Politics of Epistemology - 2. page

American politics and culture is divided but describing that divide is tricky. Is it a cultural divide, an ideological divide. Here, I argue it’s an epistemological divide. People are fighting about how to decide what is and is not true.

Anyone with an anti-American or vaguely left-wing worldview has probably begun noticing that the content warnings, automated suspensions, topic bans and other online speech suppression publicly justified by the need to censure Donald Trump and limit the spread of hoax Covid cures are now being broadly directed against expressions of socialist, feminist and anti-imperialist positions on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other platforms.

While continuing to curate a subreddit focused on the anal rape of women, Reddit has told gender critical feminists that their discussions are no longer welcome. Articles based on reputable, credible climate science are now tagged with the same “potential hoax” flags used for the bleach cures for autism and Covid. Even good natured joke posts like “fuck America” or “Americans deserve what’s coming to them” have resulted in Facebook bans for up to forty-eight hours. Pages like The Left Chapter, Michael Laxer’s hub of socialist organizing in Canada, have been removed from their members’ Facebook feeds by a supposedly automated decision for which there are no stated reasons and no right to appeal.

Criticisms of China’s WeChat platform grow increasingly hollow as we see our speech not merely shaped by algorithms but corralled into discourses acceptable to social media firms’ owners.

How did it come to this?

First and foremost, the self-identified left has internalized and more completely believes in what, until recently, were understood to be conservative values in the 1980s. As Brexit exposed, the free trade, investor rights and dependence on rightless foreign labour are now understood to be progressive values. Nasty conservatives want to re-erect barriers to neoliberal globalization because they are cruel and racist. Therefore, we must support the very treaties that helped to create neoliberal austerity in the first place, the logic seems to go.

Because of this, progressives understand late stage monopoly capitalism the same way the original progressives, Teddy Roosevelt’s crew, understood it in their day: universal public services should not be provided by the state but by regulated monopolies and oligopolies with state-appointed oversight boards and commissions. These boards and commissions’ job would be to guarantee minimum service standards to customers and minimum profits to investors.

The return to this system through the sale of highways, power utilities, auto insurance companies, communications utilities, etc., often by progressive governments, has caused many progressive folks to see nothing as intrinsically unjust about the social media monopolies sitting in private hands. In fact, given how unjustly they have been treated by regulated monopolies, like their local phone, electrical or cable company, many see the absolute autocratic dictatorship of a charismatic individual as preferable to the faceless, bureaucratic regulatory bodies that have failed to bridle the greed of regulated firms in any meaningful way.

Second, this internalization of essentially capitalist theories of justice as, in some way, socialism-adjacent has also been paralleled by a decline in the critical vocabulary of the putative left. In this case, the ability to identify a commons must precede any efforts to socialize one. Yet, when many progressives defended Twitter’s ban of Donald Trump, they often argued that the authority of Twitter to remove Trump’s account was absolute because the online space the platform had created was its own private property and not a common carrier, i.e. a part of the communications commons required to carry everyone’s messages without discrimination.

The fact that the organizing energy of folks opposed to the private, commercialized, conservative, manipulative and censored character large social media platforms have taken on has been almost entirely directed into creating alternative, cooperative digital commons is, on the one hand, heartening. Clearly, there is some residual of Antonio Gramsci in the effort to build socialist institutions outside the state. But the flip side of this, soberingly, is that negligible organizing energy has gone into amending the telecommunications legislation in countries around the world to make these commons at least more subject to public regulation and, ideally, expropriation and socialization. Instead, progressives have, again, naturalized a profoundly conservative and undemocratic state of affairs.

Third, and most importantly, there is an epistemological split in our society. Free traders and protectionists exist in parties across the political spectrum now. Advocates for big government and limited government, same deal. Increasing rates of permanent and temporary human migration, again, no longer divisive. Nor is public borrowing. What increasingly animates what Sam Kriss terms the “reverse identity parade” that electoral politics has increasingly become is how one makes knowledge.

Progressives make knowledge using scientific expertise. What I mean by that is that progressives make knowledge by assessing who the highest-ranked or most authoritative expert is according to their criteria and then unquestioningly believe what that person says, until such time as someone demonstrates themselves to be more authoritative. The personality cult around BC’s Chief Medical Health officer Bonnie Henry is a great example. Many physicians and epidemiologists have criticized Henry’s mask skepticism and claims about the safety of schools for exposure and transmission. Henry’s followers tend to defend her on the basis of her rank. Dissidents are wrong because they are lower than Henry with respect to political and titular rank. If one prefers the opinions of the Chief of Medicine at Royal Columbian Hospital to those of Henry, one is quickly branded as being “against science.” Because science has become synonymous with expertise: i.e. the credentials and state power one possesses on the basis of one’s putative knowledge.

Conservatives, on the other hand, make knowledge in an increasingly participatory way. “Do your research!” is a slogan now associated with the false belief that vaccines cause autism in children. Pioneered by Glenn Beck, conservative talkshows function as how-to demonstrations for organizing variegated data to produce a foregone conclusion. Because the right’s enemies are amoral supermen, number in the millions and effortlessly translate their intentions into real world events, an answer like “George Soros” or “Black Lives Matter” or “Antifa” can function to explain any event. In this way, modern remedial conspiracy theory is less “pin the tail on the donkey” and more the Aristocrats. The entire joke is filler and the punchline is both foreknown and unrelated.

Because of the horrifying amount of not merely false but seemingly deranged belief out there in the form of QAnon, Covfefe, anti-vaxx, bleach therapy, climate denial and young earth creationism. And because these beliefs are clearly winning the epistemological battle, new and more drastic measures must be taken to suppress them, the thinking goes. Because FoxNews is permitted to broadcast outrageous, lethal, society-crippling lies, with Newsmax and other crazier broadcasters nipping at their heels, progressives think that we must impose new and more stringent rules to ensure the veracity of what appears in TV and on social media.

