Keeping Informed in the Age of Information

“The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.” It certainly was informative to read those words in the Albuquerque Journal last week. A Republican commissioner of Otero County, where Alamogordo is the county seat, made that remark at a rally of Cowboys for Trump. Not only did the founder of that organization, Couy Griffin, adapt the infamous 19^th century racist phrase “The only good Indian is a dead Indian,” he also managed to call all Democrats “anti-American” and Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham a “communist.”

Very informative, indeed. Griffin gave us the real scoop on his organization. That piece of information is what the so-called Age of Information is all about. As an American, he had a right to say exactly what he thought. And we, as Americans, had a right to hear and interpret exactly what he thought. Although his remarks were classic hate speech, I don’t think they were meant to incite murder, though why I think that I’m not sure. Because it’s so preposterous? But is it really, given the President’s white-supremacist paramilitary following? Still, it wasn’t like yelling fire in a crowded theater when there was no fire.

And I’d rather know what he’s thinking than not know.

I used to be a First Amendment absolutist. Free and open communication is essential to any civilized way of life. I still think that’s true. And Griffin proves the point. But I was partially disabused of that certainty by the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that equated corporate and nonprofit political spending with free speech, speech guaranteed to individuals by the First Amendment. The Court in my view managed to equate, in a convoluted way, money with speech and along with it imply that corporations had the same First Amendment rights as human beings, that in fact corporations were corporate persons.

My retreat from the First Amendment right or wrong was deepened with the appearance of a particularly virulent kind of political hate speech at the beginning of the 21^st century in our country, racist propaganda and political scapegoating almost as vile and demonic as Jim Crow and Nazi anti-Semitism, the kind that is designed to incite violence. I was coming to feel that the Information Age had turned into the Age of Inflammation.

But I’ve become recommitted to my original feelings, even in the deluge of political fecal matter smearing all over the internet, and the gobs and hurls of so-called “journalism” stinking up the ether. How do you weed out truth from propaganda? What’s so informative about the Age of Information, or the Age of Bullshit as a very popular little book, “On Bullshit,” by Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, implied in 2005?

Frankfurt wrote that “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.” Bullshit comes in many forms, of course, and all of us are guilty of spreading it. Rumor, gossip, propaganda, opinion — all have a terrible tendency to turn foul in a hurry. That’s why this column has at the end of it the Latin motto Nullius in verba: Take no one’s word for it.

It’s up to us to sort the poo from the true. (I apologize.) And if we are too lazy to do that, then whose fault is it?

There are at least three principles involved, as far as I can see.

First, free speech and the First Amendment are not only about “speaking,” they are also about the rest of us listening and becoming informed. By listening to people and organizations engaging in free speech, even if it’s rank propaganda and advertising, we know what’s on their minds. The right to free speech implies the right to free listening and free judging. When we listen, we learn, we keep informed and we can exercise our free speech in opposition.

That’s a cloudy point to some because we seem to take a narcissist’s approach to just about everything, not only speech but health. It’s like wearing a mask in a time of pandemic. It’s not just about you not getting sick; it’s about others not getting sick because of you. The founder of Cowboys for Trump spoke his mind, and now we are informed about what a sorry state his mind is in.

Second, in an age of bullshit and “fake news,” one must develop a taste for what anthropologist Gregory Bateson called multiple descriptions of reality, if one hopes to stay informed and in touch with some semblance of the actual. It’s like trying to get the real scoop on how to avoid catching COVID-19. It’s very similar to reading a complicated poem that’s been translated from a language you have no hope of ever mastering. The only way to get a deeper sense of what the poem is about is to read multiple translations and see where they converge. If we hope to stay informed about life and death matters like coronavirus, we have to partake of multiple sources of information and learn how to cull the useful from the crap. In a hurricane of so-called information, you have to do the weeding yourself, if you truly want to be informed.

Third, each of us has to develop our own standards of truth, rid ourselves of partisan crapola and repair our ignorance every day by cultivating doubt and curiosity, identifying sources we trust while refining our skepticism and realizing how the various tricks and wiles of propaganda and advertising work their way into our consciousness like hungry, invisible parasites.

The Age of Information in America isn’t about waiting to be informed, or passively encountering the smorgasbord of truth. It’s about an active engagement with the bullshit of a nation of commercial and political con artists. It’s about learning how to separate the vast amounts bull from the few gems of knowledge that glint forth from obscurity every day. It’s about being aggressively devoted to informing yourself, rather than allowing yourself to be passively informed and inevitably bamboozled.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it