Jaime
Weinman sometimes surprises me. He's usually the TV guy, the stage guy, the media guy,
whathaveyou for
Macleans, but every so often he'll branch off into a nice, long, informed post on - generally - American politics.
Personally, I like it when he's let off the chain a little. Today was one of those days, as
Weinman considers the idea of an Epistemic Closure - namely, living inside one's own bubble of information:
There’s been a surprising amount of online commentary in the last few weeks that prominently uses the term “epistemic closure,” a term I’d never actually heard used in casual conversation before this year. It started with some posts by libertarian blogger Julian Sanchez, who was writing about the excommunication of David Frum from the conservative think tank AEI. Sanchez argued that this was part of a conservative move toward “epistemic closure,” meaning being unreceptive to facts that don’t fit into the pre-approved worldview:
One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!) This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.
This argument was taken up both by heterodox conservatives and by liberals, who agree with the claim that
Frum and Bruce Bartlett and other conservative apostates have been making: that in the era of Fox News, conservatives have effectively created their own reality which cannot be violated by outside facts.
There’s arguably a certain sour grapes quality to this, since some of it comes from conservatives who used to have think tank sinecures and got rewarded when they were willing to push the party line. Frum is the most famous example here, because during the run-up to the Iraq war, he wrote a famous article called “Unpatriotic Conservatives” about conservatives who were against the war — that is, he did exactly what is now being done to him, trying to excommunicate people from the conservative movement for trying to argue things that, in some cases, were true. And no one is immune from epistemic closure. After President Bush launched his “surge” in Iraq, there was resistance to the idea that conditions in Iraq were improving (relative to 2006, anyway), even as the statistics demonstrated that they were.
But I think it is true that the modern conservative movement often depends heavily on creating its own reality, or, maybe more accurately, its own mythology. Much of Fox News and talk radio depends on a litany of myths and legends that are sometimes incomprehensible outside of the conservative movement. For example, it’s accepted within the conservative movement that Saul Alinsky is the key to everything that Obama does. And when Republican Senate candidate Sue Lowden made her infamous comments about how people should barter chickens for health care, she was simply re-stating what was commonly accepted in conservative circles throughout the health care debate: that the health care problem could be solved if more people paid out of pocket (and, by extension, that people can afford to pay out of pocket or make deals with doctors like they did in the olden days). The ex-conservative, now-liberal blogger John Cole has a longish list of tenets of modern conservative mythology.
Now, the conservative riposte to this is that it’s not conservatives who are closed-minded, it’s liberals. That’s the argument with regard to global warming (or “AGW” as conservative mythology now requires it to be termed), that liberals refuse to accept any facts that demonstrate that the science isn’t settled, while conservatives are open-minded about alternative explanations. Though the National Review‘s Jim Manzi — a conservative who frequently argues against government solutions to global warming — looked at the global-warming chapter in a book by talk-radio hero Mark Levin and found plenty of “closure” on his own side. (And Manzi was instantly attacked by his National Review colleagues for daring to criticize Levin, who is on the good side and therefore presumed to be right about everything.)
But in any case, what’s obvious is that the two sides are not disagreeing about the interpretations of known facts. They are disagreeing about what the facts are. That’s a much more problematic thing, and it demonstrates why “bipartisanship” is a pipe dream in today’s politics, particularly U.S. politics. The premise of much of conservative television and talk radio is that certain facts are “liberal” and therefore not to be trusted, and to advance alternative facts in their place. The most famous example is on taxes, the core conservative/Republican issue. The idea that tax cuts always help the economy and tax hikes always hurt the economy is constantly repeated on these outlets, and facts that cast doubt on the idea (Reagan’s tax hikes, which occurred just before the economy recovered, or Clinton’s, ditto) are not discussed.
Read the rest
here.
Now, this idea - especially of media 'bias' - has interested me for a while. As I've remarked
earlier, both the left and right sides of the spectrum seem to find it rather attractive to blame 'the media', as if it were some monolithic, remorseless creature, for their ills.
I don't really understand why, to be honest. I mean, I've done my share of
CBC-bashing, etc., but I generally try to avoid complaining about the media as if it were out to get me and my worldview. It isn't.
Indeed, the simple fact is that there is no such thing as media bias. Because that would imply that
every single member of the journalistic and executive class in the media culture is out to get, well, whoever doesn't like the media report of the week. This is obviously preposterous. The problem with the media is not that it is biased - because every single member of the 'media' will always be biased - but that, in some cases, the biases are not so evenly mixed as to generally cancel each other out. That's why I think the Internet is such a wonderful forum for a 'new' media: it's removed many of the
pretentions of being unbiased in favor of simply shotgunning opinions and coverage, leading to a widespread system of independent medias that the savvy reader can then use to get a much wider picture of things.
But let's move on to Jaime
Weinman's broader point about Epistemic Closure.
Perhaps I'm alone in this, but my approach to debates is to, where I can, adapt a certain opinion and to try to adhere to it as closely as I possibly can. Hopefully I've chosen the right opinion - if I have, then I'll 'win' the debate. If I haven't, then my opinion must obviously be either reconsidered or abandoned completely.
This approach has its problems. For one, I risk looking like I'm flip-flopping on issues, and for another, if I'm not careful, I can fall into the trap of Epistemic Closure. Epistemic Closure is, after all, a completely understandable approach to take, if not the most desirable one.
Here's my theory as to how a bout of Epistemic Closure first gets started. First, you get hauled into a heated debate. As a blogger, I know firsthand that it's hard not to sometimes - especially in the rather partisan landscape that is Canadian ( and American, for that matter ) political blogging.
Then, once you've gotten hauled into the heated argument, in a first, initial burst of energy, you join in. You say what you think to anybody who'll hear.
And then, inevitably, the rebuttals start to flow in. And not just rebuttals. Awful logical tricks and personal attacks and, if you're really unlucky, near-
harassment. You get burned, and burnt out, and then you start looking for a way to escape.
And then an Epistemic Closure comes along. Echo chambers are always enjoyable to be a part of. I've been in a few of them myself. And once you get into an echo chamber, it's rather hard to get out - unless, of course, you're willing to subject yourself to the armpit of the marketplace of ideas again.
This is regrettable and unfortunate. But it's bound to happen. In the States, I'm sure for some people even mentioning the words 'Obama', 'health', and 'care' in the same sentence is enough to raise the collective blood pressure of the room. After all, if you've got an idea of what should and should not be regarding an issue like
health care, the last thing you need is for some loudmouth ( like me, for instance ) to come along and start trying to poke holes in your theories all over again. It's much better and easier, and perhaps even safer, to just ignore what I'm saying completely. And if I'm in a journalistic position, well, take the shunning to the next level: I must be a heretic, a member of the liberal/conservative media monolith, and a liar, a charlatan. I'm just part of the cancer that is killing the country, etc.
Epistemic Closure, for obvious reasons, is just an offshoot, perhaps a casualty of partisanship. I'm sure I'm guilty of it, just like so many other people. But at least, thanks to people like Jaime
Weinman, I might well be equipped to identify when I've fallen into that particular trap.
Getting out of it, of course, is much harder.
