Can We Trust Our Senses?
One of the things we’ve been very eager to pursue are partnerships with other publicly-minded organizations, particularly those who are addressing our democratic deficits. One of the organizations we have been partnering with is Keep Our Republic (KOR), a non-partisan civic education organization dedicated to:
Preserving a republic of laws.
Strengthening the checks & balances of our democratic operating system.
Raising awareness of emerging risks to the electoral process that is so vital to America’s liberty and prosperity.
Working at national and state levels to mitigate these risks by conducting research, publishing our ideas, and promoting dialogue.
Coordinating closely with other civic groups to help promote trust in the strength of our republic and its institutions.
I want to focus in particular on the last bullet point.
Last week I attended a conference held by Keep Our Republic in Washington, DC, the main theme of which was dealing with challenges we will face in this election year. All the presentations were very well done and interesting. An evening discussion concerning section 3 of the 14th Amendment left me dissatisfied as I thought the speaker was largely wrong in his interpretation, even though there is no questioning his expertise, and the sessions the next day were uniformly excellent. Gregory Jacobs gave a most engaging presentation on the legal issues surrounding the electoral count in 2020, but, for me, the most compelling panel involved Mary McCord from the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection and Miles Taylor from the AI and Election Security Coalition (and former Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security).
They discussed how AI was going to factor into the coming election, and — to be frank — their presentations scared the heck out of me and, in my judgment, the things they highlighted ought to concern all Americans. See this video, which they showed at the event, to get an indication of why:
[embed here]
https://twitter.com/MilesTaylorUSA/status/1742217063018463435?ref_src=twsrc^tfw|twcamp^tweetembed|twterm^1742217063018463435|twgr^6baaed0a0f7136bc9d790621468c918ffe5b18c7|twcon^s1_&ref_url=https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/01/05/opinion/2024-election-deepfakes-disinformation-ai/
At the conference we addressed the trust deficits that affect our polity, perhaps most notably demonstrated in the wake of the 2020 election. But we shouldn’t let our focus be too narrow. Public opinion polling indicates that Americans have lost trust in virtually everything. Very few of our institutions have survived this trust deficit, in no small part because the fates of all institutions tend to be linked. Then, too, one can’t help but notice the weakness of our major institutions. American’s confidence in our financial system has not recovered from the catastrophic collapses of 2008. Our faith in our governing institutions is at an all-time low. Those of us who are Catholic have a long way to go before we can trust again the leadership of our Church. Our academic institutions are a mess, particularly when our leading university has to fire its president — begrudgingly! — for the cardinal academic sin of plagiarism. Hardly anyone trusts the media to tell them the truth. Our families are in disrepair. Our entertainment industries are steeped in controversy. Our medical officials lost credibility during COVID. Even the military, usually a holdout when it comes to declining public confidence, has not been immune. In short (and I don’t want to be a declinist) it’s hard to think of a single social institution that is in better shape now than it was 20 or 30 years ago, and our relationship to the world is mediated through those institutions. Like children of a bitter divorce, the failure of these institutions leaves permanent psychic scars; and trust, once lost, will be hard to regain.
At the beginning of what we call the modern project, Rene Descartes looked at some wax melting by a fire and wondered to himself whether he was really seeing what he thought he was seeing. He ushered in a permanent feature of our condition: a radical skepticism resulting from the worry that we could not trust our senses. If we can’t trust them, he wondered, how could we possibly know anything? Now, Descartes responded to a deeper set of cultural issues, living in a very unsettled and unsettling age where verities both temporal and eternal were under attack — in many ways, an age similar to our own, although we stand at the back end rather than the front end of the modern age. But subsequent thinkers felt compelled to take up his basic question: how we might possibly navigate the world if we can’t, at least to some extent, rely on our senses?
