In the second chapter of the first book of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle says that “the most governing and most masterful” human pursuit or discipline is hê politikê, probably best translated as the substantival adjective “the political.” Is the political an art or a science? Scholars debate the question, but since its aim for the Stagirite is to produce or to make good citizens, it is probably best thought of as an art.
Why is “the political” so architectonically privileged? Aristotle tells us that
it prescribes which kinds of knowledge ought to be in the cities and what sorts of person ought to learn and to what extent also we see that the most honored capacities such as generalship, household economics, and rhetorical skill are under this one. Since this capacity makes use of the rest of the kinds of knowledge, and also lays down the law about what one ought to do and from what one ought to refrain, the end of this capacity should include the ends of the other pursuits so that this end would be the human good.[1]
Clearly Aristotle would agree with Jonathan Rauch, even though the latter opens his recent The Constitution of Knowledge, published in 2021, not by appeal to Nicomachean Ethics but to Plato’s Theataetus. Both would agree that to have working institutions that promote and protect the public truth of our society — be it natural science applied to climate change, statements and actions of a presidential candidate, or even the exact date of an election — a more foundational set of social commitments must be in place. And even though Rauch casts this network in terms of “freedom of inquiry,” “viewpoint diversity,” and “factfulness” — these three comprising his “constitution of knowledge” — he would surely still agree with Aristotle that it is political.
At a January 2024 panel discussion in Austin and sponsored in part by the newly formed Civitas Institute at the University of Texas,[2] Rauch and his ideological confrère Jonathan Haidt (social psychologist and author of such works as the influential The Righteous Mind and the more recent The Anxious Generation) offer a compelling diagnosis of the state of knowledge in our fragmented age. Just before Election Day in the United States, I would like to draw people’s attention to this fascinating exchange.
Summarizing his recent thinking on the state of our American political situation, Haidt offers two metaphors: the cataclysmic alteration of the gravitational quotient, and the Old Testament story of the Tower of Babel.
What if, Haidt speculates, God suddenly were to decide to double the gravitational quotient, that “given” of nature that establishes the weight of any given object, such as on Earth? Suddenly bridges would collapse, airplanes would plummet to the ground, human beings could no longer stand upright. Something similar occurred, Haight maintains, around the year 2014, when, as he narrates, students at colleges and universities across the country began to demand the cancellation of speakers on campus, claiming that if particular personalities were to come to campus, people would surely die as the result of the rhetoric.
A related curtailment of the pursuit of truth occurred, according to Haidt, on the Harvard campus about five years later, when Black economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. was censored and cancelled for his economic and social-scientific views, pointedly threatening to the Harvard academic elite, including university president Claudine Gay, later shown to have plagiarized some of her previous academic work. (Interviews and reports that document Fryer’s story are widespread online.)
So goes, Haidt narrates, the prevalence of “cancel culture,” reflected in such events as the December 2013 international flight of Justine Sacco, who, between her lift-off in New York and her landing in Cape Town (11 hours later), had been fired from her high-profile position for off-color tweets she posted during the flight, just before taking a long nap. Upon landing, Sacco was in for a rude awakening indeed, the result of a viral uprising against her (although she had only 170 followers on that website at takeoff). Cancel culture is not limited to college campuses: to quote Andrew Sullivan (as Haidt does in the conversation), “We all live on campus now.”
In this new cultural milieu, Haidt adds, chaos ensued, tantamount to satellites and all manner of objects cascading and collapsing to the ground.
But wait, there’s more, Haidt says. It’s not just as if objects are falling from the sky; it’s as if suddenly we cannot even communicate with one another. Hence his recourse to a second metaphor: the Tower of Babel, and its befuddling of communication. In the era of social media cancellations, political echo chambers, and ideological fortresses, it’s as if we can no longer understand one other.
What explains this ominous situation? Haidt and Rauch agree: one key component is the shift from a culture of print (or what Haidt dubs the “Gutenberg era”) to a culture of online discourse, the “Network era.” Can the institutions that served to curb and mitigate against the dangers inherent in democracy (the rage and passions of the populace, the attraction to demagogues), which served us so well in the Gutenberg era (the historical context of the U. S. Constitution), hold up in the Network era? While Rauch is more optimistic on this front than Haidt, both agree that the situation is dire.
Rauch (like Haidt, no progressive) argues, for example, that the belief of two thirds of Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump is the direct result of Russian propaganda. “That kind of psychological disinformation is fundamentally incompatible with running a democracy because it has persuaded … one political party that America no longer is a democracy,” he contends.
In the midst of such disheartening developments, where can we look for hope?
I turn finally to one — perhaps the only — bright spot in the interview. It occurs when Rauch turns to Haidt and asks him this provocative question: “[In your ideal world] would you abolish DEI departments [at American colleges and universities]?”
Haidt responds thoughtfully and appropriately to the question, suggesting some intriguing alternatives to the current DEI hegemony, chiefly an expanded role for the office of the ombudsman. He suggests, in an almost off-handed comment, what for me is the deepest truth of the interview. While explaining that the real problem is not with any of the letters per se — diversity, equity, and inclusion are legitimate values — but rather with the identitarianism that has come to characterize their implementation, Haidt volunteers almost in passing that not all DEI proponents are identitarian: “There are some who really do it beautifully. In my experience they tend to be Christians. There’s a way to do DEI from a position of Christian faith that begins with love. But most [DEI enforcers] are not doing it from love. They are doing it from this kind of identitarian hatred of powerful people.”
In this moment, Haidt reminds me of the journalist David Brooks, another public intellectual who frequently alludes to contemporary Christians who, for all their faults and all their blind spots, as rare examples of a love that alone seems to provide healing in our time of cultural disintegration.
I do not know what Christians Haidt had in mind when he made this comment (which is far from fashionable). What I do know is that the Christian Church is called, at all times and in all places, be in the world but not of it.
This will surely look differently in the Network era than it did in the Gutenberg era. Yet what both eras are in equal need of is Christian love.
[1] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, tr. Joe Sachs (Focus Philosophical Library, 2002), 2.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVKsS3x1HWU&t=977s
The Rev. Dr. Matt Boulter is the rector of St. George’s Episcopal Church in east central Austin, Texas. A former Presbyterian minister with a Ph.D. in philosophy, Matt’s great love is reaching the city with the love, the good news, of Jesus Christ.