The role of morality and democracy in the spread of knowledge

                Knowledge is Social and Requires a Moral System

How much do we know?  And how do we know it is true? The things that we know about turn out to be the things we are most familiar with: the state of our bodies, our families, our living arrangements,  our friends,  our pastimes, our communities, and so on.

It’s obvious that no one person knows everything. Since no one individual knows everything, every person depends on many others to get to know more than what they themselves are familiar with. In getting to know, we observe, practice, ask around, take classes, read books, consult Wikipedia, etc.  Every way we come to know outside our own observations and practice involves other people doing the learning or passing on the knowledge to others, who pass it on to others.  Knowledge, therefore, is like a continually developing awareness of reality that expands outward through human social networks.

Perhaps the most important thing about human knowledge is that it is sharable. Nowadays the scale of society is such that we can conceive of this sharing to involve eight billion people, although we break this “compact”  in times of war and when we are around potential enemies.  The fact that we share scientific, economic, and general interest kinds of  knowledge universally is an incredible feat. We take this for granted, but we shouldn’t.  Sharing knowledge is the basis for all human societies’ ability to capture resources and energy and thereby continue to grow. The practice of sharing knowledge is what makes the global scale of human society possible.

But why would people care about global society?  And anyway, can’t we just keep our knowledge to ourselves? Why indeed, do we share knowledge?  To answer these questions it helps to imagine what it would have been like to live for most of human existence before agriculture was invented, when living in a nomadic foraging group was the only option. 

Human evolution largely occurred during the ice ages, a period in which massive amounts of water were locked up in ice sheets, and tropical forests shrank back into “islands” surrounded by dryer savannahs. Nomadic foragers did not have all season access to tropical forests like apes did. In these dryer conditions survival outside the forests was not possible without extensive cooperation. Human hunters needed to share the kill with their neighbours as a kind of insurance, to cover the time when their own hunting was unsuccessful. Sharing knowledge about food sources, and about dangers, simply made survival for everyone more likely. The fact is, humans have never survived and prospered all on their own.

Humans cooperate on a vastly greater scale than do other types of animals.   But our particularly human type of cooperation is more vulnerable than simpler animal cooperation. Unlike animal cooperation, human cooperation requires active maintenance from everyone in society.

  The basic problem here is that if people continually take advantage of others' cooperation without themselves contributing, then others will see this and they will tend to withhold their cooperation, in a downward spiraling process that ultimately deprives everyone of the fruits of cooperation.  Thus, human cooperation is like a reservoir of water that is there for everyone to partake in, but, if it isn’t protected from overuse, it can be depleted to the point that it becomes available to no one.

Obviously, sharing knowledge is a form of cooperation, and what I argue here is that the human scale of cooperation requires a moral system, a collective enforcement system to make it possible.  In great ape social groups the incentive to share knowledge is low, because it usually means that the dominant animal will take advantage of the knowledge sharer and shut them out of the benefits of their knowledge.

The moral system requires impartiality, the quality of not favouring or disfavouring people arbitrarily within a society.  Otherwise the moral rules do not get general assent.  To commit to being a member of a moral system is, in effect, the same as committing to be a member of society. By implicitly agreeing to being a part of a moral system we agree to each becoming subject to the moral rules, like everyone else.  Once we commit to the moral rules we know to follow them in order to avoid harming others, and we are motivated to enforce the rules and recruit others to help in  enforcing the rules.

 It’s important to realize that the concept: “human cooperation” is an abstraction of a process which is quite often not directly visible without our making an inference. That likely means that it didn’t evolve by people asking others to “please cooperate with me!” It could have started when a group all realized together that they could attain a valuable goal by working together to achieve what individuals couldn’t attain  by trying on their own.  A primitive form of this is of male chimpanzees' cooperation in hunting monkeys as well as their cooperation to defend against predators such as boa constrictors and leopards. But human cooperation is on an entirely different level.  Unlike apes, human cooperation is sustained beyond responding to random opportunities or dangers and it functions on a vastly larger scale.

 To initiate a process is one thing, to keep it going is entirely another. Human cooperation is a common resource that is protected by everyone. It’s everyone’s job to protect human cooperation, which we all do by virtue of being a part of a moral system.  By living in a moral system and committing to it, it’s everyone’s job to condemn and refrain from immoral acts. Living in a moral system is the active way that we facilitate our cooperative nature. This was the default way of minimizing predation and exploitation that made human nature possible, in the time before we had civil governments and legal systems which now specialize in establishing and enforcing the law. 

