A new article from the Daedalus (Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences) Future of Free Speech Symposium.
Every society has mechanisms for inculcating in its citizens beliefs about the world, about what is supposedly true and known. These epistemological mechanisms include, most prominently, the mass media, the educational system, and the courts. Sometimes these social mechanisms inculcate true beliefs, sometimes false ones, and most often a mix. What the vast majority believe to be true about the world (sometimes even when it is not) is crucial for social peace and political stability, whether the society is democratic or not. In developed capitalist countries that are relatively free from political repression, like the United States, these social mechanisms have, until recently, operated in predictable ways. They insured that most people accepted the legitimacy of their socioeconomic system, that they acquiesced to the economic hierarchy in which they found themselves, that they accepted the official results of elections, and that they also acquired a range of true beliefs about the causal structure of the natural world, the regularities discovered by physics, chemistry, the medical sciences, and so on.
Although ruling elites throughout history have always aimed to inculcate moral and political beliefs in their subject populations conducive to their own continued rule, it has also been true, especially in the world after the scientific revolution, that the interests of ruling elites often depended on a correct understanding of the causal order of nature. One cannot extract wealth from nature, let alone take precautions against physical or biological catastrophe, unless one understands how the natural world actually works: what earthquakes do, how disease spreads, where fossil fuels are and how to extract them. This is, no doubt, why both authoritarian regimes (like the one in China) and neoliberal democratic regimes (like the one in the United States) invest so heavily in the physical and biological sciences.
In the half-century before the dominance of the internet in America (roughly from World War II until around 2000), the most prominent epistemological mechanisms in society generally helped ensure that a world of causal truths was the common currency of at least some parts of public policy and discourse in the relatively democratic societies. There were, of course, exceptions: the panic over fluoridation of water in the 1950s is the most obvious example, but it was also anomalous. Even false claims about race and gender (that were widespread in the traditional media until the 1960s and 1970s) were met with more resistance from the pre-internet media, especially from the 1960s onwards. The basic pattern, however, was clear: social mechanisms inculcated many true beliefs about how the natural world works, while performing much more unevenly where powerful social and economic interests were at stake.
The internet has upended this state of affairs: it is the epistemological catastrophe of our time, locking into place mechanisms that ensure that millions of people (perhaps hundreds of millions) will have false beliefs about the causal order of nature -- about climate change, the effects of vaccines, the role of natural selection in the evolution of species, the biological facts about race -- even when there is no controversy among experts. Indeed, a distinguishing and dangerous achievement of the internet era has been to discredit the idea of "expertise," the idea that if experts believe something to be the case, that is a reason for anyone else to believe it. Experts, in this parallel cyber world, are disguised partisans, conspirators, and pretenders to epistemic privilege, while the actual partisans and conspirators are supposed to be the purveyors of knowledge.