And because efforts to bridle the power to lie of Fox and others have consistently failed in the Senate and Federal Communications Commission, centrists and progressives have become the chief apologists for the direct censorship powers wielded by Mark Zuckerberg and his ilk. The problem, in progressive minds, is that these CEOs have been too timid in their efforts to control the claims and ideology permitted on their media. The idea seems to be that in the absence of the state, the billionaires must step in.

This is a grave error.

Last year, I wrote an essay about the 1980s Doctor Who story Castrovalva. In the show, the villain, the Master, creates a pocket dimension and populates it with simulacra, giving the environment and the characters detailed invented personal histories. The hero of the story is the librarian Shardovan. Although he is one of the simulacra and the books are all forged by the same hand, he becomes a skeptic simply because he detects the logical inconsistencies within the official histories, first material inconsistences, then logical consistencies. The climax of the episode occurs when he confronts his creator and accuses him of not being who he claims to be.

A number of people have so focused on how this essay fits into the theory of identity I was developing at the time that this intervention was primarily an epistemological one.

Both good stories and accurate social science derive their quality from their ability to describe how human beings think, feel and react to one another. The author of the false history of Castrovalva would have faced a choice: either write stories that are self-consistent, in which events hit together and makes sense on their face or write stories that are consistent with observed human nature. One cannot do both without capturing the desire of the human soul to be free. No matter which way the stories were written, they would have struck a false note to any person endowed with basic empathy and critical thinking capacity.

It is my argument that FoxNews, Newsmax, Breitbart, Rebel Media and their ilk should elicit the same reaction from folks with remotely functioning critical thinking skills and basic empathy. If a person with a healthy sense of empathy and basic critical thinking capacity watches FoxNews for a week, they will know that the station is telling lies, even if they have access to no other news source. In fact, a person with these two basic things should, over time, be able to figure out what is actually happening by only watching Rupert Murdoch’s equivalent to the Jonestown loudspeaker.

That is because FoxNews and its allies are horribly inconsistent. Donald Trump both organized and did not organize the riot at the capital. The riot at the capital was both patriotic and unpatriotic. No officers were killed there. The officers who were killed were no big deal. No officer death is ever acceptable. Barack Obama is a communist. And an atheist. And a Muslim. Anthropogenic climate change is good. Anthropogenic climate change is not happening. The seas are not rising. The seas are rising because we threw too many rocks in the ocean. Robert Mueller is a traitor. Robert Mueller is Donald Trump’s best friend.

No person with functioning empathy and critical thinking skills is going to be susceptible to the kind of disinformation centrists and progressives think the new censorship will protect people from. And the reason this fear seems all the more real because critical thinking skills are on the decline everywhere. The progressive embrace of expertise is a mirror image of the right’s embrace of QAnon. And they share a cause: the kind of self, the kind of soul human beings were called-upon to construct during the Enlightenment is under attack. It is being remade.

Whether moving in progressive or conservative circles, not only do we see a decline in the practice of reasoning aloud in conversation. We see the normalization of the emotional reactions of people suffering clinical narcissism. It is expected that people learning that another person has special talents or knowledge they do not will be experienced as an attack. It is expected that not being seen as one ideally imagines oneself is an injury, an attack. We determine what viewpoint is correct by assessing who has the greatest emotional stake in being right and the status needed to force that recognition. We imagine the words said about us must be the same as the words said to us. As I wrote nine years ago in Age of Authenticity, these post-Enlightenment selves are larger, more porous and overlap others. For these selves, truth is located at the centre of the self, the place most walled-off from material reality. One’s epistemological foundations are to be found on an inward journey, not an outward one.

Combined with the reduction in teaching and the lack of cultural confidence in basic critical thinking and reasoning skills, a growing portion of our population will espouse belief in incoherent nonsense. Changing or reducing the supply of pre-fabricated nonsense will make little to no difference. That is because modern conservatism has an intellectual do-it-yourself-ism that easily enables folks to substitute their own homemade batshit crazy ideas, with the same base ingredients of racial animus and confusion.

That social trend can only be arrested by dealing with the problem of the consumer, not at the level of the producer.

If Breitbart or FoxNews had existed in the 1960s, most people who believe them today would not only have disbelieved them. They would have found them laughable, funny, absurd. Even the John Birch Society and Lyndon Larouche activists would have found their explanations unusable because of the conspiracy theories would not be self-consistent with their last retelling. Too many details would be missed or wrong. And Alex Jones and his crew, the belief that every piece of errant data is a false flag or a “crisis actor,” would likely be institutionalized under the more muscular mental hygiene statutes of the time.

A population this addle-minded cannot be protected from thinking crazy things by censorship. It can only be protected by rebuilding not just our capacities for empathy and logic but for the cultural institutions that have nurtured and reinforced these things. We must re-democratize civil society institutions. We must increase the amount of zero-barrier free education available to regular folks. We must renew our democratic institutions like the FCC and CRTC to convert social media into socialized common carriers. We need to reform our education systems to prioritize critical thinking and logic and understand the inculcation empathy part of that project, not oppositional to it. We must throw off orthodoxies, new and old, that seek to shut down our capacity to think aloud together.

In the Jewish Bible or Old Testament, one of the most memorable stories is that of the Tower of Babel, a story of human hubris. The people of Babel used their vast wealth and power to build a great tower that symbolized their hegemony over the lands they ruled. They build the tower so high and, consequently, placed so much of the world under its sway that the Lord confounded the languages of the people and destroyed the tower, shattering Babel’s hegemony.

Today, the story is taking place in reverse. The world over, new forms of authoritarian rule are arising through an increasingly close alliance between social movements that hold ideas of liberty and equality in contempt and an increasingly powerful oligarchic billionaire class. Prominent in this billionaire class is Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and he, like other media and communications oligarchs are making the construction of these new Towers of Babel possible by confounding the language of the people.

