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Epistemological Relativism Runs Rampant, an essay

I want to address something that I've seen Joshua Micah Marshall mention from time to time on his blog. Last night, he made this curious post:

Earlier this evening I flipped by the Fox News media criticism show and noticed that they were talking about the Mark Halperin memo posted on Drudge. I had the volume off so I didn't hear what was said. And there is a certain richness to Fox News discussing any other news organization's 'bias' when they're just a few days away from and have yet to explain why their chief political correspondent published a denigrating and fabricated story about the candidate he is supposed to be covering.

But what does this memo say, exactly?

Various right-wing barkers are trying to make it out as though Halperin has been caught in some impolitic or embarrassing remark. But quite the contrary is the case.

This is simply a news organization trying to grapple with the same reality that every respectable news outlet is now dealing with -- how to report on the fusillade of lies the Bush campaign has decided to use against John Kerry in the final weeks of the campaign.

The plain intent of the memo is to tell ABC reporters that they should feel neither obligated nor permitted to equate the level of deceptiveness of the Kerry and Bush campaign's if and when they are in fact not equal.

Everyone can see that they are not equal. Halperin is just saying it. And in doing so he has run smack into the epistemological relativism that now defines the Republican party.

The most noteworthy thing I've seen in the right-wing response is that there seems to be little effort to deny or engage the question of whether the Bush campaign is being qualitatively more dishonest than the Kerry campaign. All the whining is focused on the fact that any news organization would have the temerity to try to distinguish between them.

Which gets us to a key irony of the conservative assault on the concept of journalistic objectivity and claims of media bias. Though they attack the very notion that journalistic objectivity is practiced by the mainstream (i.e., non-Fox) media, they are most often -- and certainly in this case -- its great beneficiaries in as much as the failing of the current norm of objectivity is that it advantages liars. No surprise they'd want to maintain that advantage.

His linking of the phrase "epistemological relativism," really caught my eye. For one, I don't totally understand what the word "epistemological" means (my Philosphy class in college was at an un-Godly 7:30 in the morning which has obviously lead to a memory lapse), but for two, because in the context of what he is talking about, I totally know what he means.

A quick Google search turned up this, by Sandra LaFave:

• Epistemological relativism is the view that truth and falsity are relative; in other words, no statements are "objectively" true or false. Truth is relative to a person or a culture. An epistemological relativist denies that anything at all can be known. According to hard core epistemological relativism, everything is a matter of opinion, including science. Naturally, anyone who is an epistemological relativist is also an ethical relativist.

• Ethical relativism is the view that morality is relative. An ethical relativist restricts relativism to ethical matters; an ethical relativist might not be an epistemological relativist. For example, an ethical relativist might accept the possibility of scientific truth but deny the possibility of truth in ethics.

But what does this have to do with the "epistemological relativism that now runs the Republican party"?

He is talking about the kind of bizarre relativism that somehow makes a lie or mispoken phrase on one side equal to hundreds of untold many lies on the other side. For instance, in recent discussions with friends about the numerous lies of George W. Bush, I get ridiculous comments like, "I think that Kerry lies more," and when I ask them to prove it, all they can bring up is a flap about a question asked of Kerry's SUV ownership where he said he didn't own one, because his wife did (yeah, sure, that sure is "telling," "frightening," or "terrifying" and other fear-mongering phrases with no relation to reality and things that are important). The epistemological relativism inherent in these statements is the assumption that the truth and falsity is relative to each person, so it's perfectly acceptable to raise the lies about SUV ownership up to the level of lies that mislead nations into pre-emptive war causing the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians. (Of course the first rebuttal to this is that Kerry looked at the same "intelligence" that Bush did so that makes him every bit as "guilty" as Bush in another attempt to make a relativist claim. That is also gravely untrue.) Everything is a matter of opinion--even facts and science--so the sheer imbalance of the amount of lies being told on one side of a political debate to the other's side is tossed aside as the issue for a new way of looking at things, that for the lack of a better phrase, can be called "fair and balanced."

Great many more events have transpired since those discussions, so there is a lot more material on both sides to ridicule (with one side far out-weighing the other immensely, of course), but there were other actual so-called "examples" brought up by friends that somehow proved Kerry told an untruth. Most of the time it was a misunderstanding of actual events, but other times, yes, Kerry was getting the facts wrong. Call it a lie if you will. Although, if he was deliberately misleading is another discussion. Over the last week and a half, I'd challenge anybody to go to the factcheck.org pages that analyze each debate between the Presidential (and VP) candidates and try to prove to me that, even though both got their facts wrong on multiple accounts, that there is a true "balance." The evidence just doesn't support it.

