And We Could Move the Earth, Research Time, 03/11/2017

Archimedes is a part of the Western cultural imaginary about the nature of science, knowledge, and scientific power. Get me a lever long and strong enough, find me the right place to stand, and I can move the world. That’s the image.

Now, I’m about to take over as Digital Editor of Social Epistemology. So it’s not like I actually believe this is the way science and scientific knowledge actually works.

Human knowledge, technology, and power have definitely moved the world. It’s moved the world into a distinct geological epoch – the Holocene era, blip in the planet’s history that it is. It’s moved the world into remarkable extinction event as well, as we drown so much of the Earth’s creatures in our toxic waste.

But scientific knowledge doesn’t need to understand the world from some point of perfect objectivity to do its work. The view from nowhere not only doesn’t exist, but it was never necessary in the first place.

I write this so that I can draw out of Hannah Arendt’s writing about this idea something that I can use in my own philosophical work. She talks about an “Archimedean moment” in the history of Western science, from which we realized that view from nowhere.

Yet I think she also understands that this “Archimedes” image doesn’t refer to scientific practice itself. Scientific practice and technological development is far more complex than the popular image of it all.

That’s where I pick up Arendt’s thread on this image of Archimedes. The popular image of science remains this ludicrous, inaccurate one of the view from nowhere. The point of pure objectivity where our knowledge is pure in its truth.

Even that popular image misunderstands Archimedes’ words,* ignoring their directly practical character. Knowledge is how he moves and changes the world, not simply understanding it in some purely abstract sense.

* I doubt Archimedes himself ever said anything precisely like that. Same with the Eureka! moment. The idea, the image, the cartoon that appears in our popular culture is most important. 

No, what matters is the image of the Archimedean point or moment. The image that fixes our belief in human knowledge as aiming for pure objectivity is part of our popular culture. It isn’t true about the nature of knowledge, but it’s popularly believed to be true. We shouldn’t confuse the two.

Arendt writes about how that popular belief has informed popular attitudes about science and knowledge for centuries. She cites a philosophical explanation of Galileo’s experiments. But she could just as easily be talking about the public relations campaign of Robert Boyle and the Royal Society to keep their research from being swept up in the violence of England’s politics at the time.

I also want to keep an eye on Arendt’s explanation for what Galileo’s experiments actually did, her philosophical account of it. Copernicus’ sun-centric model of Earth’s system was conceived and used simply as a mathematical tool. It was a way to simplify planetary mathematics.

Only when Galileo made his telescopic observations of the planets did Copernicus’ model turn out to be so inconveniently true. He didn’t prove it true like a demonstration of logic. He discovered facts which established heliocentrism as a fact.

His telescopes were the long and strong levers that, in popular consciousness at least, moved the world. Which seems to be where it really counts.

Giving Up on Objectivity, Jamming, 13/03/2015

I came across a curious video on Twitter the other day, an interview on FOX Business between anchor Deirdre Bolton and Stewart Baker, a former general counsel to the NSA. It’s the typical FOX softball interview with someone saying sort of insane things about the government’s right to spy on American companies in the name of national security, except for a few points. 

Essentially what state surveillance agencies do all the
time. Just replace the toilet with a smartphone.

You can find it at the FOX News website, but I prefer you to watch it at this link, where I originally discovered it through Twitter, for reasons that will be clear by the end of the post. Here’s a brief run-down. Baker advocates that the American government’s spy agencies should have the right to monitor iPhone transmissions all over the United States and the world because ISIS members have communicated using iPhones.

Baker seems to be going on a tour lately to convince people that it’s wrong to want privacy from the American government’s secret surveillance. And that it’s wrong for large American companies to care about maintaining the privacy of their customers. I find it increasingly sad that the fears of some of the world’s more paranoid encryption nuts are coming true.

But we know all this already. The American government is spying on its citizens. This isn’t news.

What interests me is a particular, almost throwaway, comment of Baker’s to disparage the source of the information that Bolton was interviewing him about: that the CIA had been attempting to hack Apple’s iPhones for years. It came from Edward Snowden and The Intercept, which Baker said was an “ideologically motivated” media organization. 

Baker said that on the FOX Business network. The irony was obvious. The tweet where I first saw it appeared in the feed of Glenn Greenwald, who I follow on Twitter as a source of generally solid dissident journalism* and an interesting person. Like it or not, he is a historic figure in journalism already.

