The Internet of Us (7 page)

Fragmented Reasons: Is the Internet Making Us Less Reasonable?

The Abstract Society

“We can conceive,” wrote the philosopher Karl Popper in 1946, before television, computers or iPhones, “of a society in which men practically never meet face to face—in which all business is conducted by individuals in isolation who communicate by typed letters or telegrams, and who go about in closed motor-cars. . . . Such a fictitious society might be called a completely abstract or depersonalized society.”
¹

This passage is remarkable in several ways. It is certainly prescient. The idea—if not the prose—is more like something you would have found at the time in
Amazing Stories
or the adventures of Tom Swift, rather than buried in a difficult two-volume essay on democracy, fascism and knowledge. It is also very honest. Popper was, in effect, offering a warning about his own ideas concerning open societies—namely, that such societies could
easily become “abstract” or “depersonalized.” Popper was a fierce advocate of openness, and he saw open societies as being marked by their values: they are committed to freedom of speech and thought, equality, reasonableness and an attitude of progressive criticism. Today we might say that a society is open to the degree that it protects freedom of communication and information, imposes little government censorship and has a diverse (and diversely owned) media.
²
By this standard, a country like the United States is reasonably open (if not as open as many of us would like it to be, and becoming less so). And the Internet is a large part of this. The Web flourishes in part because it allows us unprecedented control over the sources and types of information we receive, to dip into the flow of information where and how we wish, and to extract and isolate what interests us more quickly, all in the comfort of our pajamas. It allows us to get what we want—or what we think we want—faster. And it allows us to do so without leaving our protective bubble, without sullying ourselves with the messy and inconvenient physical lives of others; it offers anonymity and friends we've never met. And that, one might think, is precisely what Popper was warning about: that with increased freedom of expression and consumption comes the risk of increased individual isolation.

Research over the last couple of decades suggests that Popper was right to be concerned.
³
But it is not clear that the only, or even the most fundamental, problem is that we are more isolated
individuals
. Really, communication is communication—even if some methods might be better for certain purposes than others. And the information technology coursing through our society's veins has given us more ways of communicating.
⁴
Indeed, we can
hardly get away from one another: we email, we text, we tweet and soon, maybe, we'll just think to one another. But to whom do we talk, and to whom do we listen? That's the question, and the evidence suggests that we listen and talk to those in our circle, our party, our fellow travelers. We read the blogs of those we agree with, watch the cable news network that reports on the world in the way that we see it, and post and share jokes made at the expense of the “other side.”
⁵
The real worry is not, as Popper feared, that an open digital society makes us into independent individuals living Robinson Crusoe–like on smartphone islands; the real worry is that the Internet is increasing “group polarization”—that we are becoming increasingly isolated
tribes
.

As one of the most influential thinkers about digital culture, Cass Sunstein, has noted, one reason the Internet contributes to polarization is that “repeated exposure to an extreme position, with the suggestion that many people hold that position, will predictably move those exposed, and likely predisposed, to believe in it.”
⁶
So, with a steady diet of Fox News, conservatives will become more conservative. Liberals who only read the
Huffington Post
or the
Daily Kos
will become more liberal. And that means, Sunstein argues, that true fragmentation of the society results, “as diverse people, not originally fixed in their views and perhaps not so far apart, end up in extremely different places, simply because of what they are reading and viewing.”
⁷

We are getting more and more used to fragmentation now. It is reflected in our social media. Liberals tend to be friends on Facebook with other liberals, and Twitter feeds are clogged with the tweets of daily outrage: the latest news that is sure to piss your friends off as much as it did you.
⁸
Yet most discussions of
polarization talk about the fragmentation of our
moral and political
values. That makes sense: we live in a world of Christians and Muslims, atheists and theists, Republicans and Democrats, free-marketers and socialists, etc. These differences in religious, moral and political values are how we identify one another as members of the same tribe; and they affect our behavior in all sorts of ways, from determining who gets invited to the dinner party to which candidate we'll vote for in the election.

But could it be that the Internet is helping to fragment not only our moral and religious values, but our very standards of reason? Could it be making us less reasonable?

When Fights Break Out in the Library

Let's go back to the idea of the Borgesian library discussed in chapter 1. It encompasses the world. It contains books on every subject, from politics to physics to pencil-making. But not all the books agree. And we cannot leave the library to find out which is right and which is wrong. It is all there is.

Were we to live in such a Borgesian library world—as we do, in an obvious sense—we would be in a state of
information glut
. Information on any topic we can imagine—and much that any particular individual can't—is contained within the infinite walls of the library. Some of it will be accurate and some partly so, and some complete gibberish. The question is how to tell which is which. Theories will be propagated, and certain reference books will be seen as keys to unlock the secrets of the other books or as useful maps to the truths and falsehoods. But people will disagree
over which books are the best references, over the very standards for sorting the good books from the bad.

How would people react in such a situation? A natural reaction would be an increasing tribalization of the sort we saw Sunstein remarking on above. Just as in a room of shouting people you start by focusing on the voices you recognize, so the library-dwellers would be prone to read some books over others, and to discount not only their rivals' books but their reference books—the very standards they use to sort good books from bad. As such, rational discussion about whose books are best, and how to sort new books that come in, will become increasingly difficult. Tribes within the library will evaluate one another's reasons by completely different standards.