So, with great curiosity, I began to read Joshua Marshall's piece at The Washington Monthly. His thesis beings with describing the style in which Bush and his administration lies in comparison to past Presidents who have also been fib-tellers:

George W. Bush has a forthright speaking style which convinces many people that he's telling the truth even when he's lying. But in under three years, Bush has told at least as many impressive untruths as each of his three predecessors. (See The Mendacity Index, p.27) His style of deception is also unique. When Reagan said he didn't trade arms for hostages, or Clinton insisted he didn't have sex with "that woman," the falsity of the claims was readily provable--by an Oliver North memo or a stained blue dress. Bush and his administration, however, specialize in a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion.

It's that "undisprovable assertion" that has become the keystone of every dubious claim that Bush and his administration have been peddling. The undisprovable assertion of the WMD stockpiles ("we don't know, they could turn up"), of cutting taxes for the super rich while telling the American public that "by and large" they go to benefit the middle class even though they clearly do not ("we don't know, it might... eventually"). Marshal goes into more detail here:

This summer [of 2003], when it became clear that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program--indeed showed no apparent evidence of any weapons of mass destruction at all--that the economy was still losing jobs, and that the administration's own budget office predicted deficits as far as it dared project, Bush's reputation for honesty took a turn for the worse. By the middle of July, only 47 percent of adults surveyed by Time/CNN said they felt they could trust the president, down from 56 percent in March. The president's response to all this was to make yet more confidently expressed, undisprovable assertions. He simply insisted that his tax cuts would create jobs--and who knows? Perhaps someday they will--and that American forces would eventually turn up evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But by then, the press was beginning to pick up on deceptions in other policy areas--the redaction of evidence of global warming in EPA reports, the administration's refusal to provide Congress with any estimates whatsoever about the costs of the occupation of Iraq. The White House seemed guilty of what might be called persistent, chronic up-is-downism, the tendency to ridicule the possibility that a given policy might actually have its predictable adverse consequences, to deny those consequences once they have already occurred, or--failing that--to insist against all evidence that those consequences were part of the plan all along. By late July, even a paragon of establishment conservatism like Barron's columnist Alan Abelson was lamenting the president's "regrettable aversion to the truth and reality when the truth and reality aren't lovely or convenient."

What's really going on here is a classic case of epistemological relativism: constantly making undisprovable assertions, almost a complete rejection of science when it doesn't fit with their agenda (and it pretty much never does, unfortunately), etc. What is true for Bush and his administration certainly isn't true for everybody, especially all of the facts, the news, the reports that have been flying smack in the face of most of the assertions they have ever made on just about anything. Rumsfeld's "unknowable knowables" is about the height of this absurdity of undisprovable assertions.

One of Marshall's concluding paragraphs is thus:

Everyone is compromised by bias, agendas, and ideology. But at the heart of the revisionist mindset is the belief that there is really nothing more than that. Ideology isn't just the prism through which we see world, or a pervasive tilt in the way a person understands a given set of facts. Ideology is really all there is. For an administration that has been awfully hard on the French, that mindset is...well, rather French. They are like deconstructionists and post-modernists who say that everything is political or that everything is ideology. That mindset makes it easy to ignore the facts or brush them aside because "the facts" aren't really facts, at least not as most of us understand them. If they come from people who don't agree with you, they're just the other side's argument dressed up in a mantle of facticity. And if that's all the facts are, it's really not so difficult to go out and find a new set of them. The fruitful and dynamic tension between political goals and disinterested expert analysis becomes impossible.

I really wish Marshall would have gone further into that particular assertion about the Bush administration really being "French," "post-modernists," but The Washington Monthly is not a philosophy publication. That being said, it's apparent what Marshall is getting at: that Bush and his administration are really epistemological relativists who disregard all facts as relative to who is telling them, disregarding anything that is in dispute with their ideological agenda because you have to have their political and ideological agenda in order to make it a fact.

As we have seen over the past few months, this translates into many levels of absurdity. For instance, there are suddenly always two sides to a story ("suddenly being pretty much ever since FOX News was born in 1996, but the ideology behind it traces back much further, of course):

• If Bush lies a lot, then Kerry must also lie a lot because he's a politician so make sure to bring those lies up in an effort to "balance" your story out.



• If the lying liars known as the Swift Boat Veterans for "Truth" are telling untold numbers of lies as a 527 group, then that must mean that all Democratic-funded and -leaning 527 groups who are attacking Bush must also be filled with lies and "smears" -- and hey, because there are so many more Democrat-funded and -leaning 527 groups out there, that really makes a balance to this whole Swift Boat Liars situation, despite the fact that the record shows that no other Democratic 527 group has gotten anywhere near as much free air time on television from all the "news" programs showing their unfounded and thoroughly discredited commercials all while promoting their unfounded and thoroughly discredited Unfit for Command book; and despite the fact that the record shows that no other Democrat (or otherwise) 527 group has told so many bald-face lies than the Swift Boat Liars have told.

