Humility, integrity and courage in the quest for shared understanding

Sometimes, a glance at online comments is all it takes to conclude that overconfidence in poorly supported claims is rife. There’s a staggering degree of epistemic hubris on show across the board.

In our niche field of education for thinking, there’s often an added layer of unintended irony. Actual, non-satirical comments I’ve seen include: “It’s time for people to get over old-fashioned ideas from the 60’s because they are wrong,” and “Critical thinking and basic logic should be taught in middle school. A greater focus needs to be turned on the matter. People are overly dogmatic”. However sympathetic I might be to the commenters’ positions, the very baldness of their assertion suggests a lack of intellectual integrity and an attempt to bludgeon readers into submission.

“If I could instil one thing into the next generation’s minds it would be epistemic humility”, host Aza Raskin says in a recent episode of Your Undivided Attention, a podcast investigating the demise of a shared socio-political reality and how to restore it. Epistemic humility, yes, “and a real curiosity of how we come to the beliefs that we come to — because [that’s] sort of an inoculation against all of the harms”, Raskin continues. He’s talking about the harmful effects of algorithmic bias, the rabbit hole of online radicalisation, targeted advertising, cultural and political echo chambers, and simple misinformation (issues that I’ve blogged about previously). These are recurrent themes in Your Undivided Attention, an excellent podcast that squares up to the current epistemological crisis and that rates a special mention here in my short series about podcasts concerning post-truth.

Your Undivided Attention co-host and technology ethicist Tristan Harris adds: 

The core question… for high school students as we’re developing our tools for understanding what’s true in the world, is to ask ourselves ‘how do we know what we know?’ ‘Is that true?’, ‘Can we be absolutely sure that it’s true?’ Noticing that that belief didn’t come from us internally but might come from media that we see… And social media’s a kind of false-belief factory. So I think introducing some humility in how we navigate information environments is a key.

Epistemic humility, when it comes, comes at a price: you pay in tentativeness, uncertainty and sometimes indecision. Beneath the shadow that doubt casts on comfortable truths, it’s harder to know what to believe. Knowing when to act with conviction in the face of limited information is the essence of practical wisdom, as philosopher Bertrand Russell famously observed during the Second World War: “To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.”

Yet hesitation is sometimes justified. It may in fact be unwise to act decisively when you don’t know whose voices are worth heeding. One source of trouble is that many public intellectuals whose views ought to be credible are being influenced by the perverse incentives of status, wealth and security. In ‘Public Thinking’, an episode of the podcast Ministry of Ideas, humanities scholar Zachary Davis explains: “The problem with our intellectual sphere today isn’t that there are too few voices. The problem is that not everyone is speaking with the same goal.” He points to the ideal of public intellectuals upholding standards of justice and truth, while noting that many intellectuals instead uphold structures of power and profit. This, as Davis says, makes it harder for the public to trust these intellectuals — and harder for them to merit trust. (It’s too bad we can’t all be human lie detectors like Charlie Cale in Poker Face, unerringly calling bullshit on all the dissemblers.)

Davis also proposes that today, we can all be regarded as intellectuals to the extent that we produce or disseminate knowledge. Accordingly, we each have a duty, in the words of Edward Said, to “raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma, to be someone who cannot be easily co-opted by governments or corporations”.  That’s a tall order. Since we typically fear reprisal or ostracism, these actions demand a kind of courage, even self-sacrifice, that few possess. Socrates knew this when — defending himself against the death sentence — he remarked:

I am the gadfly of the Athenian people… you will not easily find a successor to me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly… and the state is a large thoroughbred horse which because of its great size is inclined to be lazy and needs the stimulation of some stinging fly to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly …and all day long and in all places, am always settling upon you, rousing, persuading and reproving you. You will not easily find another like me. (Plato, Apology, 30e-31c)

As uncomfortable as is to defy popular opinion, and as intimidating as it is to challenge authority, these can be virtuous acts. Importantly, they’re acts for which the philosophical habit of relentless questioning prepares us. It pays to remember: there’s nothing sacred about the status quo. As Mark Twain put it — hyperbolically but with characteristic wit — “The majority is always in the wrong. Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it’s time to reform — (or pause and reflect).” 

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Postscript (31 January 2024)

Another podcast I want to celebrate here is The Gray Area with Sean Illing, with its series of probing conversations that dwell in nuance and explore deep questions with an open mind. In an episode entitled ‘The Joy of Uncertainty’, Maggie Jackson discusses with Sean the temptation to retreat into certainty and closure, the difference between uncertainty and ignorance, how regarding uncertainty as an opportunity rather than as a threat can assuage anxiety and depression, how to be confident in the face of uncertainty, and why embracing uncertainty is how we become alive to life’s possibilities. In conversation, Maggie says:

I like to think of uncertainty as wisdom in motion, rather than the paralysis that we think it is… 

We evolved to have a stress response when you meet something new or unexpected or murky or ambiguous… But at the same time… the realisation that you’ve reached the limits of your knowledge instigates a number of neurological changes, like your focus broadens, and your brain becomes more receptive to new data, and your working memory is bolstered. You’re on your toes.

That’s why uncertainty is a kind of wakefulness. That’s the moment when your brain is telling itself that there’s something to learn here. By squandering that opportunity, or retreating from that discomfort, we’re actually losing an opportunity to learn. When we are jolted from our daily routine, that’s the time when your body and your brain begin to turn on… 

One of the most important facets of our curiosity is the ability to tolerate the stress of the unknown, to lean in to that uncomfortable feeling and to know that that’s your brain’s way of signalling to you that this is a great chance to think and to learn and to create… 

And people who are curious are more likely to express dissent. Trying something new [or] taking the perspective of another is just jolting yourself from your assumptions… you’re jolting yourself into what Socrates called perplexity: productive perplexity… 

This is all about being fully alive, both to the disquieting and the beautifully joyous elements of life. Because if we can’t contend with uncertainty, then we can’t contend with life — because life will always be contradictory, paradoxical, mutable and dynamic.

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This is the second post in my two-part series ‘Podcasting about post-truth’. You can read the first post here.

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The Philosophy Club works with students and teachers to develop a culture of critical and creative thinking through collaborative inquiry and dialogue.