The Courage to Distinguish Facts from Judgments
 

Roger Berkowitz

Courage, Hannah Arendt believed, is the first virtue of politics. Martin Gurri makes a similar argument, arguing that the post-truth malaise we find ourselves in requires the courage to distinguish facts from judgments. Gurri writes:

We are supposed to live in a post-truth world—I have said so myself, and more than once. What does that mean? Basically, that trust in our interpreters of truth—the elites, the mediating class, whatever one chooses to call them—has evaporated. We haven’t believed our presidents for at least a generation. We haven’t believed the news media and other organs of information since the advent of the web. At some point during the COVID-19 pandemic, we stopped believing our institutions of science.

Truth isn’t the sum of many facts: It works the other way around. We erect frameworks of understanding, which the facts must fit into or modify. A healthy society will debate the relationship between a given fact and its role in our understanding of the world. The catastrophic failure of the mediators means that we now debate the frameworks and their meanings among ourselves. In this rolling chaos, interpretations have turned tendentious and partial. Reality has splintered into a million pieces. That’s the post-truth condition.
Our cognitive need for a framework carries an interesting consequence. Information doesn’t occur spontaneously in nature, to be picked like a wildflower for our delectation. It is always generated by human beings, to fit some human purpose. This subjective element in information is usually treated with suspicion, for good reason: We tend to distort reality in our favor. But considered as a sort of universal framework—a boundary condition of truth—it can open a door out of our present predicament.

To ask, “Is this information right or wrong?” is to be plunged instantly into the struggle of frameworks and the twisting labyrinth of post-truth. To ask, “What is this information for?” begins a trail of explanations that could, with luck, lead to understanding….

The most prolific source of error today is the confusion of moral judgments with irrefutable truth. This confusion is wholly intentional: It’s the ultimate weapon in the war between frameworks of understanding. At every step, terms like “racist,” “fascist” and “colonizer” explode around us, inflicting their fair share of casualties. The terms are meant as statements of fact and are usually taken as such. If I said, “Donald Trump is an authoritarian,” the typical response would be, “Of course he is!” or “On the contrary, he’s a victim.”
This is a fallacy, mixing up facts with judgments about facts. The consequences of an earthquake or a pandemic are brute facts, independent of human say-so. The statement “Donald Trump is an authoritarian,” on the other hand, is a moral judgment: an appeal to a specific standard of value that can be true only to those who share that standard. It’s stacked with value assumptions about the nature of authoritarianism, the fit with Trump’s actions and the proper attitude toward both, which one must accept before endorsing the proposition….

How can we escape the mass delusions enabled by post-truth? A therapist would prescribe a return to reality—but the interpretation of reality is precisely what is in dispute. We have to learn to orient ourselves inside the labyrinth.

At the individual level, we should remember that the function of moral judgment isn’t to represent reality but to shape it. We should engage with the assumptions, not the conclusions. The most fruitful response to “Trump is an authoritarian” and other such affirmations of doctrine is “What do you mean by that, exactly?”

The objective must be a modest one: to understand our differences. The reaction, almost certainly, will be fear and fury. Failure to agree unconditionally with “settled” judgments will unleash the convulsive forces of a psychotic society, and the risks—especially for those with something important to lose, like a job—aren’t trivial. But the choice is fairly stark: Either we persist or we submit. If we are too cowardly to defend truth as we understand it, we will get whatever untruth a sickly system sends our way. The virtue desperately needed at the moment isn’t empathy or tolerance but courage.

You can listen to Roger Berkowitz’s interview with Martin Gurri on the Hannah Arendt Center’s Reading Hannah Arendt Podcast here