A normal person can tell you lots of factual information about his life, his work, his neighborhood, and his hobbies but very little about the FDA clinical trial process or the moon landing. But do you know who knows a ton about the moon landing? Crazy people who think it’s fake. They don’t have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks. If you can remember the number of the Kennedy administration executive order about reducing troop levels in Vietnam, then you’re probably a crank — that EO plays a big role in Kennedy-related conspiracy theories, so it’s conspiracy theorists who know all the details.
More generally, I think a lot of excessive worry about “misinformation” is driven by the erroneous belief that more factual information would resolve political disputes. Both David Neumark and Arin Dube know far more than you or I do about the empirical literature on minimum wage increases. Nonetheless, they disagree. It is simply a heavily contested question. Relative to Neumark, the typical progressive is wildly misinformed about this subject; relative to Dube, the typical conservative is wildly misinformed. And lots of political disputes have this quality — most people don’t know that much about it, but you can find super-informed people on both sides of the question. That’s why it’s a live debate.
useful thinkers in three kinds
Useful thinkers come in three varieties. The Explainer knows stuff I don’t know and can present it clearly and vividly. This does not require great creativity or originality, though Explainers of the highest order will possess those traits too. The Illuminator is definitionally original: someone who shines a clear strong light on some element of history or human experience that I never knew existed. (Though sometimes after reading something by an Illuminator I will think, Why didn’t I realize that before?) The Provoker is original perhaps to a fault: Ambitious, wide-ranging, risk-taking, Provokers claim to know a lot more than they actually do but can be exceptionally useful in forcing readers to think about new things or think in new ways.
Some 20th-century thinkers who have been vital for me over the years:
- Explainers: Charles Taylor, Mary Midgely, Freeman Dyson
- Illuminators: Mikhail Bakhtin, Iris Murdoch, Michael Oakeshott
- Provokers: Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Simone Weil
It’s especially important not to allow the Provokers to convince you that they’re Explainers or Illuminators. This is I think the great error of Girardians: If you take Girard as an Explainer, as they do, then his influence is likely to be disastrous; but if you were to see him as a Provoker, then he could be quite helpful to you.
Kierkegaard once wrote in his journal, “If Hegel had written the whole of his logic and then said, in the preface or some other place, that it was merely an experiment in thought in which he had even begged the question in many places, then he would certainly have been the greatest thinker who had ever lived. As it is, he is merely comic.” That is, Hegel could have been the greatest of the Provokers, but, alas, he thought he was an Illuminator. (One of the ironies here is that Kierkegaard himself sought largely to be a Provoker in his pseudonymous writings, but that work has consistently been taken as illumination. The works Kierkegaard signed with his own name, the ones in which he genuinely tried to illuminate, have been largely ignored.) Much the same could be said of Rousseau: marvelous and wonderful as a Provoker, but God help the reader who takes his purported illuminations seriously.
Obviously one shouldn’t be too legalistic here: Some great thinkers might fulfill one role in one book, a different role in another book (Francis Bacon is the first example that comes to mind). And some of the greatest books serve to explain, illuminate, and provoke all at once — though this is quite rare, and probably no book has an equal distribution of the three virtues. (I may say more about this later, in a post on humanistic scholarship.) But I find these categories useful in helping me to know what I can reasonably expect to get out of the books I read.
Possible topic for another post: Whether novelists and poets can be fit into these categories as well.
Old loyalties.
soma
Adam Roberts, back in 2014:
There is, I think, a genuine human fascination with outer space. Apollo could have capitalised upon that fascination and expanded into broader and better conceived programmes. But it didn’t, and the real reason it didn’t is that people found a more satisfying way scratch their metaphorical itch. Like a diet of sweets and pastries instead of spinach and brown rice, big screen sci-fi quelled our appetite for space travel in a way both delicious and fundamentally unhealthy. Why should people around the globe give up a significant fraction of their respective gross national products to pay for actual space travel when Hollywood could give them all the thrills of outer space in virtual form?
I think this point — which I missed back when it was published — harmonizes nicely with the argument I made in my essay from the same year, “Fantasy and the Buffered Self”:
Fantasy — in books, films, television shows, and indeed in all imaginable media — is an instrument by which the late modern self strives to avail itself of the unpredictable excitements of the porous self while retaining its protective buffers. Fantasy, in most of its recent forms, may best be understood as a technologically enabled, and therefore safe, simulacrum of the pre-modern porous self.
Stories as distractions, as substitute satisfactions, as soma.
Currently reading: The Gnostic Religion by Hans Jonas 📚
To start, large social media companies should be required to become interoperable with one another: Just as you can email someone who uses a different email provider than your own, you should be able to contact and engage with individuals across different social media platforms. In the same vein, large social media companies should be required to permit the use of alternate filtering and sorting algorithms — democratizing content moderation by allowing users to choose which content they wish to view or block, rather than relying on the black-box internal processes of an individual, hyper-concentrated company.
Agreed, except that the first point is potentially in tension with the second. Perhaps micro.blog should be forced to become interoperable with Twitter, but I should also be able to set my micro.blog account so that I will never see anything that anyone on Twitter says to me — which is precisely the setting I would choose.