ON KNOWLEDGE OF POLITICS
OR
HOW DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW?

Last week I was reading some of Atrios' posts over at Eschaton on international banks selling off dollars, the potential for sleazy Democratic congressmen to cut a deal with Bush on Social Security privatization, and the significance of the upcoming Social Security Trustees' report. It's good, informative stuff. Indeed, I am sometimes very impressed with Atrios' command of cool economic analysis mixed with what seems to be a thorough understanding of both the political process and the key players involved.

I must admit that I am just not able to pull off that kind of day to day, report by report coverage of such issues the way that Atrios does--I don't have the time, and I don't have the educational background, which forces my writing here to focus more on the big picture. Actually, I'm not even really interested in going the way of the wonk because I fear that, for what I want to accomplish, the forest will be lost for the trees. Don't get me wrong, details, facts, data are extraordinarily important, especially because our current leaders don't seem to really care about these things. It's just that I'm much more concerned about what these details mean in the overall context of human life in the United States.

So I try to have an awareness of the ins and outs of politics and economics, which informs my attempts to find human meaning among the big events of our era. This brings up an important question: if I don't have a full understanding of economics and American politics, how do I know that what Atrios says is true?

The point is that I don't know. But I trust Atrios--he seems to be flat out wrong rarely--and I feel like I understand his biases (he's a liberal economist, more center than I am, and anti-Green). So I generally accept his line on things that I don't know much about if what he's advocating seems reasonable. Occasionally, he seems unreasonable, like when he held on to defending Dan Rather's smoking gun memo for about a week after it was clear that CBS couldn't authenticate it. Most often, however, Atrios doesn't set off my bullshit detector. So I ususally believe his assertions.

That's the point: I believe what Atrios has to say; I don't really know that what he's saying is true. I realize that this is a dangerous game to play intellectually, but the thing is that this is how most of us "know" what we "know." We believe it. Hell, if I really wanted to get Descartes about this I don't even really know that the Earth is round, or that it revolves around the sun. I believe these things because I trust the people who say that they know, that is, scientists. And that's reasonable: I understand the scientific method; I understand the nature of the scientific community and how they approach the creation of knowledge; I know that scandal erupts when this process breaks down. I can't possibly verify every single fact that science tells me is true, because I would have to devote my life to that, and I still wouldn't be able to pull it off. So I must develop a personal system of deciding who I want to trust and who I don't want to trust if I am to "know" anything about the universe at all.

This brings me back to political and economic knowledge. I trust Atrios because I know enough about him to know how he approaches the gathering of ideas. He has earned my trust because his process seems sound and I feel aware of any problems with that process. As far as I can tell, this is how most rank-and-file Americans put together their own personal body of political knowledge: they "know" because they trust, for whatever reasons.

It is the "whatever reasons" part that presents huge problems. Not everybody is so concerned with the knowledge gathering process: many Americans trust opinion makers because of personality or charisma, looks, race or ethnicity, and cultural similarity. Indeed, many people trust what President Bush has to say because he proclaims himself to be a "born again" Christian. Lots of young anarchists trust Noam Chomsky, even if they don't really understand how he arrives at his conclusions, because of his huge reputation as an anarchist intellectual. My big fear is that most people trust a given political advocate because of some kind of subconscious self-identification with that individual. Just imagine your typical Fox News viewer.

Of course, that's what I'm leading to: even though liberals are just as subject to the belief/knowledge problem, I'm pretty much of the opinion that the conservative side shamelessly rolls around in their beliefs, their "knowledge," like pigs in mud. In other words, not only are conservatives as prone to confusing belief with knowledge, they seem to be proud of it, dissing scientists and intellectuals, taking every word drooling out of Bill O'Reilly's mouth as gospel. There are, of course, principled, intellectual conservatives out there, just as there are moronic bandwagon liberals, but careful rational conservatives seem to be fewer and fewer in number as each year goes by.

I'm not sure why we are at this point of willful ignorance in American history--my own bias blames our authoritarian school system and the corporate media--but the point is that this is the game board on which progressives and liberals must now play. How the hell are we supposed to even communicate with people who "know" that up is down? I don't know.

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