America’s Polarised Public Square and the Case of the 2024 Presidential Campaign

Plato’s tale of shadows being misinterpreted in the cave
can be taken as a warning about the dangers of propaganda and misinformation

By Keith Tidman 

There’s a thinking error, sometimes called the Dunning-Kruger effect that warns us that cognitive biases can lead people to overvalue their own knowledge and understanding, amplified by tilted campaign narratives that confound voters. Sometimes voters fail to recognize their patchy ability to referee the truth of what they see and hear from the presidential campaigns and various other sources, including both social media and mainstream media. The effect skews public debate, as the electorate cloisters around hardened policy affecting America’s future. It is a tendency that has prompted many thinkers, from among the ancient Athenians to some of America’s founders, to be wary of democracy.

So, perhaps today more than ever, the manner of political discourse profoundly matters. Disinformation from dubious sources and the razor-edged negative branding of the other candidate’s political positions abound, leading to distrust, rifts, confusion, and polarised partisanship within society. The bursts of incivility and brickbats are infectious, sapping many among the electorate. Witness today’s presidential campaign in the United States.

 

Even before the conventions of this summer, the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are a lock; yet, any expectations of orderliness are an illusion. President Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump, with candid campaign devotees deployed alongside, are immersed in spirited political tussles. The limited-government mindset of Enlightenment philosopher John Locke might well stoke the hurrahs of libertarians, but not of the mainstream political parties thriving on the nectar of activism and adversarial politics.

 

We’re left asking, then, what facts can the electorate trust as they make political choices? With what degree of certainty should the public approach the information they’re served by the campaigns and legions of doctrinaire pundits talking at cross purposes? And is it possible to cut through the diffusion of doctrine and immoderate conviction? 

 

Facts are indispensable to describing what’s happening inside the political arena, as well as to arbitrate policy changes. Despite the sometimes-uncertain provenance and pertinence of facts, they serve as tinder to fuel policy choices. The cautious expectation is that verifiable facts can translate to the meeting of minds. The web of relationships that gives rise to ideas creates an understanding of the tapestry that the public stitches together from the many fragments. The idealised objective is a Rousseau-like social contract, where the public and elected representatives intend to collaborate in pursuit of the common good — a squishy concept, at best.

 

Today, anyway, the reality is very different: discourse in the public square often gets trampled, as camps stake out ownership of the politically littered battleground. The combustibility of political back-and-forth makes the exchanges harder, as prickly disputants amplify their differences rather than constructively bridge divides. In the process, facts get shaded by politically motivated groups metaphorically wielding high-decibel bullhorns, reflecting one set or another of political, societal, and cultural norms. Hyperpartisanship displaces bipartisanship. 

 

Consider the case of refugees and migrants arriving cross-border in the United States. The political atmosphere has been heavy with opposing points of view. One camp, described by some as nativist, contends that porous borders threaten the fabric of the nation. They fear marginalisation, believing “fortress America” is the solution. Another, progressive camp contends that the migrants add to the nation’s economy, enrich our already-dynamic multiculturalism, and on humanitarian grounds merit assistance. Yet, the cantankerous rhetorical parrying between the camps continues to enlarge, not narrow, the political gap.

 

Disputes over book bans, racial discrimination, reproductive rights, tax policy, inequality, role of religion, public demonstrations, gun safety, rules of democracy, and other normative and transactional wedge issues are equally fraught among intransigent politicians of diametrically contrasting views and immune to persuasion. Such flashpoints are made worse by intra-party, not just cross-party, hubs at boisterous variance with one another — leaving one wondering how best to arrive at a collective of settled norms.

 

Instead of being the anchors of social discourse, real or disputed facts may be used to propagate discord or to disadvantage the “other.” Facts fuel jaundiced competition over political power and control: and as historian and politician Lord Acton said, such “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Many people complain that this “other” is rooted in systemic bias and ranges across race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, language, religion, education, familial pedigree, and socioeconomics. The view is that marginalisation and disenfranchisement result from the polemical fray, which may have been the underlying aim all along.

 

Unfortunately, while the world democratises access to information through the ubiquity of technology, individuals with manipulative purposes may take advantage of those consumers of information who are disinclined or unprepared to thoughtfully question the messaging. That is, what do political narratives really say, who’s formulating the narratives, what are their benign or malign purposes, and who’s entrusted with curating and vetting? Both leftwing and rightwing populism roams freely. It recalls Thomas Paine’s advice in The Rights of Man that “moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.” Shrewd advice too often left unheeded in the presidential campaign, and in the churn of events has itself become the tinder of the dissent mentioned above.

 

Today, dubious facts are scattered across the communications landscape, steering beliefs, driving confirmation bias, stoking messianic zeal, stirring identity warfare, and fueling ill-informed voting. As Thomas Jefferson observed, the resulting uncertainty short-circuits the capacity of ordinary people to subscribe to the notion “That government is the strongest of which every [citizen] feels himself a part.” A notion foundational to democracy, one might say. Accordingly, the public has to grapple with discerning which politicians are honest brokers, or which might beguile. Nor can the public readily know the workings of social media’s opaque algorithms, which compete for the inside track on the content of candidates’ messaging. Communication skirmishes are underway for political leverage between the Biden and Trump campaigns. 

