The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - Do We Now Distrust ... Everything?

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

Question authority. Think for yourself. We've all heard these slogans before. But what happens when they go too far? What happens when they slide into a distrust of everything – from science to media to government? In his new book, "Question Authority: A polemic about trust in five meditations", author Mark Kingwell offers his answer and a roadmap to getting trust back. He's also a professor of Philosophy at the U of T. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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And discover your 2-Point TVO. Question Authority. Think for yourself. We've all heard these slogans before, but what happens when they go too far? What happens when they slide into a distrust of everything, from science to media to government? In his new book, Question Authority, a polemic about trust in five meditations, author Mark Kingwell offers his answer and a roadmap to getting trust back. He's also a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto,

and we are delighted to welcome him back to our studio. It's great to see you again. It's great to see you, Steve. Yeah, long time. Thank you for having me. You used to hang out in these parts for quite a bit. I was on your culture panel for a long time. On Studio Two, the previous show.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you were in here every week. Well, it's good to have you back. Let's dive in. You point out more people are going to cast electoral ballots in 2024 and next year, 2025, than at any other moment in human history. And so far, if you look at what's happened in 2024, from 10 Western governments facing election this year,

they all either lost or they all certainly lost vote share. That's the first time in more than 120 years of record keeping that that has happened. Question, what does that tell us about the political moment we are in? Well the two things. I mean the first of all the stats about the super democracy year or period are remarkable. That would seem on the surface to indicate that it's a good time for democracy,

because a lot of people are going to the polls and exercising their franchise. But what we've seen so far is that there's a big pushback against incumbency. And to me, that suggests that there's a great deal of discontent with the current arrangement. And whether that means late capitalism in some kind of death throes, environmental and climate

crisis, or simply just a kind of shift of thinking about the nature of government and the relationship of citizens to government, that really is going to take a long time to shake out. But this push back against the incumbents is something that I think political theorists have to pay a long time to shake out. But this push back against the incumbents is something that I think political theorists have to pay a lot of attention to and politicians should be worried about. You know, I remember having our current UN Ambassador, Bob Ray and that chair many years ago.

And we tried to talk political theory about why, you know, this party loses and that party wins and so on. And he said, you know, sometimes it's possible that just at the end of the day, the folks want the ins outs and the outs ins. Does it get more complicated than that? I don't think it does at some level, you know, but the problem is that, say goodbye to the old boss, here's the new boss. And people think that they're getting changed

by exercising this kind of choice to get rid of, you know, kick the bums out. It's not necessarily gonna change in the ways that they want. So I think if you look at the, you know, kick the bums out. It's not necessarily going to change in the ways that they want. So I think if you look at the, you know, everyone's focused on the American election. What is that vote about? A lot of things.

But one is certainly a discontent with the way things are seen to be arranged. And that would mean not just Washington and inside the Beltway politics, but just the idea of government having a kind of say in people's lives. So a lot of it is just discontent, unfocused, until you get in front of that ballot box, and then you say, you know what?

I don't like this guy or this woman. I'm going to vote for something different, or what I imagine is different. Having said that, you write, the remarkable thing about human societies is that they function at all. What do you mean by that? Well, I think we should always remember this. First of all, go back to the original point.

Isn't it amazing that so many people even have the capacity to vote and that they are allowed to have a say in how their daily affairs are ordered? It's a relatively new phenomenon in world history. It really is. Yeah, and we forget about this. I mean, we tend to think of political history in terms of maybe decades. But we should think of it more in terms of centuries.

The liberal idea, the idea that we can disagree about certain fundamental things but still live together peaceably, that idea is only about 400 years old in terms of its influence on the Western world. It's an achievement. And it's a fragile achievement. So the franchise itself is a great thing to see. its influence on the Western world. It's an achievement, and it's a fragile achievement.

