Eco-Nalogies: On Information: Circumnavigating The Elephant
In ecology, an ecosystem is generally deemed healthy based on how many species can simultaneously thrive there. A proper redwood stand, for instance, might be more than half composed of Douglas fir, big-leaf maple, tanoak, with a varied underbrush of manzanita and ceanothus and other shrubs. A monoculture of solely redwood trees would be imbalanced, dysfunctional, prone to pathogens and other disturbances. Nature rarely builds, or sustains, a true monoculture. No matter how ‘great’ a species is, it will almost always exist more healthily within a balanced ecosystem.
Humans can be a bit trickier—or at least we think we are. In our search for truth and a consistent worldview, we tend to search out that which is objectively true. Naturally, then, we’ve come to view this age of misinformation as a nuisance, a threat, a departure from our healthier past. But what if we considered that a bevy of partisan news sources might be no less helpful to society than are a few scattered tanoaks within a redwood forest?
People tend to classify truth as either objective or subjective, as starkly black-white or else a swirling, obfuscating grey. But if we shift our focus from truth to truth-seeking—a replicable method by which we might extract truth from our environment—then the landscape becomes far more murky. Not objective or subjective, but a hybrid between the two; perhaps a subjective viewpoint on an objective reality.
Consider the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant. In this parable, a group of blind men surround an elephant and attempt to classify it through describing the body parts that are within their reach. One man touches the trunk and declares the elephant to resemble a thick snake; another caresses its leg and declares it akin to the trunk of a tree. And on and on this goes, until the men accuse one another of sabotage and falsehood, each wholly convinced that his own segment of the elephant’s body, and his alone, is indicative of the whole.
Often I’ll hear someone lament the loss of an ‘objective’ standard through which all of us could agree to the basic shape of the world in which we live. And no name is cited more often in these laments than the seemingly-untouchable Walter Cronkite. Now, being a young man, I must admit to having grown up in a post-Cronkite world, so I am surely no expert on what made him so reliable and trustworthy. But I would venture that people trusted Cronkite not because he could see and touch the whole conceptual elephant, but because he was clear about where he stood and didn’t obfuscate his findings. “I’m standing at the tusks and they seem inflamed,” he might report, or “I tripped over the elephant’s foot and he almost kicked me.” People believed him not because he could see the entire elephant, but because he was always honest about which parts he could see and which he couldn’t.
Now, it feels like media sources have bitten off more than they can chew. (Or classified more parts of the elephant than one person can reasonably attest to have personally inspected.) Simultaneously, they have striven to become more specialized, examining the elephant’s parts through ever finer microscopes, while so too do they aspire to generalism, defining the elephant beyond reasonable doubt. We may all be blind men feeling our way to truth, but they have vision and can tell us what we remain too limited to see.
The problem with this mindset is that it’s like a redwood stand with only redwoods. That its overt coherence and simplicity sets of instinctive alarm bells in our minds. Where’s the big-leaf maple? Where’s the ceanothus? The more easily-reducible a forest is, the less fit it is to survive external pressures.
In her recent resignation letter from the New York Times, journalist Bari Weiss lamented a changing media culture in which “truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.” Again, this hearkens back to the conception of truth-seeking as either a verb or a noun. Not that truth itself is ever-shifting, but that our conception of it becomes ever-clearer as we parse out new perspectives.
Nowadays, many people would be embarrassed to be caught digesting the wrong news source. It’s not just content producers who get called upon to “de-platform” some unworthy person, but the consumers of that media, too, as if we cannot be trusted to evaluate all possible information and judge for ourselves what is valid and what is ‘fake.’ Many are labeled ‘bad actors,’ intentionally striving to mislead their listeners regarding just how much of the elephant they have analyzed. And for some, it must be said, this indictment holds true. But not every conflicting viewpoint is the result of foul play. And as we struggle blindly through this chaotic world, it is asking too much of us to listen only to the elephant-feelers gathered along one particular flank.
It gives me much pride to see that Instagram can’t quite figure me out. In one scan of ‘suggested’ posts, I get communist memes, anti-communist memes, intersectional feminist accounts, hard-line libertarians, etc. Thankfully, I have sought out and ‘liked’ enough heterodox posts/accounts that I can’t be pigeonholed into one tiny area and fed my diet of lukewarm slop. But for too many of us, this is not the case. Sites like Instagram have isolated our tastes and extracted them out, then sell our attention to the highest bidder. I do not think we as a society have fully grasped the danger of this ever-deepening subdivision along ideological lines, of feeding potatoes to potato-eaters and rice to rice-eaters. Whatever happened to the Food Pyramid we were taught as children?
Sure, that Pyramid was riddled with scientific inaccuracies and unduly influenced by corporate interests… but at least we had someone recommending we eat a varied diet! But information diets, we have been told, are not like food: ‘Meat will kill you; come eat some more bread.’ Or ‘bread will kill you; come eat some more meat.’ Nowadays, you can’t eat a burger without being labeled an extremist by both sides!
Two of the many podcasters I listen to, libertarian Dave Rubin and progressive Ezra Klein, absolutely cannot stand one another. Neither can Rousseau-esque Christopher Ryan and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker. I might listen to a Cornel West interview one day, and a Thomas Sowell one the next. Even the journalist I favorably cited earlier, Bari Weiss, has publicly slandered the politician I respect the most. (Though I will hold off on labeling her a ‘bad actor’ for doing so.)
The reason I can digest these divergent, often conflicting news sources without suffering deep mental anguish is because I expect no individual one of them to nourish me completely. Sure, Pinker and Ryan cannot both be right at the same time regarding humankind’s progress or lack thereof, but I am after truth-seeking, not just objective fact. And in the tension between these two disparate minds, I can find some measure of stability and even objectivity. If one tells me the elephant weighs two tons, and the other claims it’s ten, then I can begin to hypothesize that it actually falls somewhere within that range. And if two more educated people tell me it’s either three or nine tons, then I can be reasonably confident that I’m on the right path.
Sometimes, you might uncover a plant that simply does not belong within your forest. But even then, we must have enough courage to expose ourselves to it initially, for fear of erroneously discarding a valuable piece. None of the various hit pieces on Gavin McInnes did as good a job of convincing me that I didn’t need him in my information diet than just sixty minutes of listening to him, untrammeled, in his own words. We must be as Odysseus at sea, tied to his mast so that he can listen to the Sirens’ song without leaping into the open ocean.
Perhaps at the root of this burgeoning impulse to censor our own thoughts and information diet is a worldview where we have enshrined only one half of information gathering, and left the other to wither away. Consider for a moment a child whose father is the picture of ethical behavior and mental health. For this child, it would be rather facile to learn merely by emulating your inherent role model, and indeed this is the simpler path. But what of the child whose father is a rampant drunkard, who abuses this child and others too? How are we to instruct this child to learn—by de-platforming their father in their own mind? We are steadily losing the ability to learn from someone in the negative sense, to study their actions not by way of emulation, but of avoidance. And the unfortunate truth is that the most vulnerable among us have the most to lose by discarding this invaluable tactic for effecting growth.
As a consequence of monetizing attention, we have naturally come to associate attention with endorsement; after all, even my one-time McInnes listen did presumably earn him a few extra cents from his advertisers. The sad fact of the matter is that in an attention economy, attention does become endorsement: We cannot learn from our abusive fathers without inadvertently paying their bills. I do not pretend to have some quick and easy solution to this dilemma (I will try to stick to what parts of the elephant I can actually touch), but I do worry about where this road is leading us. If we cannot learn from others’ mistakes, then we are surely doomed to repeat them.