World-historical journalist Glenn Greenwald.

* Naturally, I don’t agree with everything he says. But he’s a perfect barometer of the modern left. In general, everything he writes, links, and tweets criticizing the American surveillance state is wonderful and illuminating. But I find that he gives something of a soft ride to Iran and anti-Israel militant groups. The left, however, should never enforce total unity of thought on all its members. It goes against the entire idea of liberation.

Bolton’s response was more illuminating than a FOX anchor had any right to be: sarcasm. “Stewart, you're talking about editorial judgment! Believe me, that’s a scandal.” Baker spoke as though being ideologically motivated would automatically discredit The Intercept, meaning that they aren’t trustworthy. 

I’ve spoken before of how the concept of objectivity as an ideal for journalism arose as a public image for papers like the New York Times. They strove for objectivity in reporting to distinguish themselves from a more nakedly ideological, sensationalist newspaper media environment in a manner that would earn public trust. General public trust in the objectivity of their reporting would secure the New York Times a reliable revenue base through subscription. 

That’s not to say that the ideal of objectivity was necessarily always a lie. The New York Times and the papers that followed the subscription model used a less sensationalistic, more objective tone of writing and approach to journalism to support their public image as objective. The most foolproof way to appear in a particular manner is actually to do it. 

But an editorial director is always a person, and so comes with presumptions about what is politically reasonable and what is more or less important news. And such people will hire similar people to work with them. Unless hiring a token figure with different moral and political attitudes, usually to appear more objective in the social context of the time. 

I find it very disheartening that even the most insanely
paranoid cryptanalysis junkie of Neal Stephenson's
body of work has turned out to be pretty much right
about the dangers of government surveillance.

Bolton understood something that’s always been true about the media environment. Editorial judgment is the process of ideologically motivating a media organization, or really any organization that produces content or does anything. Our ideologies are our frameworks for our moral and political beliefs. They’re our beliefs about what is reasonable to believe. In that sense, ideology is inescapable, and any editorial judgment is an exercise of ideology.

We know this, generally, as a culture. Though we often take a nihilistic attitude: if the total objectivity that the New York Times convinced me to believe in (so I'd buy a Times subscription) isn’t true, then I guess there can’t be any objectivity.

Maybe not literally, but there can still be what we used to use the language of objectivity to achieve: trustworthy, rationally considered, well-researched journalism. Journalism that doesn’t openly proselytize for a particular ideology, to create a shared mass ideology among its viewers such that they all see the world in a single, simple way.

Such mass ideology is called dogma. Its self-destructive effects are why societies need heretics, to keep these totalizing forces of uniformity at bay. If everyone thinks the same way and does the same thing, and such action was a mistake, there won’t be anyone left to think again. Dogma must be fought because it damages our capacity for social adaptation. 

Objectivity Is IV: What All This Has to Do With Communications, Composing, 20/02/2015

Continued from last post . . . The modern model of journalism grew out of the reaction to the yellow press style of reporting and publishing. Newspapers no longer needed to shout over each other for attention to earn their sales. Instead, they could build a reputation for fair and informative reporting, and let their regular subscribers carry the bulk of their income.

Objectivity was the rule of the new game of newspapers that made their reputation in prestige. Contrast this with the public relations industry, which was still progressing its norms and techniques into territory just slightly more sophisticated than carnival barkers. The conditions were just right for the two industries to crystallize their public images that would sustain for decades. 

Hearst used his corporate newspaper empire to attack
Citizen Kane because he took personally its critique of
him as an egotistical blowhard who would use his
corporate newspaper empire to attack his enemies for
spite. It proved that he was exactly how Welles
depicted his thinly veiled character.

Cracks showed in the pristine reputation of the new objective ideal of journalism from the beginning, starting with the open secret that William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his day, promoted messages through his newspapers that boosted political ends he favoured. By the 1980s, the fragmentation of media through cable news created the conditions for the niche development of journalism. 

We all knew that, under the mythical veneer of total objectivity, particular publications had always slanted in particular directions either generally or on particular issues. The explosion of media channels, first on television and then on the internet, constituted a positive push in the economic environment for outlets to double down on their ideological biases to corner a loyal audience. Combine this with the economics of the click-through in blog-based media, and we have the modern resurgence of the yellow press. 