Our communities are becoming, as a consequence, increasingly separated by political alignment and identity. Political content and political debates increasingly dominate media that previously were focused on familial or aesthetic connections. While Facebook rewards people for performing all kinds of difference from one another, political difference often produces the greatest rewards. Of course, this is not limited to social media. Attempts by news organizations to draw audiences from across the political spectrum are all but over.

For many years, now, people have been saying that this is producing political “echo chambers,” except that this has entailed redefining what an echo chamber is. Supposedly, an echo chamber is one in which one says something and it echoes back verbatim, perfectly. Allegedly, in an echo chamber, one hears one’s own words, one’s own views repeated back.

Except that is not what echo chambers actually are, or were before the second decade of the twenty-first century. Echo chambers are actually the opposite. Echo chambers have long been used in music and other fields to make conventional sounds seem uncanny or incomprehensible. Sound is issued into the chamber from a voice or instrument and it begins a chaotic (in the mathematical sense), escalating process of echoing and reverberation with sound overlaying sound overlaying sound. After a few minutes, in a real echo chamber, there are no longer distinct words or sounds, just the complex interplay of increasingly distorted, unrecognizable echos.

An echo chamber, then, is the auditory equivalent of a funhouse mirrors at the carnival, except that the reflections iterate for so long and with such complexity that the reflections can barely be recognized as human.

Rather than producing ideological conformity and shared political analyses, forces like Fox and Facebook do not function so much as the hypothetical echo chambers of the present but like the literal echo chambers of the past. When we type words into Facebook threads, they transform from ideas to talking points to nonsense. And they grow increasingly nonsensical as they bounce off not just other people’s words but the words we have previously typed; in fact, they go beyond nonsensical; they become uncanny, familiar words distorted into something frightening and alien.

When we engage in the politics of small difference within a community bounded, if not by ideology, then, at least a set of shared political positions, one would assume that the combination of a shared critical vocabulary and shared aims would make debate possible. But the reverse is true. That is because “if-then” and comparative reasoning have been eviscerated by standpoint epistemology. An emerging consensus across, for want of a better word, ideological communities believes that truth-making and truth-seeking processes do not exist in the intersubjective space where our conversations reside. The truth is no longer the argument most participants in a debate, agree to, through the presentation of evidence and the practice of reason, because truth is no longer located in intersubjective space. The conversation is not the thing that produces truth; it is the place to which you report subjective truths already produced.

Conversation, then, tends to comprise competing claims of the validity of one’s subjective truth; this typically involves claiming membership in an identity group and then arguing that this identity group is the one vested with authority to report what is true. Among what I am increasingly tempted to call the “fake left,” this involves claims of membership in a marginalized or stigmatized identity group. An act of oppression calculus then takes place to review evidence not about the person’s argument but their claims of marginalization. Whether a person able to pass as white can make a claim to authority based on being a member of a racialized group must be adjudicated—it is here, ironically, the intersubjective truth-making does take place; the authority of the crowd is relevant but only insofar as it situates one’s identitarian credentials but not in whether one’s claim makes logical sense or is supported by evidence—and pronounced upon.

On the right, the same ideas obtain, right down to the narration of victimization and marginalization. Except that the stories are of white male failure and white male victimhood. A man was passed over for a promotion in favour of a woman; a white person lost out to a person of colour; a business owner went bankrupt; a white Christian had to attend a Kwanza’a party for work. Once adjudged the biggest white failure in the room, the man—and inevitably it is a man—can then narrate what’s “really going on,” with Antifa and Black Lives Matter being paid millions of dollars by George Soros to destroy Christianity, or whatever.

Once one has won the argument as to the superior oppression calculus credentials, one may then report the truth. But truth, at this point, is increasingly presented not as an if-then syllogism but instead as a talking point or set thereof.

I have written about talking points before, a new speech style developed during the deregulation of 1980s neoliberalism to shield corporations from liability for increasingly frequent product recalls and industrial accidents. Following the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster that killed hundreds of thousands, the firm handling the file, Burson-Marsteller pioneered specialization in “crisis communications,” PR strategies designed to minimize the effects of corporate malfeasance.

Central to crisis communications is the use of “talking points.” Talking points are one or more mantras corporate representatives are taught to repeatedly intone during interviews with media. Their purpose is not to offer answers or inform listeners or viewers but instead to beat meaning out of conversations by repeating a slogan that appears, superficially, to relate to the matter under discussion but never to the question that has been asked. By breaking down conversational interchange, itself, corporate representatives could concurrently bore and confuse their audience, ultimately causing them to tune out because no sense was being made.

After all, the first rule of crisis communications is never to answer the question you have been asked but simply to present one’s talking points brazenly as a non-sequitur.

Talking points soon metastasized into electoral politics and were used to great effect by the apologists for neoliberalism to produce confusion and disengagement, the next best thing to actual consent of the governed. But either as part of Third Way popular front politics or simply because of the discourse environment, what passes for a left began to adopt talking points language but with no understanding of what it was for or what it could successfully do.

Of those on the putative left, organizations that identify as progressive are the most likely to believe in the use of talking points, believing that if one can reduce one’s ideas into a set of koan-like non-responses that roll off the tongue well, one is somehow meeting the right on its own field of battle, using its own weapons and can therefore win the day, not understanding that important Orwellian lesson that nonsense is not politically neutral; it serves the oppressor.

In this way, argument becomes impossible because an increasing portion of every conversation is both nonsensical and non-responsive. People are asked to “check their privilege,” as though there a privilege-check boy waiting them at some metaphorical coat-room, who could somehow relocate them closer to a subject position closer to ideal victimhood if tipped well enough. This is a talking point amongst talking points, impossible, non-responsive and designed to address solely the authority of the speaker, not the veracity of the argument.

