The idea of being judged for what you think, not on how you act is seen as insidious, dangerous and desperately dystopian. And, yes, it is obvious to say you should be judged on your actions rather than the fleeting thoughts that you may have.
I certainly won’t be signing petitions to send my mum to the gulag when she is very obviously thinking of dismembering the car that has pulled out in front of her, though her insistence on calling them ‘a fucking dildo!’ means that she has passed through the thin threshold of thought to action.
I have long pondered the ideas of knowledge. Such small questions as what we do know, how we know it and why we do we know, are just really interesting to me. I have always wanted to learn about learning and how we formulate new concepts. It is the reason I chose to study philosophy at university.
The area of philosophy that tackles these issues of knowledge is called epistemology. There is more to it than that and, just like music genres, the term could be said to convey just the general idea of what's going on.
When I finished my degree, with still more questions to answer, and with nothing better to do, I embarked on a Masters by research. I would spend the next year and a half looking closely at epistemology and write a thesis arguing a position on it.
And as I wasn’t able to get my final draft sorted due to a mixture of chronic mental illness, loneliness and laziness. I have explained what I was trying to get at so I stop bleating on to people at the pub who wish they were anywhere else.
This is where the thought police come in.
While the idea of thought police seems cynically absurd, there are two terms that very quickly show that this ethical concern of knowledge isn’t new.
Prejudice and ignorance.
Are there any moral obligations for you to know something? Are there any regarding your approach to learning?
I was introduced to an extremely compelling book by Miranda Fricker called ‘Epistemic Injustice Power and the Ethics of Knowing’.
I will summarise some of the points raised in the book but I would definitely read this for yourself as I will have most likely bastardised some of the points raised, in no small part due to losing my heavily annotated copy and my cheapskate natured reluctance to buy it again.
I do not think it's unfair reading of the book to say that it focuses on prejudice; what it is, how it occurs and why it's a problem.
Prejudice is one of these words that we know what it means but is often hard to explain without pointing an example out. One of them words that appear in your mind like a messy Ikea cupboard; it's all there but it's hard to put together. These kinds of words draw thinkers to them.
Fricker actually is fairly straightforward with her explanation. It's oddly satisfying yet annoyingly succinct.
Prejudice is, to her (according to me - a bad person to trust), is resisting counter evidence, for non-academic reasons.
This paints the term prejudice in the light of knowledge. It's not just an ethical problem but often an epistemic one. You are able to make the following statement that contains both issues:
You should know better.
This statement, popular among parents, tells you that you are to blame. You are in the wrong because you didn’t think better. Time to call the thought police!
I thought this was cool in the way that any philosophy can be cool. So not much, but still infinitely cooler than a first year nihilist.
I knew that I wanted my Masters to explore this and the threshold for being blameworthy. I wanted to become the thought police Chief Constable.
To be honest I wanted to also show this within the context of class as I’m a white man so had no other category to be annoyed at. I will say I do agree with the feminist/racial arguments presented and that I am only being sarcastic because I want people to like me.
My thesis became a bit of a mess. If the idea of prejudice is an unassembled Ikea cupboard, then my thesis was the whole bloody shop. You will see this happen again.
There were many threads I was chasing, but one of the main ideas was...
Accessibility.
To have resisted counter-evidence you must have encountered it. Fricker, being a better philosopher than me, had already addressed this. She has some intriguing examples that look at when the evidence was sufficient to use the term prejudice. It also shows that you could comfortably say that having more counter-evidence means that you are more prejudiced. Not that it's a competition.
This seems obvious, and to me, when philosophy can understand the obvious then it's good. You can then use it to unpick what is less so, and that is the most directly pragmatic that philosophy can be.
Despite these examples, I still thought that this could be looked at more closely. There seemed to be a big elephant in the room called...
The World Wide Web.
Despite having a near unimaginable amount of information now readily available to nearly everyone on Earth, we seem to have become more attached to our original biases than ever.
I felt that the stick for what counted as available counter-evidence had to change. You can’t just say that a person holds prejudice just because they could have googled the counter-evidence. Well you can, and maybe you should. Arguably if you are unsure about certain things, looking it up beforehand isn’t a bad habit to have. But that misses the point, what constitutes accessibility in the age of information?
This is where I went a bit too all over the place in my thesis but I don’t want to convince you of my findings or ideas, mainly because they were still being assembled and ironed out before I finished. I just think that the line of thought is a worthwhile endeavor.
I actually thought that a lot of the answers were in Fricker’s book. That last section is dedicated to an idea called Hermeneutical Injustice. This is philosopher for an idea that broadly says that you use certain tools to help you learn and organise thoughts, most prominently language.
If the necessary tools to explain certain experiences don’t exist then you may suffer from not adequately being able to interpret your own experiences. This can be made even worse as you are also unable to express it.
I don’t think this is a wild theory, and has actually been expressed many times before, just not in such a direct way.
This returns us to the Thought Police
1984 by Orwell could be argued to be all about this very issue. Winston’s job is rewriting yesterday’s headlines with today’s message. The resources people have available are controlled by Big Brother and not only do they start believing lies but they lose the function to properly observe the world around them. The tools to do so have been taken away.
