Echo chambers, polarization and “post-truth” politics are destroying rational debate. Can democracy survive? The solution, it’s often claimed, is to reaffirm our commitment to Truth, Reason and Objective Reality, as bulwarks against disinformation spread by figures like Donald Trump. But it’s a fantasy to think this might work, argues Chris Voparil. Instead, we must focus on rebuilding emotional bonds with those with whom we disagree, to create the right environment for productive debate and the emergence of agreement.

Democracy in crisis

Political discourse, in the U.S. and elsewhere, is in a state of acute disrepair approaching utter dysfunction. Tribalism has become the norm and is further entrenched daily. Divides between political opponents have grown so wide as to render group identities unbridgeable chasms that none dare cross. And a post-truth or post-fact milieu has ushered in Orwellian dynamics where each side not only lays claim to “alternative facts,” but 2 + 2 = 5 has been made believable. Many remain mired in the quicksand of echo chambers and epistemic bubbles, seemingly uninterested in rescue.

Distressingly, this situation has made a mockery of public reason and the idea that rational deliberation, with enough time and space, could achieve consensus and govern democratic life. Does this spell the end of deliberative democracy?

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We must rethink long-entrenched assumptions about the connection between fact and belief, and about truth and reason

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The solution, it’s often claimed, is to reestablish our ties to objec­tive reality. The hope is that the authority of Truth or Reality or Rationality can serve as a bulwark against the deterioration of democratic norms and the rise of popular support for authoritarianism. But this hope is forlorn – or so this article will argue. Once-hallowed truisms about the power of the better argument and assent-inducing “facts of the matter” now strike us as quaint, if not downright absurd. Agreement of our peers no longer can be counted on as a sign of truth or rationality. Everything is up for grabs and disputed. Conspiracy theories abound.

Instead, we must rethink long-entrenched assumptions about the connection between fact and belief, and about truth and reason. In place of simply reiterating our commitment to objective truth and rationality, and decrying a world that no longer seems to value facts, we need to shift our focus towards rebuilding our emotional bonds – our affective ties – towards those with whom we disagree. Only then may rational debate – and perhaps even agreement about facts –follow.

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The pursuit of knowledge presupposes a community with certain ethical commitments

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The importance for deliberative democracy of a background of strong affective ties between citizens was a central concern of the philosopher Richard Rorty. He garnered posthumous political notoriety during the 2016 U.S. presidential election for passages he wrote in the mid-1990s, in which with uncanny prescience he warned of the rise of a Donald Trump-like figure. Rorty’s insights into the limits of rational persuasion and the importance of attending to our emotional relationships with each other point to a practical path forward – and just maybe offer hope.

The limits of appeals to truth

A fundamental insight of the tradition of American pragmatism in which Rorty stands is that democratic debate and discussion takes place within a “cultural matrix” (as John Dewey called it) rather than transcends it. What this means is that the pursuit of knowledge presupposes a community with certain ethical commitments, and cultivating those commitments is part and parcel of making progress towards knowledge.

This insight is often overlooked. It’s common today, even among modern pragmatists like Hilary Putnam and Cheryl Misak, to justify democracy partly on the basis that democratic deliberation is an effective path towards knowledge. Democracy, by ensuring conditions of free and open debate, is said to generate beliefs most supported by reasons and evidence. Crucially, this epistemological justification of democracy hinges on the presence of what Putnam refers to as “rational beliefs about matters of fact.” In other words, it depends on the idea that moral and political deliberation aims at “the truth or at getting things right, where ‘right’ does not mean merely ‘right by the lights of my group’” (Misak 2000, 3). On this picture of democracy, current tribalist invocations of “right by the lights of my group” must be countered by simply redoubling our commitment to truth.

But such epistemic remedies have become ineffective – and Rorty helps us understand why. Using Thomas Kuhn’s notion of “normal” science, we can say “normal” rational discussion and debate takes place in a preexisting logical-interpretive space, where there is general agreement about facts and criteria for good evidence. Rational persuasion is “a matter of putting everything into a single, widely available, familiar context” (Rorty 1991, 94–95). The “patterns of inference” that we rely upon to interpret events are stable and widely accepted or endorsed. Under these conditions, democratic deliberation provides a reliable path to agreement and knowledge.

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Appeals to Truth, Reality and Rationality lose their force when certain affective relations are absent.

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But when this sort of background agreement breaks down, we find ourselves in “abnormal” conditions for debate and discussion. Lacking widely shared standards of evidence and habits of interpretation, the logical space that makes rational persuasion possible is fragmented and in disarray. Rational deliberation breaks down as individuals and groups only have recourse to piecemeal mechanisms for “reweaving” their webs of belief. Rorty called these “paradigms of imagination,” where new words and metaphors are especially powerful. Occasionally, these disorganized conditions become ripe for “a revelation which leads one to rethink one’s long-term plans and, ultimately, the meaning of one’s life” (Rorty 1991, 94–95). More often, they open the door to climate denial and other false beliefs.

One of Rorty’s key insights is that appeals to Truth, Reality and Rationality lose their force when certain affective relations are absent. Trust is a good example. Recent analysis reveals that “An echo chamber doesn’t destroy their members’ interest in the truth; it merely manipulates whom they trust and changes whom they accept as trustworthy sources and institutions” (Nguyen, 2018). Echo chambers create distrust of all outside epistemic sources (Jamieson & Cappella, 2008), with disparagement directed at anyone who expresses a con­trary view: “outsiders are not simply mistaken – they are malicious, manipulative and actively working to destroy” (Nguyen, 2018). It becomes difficult, if not impossible, Rorty suggested, to find out what the facts are, since the normally reliable agreement of our fellow citizens “is no longer a good sign of truth” (2000a, p. 342). This is why mere appeals to the truth or to facts become useless in such circumstances.

