the principle of fallibilism (any claim of knowledge could later prove wrong), and the widespread sharing of knowledge mark this new way of generating knowledge. Note, however, that Rauch realizes that these ideals often break down in practice; therefore, the "constitution of knowledge" isn't a machine that would go of itself. It needs a constant commitment from those who constitute the institutions. Also, Rauch emphasizes that these are social organizations (law, science, government, and journalism) and subject to the foibles that he describes at the beginning of the book. Also underpinning these institutions and the liberal order is a shared aversion to coercion. A level of conflict attendant with openness is a hallmark of the liberal order. Disagreements, over physics and well as politics will occur but should be resolved through words, not weapons.
That we must pay close attention to our institutions for creating knowledge and refining it arises from the attack that this regime, which Rauch has dubbed the "reality-based community,"* has undergone in our time. Of course, forces of authority (from above) and ignorance (from below) have always battered liberal regimes. But current attacks have once again gotten worse (although the mid-twentieth century probably still takes the cake). Rauch delves into these contemporary attacks that eminate from both the political (extreme) right and the political (extreme) left. From the extreme right, we get a flood of information, mostly via social media, that's either false, misleading, or distracting. This involves a "firehose of falsehood" (Rand corporation's term) or as Steve Bannon described his strategy: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” (Location 3061). Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt provides another apt description of a method for degrading knowledge in his work On Bullshit (the title says it all, doesn't it?). Needless to say, the examples Rauch provides are legion and start at the top in the U.S. during the last presidential administration. I'd hoped that we'd lanced this boil with the absurdist yet dire attack of January 6, but as that event recedes in the rearview mirror, I fear that the boil remains.
The attack from the other side comes primarily from the "woke" left, the so-called "progressives," or at least the most radical elements of this group. In this section, Rauch addresses the issue of "cancel culture," which is simply a new name, attendant with social media, for ostracisation as a tool for the coercion of opinions. As Rauch notes, the problem of social coercion to seek to establish opinions to conform to a norm is not new to democratic societies. Both Alexis De Tocqueville in his Democracy in America and John Stuart Mill identify a trend toward conformity of opinion in democratic societies (that were relatively new at the time--if we exclude ancient Athens). The drive for purity and against pluralism seems to be a phenomenon more on the political and cultural left than on the right. When we look at history from the French Revolution to Lenin and Stalin's regime to the reign of Mao and his Cultural Revolution we see a demand for purity and conformity that results in deaths, imprisonments, and disgrace. (Note that the extreme right is not without sin: the right tends to deal with dissent with more dispatch; to wit, with more preemptory violence, skipping show trials and efforts at "re-education.") Nothing in the U.S. has reached these extremes, but it's a gnawing concern. I have to admit that I've tended to brush off concerns of this sort in the past as merely a passing fad among some college students, who are given to excess. (I know; I once was one, and I lived and practiced law in a college towns for over 30 years.) But the level of fear of being called out among students and professors for some imagined transgression has increased greatly. Rauch makes a case that those who are sympathetic to progressive values and goals have to work to separate the gold of liberation from the dross of social coercion.
Toward the end of the book, Rauch becomes more personal. He counsels an imaginary young college student, whom he dubs "Theaetetus," in honor of Plato's young inquirer in his dialogue of that name. Rauch provides sound counsel to the young inquirer about when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em; when to confront purveyors of falsehoods and those who seek to coerce conformity. Rauch is a gay man now in his early 60s who's experienced life from the closet to Stonewall to the acceptance of gay marriage (about which he published an influential book in 2005). He knows the value of liberation, the disparagement dished out to gay people (now, one hopes, a dwindling occurrence), and he knows the importance of standing one's ground by making rational, coherent arguments for one's cause even in the face of seemingly intractable resistance. It's in this section that Rauch goes beyond impressing me with his skills as a journalist who reports with depth and insight about the fundamentals and history of science and thought and who has a breadth and depth of insights into contemporary events. Here I perceive Rauch as a wise man who can give counsel to those in need based on a depth of knowledge and experience. Fighting the good fight by the rules.
Now, go back a read my opening paragraph (in italics). What should you do?
*One slight bit of dissent: Rauch's use of the term "reality-based community" as a short-hand for those who adhere to the principles of the constitution of knowledge. He later notes that one can be a member of the "reality-based community" and, for instance, go to church. Many aspects of life aren't governed by the conventions of the reality-based community, such as personal experience, feelings, spiritual experiences, and so on. A lot of life! The negative pregnant here is that these experiences (personal, non-replicable, private, hidden) aren't real, or at least that they are so subjective as to beyond community recognition. I agree that there exists a reality-based community if we're talking about a certain sphere of knowledge, let's call it "Nature." Thus, I always appreciate Dr. Samuel Johnson's contribution to the reality-based" viewpoint:
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, "I refute it thus."
— James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
However, logicians will note the fallacy of Dr. Johnson's response, and that as to non-material issues, we have no such easy recourse. Thus, it might be more accurate for Rauch to say that this is the "basic" or "material" or "scientific" reality-based community. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And I should also note here that Rauch recognizes the importance and validity of arguments over topics such as which is the better play between Shakespeares's Timon of Athens and his Hamlet. No commentator argues Timon the superior play. This too, I argue, is a "reality-based" assessment.
