Democracy and Truth by Sophia Rosenfeld

Author:Sophia Rosenfeld [Rosenfeld, Sophia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812250848
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2018-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Democracy in an Age of Lies

It’s one of the oldest dreams around. One day, a single language, a single grammar, a single learning method, or even a single repository like a world library will lead to universal knowledge. Universal knowledge will, in turn, produce harmony among all peoples and maybe even lasting world peace. You can find versions of this myth throughout history, from Ptolemy’s efforts in manuscript collecting in Alexandria in the third century BCE to the introduction of Esperanto as a lingua franca at the end of the nineteenth century CE.1

Such an idea might well have become obsolete by our own era. Knowledge, after all, has steadily proliferated and diversified over all those years. Arguably, there is just too much “truth” out there by now. Instead, the opposite happened at the end of the twentieth and the start of the twenty-first centuries: this ancient dream came to seem newly within reach, a potential byproduct of the great technological and cultural changes of our times. It also quickly took on a demophilic cast, as fits the attachment to democratic governance characteristic of the era after World War II and, especially, the post-1989 era. As recently as a few years ago, evangelists of the Internet were still holding out the promise that, by dint of its vast reach as well as low cost to consumers, we, the citizens of the twenty-first century, were fast approaching the point at which the entirety of knowledge would be democratized, equally available to everyone everywhere. Then liberal democracy itself, as the dominant and preferred system for organizing the human world, would naturally follow, capitalism in tow.

At home, we’d be liberated from an old formula in which economic inequality naturally reinforced information asymmetry, and vice versa, even as we continued to think of ideas existing in a marketplace, freely competing for our approval. Outdated hierarchies of epistemic authority, whether political, economic, or cultural, would likely evaporate too. For once we were all able to get our news directly from the source or sources, we would no longer need to treat television network news anchors, or any other cultural figureheads, as modern oracles. And maybe most significantly, in still nondemocratic polities, like postrevolutionary Cuba, the Internet would break down the state’s media monopoly and produce a true public sphere in which citizens would finally be able to locate one another, claim their rights, and engage in new forms of social and political action designed to secure them. All over the globe, in other words, the Internet would favor the oppressed over the oppressor. Its power as a source of emancipation would prove unbeatable.2

No one is so sanguine these days. Just as earlier communicative breakthroughs—the printing press, radio, television—spawned new forms of techno-utopianism, they also all generated second thoughts, and sometimes real panic, about the dangers that had been unleashed along with the promise. One need not be a Luddite or total stick-in-the-mud to see that the fearmongers were often right. The advent of mechanical printing

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