And so the tower grows higher, Mark Zuckerberg standing atop it, its panopticon enabling the creation of a new kind of hegemony through the confounding of language itself.

Several people have asked me to write a blog post about the kind of society I see as emerging out of the Covid-19 epidemic, one that learns lessons from the pandemic and reorients itself in a more compassionate direction. This request joins a long lineage of requests for descriptions of the future, from what an eco-socialist BC might look like, how the Pacific Northwest might look with a bioregional system of political economy, what a post-imperial global order might look like.

It is not so much that I refuse to do these things as that I cannot do these things. The feats of imagination being asked of me are far beyond any human’s imaginative capacity. Furthermore, the belief that such feats are within the capabilities of human beings in our present moment, is, itself, dangerous.

Marxist and poststructuralist thinkers have a lot more in common than is often credited, especially in this day and age when fake intellectuals like Jordan Peterson try to conflate them. But one area of considerable overlap is the understanding that the system of relationships that comprise a social order, whether we call it a “stage of history” or an “episteme,” is the understanding that what we can imagine is profoundly conditioned by that order. The human imagination is never unfettered; it is always circumscribed by culture and knowledge. Late stage capitalism opens us to certain new areas of imagination—how a sexualized ideal of ourselves might look in our mind’s eye, new possible flavours of ice cream, how to appropriate and commodify some part of another’s imagination or our own—but it also works to dim or eliminate all kinds of imagining. And yet, at the same time, we are told that imagination is pre-social, individual and unfettered by material or cultural conditions. One of the central lies of capitalism is that it does not fetter the imagination. And we often can only guess at what it is that we have lost the capacity to imagine, given that we have lost it.

That is not to say that I do not expend huge amounts of my mental energy imagining places and times other than this one, in the past, in the future, or in a universe with different physical properties. Indeed, doing this has been one of the greatest and longest-standing passions of my life. Since being prescribed the Basic D&D boxed set by a child psychiatrist in 1981, I have spent thousands of hours imagining different worlds, different societies and sharing them with my friends.

As an adult, I became a historian and completed a PhD and postdoctoral fellowship not just in the study of the past but in the study of the imaginary past of the Mormon church, one in which God is from the planet Kolob and in which people called the Jaredites traveled from Eurasia to North America in submarines four thousand years ago.

But just as the Book of Mormon is actually a commentary on Jacksonian America, its controversies, limitations and imagination, my games are simply essays on the limitations of the late capitalist imaginary; no one is so special as to transcend it.

That stated, it does seem to be true that those most capable of imagining a future different from today are those most versed in the wide array of human societies of the past and present, historians, folklorists, classicists, medievalists and anthropologists who can use the physical and documentary evidence left by other societies to try and reach outside the imaginative limitations of our own.

That is why I have always treasured Brian Fawcett’s Cambodia, a book in which Fawcett tries to reach outside his own consciousness to report on the thoughts of his dead friend while engaging in an extended meditation on Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Fawcett’s ultimate conclusion is this: the main thing that conditions our ability to imagine possible futures is our ability to remember the past.

That is why the Khmer Rouge and other despotic movements attempt to obliterate knowledge of the past or replace it, whole cloth, with an “all now” consciousness in which human nature and human society have always been essentially identical, with the only thing in flux being labour-saving technology. In Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the term “revolution” was redefined as “return to the past.”

Perhaps the most clear-headed thinker political thinker on the limitations of the human imagination and how these limitations impeded the revolutionary project was Vladimir Lenin. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had argued, in original dialectical materialism, that the capacity and will to rise up against capitalism and smash it varied directly with how alienated capitalism had made a person, not just in the Marxian economic sense but in the larger social and cultural sense this encompassed.

People who did not control when they went to work or when they came home, who did not own their tools, who did not own their homes, who were cut off from cultural production and participation: these would be the people who would take up arms against capitalism: the working class of England, Germany, the Netherlands and France.

Lenin saw it more clearly. Rising up against this alienation was contingent on the ability to imagine something different. And the ability to imagine something different was contingent on the ability to remember something different. Consequently, he came to believe that Russia’s highly distinctive way of industrializing made it the best candidate for revolution.

Most of the industrial proletariat of Western Europe had become factory workers as part of a multigenerational process of dispossession and urbanizatioin. The workers in the steel mills of England, France, Germany and the Netherlands were mostly from families whose ties to the villages where they once farmed had been slowly cut over more than a century. Even if someone had migrated from the countryside in their own lifetime, the countryside they left was one whose feudal obligations and common lands had vanished long before. First, feudal title changed into fee simple title and then lords turned into landlords; inherited peasant land became rented land; the rural poor descended from renter, to debt peon to part of a landless and increasingly mobile rural proletariat. Urban, industrial labour was not an alternative to life as a peasant on aristocratic or common lands but an alternative to life as a migrant agricultural labourer.

Thus, for the proletariat of Western Europe, only a small minority had a clear memory of living and farming on a family plot with hereditary rights, owning one’s tools, etc. But in Russia, things were different. Serfdom still existed in Russia, as did a wide network of common lands where serfs were operationally free people but legally, the tsar’s property. Also, the landed aristocracy and the urban elite were not two overlapping communities, as in England but a single community, comprising the identical people.

Consequently, what made economic and political sense was for boyars to open factories in St. Petersburg or Moscow and then simply uproot a portion of their serfs from their rural estate and staff the factory with them. Even the factory workers who had urbanized less coercively had typically done so within a generation or two, not within five generations, meaning that nearly everyone in a Russian factory retained a memory of owning their tools, inheriting their home and making most of the things they needed in their local community.

Lenin understood that there is a difference between alienation and consciousness of alienation. Alienation is the reason to revolt. Consciousness of alienation is the motivation to revolt. Or, in Fawcett’s terms, Russian workers could imagine a future outside capitalism because they could remember a past outside it.