Public relations, meanwhile, was becoming corporate communications. Although there was still a great deal of unethical behaviour at the top of the profession, where the largest firms tend to work on behalf of the most dangerous projects, the industry was becoming more prestigious and professional. 

I think a lot of this had to do with the fact that corporate communications was becoming a female-dominated industry, overcoming the dickish egotism that tends to prevail in male-dominated fields. Finesse and nuance were the skills of thought and expression that you needed to advance and progress in corporate communications, no longer bullish competitiveness and the will to dominate.

It was also becoming more complex, adopting the tools of narrative creation that had been perfected in reporting and journalism. But they were adopted to build the images of corporate and community clients, not for any duty to report truths. Truthfulness was still important; outright lying is considered unethical in public relations practice, no matter how many prominent examples you can find among the richest companies. Riches corrupt, after all.

No one could even pretend that Sean Hannity's
softball interviews with Mitt Romney during the 2012
Presidential election approached objective journalism.

But there’s now an honesty to public relations that modern journalism lacks. Even the journalistic institutions that are the most nakedly partisan (the most obvious examples being FOX News and other prominent media brands in the Murdoch conglomerate) pitch themselves as essentially truthful. If a FOX journalist calls himself conservative, he says it’s because his conservative beliefs reflect the truth. The liberal journalist will say the same thing. 

The reputation of journalism as an objective pursuit remains with us, even as almost every instance of objectivity collapses into a partisan venture. This is why, yesterday, I wrote that the concept of objectivity in this context (among pretty much every epistemic context, but that’s for another time) can no longer work, and that we need a virtue of truthfulness instead. 

Corporate communications has an honesty that modern journalism, with its yellow streaks, lacks. A corporate communicator will always admit her agenda, her goals about what she wants her audience to believe. She will admit that there are other ways to think, but that her aim is to convince people of some particular belief for causes and reasons about which she’ll be completely transparent if you ask.

A corporate communicator admits her agenda. In this, she’s truthful.

Objectivity Is III: Truthfulness as a Virtue, Composing, 19/02/2015

Continued from last post . . . So here’s my little philosophy of journalism idea, the four aspects of objectivity. That word isn’t really appropriate for what I describe here, though. The myth of the objective is still too powerful, both in journalists’ culture and in wider society. 

Instead, I’ll call it truthfulness. Objectivity is a specific goal to be achieved, or rather to sit infinitely distant from every human attempt to achieve it, our fixed star in the horizon of our worldly action. Truthfulness isn’t a goal in this sense, or even an ideal. Instead, it’s a virtue, an aspect of a human personality that describes a tendency to behave in particular fashions. And it’s better that we behave truthfully than not.

This post is my tentative definition of truthfulness in communications practice, whether as a reporter, a public relations practitioner, or simply as a broadly defined communications expert. Consider these four aspects as my first, tentative conception of a virtue of truthfulness. Any truthful communication must be fair, adequate to the subject matter, revealing, and comprehensive. 

A panel from Paul Cornell's The Girl Who Loved Doctor
Who, a story that explores the real ethical and political
differences between the world of Doctor Who and ours.

Fairness. The empty platitude version of this idea is “There are two sides to every story.” That’s pathetically underdetermined. Really, there are as many sides to every unfolding story as there are participants (sometimes, more). 

The example I gave at the start of yesterday’s post, that the military dictator deserves equal time to the activists he suppresses, was much too stark a contrast. I chose it as an extreme example to show the limits of fairness.* Fairness is a submission to the moral complexity of the world, an admission that there are rarely heroes and villains. All sides of a conflict, no matter its violence or intensity, can do terrible things and also be upstanding, admirable people. As Paul Cornell once wrote, our everyday world has no monsters to destroy, only immensely difficult problems to solve.

* A note about the concept of reversal in the McLuhans’ Laws of Media. Even here, a principle taken to an extreme expression reverses itself. I may also ask my Hegelian friend B-Rad what this conceptual movement might have to do with Hegel’s concept of aufheben. But that’s a philosophical-historical triangulation for another time.

Adequacy. Reporting is essentially synthesizing empirical observations into an account of what you’ve observed. If you’re going to report your observations truthfully, then what you say has to be adequate to the events and people you’re talking about.

This isn’t the same as total accuracy. We can’t be accurate in any total sense about anything we talk about simply because there’s too much going on. I’ve read some very good journalism lately about the fight in Canada’s parliament over the government’s sloppy new anti-terrorism legislation. Adequate reporting discusses the content of the bill, its possible uses, evaluates the legislation for possible problems and overreach in execution, describes the causes and content of every disputant’s perspective and goal. 