So the franchise itself is a great thing to see. We have to, of course, abide by the results. And the results sometimes can be unsettling. They can even be self-defeating. That's what I think a lot of people worry about. Democracy can become its own enemy. But one of the reasons I wrote this book was to try to highlight some of the things that

start out as good intentions, wanting to be informed and have your authorities transparent to you to justify power, not just exercise it, and how that desire for justification and transparency can sometimes turn around on itself. I suspect we could have a great debate about what the greatest invention of all time was Everything from the iPhone to the screw, which is a pretty important invention as well however, I

Mean if you read this book, you might think that the invention of trust is the greatest invention of all time You want you want to put that on the record? Sure. I mean trust is a technology first of all I think that's one good way to think about it. It is driven by human desire, our need, to have certain goods made possible that we can't achieve alone. And so we need to trust. Trust then becomes evolutionarily adaptive,

because it allows us to accomplish goals and survive challenges that we couldn't do otherwise. In that sense it's the basis of institutions, of functioning bureaucracies, of exchanges, contract. So anything that's really basic to human interaction has an element of trust in it. Would you go so far as to say that without trust in the institutions, which are the foundation of democracy, democracy must fail? Yes, I would absolutely say that. And I think that's one of the reasons we have this focus on critical trust deficits in institutions. And we can take them institution by institution. One of the reasons I started writing this book was to try to focus sector by sector, media, politics, academia, science, public health,

and try to see how the trust in those institutions or the structures that govern those aspects of life had eroded over time and why. And of course, that's an encyclopedia all by itself, just detailing, providing the evidence of that crisis of trust. So I wanted to move then to a kind of critical analysis. Why is this happening? Why are people losing trust in institutions? And what can we do about it? So that's really what this book is about. We're going to get to the what can we do about it in a second, but let me follow up on that last point.

We seem to be in a time, which is really different from say when we were kids, where you actually did have a pretty good amount of trust in some of the bigger institutions that kind of governs your world. But that's all been, I don't know, but all, so much of it has been replaced today by our trust in our tribe. We only care about what's happening in our tribe, and we don't want to know from anything else. How problematic is that for democracy?

Well, very much so. And it highlights a couple of interesting things. One is that trust often functions best when it's invisible. So to call it a technology would seem to suggest, oh, it's a tool in front of us on a table, a work bench, or something like that. That's not how it works.

It works by being a kind of implicit arrangement, an attitude, and I would even argue, eventually, a kind of psychology of being in the world, whereby we can engage in activities with an expectation that they're going to work out for everybody. So what happens is when that expectation is not there or if it's put into question, there's a knock-on effect, kind of rippling out of dysfunction.

And getting back to the point where trust is functional and invisible is very hard. Tribalism and a kind of shrinking of the trust basis is definitely a danger. Again, this is a positive achievement of the last few centuries that we could have radically decentralized societies where I don't need to know who you in particular are. I'm on the subway or I'm in a public space.

I don't want to even know who you are. You're a stranger to me. But we have certain relationships that are embedded in the institutions that surround us. And this kind of estrangement is actually a great possibility. But it means that the countervailing force is retreat to the community, the tribe, the family, and ultimately to oneself and one's own opinions,

which become for some people the only authority there is. We love the Mark Twain line, don't we? About statistics. There's lies, damn lies, and statistics. So let's put some stats on the record here. Sheldon, you want to bring this up here? This is according to the Edelman 2024 Trust Survey, they come up with this every year. 60% of Canadians worry government leaders are purposely trying to mislead them. 60%, that's up 7% from the year before. And what about us in the fourth estate? 55% think the same of journalists,

and that's up 5% from 2023. And we'll follow up with a quote from your book, Mark. We live in a time when many of the strongest habits we have are bad. Bad for us, bad for others, bad for the environment, bad for politics, bad for everything we care about. But humans are creatures of habit, and breaking harmful ones is hard work.

All right, let's get into it. What are these bad habits we're having trouble with? Well, the interesting thing to me is that it starts with a good habit, which is what's sometimes called epistemic autonomy. So the idea is that think for yourself, and that you shouldn't simply go along with something that somebody tells you just because they tell you. That's a virtue.

And it's a virtue in the Aristotelian sense that it needs a cultivation over time. So you get into the habit of thinking for yourself, and then you get better at it. The problem is that epistemic autonomy starts to erode another equally important thing, which is epistemic humility. That sometimes you don't know what's going on,

and you should defer to authority, because every time you think that you're right, you might be proven exactly wrong. And both are in incredibly short supply today. Well, both are. And that's really interesting. And they both have this deep root in, you know, both of them, you could say, are as old as Socrates.

Socrates says, you know, challenge authority. But he also says, I know that I'm ignorant. So, you know, we get the famous psychological cases, the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect, where people constantly overestimate their expertise at certain things. And the idea that if the plane is in trouble, I could probably land it if I had to.

