Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience Project

original article: https://consilienceproject.org/challenges-to-making-sense-of-the-21st-century

my highlights

on epistemic hubris and epistemic nihilism - practicing epistemic humility:

The response to these conditions has been a general sense of being overwhelmed, often resulting in epistemic nihilism. This form of nihilism is a diffuse and usually subconscious feeling that it is impossible to really know anything, because, for example, “the science is too complex” or “there is fake news everywhere.” Without a shared ability to make sense of the world as a means to inform our choices, we are left with only the game of power. Claims of “truth” are seen as unwarranted or intentional manipulations, as weaponized or not earnestly believed in.

Our situation may also promote epistemic hubris, the belief that some form of knowledge can in fact clearly and definitely explain and predict those things that are most important in the world. Indeterminacy is overblown, and even the thorniest problems have a clear answer that should be accepted by everyone. While the philosophy of science itself is committed to overcoming this form of hubris, scientific findings are often misused and misunderstood, especially in highly politicized contexts.

In these contexts, epistemic hubris and nihilism form a dangerous symbiosis. Individuals and cultural groups oscillate between the hopeless mood of “post-truth” culture and the peaks of polarizing certainties that emerge around politically significant scientific and geopolitical issues.

on hyperobjects:

their glossary definition:

"Processes that occupy vast expanses of both time and space, defying the more traditional sense of an "object" as a thing that can be singled out. The concept, introduced by Timothy Morton, invites us to conceive of processes that are difficult to measure, always around us, globally distributed and only observed in pieces. Examples include climate change, ocean pollution, the Internet, and global nuclear armaments and related risks."

There has never been more scientific information about more consequential issues than at the current moment. And it is by virtue of modern society’s successes in organizing certain kinds of “knowledge production” that we are plunged as individuals and groups into a state where information overwhelms us. This state shrouds the most important issues in a “cloud of unknowing”—or worse, a cloud of false claims to definitive knowledge.

One end result of the massive technological and scientific enterprises of the modern world has been the discovery of realities that are so vast and complex that they exhaust even the best of our scientific measures and methods. They have been called hyperobjects by the ecological philosopher and literary critic Timothy Morton. The term refers to those objects of advanced science that we live with as part of everyday life, and yet which are nearly incomprehensible. Hyperobjects are discovered and revealed by leading scientific methods, literally rendered “visible” through data, and yet what these approaches discover is, in part, the limits of our ability to fully explain certain very important phenomena. Hyperobjects are so incalculably complicated, or so inherently complex, emergent, and dynamic that their full “behavior” can’t be explained exactly or exhaustively. This of course means a hyperobject’s “behavior” cannot be predicted with specificity either.

The list of hyperobjects in the news includes nuclear radiation, planetary-scale climate change, and pandemics, but the true list is much longer. Systemic injustice, world hunger, planetary-scale computational architectures, and bioregional zones (such as the Amazon rainforest), are further examples. Hyperobjects are so large, complex, nonlinear, multicausal, long lasting, and beyond human proportions that they disrupt effective public sensemaking and place great demands on individual psychology. As with climate change or radioactive waste, we all know that “it” is out there, but we can’t see “it,” nor truly understand “it,” at least not without the help of specialists—and even they disagree about important details.

For example, a microscope is required to see a plant cell, and the process of photosynthesis is difficult to understand—yet a house plant is not a hyperobject just because a scientist understands it much better than the average person ever will. To be clear, hyperobjects constitute a distinct class of realities only recently discovered by scientists, which extend across vast physical and temporal scales, and which require specific technologies to disclose, such as complex measurement systems, that often did not exist before the 21st century.

Understanding hyperobjects is a historically emergent and novel challenge to 21st-century public sensemaking. (adapted)

on modernity and the risk society:

ulrich beck’s basic thesis is that modern societies built up technologies and governance based on the prediction and control of natural and social processes, but that this approach to social life has now reached its limit. Dams and hospitals, scientific research and development, factories and schools: in many respects, the modern project succeeded at what it set out to do. Yet it was all the while creating unintended second- and third-order effects that would undermine the project in the long run, until ultimately, claims Beck, the modern period of social organization ended. These second- and third-order effects include, for example, industrial pollution (once thought safe) leading to environmental degradation, which then cascades into human migration and eventual political crises in open societies. Technologies resulting from breakthroughs in digital communication eventually and unexpectedly undermine the quality and integrity of civic discourse and participation—a pattern discussed further in the next section. Today, a new kind of society is emerging. It is built around a globally shared, reflexive response to the widespread and indeterminate risks created by modern society. Beck calls this new epoch “reflexive modernity” or the risk society.

footnote: See Ulrich Beck’s work on this risk society in his 2009 book, World at Risk, which follows up from his original 1986 book, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Beck is generally regarded as one of the premier sociologists of his generation.

on "what can be done?":

Practicing Epistemic Humility: Towards a New Ethos of Learning

On the one hand, our situation has already elicited a retreat to certain forms of epistemic hubris, in which the indeterminacy of the science around certain complex issues is denied. The refrain that rings out in these cases is: “the science is settled.” Attempts to suggest otherwise in truly complex matters are met too often with unscientific dismissals; hence the ethic is one of hubris.