We don't need to know Tom Mulcair's breakfast to
know what pisses him off.

There’s no need to report the menus of all the parliamentarians’ breakfasts on each day of debate. Adequacy requires a genuine accounting for all the relevant facts, which requires discrimination of a situation’s causes.

Revealing. Much of the world is hidden from us. Nothing conspiratorial here. The world is just a murky place where you have to go digging for facts. And the course of people’s daily lives don’t normally bring them into fairly close contact with most of the other seven billion or so humans on Earth. There’s a lot about the world that we don’t know.

Truthful communication should reveal something about the world that most of the people who hear it didn’t know before. One of the best examples in journalism is a lot of the foreign documentary work that VICE has enabled. It has produced some of the best news documentaries that I think I’ve ever seen. I was especially impressed by their coverage of the civil war in South Sudan last winter.

Straight factuality isn’t the only aspect of being revealing either. I think the kind of revelation that Werner Herzog calls ecstatic truth profoundly articulates this principle of truthfulness. His documentaries give you a sense of a phenomenon, the unfolding drama of the world itself, in a way that straight facts and precise accuracy of each piece of information would actually detract from our understanding. 

Consider how his Fata Morgana depicted the horrifying desperation of rural African poverty without ever knowing the names or life stories of any of those people in his film. Or how his Lessons of Darkness gives you a better appreciation for the stark, otherworldly, hellish terror of the 1991 Kuwaiti oil well fires better than any of the journalism of the time, no matter the praise CNN received for their own work.

You need a more poetic way of speaking when you
have to describe the experience of an entire country's
earth literally being set aflame.

Comprehensive. At first glance, you may think that adequacy contradicts this. But the term helps make an important distinction. Adequacy refers to facts, but comprehensiveness is about perspectives themselves. Being comprehensive of an event or situation means including all its constituent narratives, the human stories. 

Here’s an example to illustrate, which I’ll be talking about later on the blog in a different context. I read a fascinating interview with a Syrian dissident named Yassin al-Haj Saleh. He was talking about his disappointment with the Western left because many leftists are blind to the suffering of ordinary Syrians in the region’s current civil war, and under the Assad regime. I’ve seen this myself, talking to fellow self-identified leftists who defend Bashar Assad out of a sense of realpolitik: standing up to Western imperialism and military expansionism requires solidarity with those who oppose them, like Assad.

The nature of their blindness is a lack of comprehensiveness. The only people who factor into such a political analysis are the heads of states and militaries. For all that the left claims to be able the liberation of the people, most of its popular political activism appears rooted in blindness to the affairs of regular folks. 

Now that I have my more conceptual argument laid out, the question remains what exactly all this has to do with communications and brand journalism, which was the original Twitter conversation that sparked this days-long riff of tangents. To be continued . . . 

Objectivity Is II: Twisted Through Daily Life, Composing, 18/02/2015

Continued from last post . . . So we are left with a world where the only claim to objectivity is at best a lie, and at worst an excuse to turn away from genuine injustice. There are two sides to every story, so I must take the perspective of the dictator who runs government torture chambers and death camps with the same fidelity to objectivity in presenting their voice as the military resistance leader.

I choose this example because it’s stark and without nuance. It illustrates the problems that arise when humans attempt to achieve total objectivity: moral judgment becomes impossible because someone can develop a justification for any action. I’ve met a lot of philosophers during my time in the university system who believed in moral facts, but those moral facts are all so general that they’re almost meaningless. 

Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing re-enacts
moments when Indonesian government operatives killed
left-wing guerrillas, supporters, sympathizers, and
people who generally disagreed with government.
Legalized murder is common throughout history,
killing in the name of national security.

Yes, it’s clear that murder is wrong. Its wrongness is part of the definition of murder, a morally unacceptable killing. Knowing that doesn’t settle anything about what acts of killing are murder. 

A husband kills his wife in a domestic dispute? Yes. A sloppy driver kills a teenage cyclist at night? Maybe, but she can still sue the victim’s family for her emotional distress. Capital punishment? I and a lot of countries say yes, but a lot more say no. Soldiers in war? Depends on whose side you’re on. Civilians in war? See previous response. Assassinating subversives? I never want to work for a state security service. Euthanasia? Under debate. Abortion? Legal, but many are willing to kill to stop it.