Most of the time, when we think we can do things, we can't. And there are people who are better at many of the things that we think we're good at we can't. And there are people who are better at many of the things that we think we're good at. So this balance between autonomy and humility is really hard to achieve. And again, I think that the notion of habit or virtue as habit is really helpful here, because you

can get into a kind of balance, a mean, between these excesses. So yeah, you're questioning authority when it's appropriate to do so. But you're also deferring to authority when, for example, and take the recent pandemic, you really don't know the science better than the scientists do. And you might think you do, but you don't.

But we're addicted to conviction. Well, that's another problem. Yeah, and it's in the background of all of this. I call this addiction to conviction, doxaholism, from the Greek word for opinion, doxa. And I think it's an appropriate way to think of it as an addiction. Because first of all, addiction literature,

thinking about addiction is very close to our contemporary discourse. We have addiction issues of all kinds. I'm suggesting that everybody might be prone to addiction to conviction because there are payoffs in the short term. I get to feel right. I get to have my biases confirmed.

I get to make sharp lines between in-group and out-group. So there's reward to thinking that you're right. But there's all kinds of downsides that eventually come to light. There are politicians all over the world. And Donald Trump, of course, is just the most recent example of it, who have managed to convince people that the game is rigged, that you don't have a chance, the system is unfair. If you're mad as hell and you don't want to take it anymore, you are justified to feel that way because, let's face it, you don't have a chance. Now, they're not completely wrong about that, are they?

Well, no. And it's funny you use that language because it reminds me, I talk about it in the book, Peter Finch's Performance and Network, where he's actually going mad. But the moment at which he breaks out and shouts, I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore, it becomes a rallying cry. People are opening their windows

in Manhattan apartment buildings and screaming it into the street. I think we can all relate to that. The problem is, you know, and Trump again is a flashpoint, an exemplar, if not actually a cause. When you think the game is rigged, then the only sane position to take is to grift harder than the other guy,

to be a better con artist than the con artist. And that is toxic. That's a classic collective action problem, a race to the bottom. Every time you try to get advantage that way, you erode the game, and you make the game worse for everybody, including yourself. So we all lose for your winning.

But the competition is almost irresistible in some cases because it starts with this idea that I'm not going to be conned anymore. Well, you know what? Pump the brakes a little bit. Maybe it's not a con if somebody in the media say, are they deliberately trying to change your mind or make you think something?

Well, doubtful, but even if they are, use your mind and fight back. Think for yourself. But if it's vaccinations, for example, maybe you should defer to public health experts, because vaccinations are a public good. Well, there's going to be a new Health and Human Services Secretary in the United States. But the thinking is going to shift on that.

Well, it's going to be interesting what happens there. And on the one hand, yes, question authority, as you point out, it's a good thing in a democracy. On the other hand, are we at a point right now where the critics have just gotten so good and the monetizing of outrage has gotten to be just such a fundamental part of everything that we can't do anything anymore.

Does it feel that way sometimes? It certainly feels that way sometimes. I don't think it's a feeling that we should indulge too far, because that feeling of helplessness or of the game being totally corrupted is exactly the kind of outcome that the real grifters like. Because that's when you take advantage. When everybody thinks that there is no profit in playing

by the rules, that you're a dupe if you believe in anything, this is the collapse of human civilization, really. Because to go back to the earlier point, if we can't trust one another, we can't build things. We can't do things together. And that starts from, you know, even the smallest kind of cooperative task to the largest. On the other hand, Mark, look who's going to be president of the United States come January 20th. And I'm not saying this to be critical.

It's just it's an empirically provable fact that he has not played by the rules at basically any stage of his life and he's going to be the president again. What lesson are we to take from that? Well, come on. Those are dark days. Those are dark facts. I wrote most of this book before the—in fact, the book was released officially on the US election day, which was also Guy Fawkes' day, if you want to do the thing.

And I remember at the time when he was convicted of the felony charges, and I went back and I changed the manuscript to every descriptor instead of ex-president, I changed it to convicted felon. And I took great satisfaction for about 15 minutes in doing that. All of the things, the standards of behavior and accountability that we used to take for granted are up for account. They are, I think this is an opportunity though.