This realization led Rorty to focus on the cultivation of practical attitudes and virtues, like what he called “irony,” understood as a willingness to question one’s own beliefs combined with a curiosity about the beliefs of others. He called non-ironic orientation toward one’s own commitments “egotism,” which he explained as being “satisfied that the vocabulary one uses when deciding how to act is all right just as it is, and that there is no need to figure out what vocabularies others are using” (2010, p. 395).

Philosopher Tracy Llanera’s work (2019) on the phenomenon of “group egotism” is most illuminating here. For Llanera, group egotists are not only ignorant and dogmatic, but “proud of their group identity” (2019, p. 1). Appeals to rational argument are powerless in the face of such attitudes, which are powerfully buttressed by identity-based affective bonds and enmities.

The upshot is that fake news and self-serving lies are defeated not by insisting on facts, from a position of self-confidence about one’s own connection to reality, but by building or rebuilding ties of solidarity and trust, from a position of concern for the health of one’s moral community. Even members of extremist hate groups who defect are helped by one-on-one “redemptive relationships” with those outside those groups. Llanera’s analysis reveals that “disillusioned extremists have a better chance at successful refor­mation and social reintegration when treated with compassion, empathy, and kindness” (2019, p. 14).

Reasoning with the Nazi

But doesn’t this strategy leave us unable to refute anti-democratic authoritarians? For instance, Misak worries that since for Rorty “there is no truth or rationality in politics,” he “has an impossible time in giving us – or himself – reasons for opting for his view rather than his fascist opponent’s view” (2010, 35). The remedy, Misak says, is “aiming at something that goes beyond the standards of your own community,” like truth, which would enable Rorty to assure us that we are right and the Nazis are wrong (2010, 35).

Rorty conceded that his account authorizes no “fact of the matter” to adjudicate between fascism and egalitarian tolerance. But he adds that he sees no fact of the matter available to settle this in Putnam’s or Misak’s accounts either (Rorty 1998, 51). Indeed, “Only an appeal to something eternal, absolute, and good – like [God] – would permit one to answer the Nazis, to justify one's choice of social democracy over fascism” (Rorty 2010, 503).

When read as denying the possibility of rational discourse, Rorty’s crucial insight is missed. It isn’t that he has abandoned the power of reasons and argumentative persuasion. Rather, he is reminding us that this power presupposes and operates within the value-system of a community or form of life. When our communities become too detached, we must work to build relationships. As he explained, “there is no faculty called ‘reason’ which tells us to listen to the other side (tells the slave-owner to listen to the slave, or the Nazi to listen to the Jew)” (2000, 60, 62). That is,

There are lots of silly or pointless or crazy things one can say and not be refuted. This is because the notions of argument, disagreement, refutation, controversy, and the like only make sense in situations where both sides share a certain minimal agreement. One can only refute somebody who shares some of one’s premises. People who share too few premises are not treated as unrefutable opponents, but as too childish or nutty or uneducated or whatever to get into the conversation . . . Hitler certainly cannot be refuted. But that is not because he has an irrefutable position but simply because he cannot be argued with at all (2020, 186).

Rorty sought to keep us from the trap of believing that, if only we secure the right methods of inquiring about reality, philosophy will save us from ourselves. His work contains resources to address fractured communities of interpretation by fostering trust and a sense of responsibility for those whom we have excluded or ignored. We are a long way from shared citizenship built around deliberating about the common good. The point is not that we should give up on democracy’s power to produce consensus and knowledge, but that we need in the first place to attend to the affective bonds that enable it. Our relationships with the other side need to be repaired for democratic deliberation to function again.

References

Dewey, John. 1986. “Logic: The Theory of Inquiry.” In The Later Works, 1925-1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Vol. 12. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Jamieson, Kathleen Hall and Joseph N Cappella. 2008. Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Misak, Cheryl. 2000. Truth, Politics, Morality: Pragmatism and Deliberation. New York: Routledge.

———. 2010. “Rorty’s Place in the Pragmatist Pantheon.” In The Philosophy of Richard Rorty: The Library of Living Philosophers, edited by Randall E. Auxier and Lewis Edwin Hahn, XXXII:27–43. Chicago: Open Court.

Nguyen, C. Thi, “Echo Chambers and Epistemic Bubbles,” Episteme, 2020; 17(2):141–161.

Llanera, Tracy. 2019. “Disavowing Hate: Group Egotism from Westboro to the Klan,” Journal of Philosophical Research 44, 13–31.

Putnam, Hilary. 2017. “A Reconsideration of Deweyan Democracy.” In Pragmatism and Justice, edited by Susan Dieleman, David Rondel, and Christopher Voparil, 249–64. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1991. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. New York: Cambridge University Press.

———. 1998. Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3. New York: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2000. “Universality and Truth.” In Rorty and His Critics, edited by Robert B. Brandom, 1–30. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

———. 2010. “Trotsky and the Wild Orchids.” In The Rorty Reader, edited by Christopher Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein, 500–510. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

———. 2020. On Philosophy and Philosophers: Unpublished Papers, 1960-2000. Edited by W.P. Małecki and Chris Voparil. New York: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2022. What Can We Hope For? Essays on Politics. Edited by W.P. Małecki and Chris Voparil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.