The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
Jonathan Rauch
Top 10 Best Quotes
“If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science—open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network—is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community. Other communities, of course, can do all kinds of other things. But they cannot make social decisions about objective reality. That is a very bold, very broad, very tough claim, and it goes down very badly with lots of people and communities who feel ignored or oppressed by the Constitution of Knowledge: creationists, Christian Scientists, homeopaths, astrologists, flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, birthers, 9/11 truthers, postmodern professors, political partisans, QAnon followers, and adherents of any number of other belief systems and religions.”
“Minorities are always better off in a culture which protects dissent than in a culture which protects us from dissent.”
“A poll for the Knight Foundation in 2019 found that “more than two-thirds (68 percent) of college students say their campus climate precludes students from expressing their true opinions because their classmates might find them offensive.”
“In the real world, however, the claim that censorship or enforced orthodoxy protects minorities and the marginalized has been comprehensively disproved, again and again and again. “Censorship has always been on the side of authoritarianism, conformity, ignorance, and the status quo,” write Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus, “and advocates for free speech have always been on the side of making societies more democratic, more diverse, more tolerant, more educated, and more open to progress.”30 They and former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen, in her powerful book Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, list the horrors and oppressions which have befallen minorities in the name of making society safe from dangerous ideas. “Laws censoring ‘hate speech’ have predictably been enforced against those who lack political power,” writes Strossen.31 In America, under the Alien and Sedition Acts, authorities censored and imprisoned sympathizers of the opposition party (including members of Congress) and shut down opposition newspapers; under the Comstock laws, they censored works by Aristophanes, Balzac, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce (among others); under the World War I anti-sedition laws, they convicted more than a thousand peace activists, including the Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, who ran for president in 1920 from a prison cell.32 In more recent times, when the University of Michigan adopted one of the first college speech codes in 1988, the code was seized upon to charge Blacks with racist speech at least twenty times.33 When the United Kingdom passed a hate-speech law, the first person to be convicted was a Black man who cursed a white police officer.34 When Canadian courts agreed with feminists that pornography could be legally restricted, authorities in Toronto promptly charged Canada’s oldest gay bookstore with obscenity and seized copies of the lesbian magazine Bad Attitude.35 All around the world, authorities quite uncoincidentally find that “hateful” and “unsafe” speech is speech which is critical of them—not least in the United States, where, in 1954, the U.S. Postal Service used obscenity laws to censor ONE, a gay magazine whose cover article (“You Can’t Print It!”) just happened to criticize the censorship policies of the U.S. Postal Service.”
“An Ivy League teacher told me, “I’ve found that if students have an opportunity to jump on someone, they usually take it.”
“(As Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf put it, propaganda “must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.… [P]ersistence is the first and most important”
“universities need to make defending pluralism a top institutional priority, not an afterthought. If they do not, politicians—the world’s worst judges of scientific integrity—will try to do it for them.”
“the enemies of intellectual pluralism and free inquiry seem to be ten feet tall. Which is just how they want to seem.”
“Wrong beliefs and wrong perceptions are contagious whether or not they are sincere, because dissidents tend to self-censor and act like believers. That is how entire societies, such as the Soviet Union, can be built on everyone’s publicly pretending to believe what many privately know to be false. After a while, in a community where people are struggling to conform with each other, it can be very hard, even in principle, to know whether people are sincere or faking, or even which is which.”
“Tomorrow morning,” said Socrates, “let us meet here again.” The conversation he and his young protégé began 2,500 years ago continues, now spanning the world instead of just Athens, despite countless efforts to squelch it.”
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Book Keywords:
belief, liberal-science, speech-regulation, freedom-of-speech, pluralism, hate-speech, ideology, dissent, knowledge, objectivity, reality, culture, liberalism, diversity, truth, epistemology, rationality