I want to be optimistic that we have to go back to basics and rethink all of these things and say, why did almost, you know, or more than half the United States population who voted vote for this person who is manifestly unqualified? Well, there's a crisis there. And if we're at a critical point, maybe the critics are right that this is a tectonic shift. Liberal democracy is over. We're into some kind of post-liberal, post-national, post-something

condition. I don't think so. I think this experiment of liberalism where we can live together and we can have functional institutions, I think this experiment continues. You like the Matrix, eh? You like the Matrix movies? You use the metaphor in the book, you know, take the red pill you go on one way, take the blue pill you're going another way. Do you see similarities between critics of authority on both the left and the right? You're nodding yes, but they're different, right?

They are different in some ways. They are different, but the similarity is striking because the red pill idea, which comes from the matrix, has become a widespread right wing meme, trope. And the idea is that you take the red pill because you want to see things correctly. has become a widespread right wing meme trope. And the idea is that you take the red pill because you want to see things correctly.

You want to see reality as it is. And so then you are based in the language of the right, which is directly opposed to the language of the left, which is you are woke. Although these days, anybody that uses woke is probably writing for the national poster or something it's it's a deep based word but but woke versus based becomes a handy way of looking at the both of these are programs of seeing through punching through appearance to reveal reality and insofar as their

their projects of revelation they have the same energy but what they're claiming to reveal is different in each case. Systematic this, systematic that. The basic impulse is, again, as old as Plato. You'd find it in Plato's cave. The shadows on the wall are not real. We have to find really real things, right?

And it's not just the things that are being projected onto the wall. That's just ideology. We have to get out of the cave altogether. That idea of revelation as a kind of seeing through or punching through is very basic to our thinking. I prefer to think that the impulse of both the based and the woke, the red pill and the other tropes, what they really should be engaging in is imminent critique.

Look at what's going on inside yourself and in your own thinking. This idea of punching through, it's very seductive. But it has this problem that it can go in almost any direction. And so that's the thing. I mean, I happen to believe that the red pill movement is more dangerous than allegedly woke things, partly because I think this wokeness is over-described. But in both cases, there is a logic

that is tempting and yet dangerous. America seems quite steep at the moment in red versus blue pill thinking. How about in Canada, are we? Yeah, I think so. To a lesser extent, the interesting thing about political discourse in Canada has always been its, its susceptibility to American ideas and trends.

And we see that especially in the long wake that, that Trump is putting not just on us, but the rest of the world. So a figure like Pierre Polyaev is, is figured and maybe wants to figure himself as a kind of quasi populist. Canadian populism- Pierre Polyev is figured and maybe wants to figure himself as a kind of quasi-populist. Canadian populism. He rejects that, though. You know that.

I know he does. But he can't help it almost, right? He's being pushed in that. I wanted to say Canadian populism of the history that I remember is left-wing. It's all NDP. CCF. Yeah, CCF, right?

Prairie populism. And I mean, that's the tradition that I grew up in politically. So I think that's still part of the Canadian zeitgeist, the political awareness. I hope it's that there's a lot of yammering, right? The social media, we haven't even talked about the politics and the dangers of social media. But there's a lot of puffy discourse.

And I think the realities are not as extreme. Here's a quote from the book. Trust becomes impossible when there is even suspicion that an institution is beholden to a political agenda. Do you think Canadian institutions are now beholden or captured by an ideology? To some degree, they are. I think there's valid criticism of the CBC as a national broadcaster, and it's apparent to some.

I quote Tara Henley, who is a critic, a media critic, former CBC employee, who has detailed her argument about left-wing capture in the CBC. We should just say, when people say that about the CBC, they really mean English language television. That's right. And that's a very good point, because the very idea of a national broadcaster in this country itself

is a remarkable achievement. Once again, something that we would not want to simply dismantle or get rid of. It's the thing that historically has stitched the country together and continues to in some ways. So even if there is amounts of capture, ideological capture, here and there, the institution itself is more important than that. And I think that's one kind of class of argument about the media.

I think that you could say the same thing about academia, which is often classed in as an institution that's been ideologically captured. And sure, there's a lack of viewpoint diversity in some academic circles. But academia has often seen itself as a critic of the established order. And so it's not surprising that you're going to get people who are more reform-minded or radical than you would in the rest of the population. How many philosophers in your department at University of Toronto?