This did not merely instill in Lenin one of the most profound sociological insights of all time. It also forced a curious kind of humility on him. Like Jefferson, Madison and the contributors to America’s Federalist Papers, Lenin understood that the new society that would succeed capitalism was something that could only be haltingly, incrementally thought into being after the revolution, when the constraining power of capitalism on the imagination slowly receded.

From what we can adduce of his thirty or so months of holding power after the end of the Russian Civil War, it appears that rather than proceeding with a clear plan to build a particular society, he attempted to ignite the same kind of halting, confused, self-contradictory conversation that allowed America to think liberal capitalism into being, the century from the declaration of Independence to the Supreme Court ruling that all “rights” could adhere to individuals and individuals were the only thing to which rights could adhere.

So, Lenin changed economic policies a number of times and poured money into the arts, hoping expand the horizon of possibilities available in the Russian political imaginary. He made some big mistakes too in limiting necessary discourse to make the project possible. But often our imagination of what 1921-24 was like is coloured by our knowledge of what was to come next.

What followed Lenin’s death was, of course, a tragedy with the rise of Joseph Stalin. There are many things for which to indict Stalin (and Lenin, for that matter). But central to the problem of Stalin is this: he believed that the Soviet Union was not only imaginable but had already been imagined by him. The experimental art and literature of Leninism came to be supplanted by Soviet Realism. What is meant by “realism” is clear: the real is that which already exists, has already been imagined, is already known. The limits of Soviet communism became the limits of a single man’s consciousness formed under monarchical absolutism and Dickensian capitalism.

My refusal to describe an eco-socialist future for BC or Canada or the Pacific Northwest does not just come from an attempt at a Leninist humility, a willingness to take seriously how seriously capitalism has narrowed my horizon of possibility and reshaped my imagination in fetishistic, solipsistic ways. It also comes from an understanding of the totalitarianism that is incipient in believing one can imagine a future beyond capitalism with the tools capitalism has placed at our disposal.

For this reason, we need to read history. We need to read speculative fiction. We need to read the myths and stories of cultures far off in space and time. And we need to practice our social imagination in dreaming up other ways of being, knowing and working. But we should not confuse that for fashioning a plan or blueprint for the post-capitalist world. All we can do is ready ourselves for that task when it is thrust upon us.

Here is the final part of my four-parter on the Age of Authenticity. It’s going to be the last of my blog’s Am-con for some time. With this series essentially done, I want to offer thanks and acknowledgement to those who helped me produce this theory, most notably Jeanine Gostenhofer and Robert Miller for modeling this epistemology for me and Geoff Berner for workshopping the theory over a series of lunches, especially his reminding me of the importance of Watergate.

Next, here’s a recap:

In Part One, I introduced the idea that what many of us see as an ideological or demographic split in America is actually an epistemological split. In other words, what Americans are really at each other’s throats over is how society should decide what is and is not true. Unlike other industrial democracies, America has a substantial minority within its population who do not just reject the epistemology that became mainstream in the nineteenth century as a result of the Enlightenment but who practice new methods of deciding what the truth is. I suggested some distinctive aspects of early US history that may help to explain why Americans are rejecting the Age of Reason in favour of a new Age of Authenticity.

In Part Two, I explained how Authenticity works as an alternative to Reason when it comes to day-to-day epistemology. Those of us rooted in the Age of Reason check the truth of a statement for two things: external evidence and internal consistency. Authentic thinkers, on the other hand, check statements against their gut feelings. Instead of comparing claims to the world outside, they compare claims against their feelings, trusting that if something feels like a lie, it probably is.

In Part Three, I turned to recent history and demonstrated how Authenticity was not originally a conservative approach but instead one that came out of the New Left and Counterculture.

While religious conservatives had grown deeply suspicious of reason and science, they lacked an alternative epistemology with which to challenge dominant views. But all that would change in the mid-1970s.Watergate did not just trigger a national nervous breakdown because of the naked, petty criminality of a president; it universally dramatized what the counterculture had been claiming for years: the authoritative white men in the suits are lying, lying about Vietnam, about the election, the whole deal. The Republican Party would survive; Voltaire’s bastards would not. Nixon, the last liberal president, Kissinger, the last foreign policy realist – they were the kind of men rendered obsolete by Watergate.

America was also fatigued, disillusioned and, most importantly, divided in other ways. The renewed sectional conflict between North and South with the enforcement of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act left a nation divided, as did the culture wars over sexual morality and a host of other questions. The Born-Again movement constituted a genuine fusion of conservative fundamentalism and the counterculture. And as a genuine synthesis, the Born-Again movement provided a path equally open to hippies and squares, Klansmen and Freedom Riders, liberals and conservatives.

In any state that had gone through traumatic disestablishment in the nineteenth century, a religious movement would have lacked the institutional capacity to effect the cultural transformation it did in America. But in the US, there existed the institutional infrastructure needed to universalize countercultural ideas that most Americans would have rejected out of hand, had they come via any other social formation. Just as Authenticity saved an embattled conservative Christianity besieged on all sides by urbanization, sexual liberation and a host of ills; it also saved and popularized an equally embattled countercultural ethic of trusting one’s feelings as a more legitimate source of truth than the man in the suit with the fancy degree.

Popular, well-attended, self-sufficient churches were not the only piece of uniquely American social infrastructure needed to confer a critical mass on the episteme of Authenticity. There was also the American party system formed in the Age of Jackson. Whether because, in the case of Germany and Italy, mass membership in political parties recalled an ugly past or, in the case of Australia and Canada, civic culture had never involved true mass parties, or, more generally, turning political parties into socially comprehensive, capacious institutions evoked the one-party states of Eastern Europe, nowhere in the West, save America, had a party system that entailed political parties having millions of active members. The creation of the primary system in the Progressive Era, making political party membership free and using the apparatus of government to recruit and track party members set American democracy on a different course than the rest of the world.

