 This is an important discussion. History is here to help on a given Thursday at noon. And we have our contributor Peter Hoffenberg, my co-host, and Neil Milner. Welcome to the show, you guys. Thank you. We're going to talk about lying and disinformation in America. How did we get into this epistemic crisis? Epistemic, I guess, having to do with knowledge crisis. So maybe you could say, how did we get into this epistemic mess, where everything is always so confused. So the first thing you do, Peter, is can you introduce our special guest, Neil Milner? And can you also make some comments about the scope as you see it of this discussion? Okay, my pleasure. Neil, good to see you. I don't see you at the Starbucks cup of coffee. So this is very rare for us. Anyhow, probably most of our loyal followers know you, and know you quite well, and appreciate everything you have to say. So for those who don't know, Dr. Milner, he was a professor at UH Minoa in the political science department for almost as long as Rumsfeld was torturing American politics. He was a professor for over 40 years. He worked in various areas. Just, I know, Neil, a most well known for his work on local politics and how local politics are connected to other national issues. So he's one of our local pundits, our local public intellectuals, and he's a real jewel of our community. Those you might recognize his post-UH career as a columnist for Civil Beat, I'm sure some folks follow Civil Beat, and then a regular contributor to Hawaii's public radio is the conversation at 11 o'clock in the morning, which was our local news and activities show. He's also a political analyst for KITV. So obviously, we are taking an immense amount of LeBron, James, money to join us for this brief, brief time. And if you happen to troll Amazon and Jeff Bezos appreciates your trolling, you will find your eyes catching a book title called The Gift of Underpants. Now, I know that Neil and his beloved wife are not doing laundry and redistributing their underwear. It is a collection of delightful stories, just one more feather in Neil's cat. So Neil, welcome. It's really good to see you. We don't have much time. So let me just briefly lay out what I think we're going to be talking about. And then of course, correct me. Okay. First of all, the title is a challenge. Epistemic. And even with my pseudo degrees, I had to look at precisely what that means. And precisely what it means is how we know what we know. So today's conversation was prompted by I think what everybody has heard of. You may agree or disagree. But words like fake news, what do we do when social media trolls or expresses something that we know is not true, but other people think is true. And so in a very fundamental way, particularly in the US, I hope to make some comments from Europe and the rest of the world in a very fundamental way. But what do we do about accountability and truth if our liberal open society requires that? So Jay and Neil, is that a school what we want to talk about? Is that fair enough? Yeah, that would be good for the first two hours of it. Sounds good. All right, I'll get another cup of coffee. So let me turn it over to Jay and Neil. And I'll just, when Jay would like me, I'll make some comments about Europe, et cetera, larger issues. But Neil is really our expert for today. So Neil, you've been following political science and government for most of your life. And at some point, you saw that people in government positions of power don't believe in truth. And that has continued for the duration of the Trump administration. And it is heavily ingrained in the Republican Party right now. How do you feel about that? This is different than what you have learned, studied, lectured, and taught people all your professional life. Yeah, I put it a little bit different ways. There's a group of people who don't believe in truth, who simply are arrogant and self-serving and so politically motivated to one side that they'll self-consciously say anything. And that's a problem, but that's always been a problem. People have always lied. Politicians have always lied. They lied because for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is they can get away with it and they don't get any punishment. But I think the real question is not so much not believing in truth, is that there is a profound disagreement. You know, you call it epistemic, which is an interesting word to bring into the vocabulary. It's a word that academics have used for a long time, the nature of what we know. But it's not something that's seeped out into the broader culture because we could take all things for granted about that, not that we've got the question. But what you now have is two things that are different. One of which is among the average people, that is not politicians, it includes politicians, but others. There are different truths, different truth claims. And this is where the crisis comes in. There is no process that seems to be working so that you can examine those truth claims and come out with some kind of agreed answer about what the facts really are. And that's the most significant problem. That's the one that really has changed over the years. And so now, I mean, there's cynical people who say there is no such thing as truth. There are ways you can deal with that argument. But there is such a sense of confidence in only your position. And there is such a sense of despair or cynicism that there is any process that you can use to get over that so that if you or I disagree on something, that there's a process by which we can get at what is right. That's where the problem really is right now. Yeah. But something you said, Neil, and I want to put it to Peter, historically, at least in government, and maybe to some extent in business, people don't, they lie. They don't tell the truth. They twist the facts in order to achieve their goals. How long has that been going on? Can you give us a date, for example? Probably since Cain and Abel disagree about precisely who should inherit. And certainly Isaac and Jacob disagree. No, I don't mean to be snippy by any means of all. I think, as Neil has suggested, there's a long history of consciously lying. And