Oh, we have big departments, like 80 people. How many? 80. How many do you think are conservative? Yeah, very few. Yeah, it's true. Yeah. So people are reasonable to... Sure....to wonder where all that's going. And I would also say I don't think

in a lot of philosophical investigation it matters what your politics are. I mean, I'm a political theorist, so political philosophy, of course it matters. But if you're doing analytic epistemology, I don't think your politics actually come into it. Okay, moving on to this. On the right, groups like QAnon, I don't think your politics actually come into it. Okay, moving on to this.

On the right, groups like QAnon, it's easy to see the connection to outright conspiracy theory and that nothing seems as it is. QAnon, I don't know, for my taste, QAnon's a little out there. I suspect you feel the same way about it. We don't see that degree, I don't think, of conspiracy thinking on the left as we do on the right. How come? Ah, how come? I'm not sure about that.

I agree that there is certainly a lot of systemic thinking on the left, right? The left is interested in things like unconscious bias, a systemic racism. Those can feel conspiratorial in the sense that they're institutional. But the conspiracy, the actual idea of a conspiracy, that there is some directing intelligence or some group and a secret cabal somewhere, that does seem to be more favored

than the right. And I think it goes back to, in American politics anyway, it goes back to kind of anti-government thinking, anti-intellectual thinking that is long supported by these outlier groups. So I suspect that the conspiratorial impulse takes on this kind of anti-government quality. But then it's the anti-everything quality. So the one thing I would say is that conspiracy thinking does, to some degree, appear to look like critical thinking that you see on the left.

So critical social theory or critical legal theory, critical race studies, that can look to people like a kind of conspiracy theory. And I don't think it is, because I don't think those systemic or institutional analyses are actually saying there's some secret cabal. Mind you, I remember Barry Zwicker, the media commentator, a pretty left-wing guy coming at things from the progressive point of view. He was in that chair saying 9-11 was an inside job. Yeah, that's

that's so weird to me. I mean, the other thing, to go back to the larger question of epistemic humility, what counts as proof to people? I think this is part of what I wanted to address in the book. What do you believe and how do you believe it? And we can talk about media, trustworthiness, and sources. But people's fundamental reflection about the state of their own knowledge is largely imperfect. People don't think about why they think things.

And I know that sounds kind of second order, third order, philosophical. But you need to do it. If you're going to go around the world as a political actor, you have to ask yourself why you believe things. Well, how do we, I often heard people describing what's been going on in the United States over the past year as a fever. And for those who thought Donald Trump was a disease

and a fever, they thought a Harris victory would break the fever and we'd go back to a kind of a more normal kind of politics. Didn't happen. So what's gonna break the fever and we'd go back to a kind of a more normal kind of politics Didn't happen. So what's going to break the fever in your view? Well, there is this sense that that polarization feeds its own Dysfunction that the The kind of the raising of the temperature Enhances the the incentive for other people kind of perverse incentive to enhance their own temperature. That's true. So that counts as a fever. To break a fever like that, I think it really is a matter of obviously institutional change would

have been a good thing. So administration of a more sane type would have been very good for the great republic to the south. That's not going to happen. Then you have to start falling back to institutional guardrails, regulatory controls. Is that going to happen? That's a big question right now. People are looking at the cabinet choices, for example, and wondering if there's going to be a complete gutting of these institutional guardrails.

And then on the level of individual citizens, you have to not give up. I think there's a clear danger of what some people call self-exile or interior exile. You know, I'll just become a kind of refuse-nic of the political order. But that's not a responsible form of citizenship. It might be a luxury that we indulge too much in Canada because we're right next door and we can say, oh, you know, we're not prone to that fever. We're, you know, healthier and saner up here.

Well, you mentioned health. I'll pick up on that and let's finish on this. So when the new head of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., talks about wanting to take the fluoride out of the water, making vaccinations voluntary, making suggestions that there's more autism nowadays because of vaccinations

that people have taken. The appropriate response to all of that is what? Look to the evidence. It's got to be evidence-based, whatever your decision is. And that's the one place or the one manner in which we can balance these goals of being autonomous, questioning authority, asking for transparency, wanting to see the proof, and also being humble.

Maybe I don't know everything about vaccinations just because I don't want to wear a mask or don't want to have someone tell me I have to wear a mask. That's not a good enough basis for having an anti-vax theory. You need proof. You've been at this three decades, eh? Writing these books and getting us to think about these big things? Good on you, man. This one's called Question Authority, a polemic about trust in five meditations.

Mark Kingwell has been our guest. Great to see you again. Thanks so much. Thank you, Steve. Thanks a lot.