 

Jettisoning political stridency and hardened positions proves difficult, of course, especially among political evangelists at loggerheads. But it’s doable: The aim of sincere conciliation is to moderate the rancorous political discourse, while not fearing but rather accommodating the unbridled sharing of diverse ideas, which is foundational for democracy operating at its best.  

The Certainty of Uncertainty

Posted by Keith Tidman 

We favour certainty over uncertainty. That’s understandable. Our subscribing to certainty reassures us that perhaps we do indeed live in a world of absolute truths, and that all we have to do is stay the course in our quest to stitch the pieces of objective reality together.

 

We imagine the pursuit of truths as comprising a lengthening string of eureka moments, as we put a check mark next to each section in our tapestry of reality. But might that reassurance about absolute truths prove illusory? Might it be, instead, ‘uncertainty’ that wins the tussle?

 

Uncertainty taunts us. The pursuit of certainty, on the other hand, gets us closer and closer to reality, that is, closer to believing that there’s actually an external world. But absolute reality remains tantalizingly just beyond our finger tips, perhaps forever.

 

And yet it is uncertainty, not certainty, that incites us to continue conducting the intellectual searches that inform us and our behaviours, even if imperfectly, as we seek a fuller understanding of the world. Even if the reality we think we have glimpsed is one characterised by enough ambiguity to keep surprising and sobering us.

 

The real danger lies in an overly hasty, blinkered turn to certainty. This trust stems from a cognitive bias — the one that causes us to overvalue our knowledge and aptitudes. Psychologists call it the Dunning-Kruger effect.

 

What’s that about then? Well, this effect precludes us from spotting the fallacies in what we think we know, and discerning problems with the conclusions, decisions, predictions, and policies growing out of these presumptions. We fail to recognise our limitations in deconstructing and judging the truth of the narratives we have created, limits that additional research and critical scrutiny so often unmask. 

 

The Achilles’ heel of certainty is our habitual resort to inductive reasoning. Induction occurs when we conclude from many observations that something is universally true: that the past will predict the future. Or, as the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, put it in the eighteenth century, our inferring ‘that instances of which we have had no experience resemble those of which we have had experience’. 

 

A much-cited example of such reasoning consists of someone concluding that, because they have only ever observed white swans, all swans are therefore white — shifting from the specific to the general. Indeed, Aristotle uses the white swan as an example of a logically necessary relationship. Yet, someone spotting just one black swan disproves the generalisation. 

 

Bertrand Russell once set out the issue in this colourful way:

 

‘Domestic animals expect food when they see the person who usually feeds them. We know that all these rather crude expectations of uniformity are liable to be misleading. The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken’.

 

The person’s theory that all swans are white — or the chicken’s theory that the man will continue to feed it — can be falsified, which sits at the core of the ‘falsification’ principle developed by philosopher of science Karl Popper. The heart of this principle is that in science a hypothesis or theory or proposition must be falsifiable, that is, to possibly being shown wrong. Or, in other words, to be testable through evidence. For Popper, a claim that is untestable is no longer scientific. 

 

However, a testable hypothesis that is proven through experience to be wrong (falsified) can be revised, or perhaps discarded and replaced by a wholly new proposition or paradigm. This happens in science all the time, of course. But here’s the rub: humanity can’t let uncertainty paralyse progress. As Russell also said: 

 

‘One ought to be able to act vigorously in spite of the doubt. . . . One has in practical life to act upon probabilities’.

 

So, in practice, whether implicitly or explicitly, we accept uncertainty as a condition in all fields — throughout the humanities, social sciences, formal sciences, and natural sciences — especially if we judge the prevailing uncertainty to be tiny enough to live with. Here’s a concrete example, from science.

 

In the 1960s, the British theoretical physicist, Peter Higgs, mathematically predicted the existence of a specific subatomic particle. The last missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics. But no one had yet seen it, so the elusive particle remained a hypothesis. Only several decades later, in 2012, did CERN’s Large Hadron Collider reveal the particle, whose field is claimed to have the effect of giving all other particles their mass. (Earning Higgs, and his colleague Francis Englert, the Nobel prize in physics.)

 

The CERN scientists’ announcement said that their confirmation bore ‘five-sigma’ certainty. That is, there was only 1 chance in 3.5 million that what was sighted was a fluke, or something other than the then-named Higgs boson. A level of certainty (or of uncertainty, if you will) that physicists could very comfortably live with. Though as Kyle Cranmer, one of the scientists on the team that discovered the particle, appropriately stresses, there remains an element of uncertainty: 

 

“People want to hear declarative statements, like ‘The probability that there’s a Higgs is 99.9 percent,’ but the real statement has an ‘if’ in there. There’s a conditional. There’s no way to remove the conditional.”

 

Of course, not in many instances in everyday life do we have to calculate the probability of reality. But we might, through either reasoning or subconscious means, come to conclusions about the likelihood of what we choose to act on as being right, or safely right enough. The stakes of being wrong matter — sometimes a little, other times consequentially. Peter Higgs got it right; Bertrand Russell’s chicken got it wrong.

  

The takeaway from all this is that we cannot know things with absolute epistemic certainty. Theories are provisional. Scepticism is essential. Even wrong theories kindle progress. The so-called ‘theory of everything’ will remain evasively slippery. Yet, we’re aware we know some things with greater certainty than other things. We use that awareness to advantage, informing theory, understanding, and policy, ranging from the esoteric to the everyday.