Murder is wrong. Yes, an objective fact that produces such clear answers. 

One of the most dogmatic professors I ever had believed that philosophy had established a certain and objective moral fact, that slavery was wrong. Slavery is a horrifying institution, but I don’t think the philosophical and political debates of the Wilberforce era discovered any objective moral facts whose ground lies beyond human thought. 

What we really discovered is that you can’t be a democrat and hold slaves at the same time. You at least have to give them a pretence of individual freedom, and they’ll still hold you up for your hypocrisies.

Given how impossible objectivity is, should we even try to be objective? As far as I see it, while pure objectivity itself is only possible for God, humans can still take it as a guidepost. We’ll never be able to achieve it, but the ideal functions as a horizon, always infinitely distant, but providing us our proper orientation. 

Even if journalistic institutions usually don’t have a partisan agenda, they each have their own orientations. We’re able to tell which orientations are better or worse, not in terms of whether they achieve objectivity, but whether they’re fair, adequate, revealing, and strive for comprehensiveness. 

These four qualities constitute the human virtues of objectivity. As for what precisely those might be, I’ll walk through that tomorrow. To be continued . . . 

Objectivity Is I: A Dream Born From a Lie, Composing, 17/02/2015

One thing I always loved about the practice of professional philosophy was the intellectual challenge. Wrapping my head around complex concepts is some of the best mental exercise you can do. I always knew I’d miss that when I decided to move on from the university world to the business world.

Except that I don’t have to miss it at all. I’m a student member of the International Association of Business Communicators, and every Thursday, there’s a Twitter chat open to all its members. I’ve been taking part every now and then because it’s an easy way to network all over the country and beyond, but it’s also a good place to just have interesting Twitter conversations.

Last week, a discussion of brand journalism turned into a fascinating discussion of the nature and possibility of objective knowledge. Some industry context. Brand journalism is essentially when the marketing wing of a corporation uses the tools and products of journalism to build its image throughout multiple media platforms. Essentially, the methods of journalism are used to build complex narratives about companies. 

The New York Times used to be the paragon of the
journalistic virtue of objectivity, but a naïve belief in
such a virtue today appears hypocritical.

I don’t really consider this controversial. It’s one additional way that companies build their public images. But the concept of brand journalism unsettles people, I think because of the popular myth that the profession of journalism developed over the 20th century as the guardians of public trust by their fidelity of total objectivity. 

Brand journalism therefore unsettles people because it uses the tools of journalism for purposes that are clearly not about communicating information objectively. It’s an openly partisan activity, journalism for the sake of building a company.

Here’s my own perspective on the entire issue. Journalism is a collection of techniques in gathering, reporting, and assembling information about ongoing social and political issues and events. It’s typically used to refer to a profession of people who use those techniques, and they have usually worked for organizations like newspapers and television networks whose goal is simply to inform people about the wider world. 

When mass market journalism began, its discourse was often very sensationalistic, because its economy was driven by people paying for copies. In a competitive marketplace, where sales were driven literally by people shouting front-page headlines in the street, the most sensationalistic content generated the most money. This is the model of the yellow press. 

When newspapers began to be sold by subscription and less by newsboys, they secured their income through reputation. And the most reputable subscription newspapers became known for depth of analysis and objectivity of perspective. 

Murdoch at least as the virtue of being up front about
his socially conservative, hateful biases, and how they
explicitly inform the publications he owns.

As this reputation became the dominant popular conception of journalism, it was widely believed within the field itself. One tweeter during the #IABCTOchat described a former editor he had during his days as a journalist who still believed in the myth of pure objectivity.

Because it was always a myth. Although the practice of journalism remains motivated by its goal of pure objectivity in individual stories, every story has an angle and every editor identifies what stories will be pursued and which will be left to whither in obscurity. I don’t know how anyone can believe in the essential objectivity of journalistic practice in the era of Rupert Murdoch. 

No matter the virtues of its individual practitioners, their powers are constrained by the corporate policies of their employers. No one believes that any media outlet has a genuinely unbiased approach to the news. Even the lack of bias is a bias, an act of turning away from problems of injustice, responding to situations of clear discrimination or exploitation with the empty platitude, “two sides to every story.” 

So what are we to do in this modern environment where objectivity has become an impossible dream? To be continued . . .