even a long history of people accepting that. But as Neil suggests, the mechanisms have changed. So for example, what we all experienced, the Vietnam War, was clearly a lie. But there was a mechanism by which the Pentagon Papers could be released. The courts approved that. I mean, that's one example. I was thinking about what, to a certain degree, I don't know how Neil feels about this. We're really going to wait talking about the big lie, right? We're not talking about the little ones, but major ones that affect the very institutions and seniors of our society. So, you know, America's big lie about slavery, right? And there are still people who think that slavery was a good thing, or people, or people who should be enslaved. A big lie about the elections. And I was thinking to answer your question, Jay, that seems to me as a historian, these work when at least two things happen. I don't want to overly simplify it, but maybe we can start by picking at this. One is look at preconception, right? I mean, the big lie about slavery exists as a product of racism, right? I mean, the preconception, the big lie about the election relies on the preconception of so many people not trusting other people. Plus, though, I think historically, plus, the big component is a self-righteous sense of betrayal. Betrayal by quote unquote elites. Betrayal by institutions. So, to answer your question, we've dealt with this for a long time, but for me, the most explosive, I don't really like this term that everybody used in culture wars. I think it's a meaningless term that we use it. So, culture wars, right? Things that explode, big lies that explode throughout culture and society usually include a very strong sense of betrayal. My last sentence would be just because this is what I study and Neil studies politics in particular, what I study is the consequences of big lies about war. And those big lies always have a sense of betrayal, right? The French army was betrayed by dryness. The German army was betrayed by socialist regimes. There is circulating America still, and I think it's helped fuel the current crisis that the U.S. could have won in Vietnam if X allowed the U.S. to win. So, that's my long-awaited answer is Neil's right about the immediacy, and I see it even repeating today in the immediate context that we're dealing with preconceptions plus a strong sense of betrayal. We're getting closer to the real topic here today, Neil, and that is the effect on government. And Peter's use of the term betrayal really suggests a lack of confidence in the government that people could take the position that Trump really won the election means that they have no confidence in the system by which it appears he has won the election. And I think the people on the other side, they lose confidence too to think that you can actually go into the Capitol and storm the place and get away with it. So, I think we have a crisis of confidence, and confidence is the core of management of the country, isn't it? Of the social fabric. What's your suggestion about what are your thoughts about how this information and lies affect the democracy? Well, I prefer to use the word trust rather than confidence. And if you look at the data on trust and institutions and what people think about government over the past, oh, I don't know, 40, 50 years, it is just, it is dropped immensely. There is a sense of much less trust in government. But the other part that's important here is that the trust of your opponents, the trust of people, the trust you have of people who think differently from you has dropped immensely. And so you can, it's easier to understand the trust in government that dropped because all of us complain about it all the time. You have to understand how crucial it is for this whole question about trying to determine in a civil, productive manner an agreed upon set of facts, how important it is that we don't trust the other side. Trust that we have a much, this goes for both parties. It's certainly part of liberal thinking. You're much less likely to want to socialize, to have your children socialize, and to live near people who think about politics differently than you did before. Because you don't trust them, and because it's moved closer to seeing them as evil. As soon as you do that, then the process that, you know, it doesn't just make you susceptible to lies, which is partly what we're saying here. It also means that you don't have a way, or you don't care about a way, or you despair about a way of speaking to people who think differently from you in order to reach a kind of agreement. There's not a set of rules there. That may sound very abstract, but it's not. Think about sitting around and having coffee with your friends, most of whom agree with you totally politically. Think about another table nearby, people thinking very different. Nobody anymore has any good sense of how you can conduct a conversation that would bring people to have not necessarily, not necessarily compromising, but having some kind of process where you can say, you know what, you're right. What about, you know, the notion of politicization? I worry, well, I wonder whether politicization came first in the sense that you politicized the truth, that the politics, the positions, the divisiveness, if you will, that has emerged in this country has just politicized every bloody thing. And one of the casualties of that are facts. And so, is it that the politicization, the divisiveness came before the lies, or did the lies create the politicization? Well, remember, going back to what Peter and I said, the lies have been around for a long time. There's no question that Trump, in terms of quality and quantity, is a champion liar. There's no question about it. And there's no question that he did it for political gains. The real question is the extent to which that became part of the rest of society. It's hard to decide what came first. Since there certainly has been over the past 50 years, a much greater political and social polarization in society. Not just that Democrats and Republicans differ more, but they have, in many ways, different lifestyles. There's been a social polarization, and there's been