After Trumpism: Facts and Tyranny
Part 1: Do I love my cat?
“We must reject the culture in which facts themselves are manipulated…” — President Joe Biden, January 20th, 2021
What is a fact? While this essay is certainly political, it’s also about my cat, Diderot. I love Diderot. Do you think that’s a fact? Let’s talk about it. Why not? It’s Valentine’s Day.
But first…
On February 4th, voting systems company Smartmatic filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Fox News, Lou Dobbs, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and others for damaging their business prospects through an alleged coordinated disinformation campaign waged to discredit the results of the 2020 U.S. election.
Legal filings are rarely page-turners, but their complaint’s introduction launches with this claim, unusual for its simplicity:
- The Earth is round. Two plus two equals four. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the 2020 election for President and Vice President of the United States. The election was not stolen, rigged, or fixed. These are facts. They are demonstrable and irrefutable.
Here, before the New York State Supreme Court, is a defense of factuality spelled out in elementary school math and geography, because that is how far our culture has strayed from “demonstrable and irrefutable” reality.
We hear the word “fact” a lot now, including in President Biden’s inaugural address. Leaders and pundits use the word “fact” as if we all agree on the word’s meaning. We do not.
In recent years, a segment of our society and their leaders have tried to turn facts into political footballs. You have your facts. We have ours. This segment is willing to go to extraordinary lengths to subvert our democratic republic’s traditions when real facts inconvenience their ambitions.
Facts about facts
So what, then, is a fact? I have been researching and writing a book that is about an encyclopedia from the Age of Enlightenment and also about Wikipedia and sort of about the role of technological change–from the printing press to memelord disinformation campaigns–in shaping how we know what we know, and it’s a little bit about why anyone bothers to fight for facts and the sacrifices they make to preserve this shared legacy of human knowledge for future generations. The working title is How to Build a Fact: the Wikipedia Paradox and the Perilous Future of Knowledge.
After more than a year of researching and planning the story, I understand why people get confused about just what facts are. It is confusing. As we work our way through the Digital Age and the information deluge that comes with it, we’ve lost track of our own history of knowledge.
Knowledge — what we know and how we know it — has a history. It varies across times and places. Part of our current confusion is that we’re living through a major change in our experience of knowledge. It’s time to take a serious look at how we, as individuals and collectively, achieve any certainty. We can’t leave these conversations to the academics any more. We need a broader conversation about how we know what we know. To start with, I’ve found that the fact is a manageable unit of knowledge.
I have much to learn and share as I finish the book, but with questions of fact coming up daily in our network news and social media feeds, I feel an urgency to share some of what I’ve gathered while the word “fact” is finally coming back into fashion.
I’m not going to lie. I’ve had to read some very boring things just to start to get a handle on what does and does not constitute a fact. But I’ve read a lot of exciting things, too. And I’ve talked to exciting people with exciting projects underway. It’s hard stuff, but wrestling with it has actually lowered my anxiety levels and given me some perspective I hope will help others.
I’m breaking this essay up into a series of shorter posts, each focusing on one or two arguments about what is and is not factual.
- First, facts are a special kind of knowledge. I’ll start here, below, by asking, “Do I love my cat, Diderot?”
- Second, facts are something we make or, as I prefer to say, something we build. If a tree falls in a forest without human observers, it did actually fall, but its fall is not a fact without some human participation.
- Third, building a modern fact requires a particular procedure. If you don’t follow that protocol, you might have some kind of knowledge, but you won’t have a fact. When we get to this, I’ll discuss the question of whether I love my cat Diderot in even more detail.
- Fourth, we’ve only been building facts for a short period of human history. Myth, superstition, and propaganda have been competing for our attention for much longer. Taking facts for granted comes with consequences.
- Fifth and finally, facts are fragile. We think of them as fundamental, somehow unshakeable, but our brains are very good at rejecting them under lots of circumstances. That’s a big part of how we got into this mess, and getting clear about that confusion is a good place to start if you’re looking for ways to get out.
First, facts are special — do I love my cat?
Facts are a special kind of knowledge. Knowledge is a big category of human experience. Facts are not beliefs. Neither are they ideas nor wisdom. Facts are built of information (and some other ingredients), but information and facts are not the same thing. Whether facts are the same as truth is still a matter of hot debate.
If you asked me if I love my cat, Diderot, I would say, “of course I do.” First of all, just look at him!
Do you believe me? Do you think it’s true? I hope you do. If I don’t love this fluffy, very good boy who gives me sweet nose boops, that would make me a monster.
But my love for Diderot is not a fact.
My love for this little fur noodle is not a fact, because you don’t have any way to verify it. Talking about “love” leads down a slippery slope, but even if you had the perfect definition of love and a method to measure it, you would still have no way to demonstrate to others, irrefutably and in my absence, that I love him.
You could observe and even record what could be considered acts of love–the regular feedings, the times I stop what I’m doing to give him the attention he needs, the many scritches he enjoys every day, the times I text my housemates to check in on him if I leave for more than a few hours–and still have no evidence for the experience of love happening inside of me.
If we knew what the measures and indicators of love looked like in an MRI scan and put me in a machine along with pictures of Diderot, you could show those numbers to others and call them “fact,” but the love itself eludes factual verification.
Why does it matter? Because my love for Diderot is an idea. For me, it is knowledge. I know I love Diderot. I hope you believe that I do. But a fact is something we can both know with a high degree of certainty. “Two plus two equals four” is a fact because they always add up to four. We know the global temperatures are rising because every method of measure confirms it. Temperature isn’t a slippery idea like love is.
Beliefs are important. They motivate and inspire us, but when we confuse belief with fact, we’re in for a world of trouble, as we’ve seen over and again recently.
I’ll give the final word for now to my cat’s namesake, Denis Diderot, philosopher of pre-Revolutionary France, writing an article about “Encyclopedias” in his masterwork, the Encyclopédie:
“All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.”
Up next: Facts are something we make, something we build.
