“Merely rearranging their prejudices”
Day-laborers like Joey on the construction site were not an educated bunch. But they had opinions. Lots of them. When Joey began a sentence with, “Now, I’ll tell you what’s the truth …”, it was time to buckle up. Here it comes.
Brian Klass does not invoke truthiness in writing this morning about knowingness, but the two are cousins. An essay by Jonathan Malesic at Aeon provoked Klass to explore the latter. “We know there is something wrong with the way we know,” Malesic explains:
Knowingness, as the philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear defines it in Open Minded (1998), is a posture of always ‘already knowing’, of purporting to know the answers even before the question arises. When new facts come to light, the knowing person is unperturbed. You may be shocked, but they knew all along.
In 21st-century culture, knowingness is rampant. You see it in the conspiracy theorist who dismisses contrary evidence as a ‘false flag’ and in the podcaster for whom ‘late capitalism’ explains all social woes. It’s the ideologue who knows the media has a liberal bias – or, alternatively, a corporate one. It’s the above-it-all political centrist, confident that the truth is necessarily found between the extremes of ‘both sides’. It’s the former US president Donald Trump, who claimed, over and over, that ‘everybody knows’ things that were, in fact, unknown, unproven or untrue.
When evidence becomes meaningless
Some of us exist in a parallel dimension, an Upside Down in which the epistemological analog of Newton’s Laws does not apply. It’s that, not polarization, at the heart of our republic’s ills, Klass argues. Even if knowingness is politically asymmetric.
Klass writes:
When evidence becomes meaningless, as it does in the intellectually incurious vortex of knowingness, well, then we’re screwed.
There are two distinct subsets of knowingness in modern society.
Type 1: People who think they know but they don’t; and
Type 2: People who don’t want to know.
Often, unfortunately, they overlap, with the person moving from Type 1 to Type 2 when inconvenient facts clash with their incorrect certainty. This case study was a classic example of moving from one form to the next, making it the most persistent and dangerous form of knowingness there is. Type 1 Knowingness can be cured. When someone also has Type 2, it’s much more stubborn.
Guys like Joey were Type 1 back in the 1970s before movement conservatism invested in a cottage industry of misinformation that by 2000 elected a dimwit to the presidency and in 2016 its patron saint. Now, no amount of new information can dislodge misinformed certainty. Today’s Joeys are militant Type 2s about “what’s the truth.” They “think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices,” as “an obscure New England bishop” wrote in the early 1900s.
Knowingness is why, Malesic laments, “present-day culture wars are so boring. No one is trying to find out anything. There is no common agreement about the facts, and yet everyone acts as if all matters of fact are already settled.”
There is joy in learning that fundamentalism, religious or political, seeks to destroy like the Buddhas of Bamiyan. One of the most important things to know in life is what you don’t know. Some of us would rather wrap ourselves in an ill-informed cocoon that misidentifies certainty as faith.