a reduction in the process of the ability to talk to one another. So I don't know which, you know, I think that we had a lot of, there certainly has been a lot of lying in politics for a long time on both sides. It didn't have the consequences that it has now, because people shared a kind of, there was a shared reality. Not, you know, that doesn't mean you agree. There was just a sort of shared reality about how you reach some kind of agreement on sorts of things. And that's what's really, that's what's really gone down the tubes. And that's what Jonathan Roth's trying to get at in his book. One of the things in his book, and I guess I'll put this to Peter, is that our world has changed because of social media. Social media is a factor in all of this. And this book is called The Constitution of Knowledge, A Defense of Truth. And it's very healthy that somebody should stand up and defend truth for a change. Anyway, so what are your thoughts about that, Peter? Social media has changed things, but has it changed our perception of truth? Sounds like, I think Jonathan Roush would say, it has changed our perception of truth. So as the son of two economists, I'll give you on one hand and on the other hand. So looking at his book, I would say that he very conveniently leaped from the 19th century. Because if you look at the crisis of the 19th century, and his hero is John Stuart Mills, I'm kind of surprised that elite fraud did. Much of what we are dealing with, and I'm answering your question, much of what we are dealing with fundamentally is the same in the 19th century with the telegraphs, the railways, and the explosion of newspapers. There were the same questions of distributing lives or truth. Who would be able to confirm with authority. Now, having said that, as a historian, we do try to find some comparisons, right? Certainly. And this is everything that everybody who ever checks into the show agrees. That the immediacy of social media, right? Within 30 seconds, I can get something confirmed. And as Neil says about the compartmentalization of society, which we'll have to have another discussion because I agree with you. And I think it's gotten worse because of housing restrictions and education segregation, right? There are a lot of reasons. And the old adage, we don't bowl anymore. I mean, there was certain agreement. Okay. So I think Neil's absolutely right about that. So to answer your question, we are dealing with similar issues that the telegraph, et cetera, did. And in a way, what Jonathan is saying is that the printing press, right? Because the idea that the constitution needed existing required correspondence and printing. But having said that, we could easily do a checklist, right? This social media is immediate. I don't need to reflect anything. I just need immediate, immediate satisfaction. We all know, and I don't want to blame anybody to look, we all know with algorithms, right? That we're much more likely either on our own or with one of the companies to communicate with folks who think the same way. All right? Thirdly, it's quite obvious that hackers and brilliant, pimply kids and darkened rooms, wherever they are, are able to put people together that would not normally be put together. All right? So I would say it's worse, but on a flip side, and you know me, I'm usually dark and morbid and pessimistic. On the flip side, social media also gives us a chance to save democracy in ways addressing like what Neil said. The potential for social media is in fact for people to communicate or at separate tables and live elsewhere. So I think one of the major players and Jonathan sort of agrees with this, but not so. It's really what the big tech companies are going to do. Well, you know, one of the directions of that book, the Jonathan Rauch book, is to try to give suggestions for how we save truth, what we do to turn this around. Because right now, it doesn't look very good. Trump is out, he's out of Twitter, and also you have these people who are following in his footsteps, who are repeating what they think he might do or say, and they double down. That's my favorite part. You make a big lie and you double down. That was very popular in Germany in the 30s, doubling down on lies. And so it has a bad effect. And so my question is, Trump is not the only person doing this. There are more people now reading about and using the blood libel against Jews since the middle ages. Everybody can lie. He did it very well. So how do you feel, Neil, about Jonathan's suggestions of reversing this trend somehow? And in any event, what can we do about it? Are we going to be an increasingly threatened victim to this process? Here's what, here's the good thing about Jonathan Rouse's book. I'm probably more pessimistic that you can pull it off. But first of all, he gets you away from thinking about the big lie. A big lie is important for sure. But he talks about a process by which you can examine information as human beings that lets you determine something. The second thing he says is, he's not talking about determining truth. If you want to think about natural law truth, that there isn't a section of truth, he's thinking about a process that you use that allows people to determine some kind of agreement on what the facts really are. And he turns toward what he calls liberal science. It's science. He says science has a process of examining facts and examining research and examining evidence. It has a set of rules, a set of standards, like you can't pull rank. It's the data. It's not the person. And he emphasizes, it's about having institutions and rules that allow this process to exist. So one of the good things, complementary things he says about, he says about social media is that he says, if you want to look at where this process is redeveloping again in a political sense, look at Wikipedia and look at Facebook, where they actually have these kind of networks. So what he says ultimately is we can reactivate this process, this process of getting people to argue about what the facts are, but to use certain rules of evidence to get there. He's making an analogy from science to democracy, which he makes a pretty good, he makes a pretty good case