For this week's final discussion, I would like you to read the interview given below and answer

the
questions that follow.

1) What is the main point Rosenfeld is making in this interview?

2) Provide three ideas from the interview that you consider insightful regarding the relationship
between democracy and truth. Explain what you find insightful about the chosen claims.

Article:

Does Democracy Need Truth?: A

• Ever since Donald Trump announced his Presidential candidacy, in June of 2015, there has been
considerable concern about whether his allergy to truth is endangering American democracy.
Without a public sphere dominated by agreed-upon-facts, many say, a healthy society—and
wise polity—become impossible to sustain. In her new book, “Democracy and Truth: A Short
History,” Sophia Rosenfeld, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that
the relationship between truth and democracy was fraught for centuries before the time of
Twitter and Trump. “Does democratic politics really ‘need truth to do its business well,’ as some
have recently claimed?” she asks in the book. In addition to trying to answer that question, she
argues that questions of truth have always been litigated and disputed, and that a politics
dominated by shared notions of the truth has never really existed.

With Trump halfway through his four-year term in office, it seemed like a good time to talk about the
state of truth in American society, so I called up Rosenfeld. During our conversation, which has been
edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed whether it is healthy for a democratic society to debate
issues like evolution and global warming, why people distrust experts, and whether public fact-checking
is a good solution to the problem of fake news.

What came across from your book is that the fretting about the future of truth in a democracy, as
it relates to Trump, has irked you, even though you’re obviously not a fan of the President. Is that
fair?
Well, you’re right, I’m not a fan of the President, so I’m not in any way trying to excuse what I think is a
demonstrably terrible Presidency. That said, I don’t think that we have to rush into the idea that we’re
heading full force into fascism every time he opens his mouth, either. I do think that taking a longer
historical look, not simply looking at the last two to five years, allows you to see the way even this
moment, with all its obviously unusual features, still belongs to a much longer story.

What’s that story?

That story is twofold. One, it’s a story about how democracy itself is always based on uncertain notions
of truth, in moral terms and in epistemological terms. The other is a story about a continual conflict
between a kind of expert truth and a more populist, everyday, common-sense truth that supposedly
stems not from experts but the wisdom of the crowd.

Even if truth in a democracy has always been up for grabs, and we’ve always had politicians use
fake news, that still raises the question of whether we require some fundamental baseline of
truth to have an actual democracy.

Right. It’s in some ways the great problem of democracy. Democracy insists on the idea that truth both
matters and that nobody gets to say definitively what it is. That’s a tension that’s built into democracy
from the beginning, and it’s not solvable but is, in fact, intrinsic to democracy. I think both things matter.
We don’t want to have one definitive source of truth. Part of the reason ideas evolve and culture changes
is that we’re constantly debating what is an accurate rendition of reality in some form. But, on the other
hand, it makes for a lot of instability. That instability can be productive or unproductive at different
moments and in different ways. You know, the aspiration for knowing more and getting closer to the
truth is a really important one, because it lets us constantly rethink what we know to be true and often
decide that what we know to be true isn’t.

Have there been societies that you would consider democracies whose foundations started to
shake because that pursuit of truth stopped?

There’s always the risk that if there’s too much instability in truth, people will find life in general
unstable, that you won’t know what to believe in at all. I do think there’s a serious risk in a politics
anywhere that doesn’t have some agreed-upon foundation, even if it’s a loose consensus. The classic
example would be something like Weimar Germany, when there ceases to be a real commitment to
seeing the world collectively. Then you get some kind of revolution, you get some kind of really abrupt
change. You might just get apathy. People stop caring about truth, as sometimes happened in former
Eastern European states where people retreated into private life and dismissed public life as just filled
with untruth. That’s the great risk, but democracies do thrive on a certain amount of combative truth
claims, always. If you run through American history, you can see sometimes they’re explosive, but most
of the time they’re part of public life.

What would be some examples of truth claims that you think are either important to the
lifeblood of democracy or explosive and dangerous?

Something like Darwinian claims about evolution, which were heavily contested. To some degree, they
still are, and they’ve been part of democratic life and part of legal life. Can we accept evolution as a set
truth or not? They have not exploded to the point where they’ve destabilized our political or social life,
but they’ve been a controversial question for over a hundred years. That’s a public contest that, actually,
democracy’s pretty good for. You know, you contest things in court, you contest things in universities,
you contest things in the public sphere.
You said democracy’s good for them, but are they good for democracy? Could I argue that the
battle over evolution has not brought down American democracy or done damage in the way that
other things have, but that, if everyone just accepted the broad claims of evolution, we would
have a healthier democracy?