Now this isn’t a perfect fit as an example but it definitely points in a similar direction. There is an essay by Orwell about language and the need for variety that also hints at this need to represent the world truly with new tools. I can’t for the life of me remember its name and I refuse, in order to be in line with this article, to google it.
Fricker’s examples here (that I actually think are the weakest part of the book) are much stronger and pointed, but also more depressing and so I am setting it as further reading.
One thing that is important to note is that power strongly influences these tools.
Big Brother, in 1984, has a monopoly on language used and effectively blinds its populace to the truth, despite them seeing the contrary.
The people can’t be prejudiced against the reality they are ignoring as they no longer can understand this reality. All of their abilities to understand are controlled and manipulated so the party’s message is true. Winston doesn’t even know if it's 1984.
The point I am getting at is to adequately have access to counter-evidence you need to have the tools available to access them. 1984 shows that evidence is destroyed but evidence that can’t be destroyed is made redundant through inaccessibility.
They also showed that the thought police are against us not with us.
You don’t have to believe this extreme example is possible to understand there is a degree of truth. Words are created all the time, sometimes naturally and sometimes with intent, to fill gaps in meaning. The issue Fricker raises is that there can be inequality in those who have the power to create, curate and endorse these tools, intentionally or otherwise.
I do not believe there is a big conspiracy to undercut the ability of sections of the population to be able to understand and coherently express their lived experiences.
I do believe that the dismissal of slang as ‘real’ language is more likely to make certain groups of people less likely to understand and coherently express their lived experiences.
You don’t have to subscribe to some menacing plot to argue that sometimes people can’t really explain, even to themselves, what's going on as they can’t find the right word or example.
But it isn’t just language but what is in the shared common understanding or the 'zeitgeist' that are used to express these experiences. The stories, news and ideas that are known by all are used to draw similarities and are important. These things are pulled on to do the heavy lifting of explanation and using common knowledge we can infer new ideas to one another confidently.
There is a really interesting fella called Kuhn who wrote lots about the nature of science and how fundamental changes within areas of thought happen. He uses the word meme to express a small idea that permeates and becomes shorthand for understanding.
Memes...
on the internet are just that, a shorthand to express something. A tool used to share social understanding.
I didn’t say this understanding was always important.
We can also use memes to show that there are different bubbles that people will belong to where they will need different tools. One meme might work in one whatsapp thread but not another. Part of becoming acquainted with a group is grasping these memes both in the old and modern sense of the word.
When there is a really important thing to explain then obviously the ability to explain it is more important. This is where the power structures of these groups are important.
The curation and creation of the zeitgeist is influenced by the authority and power given to the members and institutions within them. Again, Fricker already says this and how credibility affects the power given to expressed ideas. This can be virtuous, like trusting a doctor on medical advice over a games writer or troublesome, like trusting gaming advice from a doctor over a games writer.
I won’t get bogged down into the details but you can see that there needs to be a way for everyone within one of these bubbles, to be able to influence these bubbles. The solution is mainly down to - and yes Fricker did get there first, again - is representation. If you have ever felt a bit of a fish out of water in some situations, and this is prolonged and you aren’t able to understand the subtext of that world, through no thought of your own, then this is that problem.
But what has this got to do with the...
internet,
I hear the voices in my head ask.
The idea of these social zeitgeist bubbles will inform what you see on the internet, what you will see as credible and how you interpret what you see.
I am part of the paradox grand-strategy reddits, and see memes about incest. I interpret this with the shared understanding of this group about Crusader Kings and Hasburg style families. Other people will not understand this the same way despite having the same information available. You need them tools to share information, even if its a stupid joke.
The problem is that the internet is set up to only show us what we will easily understand and accept. And as this goes on, and as the internet becomes more and more important to our social lives, we are finding it harder to understand those who don’t share these bubbles.
This has always been an issue. Certain communities will have accepted language and well used phrases that are memes, shorthand to quickly express something to someone similar. But the increased targeted media means that we are missing more common threads that bind us.
If we cross over to others who have different points of reference, we are needing to create or ask for more tools to translate this social information into a language we can understand. This can be a strain and there is an element of thought exertion that makes this tiring.
Translation is a word that can be used literally as well as figuratively here. If there is something that is important for me to know and is on news websites, I would expect it to be in a language I read. It is unfair to ask someone to translate the language to make this understandable. There is a duty of those with the ability to do so, to make it as easy as possible.
Obviously there is give and take, but the expected amount of work to cross these boundaries should take into consideration the time, stress and ability each party has.
Overall, my idea was along the lines that the internet does present us with loads of counter-evidence for our prejudices but not necessarily with the tools to access them. This does just kick the can down the road, when can we say that you had enough tools, how much can you be expected to do?
It is easy to put the burden of prejudice and ignorance more on the individual because of the internet, but I think if anything, it has become a bigger systematic problem.
There is a really important ethical and epistemic duty of social media and big websites to be accessible to all and encourage diversity. To encourage these shared points of reference.
It also says that if we want to be heard by others then, rightly or wrongly, we need to try and understand where they are coming from and explain our thoughts in a way that is compelling to them. It isn’t our obligation but If we want to present counter-evidence effectively we need to stop the most common problem in modern communication.
To stop preaching to the converted.
Like I just did.
Tl;dr - 1984 is called 1984 because the protagonist doesn’t know if it actually is 1984
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