for. I was going to say, I'd love to live in that world again, because it's a world that is really essential for our survival. I mean, if you think of a world that we're in right now, when a third of the people, that is, if you live in an average place, one third of your friends, well, of your neighbors, maybe one third of the people leave something totally different and pretty weird about an election, that really shows the extent to which you were there. So I don't have that my own answer. I think Ross is on to something. I think he's definitely on to something, and I definitely applaud the way you describe it. I have some concerns which I know he has as well. So this is not a criticism of his book, but getting back to Jay's original idea, I mean, how we know what we know, how we can trust, et cetera. I think there's some difficult worms we have to deal with. And again, it's worthy of another conversation near the end. Let me just put them out to you. One is the fetishization of religion. And what I mean by that is religious thinking. Okay. And the inability of what Neil described beautifully and Jonathan embraces scientific thinking and scientific process among people who basically view the world in a religious way. So as long as we continue, for example, to deify religion in the public sphere, it is going to be a problem to get a scientific view of the world, which does not rely on faith. Secondly, and I know Jonathan and Neil would agree with me, it's just a reminder that we are all predisposed regardless of our media. We're predisposed to read for agreement. I used to work in Washington and to echo what Neil said, there were a whole set of people who read the New York Times, and that's how they got what they wanted for policy, and a whole set of people who were at the Wall Street Journal. So somehow we have to break out of predisposition, which I think we all have. And third and finally, which is kind of my, I guess I'll beat the dead horse down the street and across the block. Neil's subscription of science is perfect. It takes two things we're not willing to do. It takes time, and it takes mistakes. We are in a society where expectations, I've always talked with my economic students that we should do away with quarterly reports. Quarterly reports are not conducive to long-term investments. And we have a hard time with mistakes. So Neil, I completely agree with you. I think if John were here, we should be great. And those are not my pessimisms. It's just a reminder of maybe the one thing that struck me most about his book, which is a really good book. It takes damn hard work. You can't just believe in an institution. It takes education too. It takes what we're on. I'm saying Daniel Cleverson. Yeah, the case of Torreston, Bailey Cleverson. We were taught in school that we had to read the newspaper carefully. In fact, I remember a course I had when I was a kid, how to read the New York Times. You fold it this way and you open it that way. Exactly right. But isn't this, isn't this really a failure of education, a failure of prioritizing science, a failure of prioritizing critical thinking? I'm not necessarily talking about higher education. I'm talking about all of education. Both of you are educators, political science and history. You must have thoughts about what you would say to a student right now over time to try to prioritize science. I would say no. It isn't. Here's why. Because the process that it involves to do that, we certainly can do it. And we certainly can try to teach critical thinking. But you're fighting a societal trend. It's like giving educators too much credit when things go right and too much blame when things go wrong. This is not, I mean, every study that's ever been done on the effects of education, on political knowledge and how that improves citizenship feels good, never shows anything that's significant. There is an educational process that's involved here. And it's a process that's throughout the society in an informal sort of way. It's people talking to one another and having institutions that incur certain kind of behavior. And I want to come back to that because that's what's very important in Jonathan Rousebook. And that's what people tend to forget about now when they talk about politics. They're distrustful of institutions. And it's interesting that if you want to find out the best arguments and favor of institutions, you read some of the modern conservatives. Yuval Levin is a good idea. They make the argument, institutions, families, churches, whatever else, teach certain kinds of behavior. They teach you that you are part of something larger. That's a much more important way to change the process of thinking. If I had a way of teaching people critical theory that I knew, or critical thinking that I knew would work, I'd even give up my 11 years of retirement and go back into the sweatshop in that great university of Hawaii. It wouldn't be such a sacrifice. So education, yes, but a kind of education that involves something very different. And one other point, back in the day, when there were a lot of things that happened with religion that make this situation worse. But back in the day, we were a pluralism of religions. For sure, it didn't subsume all of our thinking. And there was more open for discussion. If you look back at the Catholic Church's position on abortion even 60, 70 years ago, there was a possibility of dialogue. That's kind of, you know, so institutions are conservative things to think about, because they really are about restraint in lots of ways. But it's a kind of restraint and a kind of focus that we need. Right. Institutions like religion work, though. If the first premise is not, I know something and have a monopoly on something. And you don't. So when I was very careful, right, the deification of religion and the partisanship of religion. So Jay and I, we were good friends. I would just substitute the word partisanship for politics, because everything's always been politicized. But I think institutions now, in part, are distrusted because, look, a certain party has made, for example, a federal judiciary. It's partisan playground. How can you trust a federal judiciary, you