America, in other words, possessed a public square in a way that the rest of the industrialized world did not; and as states increasingly adopted mass primaries and open caucuses from the 1960s onward, this square grew and not just by virtue of scale. Authenticity served to magnify its participatory and leveling features. For those in the Age of Reason, participation in politics was typically justified either as arising from trust in a particular individual, typically a candidate for office, based on putative ideological accord or as arising from one’s own civic literacy. In the Age of Authenticity, civic literacy vanishes as a concept because to react is to know; all people are civically literate. To admit civic literacy as a category is, for Authentic Americans, an elitist position.

And Americans uncomfortable with this idea typically act to entrench it. Opposing authenticity is the idea that experts are trustworthy and that good decisions come from the application of expertise to data. Bill Clinton’s Democratic convention speech in 2012 had such a profound effect on the election because offered a middle way between the epistemic polarities that have arisen in the present day. Hewing to the original spirit of the Age of Reason, he invited Americans to reason together, by saying things like “I’ve recently noticed something. And you probably have too.” Instead of a choice between the democratic ethos of Authenticity on one hand and the elitist ethos of technocracy on the other, he offered Americans the Enlightenment thinking of Thomas Paine, arguing that all that is required for civic literacy is to apply reason to data, the birthright of all Americans, irrespective of expertise. But the extraordinary character of his speech serves only to indicate just how far America’s epistemic split has gone.

Another factor in Authenticity achieving its critical mass was consciousness of decline. Consciousness of decline is distinct from actual decline, often with minimal correlation. The combined effects of defeat in Vietnam, stagflation, the Oil Crisis, epidemic violent crime, the Russian oil boom and the decline in relative white male status compared to other groups helped to render belief in America’s decline mainstream and prevalent. Belief that Rome was destroyed from within by “decadence” and sloth rather than Christian anti-intellectualism certainly helped to fuel the 1970s decline consciousness of the US, yielding a nationalistic reason to retreat in the face of data and seek metrics other than GDP for the greatness of America.
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The priests of reason had few ideas for the US to overcome its malaise whereas Authenticity pointed a clear way forward: the purification of the private and national self through moral uprightness and honesty. Born Again Christians, whether former Jesus Freaks in Haight-Ashbury or former Klansmen in Selma flocked in droves to support the presidential bid of one of their own, Jimmy Carter through the Democratic primaries. But Carter let them down; the malaise, pessimism and respect for expertise only intensified in his presidency, resulting in the constituency’s shift to the Republicans by 1980.

But the legacy of the founding generations of the American republic goes beyond mobilization processes and structures. The consciousness of which the Authentic partake is also shaped by the nation’s founding documents. As I suggested in the first part of this essay, America’s canon, the Declaration, Constitution and Federalist Papers are not so much a reflection of a new individualistic political ethos as textual evidence of the process by which that consciousness was haltingly thought into being. Freedom of religion applied to states, towns, congregations and/or persons; the right to bear arms applied to states, towns, militias and/or persons.

As Cat Stevens’ answer within directed Authentic Americans to turn away from data-based texts grounded in the present-day physical and social sciences and back to documents whose symbolic value was so powerful as to transcend their contents, and as major religious debates moved out of denominations and into parties and political action committees, a historically decontextualized reading of the nation’s founding documents further reinforced the Authentic episteme. The deep uncertainty on the part of the nation’s founders about where the self stops and the world begins allowed Authenticity to develop a political program beyond electing the honest and virtuous to office. The ambivalence of freedom of religion settled by the courts in the century from the 1860s to the 1960s was back. Freedom of religion could well mean imposing religious uniformity on one’s community because Authenticity is also about destabilizing the place the Age of Reason fixed the self-world boundary.

One’s “rights,” an Enlightenment concept appropriated by Authenticity, unmoored from a stable standard for bounding the self, allows one to reach within to generate a vision not simply of how the individual should live in order to feel authentic but of how society must be restructured and remade in order to enact these rights. And Authenticity provides a clear, if completely flexible standard for checking on whether one’s rights are being impinged upon; it is simply, “do you feel good now?” If not, the political program necessary to align the interior self with the outside world must expand in both its ambition and its coercive power.

Until recently, debates about the state regulation of human sexuality have typically been underpinned by arguments about public order. Junk sociology was offered to explain how gay marriage, having children out of wedlock, etc. caused social decay, crime and chaos. But today, these debates have taken on a new simplicity. Just as the rise of Authenticity has made it easier for gay people seeking equal rights to argue that their subjective experience of love constituted a sufficient justification for legal marriage, there has been a corollary. The fact that gay people getting married causes some people emotional upset and makes them feel like their marriage is less special and important has, likewise, become sufficient reason to oppose equality. Arguing sociology is passé.

Just as importantly, a closer reading of the American Constitution indicates a chaotic consciousness on the part of the nation’s founders about whether the exercise of one’s personal religious freedom could entail the state-driven coercion of others, to the extent that the consciousness is even organized enough to perceive these things as clearly distinct. And religion is not the only area where this is true; the indistinctly bounded self of the founders’ consciousness renders Authenticity fundamentally social. Being authentic may even entail shooting other people based on the bad feelings we have about them.

If Authenticity functions by comparing the world against the interior self, solipsism is socialized, re-forming religious and political communities based on predictable, shared experiences of emotional grievance. Such communities are far more durable because they unite people based on emotional constitution rather than specific actions or goals.

Despite heavily pandering to the most authentic in American society, Mitt Romney was unable to win the US presidential election not because he ran one of the most dishonest presidential campaigns of the past century but because he ran one of the most inauthentic. The incongruence between Romney’s statements and objective evidence was an asset when it came to campaigning. Authentic Americans were unable to fully engage with his campaign not because he asserted that the president has ended work requirements for welfare funding and raised everyone’s personal income taxes but because it appears that there was a discrepancy between his assertions and his feelings.