I’m not really sure. I think it’s important that there be a contest about what is true and also about, How
do you know what’s true? Where does your information come from? I would say, largely, science has
won. That is, that the mainstream educational institutions, the National Institutes of Health, et cetera, all
accept that evolution is as close as we’re going to get to truth. Is it dangerous that there’s still some
people who don’t believe that? Probably not really dangerous to democracy as a whole. We’ve long
contested not just what’s true but how we know anything: What are the sources of truth? I think the
issue today that has people most upset is not either of those questions as much as whether we’ve
stopped caring about what’s true. The whole phenomenon of post-truth has taken us to the question of
whether we’re indifferent to truth now, as opposed to contesting what it is and how we find it.

You could say that the battle over whether climate change is, in part, man-made is a contest over
truth, and that’s a democracy. You could also say that, well, if everyone accepted that as true, the
planet might be a lot safer.

Yes. I agree entirely. The question is: How do we find some way [to insure] that the better answer
prevails? We’re not so upset that people are arguing about this. We’re upset that we haven’t been able to
fashion policies that rest on what seems to be the consensus of ninety-nine per cent of scientists and
almost anybody who’s had any involvement in climate-related issues. Why it is that so many people are
not persuaded, at the moment, by what seems to be scientific consensus—and, in many cases, not
persuaded even by the evidence that’s right in front of them?

This gets at some of the things you say in the book about experts. There are two current critiques
of them, and I am wondering if you think they are worth distinguishing. The first would be that
experts are often wrong, and so something that we view as technocratic actually brings about a
bad result. The second critique would be that experts don’t bring about bad results, in terms of
human flourishing, but they are unpopular or cause a populist backlash despite this.

That’s a really important and, I think, excellent distinction. One says that experts often make [bad]
decisions because there’s been no popular input on them—not just because they don’t know enough but
because they haven’t actually taken account of popular knowledge. The most common example involves
things like the World Bank coming up with a plan about water use in some part of the world without
studying how people actually think and use water, simply imagining a kind of technocratic solution with
no local input, and it turns out to be totally ineffective because it runs contrary to cultural norms and
everyday life. There’s every chance that experts alone get things wrong.

Your second point is really more of a social question. It’s the critique of people who are over-educated,
generally wealthier than average, and, in some ways, not part of the mainstream, making decisions for
everybody else. You see that in cases like the E.U., where, whether their policies are effective or not,
there’s resentment at what’s called the democratic deficit, the fact that people have very little say, often,
about what policies are enacted. That breeds resentment, too, whether or not the policies themselves
result in beneficial outcomes.

The first critique you made is almost that experts are not expert enough. That these experts do
not have enough expertise to get water to people properly, right?
It depends how you define expertise when you say they don’t have enough expertise at the World
Bank—say, in a water program. They do, within the boundaries of what they consider to be expert. What
they might not have is the voices of people who they wouldn’t consider experts but whose knowledge of
things is local and specific and is valuable for knowing what to do.

To what degree do you think the general freak-out over truth has to do with the rise of social
media?

Social media and the Internet more broadly have clearly had a rather revolutionary effect on not just
what we take to be true but how truths circulate, what we believe, how we know anything. You know,
we’re all addicted to these information streams. Rumors have always spread, but they spread person to
person. Now a rumor can spread, and in some ways you might say this is a kind of atavistic technology,
right? It’s making us act like we once did, before we had good sources of information.

The quickness and the spread is extraordinary, and we don’t have many tools, most of us, for
distinguishing between legitimate stories and illegitimate ones, or we don’t care that much. The end
result is a world of truth and falsehood all circulating, undifferentiated, globally.

Did you find other examples of new technology sparking panics about truth?

Yes. I would say every new technology causes certain kinds of panics about truth. The Internet is
particularly important because of its reach and because of the algorithmic way in which it promotes
what’s popular rather than what’s true. It creates a culture of untruth, probably, that other forms of
publishing can’t easily. And the law’s always catching up. The law is always behind in trying to figure out
new ways to regulate what is a changing public sphere. Certainly, I think the jury’s still out in modern
law about what to do about Facebook, or Google, or anything else.

You said that there’s a fear about the distinction between truth and fiction disappearing in public
life and people retreating into their own private lives, as you said happened in Eastern Europe. I
had that fear, too, but Trump has been President for two years. His approval rating is pretty low.
It seems like, on issues of public concern, sixty per cent of the country just tunes him out. So, in
something like the government shutdown, he just can’t get his point across and no one thinks
he’s honest. Far from being disengaged, we just had a midterm election with the highest turnout
in decades. Where do you think we are after two years of Trump?