know, for 20 years, a particular partisan position has filled them. The institutions have to have to represent the public interest, not a partisan interest. Now, let me let me ask this question, a political science question, Neil. You know, there's a lot of work to be done. Yeah. Okay. I know 11 years is nothing. Nothing. You've got nothing there. You've got something. We know we have a problem. And that's that, you know, that's visible every day, this problem. And to some observers, again, it's getting worse. It's getting more outrageous. The lies are more outrageous. And the lies are believed by more people. And we have a lot of work ahead of us to try to correct that and get it back to some kind of scientific balance, some kind of defensive truth. The question is, in a democracy, which is affected by agreement on truth, do we have the time, do we have the time left to straighten this out, before it's simply too late to protect what we have? Well, that's not a political science question. It's an astrologer's question, right? I mean, it requires predicting the future in some ways. And I pulled out my Johnny Carson connect. I don't think you have much choice, but to be able to work seriously on that on this problem right now. Otherwise, things are probably going to get worse rather than better. How do you do that? Some of it is big time stuff with political elites, let's say within the Republican Party, where there's, I was going to say where there is a fight for the soul of the Republican Party. Right now, I don't think there's a fight for the soul of the Republican Party. I think the Trumpists have it right now. But I think that there are other ways that you can do small but important stuff. You can focus on your own neighborhoods. And you can focus on projects at a lower level that require joint work that are less likely to, that are more likely to bring people with different ideologies together and to do work and essentially to build from the bottom up. There's a movement called localism that does this. This is not a quick answer. And I don't know how much time we really have. But people are going to have to start thinking about this in a different sort of way. And this is not, by the way, just above conservatives. Everybody as Roush points out and as all of the good political psychologists now accept, people are driven by confirmation bias. You have a belief and you look for evidence that supports it. And you know who's best at doing that. Educated liberals. Because not only are they, they're more intense about, about their beliefs, but they have, it's called being an academic in some ways, they have sophisticated self conceiving way of convincing themselves that they're right. And that's one of the things you get from Roush's book is how inherent that is and how hard it is to be able to work with that and to work around it. And one of the ways to do it is to get people in situations where it becomes less relevant to your life. Well, Peter, we're almost out of time. So it's time for you to give one of your famous summaries. Yeah. But Neil, not to worry because we always allow you rebuttal. Right. I think at this time, we're so close. I just want to thank you all very, very much. And I know we're not supposed to give PR, but if folks have a chance to at least read a chapter of Jonathan's book, you can even go to Brookings and get an excerpt. And also, I don't know whether you guys are aware of his first book, because this is really a sequel to Kindly Inquisitors. And that that is a shorter book, but I think very helpful as well. And the phrase is apropos what Neil said, Kindly Inquisitors. So it could be liberals, who are patronizing. And it began by he is being on a subway and a liberal knowing that Jonathan was gay, assuming that he had radical progressive views. But in fact, his views are very social. So he and his own life are very helpful about what Neil was saying. And I suppose it gets back, Neil, in a fundamental way, when you say about predisposition, we're really back to kind of identification. How do you identify the other person? And if it's by race, we got a big problem. I don't see how we're going to get away from that. Because to me, that's the biggest lie in this country and remains the biggest lie. That people because of their skin pigmentation share everything else with everybody else who has that skin pigmentation, and can be understood by that skin pigmentation. And I think an answer to your question, Jay, if we can't escape that trap, then we do we do have some big problems. So that's my depressing final note. But thank Neil for assisting us with Jonathan's book and his own editions. And I'd like to see us try to address the truth about race and race. And that would be a big step for I think to resolve our issue. So thank you, Neil. Always good to see you. Last words, Neil. Any rebuttal, Neil? I have no rebuttal. The only thing I would say is that if you want to look at how badly this whole liberal science, liberal democracy is playing out right now, how the process is working precisely against what it should be, look at the reaction to the critical race theory that's now important, where the whole focus is on not learning about it and seeing it as a threat rather than examining it. And people, I think on the other side, assuming the truth of it without even understanding it, really. The biggest lie is there's no such thing as critical race theory outside of law schools. And even law schools. Yeah, that's right. Well, especially a little bit, it's a little bit on the pandemic's agathic side when you read the law school stuff. Yeah. So anyway, don't forget, there are people who don't want to know what happened on January 6th. They don't want to investigate that and other things as well. Well, Neil Milner and Peter Hoffenberg, Neil, 11 years ago. It seems like yesterday. It seems like yesterday and he has not gone into astrology. Do I get that right? Peter Hoffenberg, history professor at UL. His story is being a political scientist as an astrologer, so that's fine. Yeah. And we've had this very tumultuous conversation. We really appreciate both of you coming down. Thank you so much. Everybody take care. Bye-bye.