While there are, of course, a limited number of situations in which the science can be settled, the majority of important issues involving complex public risks need to be understood as having indeterminacy as an inherent characteristic. This requires embracing uncertainty as unavoidable, while remaining oriented to understanding progressively more.

Scientists at the leading edges of many fields are speaking in terms of indeterminacies, probabilities, complexities, and incompleteness. The best scientists in fields that deal with hyperobjects, like epidemiology and ecology, rarely talk in terms of certainties, unless asked to do so by the press or political decision makers. The news media is largely structured so as to reduce complexity and indeterminacy into clear and agreed-upon certainties15. This mirrors the political and legal processes of liberal democracies, where complex issues must be reduced ultimately to a binding vote between definitive choices. In these contexts, actual indeterminacy cannot be accommodated easily by the structure of the sensemaking practices themselves. As a result, individuals and organizations can lock prematurely onto a belief that “the facts” are already known. These facts are then defended almost as an article of faith; the issue becomes more a matter of defending political battle lines than epistemology. Because they have been written into the actions and decisions we have made, these facts cannot easily be made subject to change or question.

Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between epistemic hubris and epistemic nihilism, because these reactions often result in similar behaviors. For example, an epistemic nihilist will also say things like “the science is settled”—only they don’t care if it really is. They have given up on notions of scientific truth; they are not naive believers in the accepted facts. But they understand the relation between knowledge and power, and use truth claims and “facts” strategically as aspects of political and economic strategy. This cynical manipulation of public sensemaking is one of the key dynamics driving mistrust, fragmentation, and widespread propagation of misinformation. This in turn results in the spread of various other kinds of nihilistic reactions, most of which result in behaviors that look more like “checking out” into apathetic acceptance of the media as ultimately cognitively disempowering. The lines between news and entertainment are eliminated. Earnest attempts to make sense of important public issues cease. A depoliticized retreat into “infotainment” and social media leads away from engagement in the public sphere.

Neither hubris nor nihilism allow for learning. If you already know, you cannot learn.

This kind of humility implies a commitment to appropriate methods and rigor; it is a commitment to not just the right intent but also the awareness that the right capabilities and technologies matter.

The stance of epistemic humility is proposed as core to a new ethos for digital media in the 21st century. It is the core of a new ethos of learning. To be clear, the idea here is not that our society needs to be humble and learn a set of new specific ideas. It is not as if some curricula could be prescribed containing requisite beliefs, which if adopted by everyone would resolve the sensemaking crisis. That is not what is meant by a new ethos of learning. Rather, to draw from the work of Jürgen Habermas, arguably one of the most preeminent theorists of deliberative democracy in the 20th century, our society needs to advance in its abilities and capabilities for learning, in general and in perpetuity. Habermas argues that a society is composed of subsystems of law, economics, and culture (among other basic structures), and it can be evaluated on aggregate according to its acquired capacities for ongoing learning.15

An ethos of learning involves public commitments to deeper principles of epistemology and communication; such principles can inform specific approaches to addressing the many learning crises unfolding around us. The focus is then not about which ideas and beliefs are widely held, and whether they are “true facts or fake news.” The focus is on putting in place broader civic virtues and practices that support public sensemaking as a process capable of legitimately transforming and changing widely held ideas and beliefs. In so far as a society can be said to “advance” or to make “progress” in general, it is largely within this dimension of institutionalized capacities for learning that real progress can be found. We must ask: has our society improved its own capacities to continue learning? Or has the social system stopped learning, falling into the traps of hubris and nihilism? A new ethos of a learning society can be planted not only in the obvious systems of education, but also in the capacity for governmental, bureaucratic, legal and economic systems to change the way they learn and alter their basic practices of sensemaking.

footnotes:

14. See Roger Silverstone’s 2007, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. 
15. See Habermas’s 1996 book, Between Facts and Norms, and his 1984 classic of sociology, The Theory of Communicative Action.  

ref on planetary computational stack:

For more on the sheer scale and complexity of the planetary computational stack that is encircling the Earth, see Benjamin Bratton’s 2015, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty.

ref on non-kinetic (information) warfare:

For an informative overview of these issues see the work of Samuel Wooly and Philip Howard, at the Oxford Internet Institute, including their 2019 book, Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians and Political Manipulation on Social Media. See also Peter Singer and Emerson Brooking’s 2019 book, Like War: The Weaponization of Social Media.