Knowledge, Trust, and Plato's "Republic"

 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 do trust people, and we commonly 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. 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. 

 Some people are  certain that what they know is true, but knowledge does not require certainty. They may 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 to be any more than that, it is only in the very narrow sense of practising 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. The problem arises because not everyone is Catholic.

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., in Plato’s mind, 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 evidentiary 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.