No one person or association can be in charge of morality because that is not how morality works.  If there were one person or one association in charge of the moral system, that would tip the scales in favour of one group and destroy the impartial nature of morality.

In the absence of morality, it always boils down to coercion - the stronger rule the weaker and coerce them, as it goes in the rest of the animal kingdom.  When this happens, the kind of cooperation unique to humans becomes untenable.

I emphasize this absence of a “boss”, because it is always true of self-organizing systems, systems that maintain themselves spontaneously from the bottom up, without a hierarchy.  A murmuration of starlings is also self-organizing.   One could say that they fly in formation when enough of them are committed to flying together.  The system works  right up to the point where the majority of the  birds abandon flying together.This is kind of conventional behaviour on the part of starlings.  It doesn’t require a  previously existing intentional structure, it simply arises spontaneously.

A moral system is the default mode in order for human cooperation to be possible. But unlike animal forms of cooperation, to be in a moral system is a lifetime commitment.  Morality isn’t just a  convention because it isn’t optional.  To opt out of the moral system is to opt out of society, to become an outlaw.   

          Wikipedia an example of the process of sharing knowledge

How is the sharing of knowledge and its ability to scale made possible by a moral system? One of the best examples I can think of is Wikipedia.

According to founder Jimmy Wales  “Wikipedia is a nonprofit Encyclopedia written and edited by volunteers.”  and, “Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute.”  But also, “Wikipedia has no firm rules.”   The fact is, that in Wikipedia anyone can edit anything, and everyone’s edits will be subject to editing. Hearing those words one can easily conjure up a free for all, a morass of truth mixed with falsehoods with no way to distinguish them. But that’s actually not what you get. 

We can take the rule about no firm rules with a grain of salt. For instance, Wales also states: “ We’ve never permitted deliberate falsification, and when we spot people doing it, we block accounts, or if necessary, temporarily or permanently block their Internet Protocol (IP) address.”

   Wales notes that “Wikipedia has a “three revert rule”, meaning that if you can’t settle your disagreement, and you’ve already reverted the edit three times, Stop. Ask others to take a look and offer an opinion….Editors who go beyond three reverts may be blocked,” he says.   So the rules are not written on a stone tablet, but they exist in practice and by general consent; and people who consistently break the rules end up being blocked from editing.

Wales emphasizes that it is not the rules that make Wikipedia work, it is trust on a personal level.  The editors are volunteers.  They call themselves “Wikipedians”.  So there are rules for editing Wikipedia, but they are more like guidelines that get enforced when people repeatedly ignore, or take advantage of the relaxed attitude.  Ultimately, people who abuse the system get blocked from Wikipedia.

Wales appears to be correct that Wikipedia runs on trust, and the guidelines and rules are in the background and mostly invisible to Wikipedia users. The basic attitude that pervades Wikipedia is that of trusting that editors are not doing the editing for malicious reasons, and, when that is proven wrong they are blocked and effectively ejected from the Wikipedian community.

  Thus Jimmy Wales’ relaxed attitude about “firm rules” compared to the moral case  when someone is caught stealing a car, or murdering someone. Whereas ideally, crime cannot go unacknowledged or the perpetrators unpunished, and the ultimate punishment is permanent exclusion from society for people who won’t stop violating the law; the fact is, that any damage that a malicious person can do to a Wikipedia article can be deleted, the proper accounts restored, and the perpetrator can be permanently banned from editing on the site in a way that is far easier than enforcing moral rules in real life.

Still the basic enforcement structure is the same.  There are rules that if consistently broken will get the perpetrator shunned and banished from society.  There are ultimate red lines, like the one about deliberate falsification, and the three revert rule, which are what makes it possible for people to trust strangers and start by giving them the benefit of the doubt.

No one is in charge of Wikipedia! Jimmy Wales’ role was to conceive of an internet encyclopedia, to recruit the first volunteers, and to facilitate their agreement as to how to go about it, and then, save for publicizing and asking for donations,  to basically get out of the way and let it happen. 

To participate in Wikipedia, volunteers end up being committed to the rules, and do what they can to enforce them, and to recruit other participants when their efforts alone cannot stop the violations.  This is enough to facilitate trust amongst the Wikipedians and build an online encyclopedia with seven million articles and counting and 130 billion page views per year - the most comprehensive and popular encyclopedia in history.