The intellectuals of the world will nod their heads sagely. It is inevitable, they will say. There is no way to know which books contain the objective truth, some will announce. “There is no objective truth!” others will assert; all books are relative to other books. Still others will declare that only faith in the one true book can solve the problem—appeals to references, citation records, card catalogues and rational standards generally is all for naught. Such reactions will only increase tribalization, and the more practical-minded of the inhabitants may begin to listen to those who point out that the only real way to settle the issue is to burn the other tribes' books.

There are reasons to think we are living in this sort of environment now. By giving us more information, the Internet not only gives us more things to disagree about, it allows us to more easily select and choose those sources that validate our existing
opinions. And that, in turn, can cause our disagreements to spiral ever deeper.

Consider for example, so-called “fact-checking” sites like Politifact, which was started by the old media outlet the
St. Petersburg Times
to help cut through all the tribe-talk and verify different claims to truth made in the cultural and political debates that fill the news. And by and large, they've had a healthy impact. But they‘ve also come under increasing assault themselves. In his essay “Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Fact-Checking': The Liberal Media's Latest Attempt to Control the Discourse,” Mark Hemingway charged that fact-checkers are themselves biased—toward the left. His evidence: several examples where fact-checkers seem to get things wrong, in a politically biased way. According to Hemingway, “What's going on here should be obvious enough. With the rise of cable news and the Internet, traditional media institutions are increasingly unable to control what political rhetoric and which narratives catch fire with the public. Media fact-checking operations aren't about checking facts so much as they are about a rearguard action to keep inconvenient truths out of the conversation.”
⁹

Notice how Hemingway frames his fact-checking of the fact-checkers. He takes himself to be exposing a hidden truth: the truth that some folks (the fact-checkers) are keen to keep inconvenient truths out of the conversation. Whether or not Hemingway is right about his claim, the point here is that the truth wars in this country have grown to such proportions that the very idea of “fact-checking” is seen as suspect.

Once debates reach this point they are very difficult to resolve. It has become a matter of principle. Not moral principles
but “epistemic” principles—“epistemic” because they are about what is rational to believe and the best sources of evidence and knowledge. Disagreements over principles such as these illustrate a very old philosophical worry: namely, that all reasons end up grounding out on something arbitrary.

For example, suppose I challenge your epistemic principle P which says that such-and-such a method is a reliable means to the truth. You defend it by appeal to some other principle, Q. If I persist in my skepticism and question Q, your options seem to dwindle. Pretty soon, being a finite creature with a finite mind, you are going to run out of principles. It seems that you must either end up defending your Q with P (whose truth is still not established) or simply dig in your heels and tell me to take off. Either way, you haven't answered my challenge, and your faith in your principles—and therefore the very methods you use to reach the truth about matters both mundane and sublime—seems blind.

This paradox goes back at least as far as the pre-Socratic philosophers of ancient Greece. Yet it reappears in cultural debates like clockwork. Today, it is heard in the claims made by evangelicals to the effect that science is really just another religion: “Everyone, scientist or not, must start their quests for knowledge with some unprovable axiom—some
a priori
belief on which they sort through experience and deduce other truths. This starting point, whatever it is, can only be accepted by faith. . . .”
¹⁰
This is a powerful idea—in part because it contains more than a grain of truth, and in part because it simply feels liberating. It levels the playing field, intellectually speaking. After all, if all reasons are grounded on something arbitrary, then why assume
science is on any firmer foundation than anything else? You might as well just go with what you already accept on faith.

If we were to concentrate just on the receptivity model of knowledge that we saw in chapter 1, then such debates wouldn't threaten knowledge at all. But that misses the point. Because the problems they cause are not for receptivity but for reasonableness. What they threaten is our ability to articulate and defend our views. The problem that skepticism about reason raises is not whether I have good evidence by my principles for my principles. Presumably I do.
¹¹
The problem is whether I can give a more objective defense of them. That is, whether I can give reasons for them that can be appreciated from what the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume called a “common point of view”—reasons that can “move some universal principle of the human frame, and touch a string, to which all mankind have an accord and symphony.”
¹²

Those who wax skeptical about the use of scientific methods to resolve debates such as the origins of life on earth, or the beginning of the universe, for example, are rarely if ever skeptical about science across the board. Their quarrel is with its use in certain domains. The folks at AnswersinGenesis.org aren't going to say that we should never use observation, logic and experiment to figure things out. What they will argue is that these methods have a lower priority in some subject matters than others, where other methods trump them. People who think that the Torah or the Bible or the Koran is a better—not the only—means to the truth about the origin of our planet, for example, see the matter in that way.

Imagine a dispute between a scientist and a creationist over these two principles:

(A) Inference to the best explanation on the basis of the fossil and physical record is the
only
method for knowing about the distant past.

(B) Consultation of the Holy Book is the
best
method for knowing about the distant past.

The friends of (B) aren't rejecting outright the strategy of consulting the fossil and historical record. So we can't just call them out for using it sometimes and not others. And obviously, we can't travel back in time and use observation (another commonly shared method) to settle who is right and who isn't about the distant past. What this shows is that debates over even very specific principles like these can end up grounding out—either the participants will end up defending their favored principles by appealing to those very principles (e.g., citing the Book to defend the Book) or appealing to specific principles that the other side shares but assigns a lower priority. Neither side will be able to offer reasons that the other will recognize for his or her point of view.