The world of direct sensation proves unreliable enough, because we are all familiar with how our wishes and desires and biases affect our perception. My son, an Ohio State fan, remains convinced (wrongly) that Roman Wilson did not catch and control that touchdown pass in this year’s game, and many Michigan fans still refer to the 2016 iteration of The Game simply as the “JT was short” game. We often mis-hear or mis-see when in a world of direct perception. The problem becomes far more complicated when our perceptions are mediated in some fashion, because now the reliability of our senses is further compromised both by the nature of the medium and by those who control and can possibly manipulate the medium. The more complex the medium, the most distant the center of control, and the more anonymous those in control, the more likely that our perceptions are distorted and can't be trusted. The greater the distance, the less reliable our senses. In an age such as ours we rely on distant powers to make our lives work, and since their work is not transparent to us, our senses are hardly even at work, which means we have to trust those running things or the whole system falls apart. And that's a very, very tenuous state to be in, in no small part because we have to be convinced that those in charge are actually running things in our interest and not theirs. Any crack in that confidence can lead to catastrophic consequences.
In one's imagination the next stage of evolution results in human beings becoming creatures with giant eyes and massive thumbs and otherwise worthless appendages. But, increasingly, we are told that we cannot trust what we can see with our own eyes. Until about 6 years ago, human beings had always been confident they could tell the difference between a man and a woman, but now simply responding to the evidence of our senses can get us labeled as hateful. Are those people we are seeing on our screen, or computer created images? Did the student even write this paper? Even the normally unreflective process of attaching words to things has now become suspect. Setting aside all the moral issues involved, telling me that I can’t rely on what my senses tell me until I get confirmation from you, and I have to take your word for it no matter what, severely distorts normal human interaction, which depends on the meaning generated by sharing a world where we hold objects in common.
And what if the only objects we hold in common are the screens we hold in our hands, by which we literally and figuratively screen ourselves off from the world of people and things? What kind of social world can possibly be built, except maybe for one managed and manipulated by those who create and control what goes on in those screens? How much freedom is surrendered to the algorithm? And that screened world will be, by definition, an inhuman world, and also an inhumane one. The only way we could possibly navigate it is by completely giving up our trust in ourselves and others and turning it all over to our electronic masters. We have taken a bite out of the apple, and have now fallen from our human estate. The god who gave us the apple is a jealous god and constantly offers us the temptation of knowledge, and will not easily let us eat of the Tree of Life. But eating of that tree and returning to the world of people and things is the only way we can restore the kind of trust that properly befits human beings. For even when our senses deceive us, our errors can only be corrected in the face-to-face interactions of human beings with one another.
On this site we've been skeptical about a lot of the claims that "our democracy" is being threatened. Our skepticism results not from our conviction that everything is in good shape but because people keep confusing symptoms with causes. Democracy, in form and essence, is a local project that doesn't scale well. It is a face-to-face way of organizing social life, which means it is a complex one and not a simple one where our freedom gets reduced to the power of logging off. Face-to-face relationships make demands on us, make us uncomfortable, make us deal seriously and charitably with difference (it's typically harder to hate someone when you get to know a non-curated version of that person), and require us to sacrifice things that are precious to us, including our time and our sense of self. Those relationships are also essential in creating and maintaining trust; at some point we have to rely on our senses and the correction by others as invaluable-though-flawed guides in building a trustworthy world; the more mediated the world is, the less trustworthy it will be. Democracy requires direct engagement: voting in elections, because we are choosing to be re-presented but are not actually ourselves present, is the least important act of citizenship that we perform. Democracy can't work well when elections become too important. The energy of democracy is generated and sustained by the friction of our face-to-face interactions. One of the central pathologies of contemporary America is that we are not willing to accept democracy with it messiness and dissatisfactions and disappointments and compromises. We want to live in a frictionless world, one where we meet no resistances. That world, however, is the one promised to us by tyrants.
*Thank you to Ari Mittleman and his team at Keep Our Republic.
Discussion Questions:
If we can’t rely on our senses, what can we rely on?
Why has public trust in our institutions declined so precipitously?
Are there any social institutions that you think are in better shape now than they were 20 years ago?
Director of the Ford Leadership Forum, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
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