In each case my friends merely "think" or "believe" this so-called "balance" to be true because if they have to actually weigh the facts, then this "belief" will crumble; these attempts at "even-handedness" actually paint a false picture with epistemological relativism as the brush. (Keep in mind that I'm not saying that Kerry is anywhere near a saint or that he always tells the truth. We're all flawed, as am I, and I know my own flaws even better than anybody else's flaws, but there comes a time when one needs to realize that nobody ever died as a result of Kerry being disingenuous about his SUV ownership.)

Brent Cunningham's brilliant "Re-thinking Objectivity" piece highlights an instance of a false "balance" as far back as the 1890's and its many unfortunate reincarnations thereafter:

American journalism's honeymoon with objectivity has been brief. The press began to embrace objectivity in the middle of the nineteenth century, as society turned away from religion and toward science and empiricism to explain the world. But in his 1998 book, Just the Facts, a history of the origins of objectivity in U.S. journalism, David Mindich argues that by the turn of the twentieth century, the flaws of objective journalism were beginning to show. Mindich shows how "objective" coverage of lynching in the 1890s by The New York Times and other papers created a false balance on the issue and failed "to recognize a truth, that African-Americans were being terrorized across the nation."

After World War I, the rise of public relations and the legacy of wartime propaganda — in which journalists such as Walter Lippman had played key roles — began to undermine reporters' faith in facts. The war, the Depression, and Roosevelt's New Deal raised complex issues that defied journalism's attempt to distill them into simple truths. As a result, the use of bylines increased (an early nod to the fact that news is touched by human frailty), the political columnist crawled from the primordial soup, and the idea of "interpretive reporting" emerged. Still, as Michael Schudson argued in his 1978 book Discovering the News, journalism clung to objectivity as the faithful cling to religion, for guidance in an uncertain world. He wrote: "From the beginning, then, criticism of the 'myth' of objectivity has accompanied its enunciation . . . . Journalists came to believe in objectivity, to the extent that they did, because they wanted to, needed to, were forced by ordinary human aspiration to seek escape from their own deep convictions of doubt and drift."

By the 1960s, objectivity was again under fire, this time to more fundamental and lasting effect. Straight, "objective" coverage of McCarthyism a decade earlier had failed the public, leading Alan Barth, an editorial writer at The Washington Post, to tell a 1952 gathering of the Association for Education in Journalism: "There can be little doubt that the way [Senator Joseph McCarthy's charges] have been reported in most papers serves Senator McCarthy's partisan political purposes much more than it serves the purposes of the press, the interest of truth." Government lies about the U2 spy flights, the Cuban missile crisis, and the Vietnam War all cast doubt on the ability of "objective" journalism to get at anything close to the truth. The New Journalism of Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer was in part a reaction to what many saw as the failings of mainstream reporting. In Vietnam, many of the beat reporters who arrived believing in objectivity eventually realized, if they stayed long enough, that such an approach wasn't sufficient. Says John Laurence, a former CBS News correspondent, about his years covering Vietnam: "Because the war went on for so long and so much evidence accumulated to suggest it was a losing cause, and that in the process we were destroying the Vietnamese and ourselves, I felt I had a moral obligation to report my views as much as the facts."

As a result of all these things, American journalism changed. "Vietnam and Watergate destroyed what I think was a genuine sense that our officials knew more than we did and acted in good faith," says Anthony Lewis, the former New York Times reporter and columnist. We became more sophisticated in our understanding of the limits of objectivity. And indeed, the parameters of modern journalistic objectivity allow reporters quite a bit of leeway to analyze, explain, and put news in context, thereby helping guide readers and viewers through the flood of information.

What stands out as an example, which has become the theme for over the next hundred years, is this: "Mindich shows how 'objective' coverage of lynching in the 1890s by The New York Times and other papers created a false balance on the issue and failed 'to recognize a truth, that African-Americans were being terrorized across the nation.' "

These and many other examples show just how harmful these false balances really are to telling the truth.

In LaFave's conclusion about "Relativism, Absolutism, and Dogmatism," she highlights the flaws in being a relativist in response to moral absolutionism, but in defining moral absolutionism, she ends up describing Bush and his administrations epistemological relativism that has turned into a kind of moral absolutionism:

You might still be tempted to accept relativism because you think it's the only alternative to moral absolutism. Moral absolutism is the view that there is but one eternally true and valid moral code, which applies with rigid impartiality to all people in all cultures at all times and places. But, you might think, moral absolutism is surely wrong and dangerous; it leads to intolerance and dogmatism. People who think they know "the truth" about morality tend to be insensitive to alternative ways. Moral absolutists have perpetrated horrible persecutions, wars, and genocide on other people and cultures. Therefore, we should be relativists in the name of tolerance. There are no moral absolutes, but everyone should be respectful and tolerant of other people and other cultures.