                    Knowledge Requires Trust, but in Moderation

 How do we know that what others tell us is true?  There can be times when it’s in another person’s interest to either conceal the truth or to lie, or, a person could simply be wrong about what they say. The thing is, we trust people.   Sometimes, when it has to do with important matters, we will only trust people who we consider reliable, based on what we have observed of their  behaviour over time.  But for everyday matters we largely assume that people are telling the truth unless we see that they have strong reasons not to.

  Normal people don’t lie all the time.  Lying all the time is pathological.  Authoritarians like Hitler, Putin, and Trump seem to lie so easily that it creates a kind of fog of confusion and amorality surrounding them. But ordinarily we don’t assume that the representatives of institutions and government are lying to us unless we come to expect this sort of deception as a matter of course.

 For much of the last thirty years Russian  propaganda and closely related right -wing propaganda from the United States has been quite effective in undermining many people’s respect for and trust in official authority. American citizens have lost trust in their society as a whole, and have become more vulnerable and more receptive to conspiracy theories and unscrupulous politicians, and, unfortunately these attitudes have also infected more stable democracies like Canada.

 When people are drawn to lies instead of the truth, they are easy prey for a tyrant. In his dystopian book, 1984,  George Orwell pictured a number of self-contradictory slogans, one of which was “Ignorance is Strength”  On the face of it this statement seems false, but it also suggests that a modern tyrant like Vladimir Putin gets his strength from widespread ignorance.  For most ordinary Russians, knowing the truth doesn’t help you, it gets you in trouble, and in extreme cases knowing “too much” can get you killed.

                       Knowledge does not require Certainty 

Some people are  certain that what they know is true. They believe it with certainty, but that kind of certainty is no guarantee of truth.  That kind of certainty is only a feeling.  If it is any more than that, it is only in the very narrow sense of mathematical and logical operations, not in any part of real life. 

The problem of trust and truth isn’t due to lack of certainty, contrary to what the French philosopher, Descartes believed.   Descartes argued that  if we trusted in God and used the right methods of inquiry we could then come to know the truth.  But the problem here is, if God is the ultimate source of truth, then only God’s word is the real truth.  But we don’t hear God on any public address system. 

 All versions of God’s words are, without  exception, based on interpretations, and these interpretations are different depending on what religious sect is doing the interpreting, which is why we encounter disputes about theology so often in the history of religions; and, if you are, like Descartes, a Catholic, then you will be more receptive to the truth that comes from traditional Catholic sources, such as from Popes,  Bishops, priests,  theologians, and Catholic philosophers.

Protestantism greatly complicates this Cartesian  picture, because it suggests that there isn’t a single official body of authority, but, instead, many competing ones, i.e., “The priesthood of all believers.”; and sadly, no guarantees of truth or authority from any of them. Accepting this reality, the iconoclast theologian Martin Luther believed that you must fall back on pure faith in God, given our human imperfections.

.  And since we fall back on faith, it ultimately falls on each one of us to make that decision ourselves, alone; which means we all fall  back to square one: What should we base our trust on, in order to make this decision to trust, in the first place?

Just letting God do all the work excludes humans entirely.  Opposition to that picture is what drives Existentialism, the modern philosophy which concludes that every individual is utterly alone when it comes to trust and decision making.  After all, the point of faith is that you are taking a risk, that it’s not a sure thing at all.  Kierkegaard called it “the leap of faith”.

Existentialism has done a service to both philosophy and religion by challenging the Calvinist assumption that everything is determined beforehand,and the outrageous implication that,as individuals we have no real autonomy.  Existentialism takes seriously, maybe too seriously, the human condition of responsibility.  However, in championing the individual above all else, existentialists like Sartre seemed to wish away the inescapability of social life and  even of being part of a moral system.

 Recall the image of the ever expanding circle of knowledge.  Contra Existentialism, trust is never something we do in isolation.   We always exist in a social milieu in which we share knowledge, and we exist in a particular society, where knowledge is distributed amongst particular institutions.

An important aspect of trust is delayed reciprocity. We do things for other people without expecting immediate gain from doing so. We trust that eventually our good deeds will get back to us. But we don't really know if and when that will be. This is, in the main, how society works. Mutual trust is a kind of “social glue” that creates a sense of community and makes it easier for people to work together.