Authentic people are not stupid. They are just as intelligent as Reasonable people; they just use that intelligence to detect lying instead of using it to detect falsehood. And it was clear to them that Romney was a liar because he did not believe what he said when he was saying it. The problem was not the discrepancy between Romney’s claims and empirical evidence but the discrepancy between his interior narrative and the one he presented to the country.

In 2012, the palpable racism and misogyny of many Republicans and the ambition of one very rich man saved Americans from a fully authentic federal government. It may be a long time before a coalition organizing around Authenticity can seize national political power. But regardless, America’s epistemic realignment will continue: facts and feelings will draw closer together; selves will become larger and more permeable; hypocrisy will continue its ascent to becoming the most loathsome and repugnant of all sins; and the sun will continue to set on the Age of Reason.

This will continue, at least, until we recognize that Authenticity is something bigger, scarier and more powerful than simple ignorance, stupidity or over-sensitivity. It might feed on those character flaws but it is something far more: it is a universally available alternative way of making sense of the world. And we can only hope to challenge it once we recognize its power and magnitude.

Let’s begin by considering this scary thought: what if it’s been the same baby boomers holding protest signs the whole time, these past fifty years? While I am sure this is not literally the case, I think we all might feel a little queasy if we conducted a series of personal micro-histories of the people who have homemade Obama as Hitler signs in Ohio. While the Lyndon Larouche movement has always been peripheral in America, in it, we can track the most clearly transformation of the slogans on protest signs from “End the Draft” to “Government Out of My Medicare.”

What is clear today, from poll after poll, is that the baby boom generation, which we associate with the Sexual Revolution and the Vietnam War resistance movement, Mitt Romney’s generation, is the backbone of the Tea Party. These baby boomers, as they have been since the Summer of Love, are the cutting edge of authenticity; the core doctrine of the movement, as distinct from the various struggles in which it has been involved, like the debt ceiling, is that their federal taxes have steadily risen since 2008, something easily disproved by the tax returns they file every year. But they know their taxes have gone up because they can feel it in their gut, not in the cold, positivistic realm of their bank account or tax return.

As I said in part two, in that Hegelian/Marxian way, authenticity was a key part of the Age of Reason; it just surfaced, over time, as the locus of contradiction or antithesis that the Enlightenment episteme inevitably conjured. In other words, just as beauty and empirical evidence cohabited in the aesthetically elegant models of Galileo and Copernicus, empirical evidence and authenticity initially seemed to get along just fine. Their mutual hostility to hypocrisy and lily-gilding helped to power critiques of the Age of Beauty like Candide.

It was in post-war America that authenticity and reason came to be pitted against each other. This was intimately tied to the innovations in personhood associated with the Baby Boom. Baby Boomers came of age in an America as deeply committed to the values of the Age of Reason as it has ever been. This was reflected in the massive expansion in postsecondary education, huge-scale investment in creating a single standard in elementary and secondary education, increasing governmental funding of science and an increasingly technocratic expertise-focused corporate culture in both the public and private sectors.

But they also came of age in the Summer of Love and the rhetoric of the late 60s which resurrected much of the rhetoric of the romanticism of Keats and others, with its interest in sexual liberation, personal experience, nature and the democratization of the arts through the resurgence of folk music. But whereas romanticism was explicitly nostalgic, and therefore easily domesticated within an episteme that prized “progress,” the Age of Aquarius proclaimed by the counterculture was forward-looking. It didn’t see the disenchantment of the world as a price we must wistfully pay for progress but instead as an error to be corrected.

This was, after all, the age of men like Robert McNamara, the great morally vacuous technocrats John Ralston Saul calls “Voltaire’s bastards.” Only a generation after the Holocaust, the moral vacuity of the priests of reason seemed totally unchastened as they poured defoliants onto Southeast Asia as part of a rational war. While conservatives like George Wallace remained significant political foes as the 1960s wore on, the counterculture, for a variety of good reasons, focused an increasing proportion of its activist energy against the likes of McNamara and Henry Kissinger.

From the simple perspective of the scale of suffering and injustice, the war in Vietnam and Cambodia simply outdistanced the white supremacist states of the American South. As immortalized by the Onion’s headline, “America’s Negroes March on Hanoi,” by the late 1960s, the US government was killing far more of its poor and black citizens in Vietnam than the Klan and its allies could hope to kill in the former Confederacy.

But there were also questions of proximity and resemblance. McNamara and Kissinger were both former Harvard professors and the white men in suits who presided over the unprecedented number of university students enrolled in the 1960s and 70s bore an essential resemblance to them: high-handed, technocratic, elitist and convinced that reason, itself, constituted a form of moral authority. The day-to-day interactions with professors, deans and other authority figures in the universities where the counterculture continued to be based until the end of the Vietnam draft seemed like miniature versions of the larger national struggle of the counterculture and anti-war movement.

Universities were the places where most of the confrontations that comprised these movements took place; most acts of resistance and witnessing were against authorities summoned at the behest of university administrators, not governors or mayors. Furthermore, because the main purpose of these administrators and professors was to inculcate the epistemology of the Age of Reason, the countercultural revolt increasingly saw itself in epistemic terms.

The inward turn of pop-psychology, mysticism and places like the Esalen Institute has been well-canvassed by scholars of the demobilization of left activists we associate with the 1970s. What is more often overlooked is the way that movements that did not become fully mobilized until the 1970s actually intensified the turn to Authenticity. The American Indian Movement played a small but important part of realigning the epistemology of the counterculture, in ways unparalleled in European countries where students were also occupying university administration buildings.