This argument is very popular, but flawed. Four critiques are important:

1. The argument presupposes that there are only two options: absolutism and relativism. This is a false dilemma fallacy. Relativism is not the only alternative to absolutism. One could reject absolutism and still say that some behaviors are morally better or worse. Most contemporary moral theories, e.g., utilitarianism and virtue ethics, are neither absolutist nor relativist.



2. The argument is self-contradictory. "Everyone should be respectful and tolerant" is a moral maxim the relativist intends to apply to all people in all cultures; yet at the same time the relativist denies that any moral maxims apply to all people in all cultures! The relativist, to be consistent, must say that respect and tolerance are required only if one's culture requires them.



3. When the relativist criticizes absolutism for causing harm, the relativist seems to be presupposing an objective inter-cultural notion of harm. But this is exactly the sort of idea a relativist cannot presuppose, since according to relativism, what counts as harm for one culture might not count as harm for another.



4. Relativism actually encourages the very ethnocentrism good-hearted relativists are trying to combat. People who have internalized the message of relativism rightly conclude that other cultures are hermetically sealed. You often hear people of good will say things like "You just can't understand people of my sex/people of my race/people of my sexual orientation, etc., if you haven't had our particular experience of oppression, if you're not one of us." But if you can't really learn anything about other cultures, why try? Why not be lazy and give up?

It becomes clear that Bush and his administration are epistemological relativists philosophically, but in practice, they come off as being moral absolutists as evidenced by the many qualities LaFave points out. Bush and his administration are neither pure moral absolutists or pure epistemological relativists, but they are indeed an unhealthy mix of some of the worst qualities of each end of this spectrum.

What's going on today and how is the Media currently complicit in this kind of epistemological relativism? Media Matters is usually on the case-- this just from yesterday: Networks persisted with façade of "balance" in post-debate fact check. Here's just one of the many examples:

Next, [NBC anchor Brian] Williams singled out as a distortion Kerry's true statement that Bush "didn't fund No Child Left Behind [NCLB]." Williams declared: "The truth is that education funding has increased during the Bush administration, though it has not lived up to the levels that the No Child Left Behind legislation called for."

In fact, NCLB is underfunded. The law places significant demands on schools, and when Congress passed the law, it decided how much money schools would need to fulfill those demands. A Democratic staff report from the House Appropriations Committee calculates that the fiscal year 2004 budget alone provided $8 billion less for NCLB than Congress authorized when it passed the law. It's not false or deceptive to claim that Bush "didn't fund" NCLB if he signed a budget that failed to provide all the money the bill promised.

Apparently trying to evoke "balance," Williams placed these dubious fact checks of Kerry alongside two major distortions by Bush. Bush claimed that "900,000 small businesses will be taxed under his [Kerry's] plan" to roll back Bush's tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans "because most small businesses are Subchapter S corps or limited partnerships, and they pay tax at the individual income tax level." Williams pointed out: "[I]n truth, according to a reputable think tank, The Tax Policy Center, that 900,000 number is inflated. Mr. Bush has doubled it. They say it would negatively affect about 470,000 small businesses in this country."

These news networks need to get their facts straight. So first of all, thank you Media Matters for pointing out the facts, and second, thanks for showing that this balance is just categorically false.

David Brock often says that in journalism, there needs to be at least some basic set of facts upon which everybody can agree. If you don't have that, then all you have are people giving their opinions in the guise of "fact," or a whole lot of "he said/she said'-style of reporting where the journalist doesn't bother to hold up what each side is saying to the truth, but simply tells what each side is saying, which leaves the reader clueless as the the truth behind the claims of both side. We need fact-checkers to speak the truth-- and not just journalists, either. We need ordinary people to realize that they can indeed speak truth to power by acknowledging that there are in truth basic facts in every issue. The merits of how each issue is acted upon and the ideologies behind them are, of course, what is subjective, but there really should be "a new kind of objectivity" that drives everybody to acknowledge that some things are indeed true.

If not, the end result is exactly what is happening in the Bush administration right now. Up is down; black is white; excuses for the war are made up after going to war; everything is "okay" in Iraq despite all evidence that indicates it's becoming worse with each passing month; tax cuts for the rich are really for the middle class even though they're not; and perhaps most frightening of all: telling the truth takes a back seat to an ultra radical ideological agenda that casts tens of thousands of innocent civilian deaths in a "war on terror" as "collateral damage" in a neoconservative age where suddenly, as General Tommy Franks said, "we don't do body counts."

As a Christian, my own tradition has a long history of speaking truth to power. Unfortunately, there's also a long history of Christians being surrogates for the violent aims of the state (the crusades, and now the "war on terror"), but I believe we can do better. Aside from being in solidarity with the poor, oppressed, and hungry, speaking the truth to power is something vital that defines what it means to be a Christian: speaking and telling the Truth.