Epistemological Bubbles and Echo Chambers - Thoughts on January 6

    An “epistemological bubble,” is “an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission.” In other words, a space in which a belief system is protected from any thought – true or false – that might cause doubt. Epistemological bubbles are bad – if truth matters, if seeking wisdom and insight matters: if the mind matters. (For a free society, all these goods matter.) Bubbles create the illusion that everyone thinks the way we do even when they don’t. They live by concealing issues from view. 

       An example: you will never see a major broadcasting company in America thematize the destructive impact of corporate capitalism on so many aspects of life, from the destruction of rural America (farmers and the small towns that used to support them) to the destruction of the land (e.g. in strip mining) to the destruction of the manufacturing base – and the working class –  during the “globalization” craze to the influence of big money in writing the rules we live by, to the concentration of wealth at the top and the squeezing of working people as a result of this. More recently, Fox News has created a still smaller bubble by excluding not only those kinds of things but also anything that would cause its MAGA viewers to question the fantasy world created by their reality show host leader, a crazy little bubble in which truth plays no role at all. The other corporate media were bubble creators, but within their bubbles, there were still standards of factual reporting; they couldn’t just make stuff up; there was also a limited space for critical journalism.  (Fox News did have to pay over 800 million in defamation damages promoting the election lie; so not completely free to make stuff up.) To show how times have changed: had Nixon tried to do a Trump, he would have been laughed out of Washington.

    Yet epistemological bubbles can be dealt with: just make truth accessible; make other serious arguments available. To pop the bubble just make the facts and arguments available that have been excluded from the bubble. This happened in my case because I read books from a great variety of viewpoints argued by serious authors.

    More worrying than the bubbles are the echo chambers. An echo chamber is “a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited.”  In other words, any argument or factual evidence that might make someone doubt the bubble must – by definition – come from a corrupt source and thus are worthy only of being mocked, not taken seriously. This has been at work in all the darkest movements in my country’s history – as it was in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Putin’s Russia (the ideal form of state for MAGA).  McCarthyism thrived on it. 

      Rush Limbaugh – who, alas, seduced my beloved father for a good while, in spite of his good heart – was a master of it. (Perhaps Goebbels was his teacher?) He taught his listeners not to trust anyone who criticized him. He painted a picture of a malicious elite out to get him and his audience – and his audience ate it up. He questioned the integrity of anyone who presented views that were outside the bubble he constructed such that they were not mistaken but malicious. Political opponents you believe mistaken are met with argument and evidence that they are mistaken; Limbaugh’s opponents were mocked and ridiculed, often with utmost cruelty, making his audience complicit in the cruelty when they laughed. He transformed political debate into a cold civil war. Great for his ratings. I think he was only interested in money.

     But Trump took over the playbook and has dramatically expanded it with the techniques of the reality show and by using the new technologies to their maximum potential. His opponents are not only malicious human beings but "vermin" that he wants to "rot in hell." Well Limbaugh never went that far. Breaking through an echo chamber is not nearly as easy – not that it is that easy – as popping an epistemological bubble.  If any outside view is by definition corrupt, the bubble is immune, can’t be popped. My former government professor and friend, Dr. Georg Bluhm, who survived Hitler's Germany, once told me that the great strength of democracy, as opposed to totalitarianism, is that it can criticize itself. Well, here we are. Thus I have very little faith that my country will even retain the trappings of democratic government. You can’t have a democracy without democrats, as Germany learned in their history. I try not to lose hope.

    I have focused on right-wing populism as an example, but the same phenomenon exists on the left, which has in a way affected me more personally. To present a philosophical argument against the dogma that society arbitrarily assigns a sex to a baby at birth – that nature has nothing to say here – will get you expelled in disgrace for many postmodernist clubs as some kind of oppressor.

 

It's all a form of fanaticism.

 

. . .

 

The media structure of a society is critically related to its capacity for freedom and justice. I think the best media structure for a democracy is the dominance of the printed word, with publishing being widely distributed and a lot of it being local. As soon as big money, a party, a movement, or a strongman controls any media, then bubbles are constructed; media becomes a power to control hearts and minds. Any technology with that kind of power must be limited and regulated in the interest of the public good and an open society.

    Behind this there needs to be a culture oriented to reasoned discussion. As part of the ethos of this culture would be the love of truth over being right. In philosophy I was taught from the beginning that a true lover of wisdom loves to be corrected since it brings them closer to wisdom. It would involve an attitude of intellectual humility. We are all radically finite and fallible. None of us are close to knowing everything. To understand how ignorant we are - how far from perfect wisdom - is the beginning of wisdom. All of us can continue to learn till the day we die. 

      It follows that it is in our interest to listen attentively to those who see the world differently. And in their interest to listen to us. Humility means respect. And this should be reflected in broadcasting. No propaganda. As soon as someone who things differently is discredited, a red flag should go up. Serious people who see things differently trying to seek truth together as partners – that should be the model. How to create such a culture in the present technological-economic constellation is beyond me.