The opposite of trust is hostility, hatred, fear, and paranoia. In these cases we do not trust others because we believe that they are either incompetent or they mean us harm. We do not trust strange situations, and we say that we do not feel at home there. Extreme lack of trust can lead to social isolation, overt conflict and sometimes bloodshed. The phenomena of mass murders in the U.S. appear to be connected to this overall lack of trust in governments and institutions.

Ironically this kind of situation can lead us to trust certain people and certain religious doctrines too much. People are attracted to religious cults because of fear and a desire for certainty. In a small group such as a cult a leader can demand and obtain blind obedience from his followers. The followers of Jim Jones committed mass suicide after he told them to drink cool-aid laced with cyanide.

The price we pay for absolute certainty is always too high. Too exclusive a trust focused on one person or group is wrong, because it prevents us from correcting course when we make mistakes. The more you concentrate trust in one leader,  one guru, in one set of ideas, and in one book of Scriptures, the less trust you have in anyone outside that circle.

 It is inevitable that everyone will make mistakes, and that many of our ideas will turn out to be wrong. If we put too much of our trust in particular people, groups, or ideas, we will not be open to making corrections when reality contradicts what we thought was true. In extreme cases, people will refuse to hear information that contradicts what they believe and will do anything they can to suppress the information and attack the messenger - in the end, a self-defeating gesture.                                   

                                           Enter: The Republic                             

Taking a leaf from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s great book: “Republic”, I believe we should look at the problem of knowledge, trust, and authority through our  understanding of what makes a  political system work to form a good government.  It is our governments that ultimately make it possible for us to have freedom to discern the facts from lies.  For in the absence of democracy you either have Anarchy: where nothing is solid, and everything is up in the air, or Dictatorship: where we trade our freedom for the illusion of one leader, one people, one law, and one person’s interpretation.

Plato, by the way, despised democracy, because a generation before he was born the economic success of Athenian democracy had led to a ruinous civil war, and then to the execution of Plato’s mentor, Socrates, as one of the city’s scapegoats for their many failures.

  In democracy every citizen gets to vote. That doesn’t mean that any individual can necessarily have his or her way all the time. Democratic politics requires intermediaries.   In order to compete for votes politicians  tell stories about the way the world is and what needs to be done.  Getting elected as a “representative”  falls short of ideal in many cases, and there will rarely be unanimous consent on anything.

Telling the truth is not always what it seems.  Politicians can be emotionally persuasive, they can play with the truth, or sometimes they can be deliberately deceptive.  Truth is not given to us already cut and dried. Truth is an ideal and we perceive it in our mind’s eye. But truth is a necessary ideal, it’s a lynchpin for society, because knowledge becomes a dead end without our commitment to the truth.

There is no guarantee that we will reach the truth.  Still, we need the ideal in front of us, else losing this ideal, people fall for political con artists and charlatans.   We need universally shared standards of evidence and description in order to inhabit a shared reality.

 Functioning democracies depend on a free press that investigates important matters, on a fair and impartial legal system that holds wrongdoers to account, and, on a government that respects the dignity and rights of everyone. Ultimately, none of these things can exist on their own without our exercising moral judgement. The impartial rule of law does not hold itself up by its own bootstraps! Democratic politics requires citizen participation. It’s up to all of us to recognize when moral rules and the rule of law are being violated, and to demand things be made right when they need improvement. Institutions and the people running them need to be held to account, or society goes off the rails.

Public exercise of moral judgement needs to be genuine and not manufactured and amplified by special interests and unscrupulous politicians.  Ideally the moral system is impartial; unfortunately, it is sometimes terribly abused and deformed, as in the historical cases of lynching and witch hunts.

Plato rejected democracy and supported the idea of a tightly controlled state run by a philosopher King.  It’s motivated by his epistemology, his stance on the nature of knowledge.  In The Republic, Plato argued that human “knowledge” isn’t really true knowledge - it cannot achieve anything more than debatable opinion. In his Parable of the Cave he intimated that true knowledge comes from the divine, from a source that totally transcends human “knowledge”. This, in turn, suggests why Plato thought a philosopher king could help.  He believed that only a philosopher, i.e., someone who receives a comprehensive education in mathematics and philosophy would have the requisite knowledge.

 In spite of the fact that I come to the opposite conclusions as Plato about the nature of human knowledge,  a fundamental point for me is that Plato was right to connect the status of knowledge to the existence of good government.  Good government upholds evidential standards and the rule of law, but good government also requires citizen participation, a general commitment to honesty, and everyone’s upholding the ideal of truth.