From Can It Happen Here? (Cass Sunstein, Ed, 2018) pp358-60
[from ‘The Commonsense Presidency’, by Duncan J. Watts]
CONCLUSION It is common these days to lament the lack of respect for truth in political debate, and for good reason: it is hard to think of a precedent for Trump’s near-constant stream of misleading statements, falsehoods, and outright lies, including about relatively objective, verifiable facts like Barack Obama’s birthplace, the size of his own inauguration crowds, the millions of illegal voters, and so on. Adding fuel to the fire, a shocking number of undeniably fake news stories circulated on social media during the election campaign, in some cases generating more reader eyeballs than competing “real” news. Whether any of this is worse than it has been in the past is difficult to establish, but it is certainly bad enough that a discussion of the place of truth in public debates – or at least a shared sense of reality – seems urgently needed.
It has been my contention in this essay that deference to common sense is detrimental to this goal. As useful as common sense may be in navigating ordinary, everyday circumstances, the fundamental assumption of common sense – that truth should be self-evident – is wrong for two important reasons. First, because common sense draws no distinction between objective and subjective “truths,” what is self-evident to one person can be non-obvious, wrong, or even abhorrent to another. And second, much of what is true in a scientific sense is not self-evident in any meaningful sense to most people. If truth is to be the guiding principle of political debate, therefore, common sense must defer to science in matters of social and economic policy as it has in matters of physics and chemistry. If that is to happen, however, then science – and social science in particular – must do a much better job than it has of building public trust. In part that will require scientists to do a better job of persuading a skeptical public that their methods are better suited to establishing truth than other ways of knowing, including common sense. And in part it will require scientists to improve their methods, which currently do not work as well as advertised.
In closing, it is worth noting that science has dealt successfully with legitimacy problems before. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the scientific world was undergoing transformative changes, in no small part because new instruments and methods were allowing scientists to observe and quantify phenomena that had previously been ephemeral. As is the case today with “big data” transforming once-sleepy areas of social science, public interest in the sciences was extremely high – scientists like Humphry Davy, a celebrated chemist, inventor of the Davy safety lamp, and fierce advocate of the scientific method, occupied almost celebrity status – but so was public skepticism. In effect, science was claiming for itself areas of human knowledge – like the size of the universe and the nature of the elements – that had for hundreds of years been the province of religion and poetry. The traditional arbiters of truth found their status increasingly challenged by a new breed of experts who brought with them methods – and a level of self-assurance in their answers – that the old guard naturally found deeply threatening. No less a figure than Isaac Newton was castigated by John Keats, himself a giant figure in the culture of the time, who claimed that Newton’s historic discovery of the color spectrum of white light had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow” (Holmes 2010). These days it is hard to imagine a poet directly criticizing the work of the world’s preeminent physicist – if anything, physicists have co-opted the language of poets to describe their work. But something similar is arguably happening in politics and business, where centuries of explanation based on intuition and narrative are being challenged by teams of data and statistical analyses. As with the Romantic-era poets, traditional sources of authority resent the intrusion and seek to undermine the challengers with appeals to common sense. And yet there is a glimmer of hope in this story: if the hard sciences also had to overcome public skepticism about their legitimacy, perhaps the social sciences can also.
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