Just the clash of opinions or different facts? Facing the epistemological divide

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late U.S. senator from New York, was famous for saying, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." It turns out that not everyone today agrees with Moynihan. It might seem that the rancor in political life that we are witnessing across the globe is merely the result of a clash of opinions. But, this upheaval is actually the product of a vast epistemological divide. (Epistemology is, of course, the study of how we know what we know.) There is no longer a consensus about how to determine what is, in fact, a fact.

I know this because those on each side look at the other and say, "How can they believe that that's true?" What they mean is not the other side's opinions; they mean what the other side believes are facts. In the realm of politics, the ledger on "mistaken" facts may seem lopsided. But politics is the realm of exaggeration and so no side is immune from mistakes.

But I'm more interested in the broader cultural and scientific battle over how to construct facts. Out of habit we think of facts as something freestanding. Facts are true whether we acknowledge them or not. Water boils at 212 degrees F. That's a fact one can't dispute. But, of course, even that fact is context-dependent. The statement is true for water containing no impurities under one atmosphere of pressure. If you add salt, it will raise the boiling point. Even simple statements of fact, it turns out, are more complicated that we think.

Since facts are actually context-dependent, they can change over time with conditions and circumstances. What we call social facts, such as the number of people suffering from mental illness, are dependent on a wide array of variables. In this case those variables include: the definition of mental illness, how health care practitioners interpret and apply that definition, how comprehensive and accurate the reporting system is, and whether there are incentives (such a reimbursement for treatment) to report mental illness cases. And, there are certainly more variables for this one example.

For any individual, the only true way to verify a fact is to observe it personally. That means very little of what we think we know we know personally. When you hear the weather report, you have the option of stepping outside and checking the weather yourself. But when the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) tells you that one in five U.S. adults suffers from mental illness, how exactly would you go about making sure the NIMH is right through your personal observation?

Of course, you can't because you could never visit so many people; nor discover their identities in the first place because their medical records are scattered across the country and confidential in any case; nor diagnose them unless you are a skilled practitioner. Even if the number of cases of mental illness in the United States were claimed to be five, you'd still have difficulty verifying it personally under the prevailing constraints. Now, you might decide to check numbers from other sources. But that still makes you reliant on information you can't verify personally.

Which leads me to this: Consensus on what constitutes "the facts" of any situation depends on negotiation and agreement. This happens all the time in business meetings, in families, in city council meetings and many other social and political settings. Some of the relevant facts are known personally to the participants. Other facts come from the reports of other people outside the group, either in printed form and/or in the form of images taken by camera or video.

What's no longer available today are effective overarching institutions that help create consensus views. I grew up at a time when there were three television networks, each having news divisions. On any given evening, you could look in on the three network newscasts and get approximately the same stories told from approximately the same point of view.

Famed news anchor Walter Cronkite used to sign off with: "And that's that way it is" followed by the current date. Of course, that's NOT the way it really was. After all, what can one fit into a 30-minute newscast and what unspoken prevailing political and social norms are embedded in it? But so many people believed Cronkite when he said those words and also believed other news anchors as well such that these newscasters together provided a backdrop for most political and social discussions in the United States if not the world.

Major newspapers played the same role since certain ones dominated the public discourse of most countries.

In the realm of literature and the arts, certain cities such as New York dominated American culture. Books that people purchased and read were plentiful, but were mostly chosen and issued by East Coast publishers with a heavy concentration in New York. American literature and art were curated by an editor and curator class who acted essentially as gatekeepers of American culture.

The rise of the internet and self-publishing and the decline of newspapers and the relegation of network news to one of many, many sources of information are, of course, important factors in the fracturing of an epistemological consensus. But, in my view, something more basic has occurred.

The post-World War II consensus regarding top-down, conceptually-based, reductionist methods and management in American life in commerce, government, education and the arts is under siege. That consensus brought huge material prosperity, but also altered American life in ways that now seem widely unfair (increasing economic inequality) and also disturbing to many people. Rural communities have been devastated by the exodus of people to the cities. Large new populations of immigrants have unsettled residents of many communities. Increasingly permissive sexual mores have been liberating for some and deeply concerning for others. The continuing liberation of women and LGBTQ communities has threatened stable sexual roles and a very long tradition of patriarchal control.

Beyond this there is the sickening of an entire population by exposure to toxic chemicals in our water, air, soil and food. There is the destruction of our common environment through continuous "development" that necessitates the felling of forests, the paving of farmland,  the polluting extraction of minerals, and the continuous spewing of climate changing gases to facilitate it all. There is the domination of the economy by large corporations and oligarchic billionaires who essentially run our politics and society for the benefit of themselves as corporate managers and owners. Anyone who questions this is "against freedom" and "against progress."

Our own personal experience is telling us that something is wrong and needs to change. But we are told again and again by the public relations agencies hired by these same powerful corporate owners and managers, that we cannot trust our own experience. We must trust the top-down, conceptually-based, reductionist ideas of those at the top. And since most of the media is now owned by large corporations, the media largely parrots this notion.

If you live in a rural community, the messages propagated by corporate PR firms and their minions in the media hit you differently than if you live in a big city. Many rural and small town residents see their way of life slipping away as their communities shrink. What's left is being replaced by something that is unfamiliar and uncomfortable (other kinds of people) or just plain destructive (for example, the opioid epidemic which was engineered by large corporations and enabled by government officials who were supposed to be regulating them). There is very little in the corporate-controlled discourse that acknowledges the unease of rural and small-town residents.

And, that's why there has been an opening for demagogues both in the United States and around the world to inflame and re-direct the fear and anger that is already there. Rural and small-town resident largely believe the current system is no longer benefiting them and also believe that what the government does helps others but not them. The loss of their rural and small-town hospitals and the decline of their schools and their main streets seems to confirm this.

For the mostly urban residents who feel they are benefiting from the vast changes in American (and world) society in the past half-century, the impulse is to characterize these rural and small-town people as unsophisticated, ignorant, backward, and racist, essentially "hicks." But it is important to understand that people having similar experiences and attitudes also live in cities and include small-business owners and unskilled laborers.

These people seek explanations for their feelings and fears. When they are told that they are wrong to have those feelings and fears, they gravitate toward leaders who affirm them. Unfortunately, it is easy and effective to affirm them and then offer explanations for those feelings with "facts" that vaguely seem to explain their circumstances, but actually divert attention from the real causes.

But wherever you find yourself on the political spectrum—and left/right does not really capture the complexity of most people's political views—you will be told NOT to trust your experience of an increasingly toxic and unhealthy environment and food system or a faltering rural community.

The real divide is not urban/rural, left/right, or even rich/poor (though the rich tend to control levers of communication and power to their own advantage). The real divide is between our experience and the rigid, top-down, conceptually based, reductionist orthodoxy that has gotten us to this point. As a now-departed colleague once told me: "It's not us against them; it's us and them against it."

This is not to say that we can always trust our own experience. Our personal experience is by its very nature extremely limited. But neither should we reflexively trust the reductionist mode of thinking. (I call this the "nothing-but" way of thinking as in: "The world is nothing but atoms and molecules.") The society-wide negotiation that allows us to value and challenge both approaches seems one possible way to attempt a new consensus that fits the realities of people's experience without discarding the useful concepts that can come from breaking problems down into their parts (reductionism) and analyzing them.

Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.