KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH

I know many things to be true.
One of the things I know to be true,
Is that some of the things that I know to be true
Are not true.
Julianne Gilmore

Whenever a philosopher says something is really real
You can be really sure that what he says is really real
Isn’t real, really.
G. H. Moore
Quoted by Clifford Geerts
in Local Knowledge


I have been reading Geertz’s book, and notably his chapter, “Common Sense as a Cultural System.” I suppose it, together with some reflection on the news coverage of the Iraq war, occasioned this blog entry.

Geertz’s suggests that some of what we consider “common sense” is the result of direct observation, but there is another level at which common sense is socially constructed. For most North Americans, it is common sense that disease is caused by germs. For most of the world’s people for most of history there were other common sense explanations of disease – offending the gods, witchcraft, bad air, etc. What seems to be obviously true is often (usually?) based on what other people have told us or what we have jointly decided with others to accept as true.

I find a lot of Internet sites dealing with development issues with “Good Practice” or (worse) “Best Practice” in development. I think these are prototypical compendiums of “common sense” of the relevant communities of practice. I mean this in the sense that they are what people have agreed to think of a “good” or “best” practices. I fear that these agreements too often – unfortunately - are based on little evidence. The belief that grass roots participation is necessary to ICT project success found in the ICT for Development community seems to me to have the same kind of epistemological justification as the belief that streams are the results of primordial kangaroo tail tracks found in communities of Australian aborigines.

Sometimes the community beliefs are held by nation-wide communities. Propaganda gained great power in the 20th century with the development of mass media. Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes were able to saturate the attention of Germans and Soviets with information, much of which was false. The Iraqi Minister of Communications has gained a worldwide mystique by standing in front of camera’s boldly proclaiming as facts things that were visually demonstrated as false in the same newscasts. The scary thing is that in all these cases, the tactic proved relatively successful.

Yesterday I posted information on a freedom-of-speech case in Iran. Smart people, like Thomas Jefferson, seemed to believe that the only way one could assure that social construction would lead to truth in common sense was through free speech. I think theirs was not a passive free speech. If good information is to drive out bad information, it will be through people arguing about the quality of that information in public discourse. People who have information that is backed by evidence and theory have, according to the theorists of liberty, the responsibility to defend that truth in public forums, and the duty to challenge those presenting alternative information to prove it!

The United States has sought to combine freedom of speech with freedom of religion. That double heritage is important, and certainly my thinking has been conditioned by growing up in the U.S. But how does one reconcile the freedom to believe the teachings of a religion, with the freedom to argue against those teachings? Iranian theocratic leadership would apparently resolve that conflict by eliminating the freedom of speech, at least insofar as speech that challenges religious authority. In the U.S. I think people often reconcile the two by a political correctness, in which it is impolite to argue against the beliefs of others. ( Do good manners sometimes have as much impact as bad laws?)

The relative success of Creationism in the U.S. is perhaps evidence that fundamentalist Christian preachers are less reticent about criticizing scientists than scientists about criticizing fundamentalist belief. Good manners apparently allows criticism of science. But I believe people should argue as forcefully as possible against the imposition of bad science even when that imposition is based on religious doctrine. And I think that people ought to be able to argue the validity of information, the evidence adduced in support, and the criteria of validity – to question whether religious authority outweighs scientific evidence.

Does nationalism trump freedom of speech? Tough question! I was fortunate enough some years ago to hear Elena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov and a longtime human rights activist, who questioned why so many of us believe that national rights trump human rights. Why were we so willing to see abuse of human rights in countries while free nations stood by honoring national sovereignty; why should sovereign rights trump human rights? Should we be any more willing to see the imposition of (false) propaganda and the denial of freedom of speech and press by governments without speaking out?

The Declaration of Independence says “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Most Americans recognize this as a cornerstone of American political thinking. Note how different this position is from that of theocratic states holding that government derives its authority from divine will. Indeed, it was a direct challenge to British claims that its sovereignty in the colonies was based on the divine right of its king. Americans therefore tend to believe that citizens bear responsibility for the actions of their governments, and that minorities who coerce acceptance of unjust governments are criminal – and that those responsible for government are subject to sanctions when government transgresses. Such a belief seems reasonable in a world of free discourse, where people can choose what to believe, where they are educated to weigh evidence and make decisions, and where they believe theirs is the right to choose, or indeed rebel. Those beliefs are less tenable in those places where the media are saturated by lies, where there is no right to dissent, where discussion is discouraged, and where people are imprisoned for publishing unauthorized information and dissenting opinion, and where people feel powerless in the face of divine choice.

An Iranian student this week sent me an email, asking whether I believed that the “Internet is a kind of cultural invasion”. I don’t think the Internet is an invasion; I think that it is a information infrastructure. What I do think is that a cultural revolution may be needed to utilize the Internet fully as a tool for development. Closed cultures are unlikely to breed knowledge economies.