I think that the doomsayers may have been a bit premature, in that there certainly is a contest going on
right now, and American political life is obviously very divided, but there’s also a contest even just about
truth. Different people are looking to different places. New York Times subscriptions have soared. At the
same time, Trump’s list of numbers of falsehoods has soared, as well, and his lies are repeated by many
people. We are kind of in the balance between the two.

So I don’t think the idea we have all suddenly gone over to post-truth is accurate. [There is] resistance to
both kinds of his untruths, by which I mean the moral position in which he lies as an opposite of truth,
and the epistemological position in which he spouts false information or unverified beliefs in contrast to
truth. There’s been a big pushback on both, and it comes in the form of journalism, it comes in the form
of publishing of all kinds, and it comes in protests of various kinds, resistance both at the ballot box and
in the street. We have not succumbed entirely to his charms or something like that. It’s hard to predict.

What have you made of the journalistic concept, seen more recently and often, of the public fact-
check?
I actually approve of fact-checking, even if I think it’s often not very effective, because it doesn’t
persuade people who aren’t already inclined to want to look at fact-checking. And I don’t think it’s much
of a substitute for real politics. It’s not politics, and we don’t want to get caught up in the idea that simply
correcting a record is a good way to counter anything. You have to make a persuasive argument. It’s a
rhetorical field. That said, I do think it’s important to fact-check because, in some long-term way, it holds
public figures accountable and provides a running record of both what was said and what actually
happened.

I don’t think facts are pure in any sense. You know, if I give you something like an unemployment rate, it
implies all kinds of interpretative work already about what is work and who should be looking for it and
how old you should be when you’re working. All kinds of things are built into even what looks like a fact.
That said, we can’t have a public life without any agreement on any set of facts. It’s impossible to build
policy if some people think unemployment is up and some people think unemployment is down. Holding
onto facts really does matter to democratic political life, though I do also think fact-checking by itself is
no panacea for either political problems or truth problems.

What is the solution then?

The solution, to my mind, is both big and small. The small part is certainly continuing to engage in
corrections of the record, but, by itself, that’s not a particularly effective solution. There also has to be a
shoring up of institutions that try to provide shared norms of truth, whether that’s government agencies,
scientific research institutions, universities, the press, elections, all the parts of the kind of democratic
machinery that ostensibly work to provide some kind of shared truths.

Then probably there’s a piece that’s elusive but important, if we want to get past this moment, which is
trying to do something about both the power of technology companies and reining in, in some ways, the
free-market approach to communication, because I think the model of the free market that will regulate
itself and produce truth is really obsolete. That’s not how online communication works. Then probably
the last piece is the one that’s critical, I think, for politics in general, which is rethinking how we’ve
gotten to a world with such enormous economic disparity and cultural disparity and disparity in
opportunity that it looks so radically different to different citizens in the United States. Of course that
applies to other places, too.

There seem, to me, to be fake news and falsehoods that arise organically, which is not to say
they’re not stoked, but they have to do with suspicions of people from different places, or
suspicions of people who are more educated. But something like belief that global warming is not
happening, it seems to me, could only be believed if, basically, rich people, for their own
interests, have convinced others that this is the case. I’m wondering if you think it’s worth
distinguishing between those two types of things, because it does seem like there’s a difference
there.

That’s actually a very interesting question, because of course not only are some conspiracies promoted
from the top and some from below but some conspiracy theories turn out to be right, so you don’t want
people to never be skeptical, right? It’s important that that’s part of democracy, too—questioning
received wisdom. If somebody says that’s how it is, it’s correct to think, Is that really how it is? Do I have
enough information to be sure that’s how it is?

Conspiracy theories, the complex ones that arise from the bottom, tend to involve seeing through official
truths and often seeing how the rich and powerful have pulled the wool over people’s eyes, that what
looked like this turned out to be that because there was a kind of subterfuge going on from above.
Whereas, the climate-change one, which we know has been sort of promoted by the Koch brothers and
others in business interest groups, as you say, didn’t start really organically as much as it became a kind
of position of industry that then took on a life of its own because it got mixed in with a whole bunch of
other assumptions, whether it was about political norms, government overreach, guns.

It’s part of a mix. Very few people are opposed to the idea that the planet is getting warmer and don’t
hold any other part of a constellation of beliefs that go with it: that government is overreaching and that
sort of thing, and that it’s a plot by the state to take away your autonomy, deny people jobs, take guns.
Those obviously didn’t have a popular foundation to begin with.