In the US and Canada, arguments about indigenous rights were inextricable from the brutal record of the re-education camps created by governments to extirpate indigenous cultures. They were also, thanks to English common law traditions, intimately tied to demonstrating long-term aristocratic title to key pieces of land and the continuity of that title with present-day indigenous groups. “This land is sacred and we have lived here since the world began,” an effective claim since the nineteenth century of appealing the European romanticism to defend indigenous land, gained a new prominence and authority with the rise of Red Power in the 1970s.

Red Power gave the counterculture and its descendants an additional impetus, absent in Europe, to question the Age of Reason. It just seemed so unfair, so racist, not to recognize some deep truth in the story of First Woman falling from the sky and giving birth to the human race, to view the story of Raven opening the clam shell to release the first people through the condescending eyes of the Victorian colonialists who dismissed this superstition and sent the elders’ children to be incarcerated and re-educated to cure them of such backwardness.

Moreover, boost in sexual icks.org buy generic levitra performance is never proven. This drug is known to have an erection viagra uk without prescription is much more than a weakness. try this now cheap viagra Indulge in some sort of physical activities like aerobics etc. Those who are suffering from the sports injury often make use of testosterone raising herbs such as Tribulus to pfizer viagra prix increase their muscle mass and strength. In the same decade as the Longest Walk and Wounded Knee II provided the counterculture’s remnants with new grounds for choosing Authenticity over Reason, France made its own contribution to the brewing American epistemic crisis through the postmodern critique. Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and others offered a profound challenge to the Enlightenment episteme that shook the French academic world to its foundations. But its impact on America was far more dramatic, thanks to the vagaries of translation and popularization.

It is not that postmodernism was not translated faithfully from a linguistic perspective; it is more that it could not be faithfully translated from a cultural perspective. The penchant for hyperbole, overstatement and linguistic grandiosity in the French corner of continental philosophy had no parallel or context for American readers. Instead of reading Foucault and Derrida in the context of the post-Enlightenment continental philosophy, the graduate students and junior professors seeking intellectual validation of their increasing sense of inauthenticity and discomfort with the Age of Reason read these texts with an earnest literalism. This reading, worse yet, was popularized by individuals steeped in New Age religion and other doctrines of self-improvement, producing a vulgarized American postmodernism that bore about as much resemblance to the thinking of Derrida as Social Darwinism did to Origin of Species.

For the French, then, poststructuralism has functioned as a means of correcting problems with the Age of Reason; for Americans, on the other hand, it has served to contest and undermine it. Recognizing that truth is socially constructed is not the same as conceding the absence or irrelevance of an underlying physical reality about which we can make real discoveries, socially mediated or not. Yet it is this kind of socialized solipsism that American intellectuals took from the postmodern critique.

Today, we do not see universities as hotbeds of Authenticity; we are more likely, despite the persistence of vulgarized American postmodernism, to see them as the last bastions of the Age of Reason. Authenticity succeeded because it spread beyond the shrinking, factionalized and increasingly unpopular counterculture, thanks, in some measure to the Jesus Freak movement and the larger, more mainstream movement it spawned, Born-Again Christianity.

Today, the Born-Again movement has been such a success that we have trouble imagining other kinds of Christianity as anything other than marginal and vaguely heretical. Yet, the emphasis on personal experience of God over any congregational, traditional, textual or ecclesiastical authority constituted as radical a departure from American churches as rural communes were from suburban life.

The old-fashioned Yankee congregational Christianity the Pilgrim Fathers brought to America was essentially Calvinist in character, emphasizing daily demonstrations of continence, fidelity and moral rectitude as the centre of religious experience. Like Voltaire, these Christians were deeply disturbed by “enthusiasm,” ecstatic, uncontrolled religious experience they associated with ignorance, a lack of self-control and other attributes that disqualified people from bourgeois culture. The Calvinist critique of enthusiasm was not just about keeping people from speaking in tongues; it marginalized the uneducated, the divorced, those born out of wedlock and a host of others whose lives did not demonstrate the self-discipline necessary to demonstrate faith.

This understanding of Christianity had been challenged by many evangelical revitalization movements in the past, since the advent of Methodism in the eighteenth century, arguing for a renewed emphasis on personal, subjective experiences of God and attacking formal denominational structures and a trained clergy. By the 1970s, these waves of enthusiasm had created an American Christianity already receptive to ideas of Authenticity but lacking crucial equipment the new episteme provided.

Even the original publication, The Fundamentals on which America’s Christian Fundamentalist movement was based accused those who spoke of a faith versus reason debate as insulting and caricaturing Christianity. This was a pejorative casting of the debate by those aligned with the Age of Reason; ideas like Creationism arose not from a rejection of empiricism but from an attempt to cloak magical ideas in the discourse of science. New science, responsibly-practiced science, truly unbiased science would ultimately validate Biblical teachings, the fundamentalist story went.

Authenticity cleared the decks for Christian conservatives struggling to express their deep disquiet with the Age of Reason. Personal truth, authentic truth, the truth that lives in feelings no longer provided hope for future proof of Biblical teachings; it was that proof. One’s personal relationship with Christ did not inspire one to continue looking for remnants of Noah’s Ark; it was that evidence, itself. There was nothing new about the idea of trusting one’s feelings to guide one to the truth; what was novel about Authenticity was that it collapsed feelings and truth into one another.

Authenticity is not about the importance of personal experience in knowing truth; it is about the sufficiency of personal experience in knowing truth.

As Cat Stevens wrote, “Because the answer lies within / So why not take a good look now? / Kick out the Devil’s sin / Pick up the good book now,” a beautiful inversion of the Protestant belief in sola scriptura; the truth doesn’t move from the Bible into our souls; the truth emanates from our souls and reaches out to find the Bible.

And it turned up in just the nick of time. America in the 1970s was in desperate need of Authenticity to respond to a host of crises gripping the nation.