The Affective Constitution of Knowledge: Or, What Bias Feels Like

We are told again and again that institutions like medicine, journalism, and the university have lost the trust of Americans, and must work to regain that trust. Of course the pundits and politicians that tells us this are more often than not the very ones who have undermined this trust. This is definitely the case with RFK, and, more importantly, it allows me to use one of my favorite memes from one of my favorite shows. However, a few weeks ago the New York Times ran a column by Lydia Polgreen, that offers a different account of at least one institution, journalism. 

Here is a long quote from the piece in question: 

"The conventional story goes something like this. Once, journalists stuck to the facts and reported the world as it was, hewing to the who-what-where-when, giving each side a chance to present its case and letting readers make up their own minds. Then, amid the great social upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s, journalists became partisans and the news became slanted to represent one side. The problem accelerated with the advent of new venues where journalism appeared: cable news in the 1980s, and most shatteringly, the social media that emerged in the 2000s.

But there’s a problem with this account: It leaves out what journalism actually looked like. The period from the 1970s to the turn of the century, when trust in news organizations fell sharply, was a golden age of news gathering, one in which newspapers had fat profit margins and invested heavily in high-quality journalism. Far from a time of failure, it was a period of astonishing advances in quality and ambition.

The early triumphs of that era — the Pentagon Papers, published by The Times, and The Washington Post’s Watergate investigations — are legendary. Yet more generally the period was marked by a deep cultural shift in journalism, away from rote reporting on the events of the day and toward more aggressive investigations and more analytical writing about an increasingly complex world. The stature of journalists rose: Out went screwball comedies like “His Girl Friday,” and in came serious thrillers like “All the President’s Men.”

At the end of the century, a journalism scholar published a fascinating comparative study of regional newspapers in the early 1960s and the late 1990s. “Papers of the 1960s seem naïvely trusting of government, shamelessly boosterish, unembarrassedly hokey and obliging,” Carl Sessions Stepp, the researcher, wrote. Newspapers of the ’90s were “better written, better looking, better organized, more responsible, less sensational, less sexist and racist and more informative and public-spirited.”

This sounds, you might think, salutary for the health of democracy. But it may have been precisely this move, away from deferential stenography and toward fearless investigation, that led to declining trust in the news media. Aggressive, probing and accountability-oriented journalism held up a mirror to American society — and many Americans didn’t like what they saw." 

Polgreen's column suggest that there is an affective rather than an epistemic basis to distrust of institutions.  To put it all too bluntly, when institutions tell us what we want to hear we trust them, when they tell us things that make us uncomfortable we do not. What we trust and distrust is predicated not on some awareness of the reliable or unreliable nature of the source, but of how we feel about it. I am reminded here of Frédéric Lordon's assertion that it is not the Appendix to Part One of the Ethics that is the basis of ideology, but Proposition Twelve of Part Three. The proposition states, “The mind as far as it can, strives to imagine those things that increase or aid the body’s power of acting.” There is a fundamental ambivalence to this Proposition, one that is reflected in its Demonstration. On the one hand this proposition asserts the very basis of our activity, an increase in our capacity to act, it is the core of rationality. At the same time, it relates this striving to the imagination, we strive to what we imagine will increase our power and activity. In other words, we like hearing things that make us feel good about ourselves, our possibilities, and our actions in this world, and do not like hearing things that make us feel threatened or insecure. 

I think that this can also be applied to another institution that has come under distrust, the university. We hear a lot about the supposed bias of faculty. Often this is based on things like party affiliation, but as I said before and will say again, activities outside of the classroom, like party affiliation or posts on social media, do not really say anything about activities in the classroom.  When we do hear of things in the classroom, like the story out of the University of Oklahoma, one of the things that is striking about them is that they are less about conservative versus liberal, than something much more fundamental. They are about the desire to have one's already existing opinions confirmed rather than challenged. As much as the essay in question made vague references to God's divine plan for gender roles, it was less a paper on religion, or the bible than the way that religion reinforce what one already thinks, to paraphrase Spinoza, imagining those things that aid or increase the body's power of imagination." The student in question, openly admitted in the essay that she quickly wrote the paper because she had a strong opinion on the matter. 

(I am not a scholar of religion, or of religious studies, but often when confronted with such things as "open carry" services  at places of worship and other aspects of contemporary religion, I often wonder how much of what is called religion boils down to simply the idea that what one thinks and believes is divinely ordained.)

Much of what is presented as a bias against so called conservative thought at universities is not really about the different canons and arguments of political philosophy and economics. It is not a demand to teach more Hobbes, Burke, Hayek, or Strauss in classrooms. It is not about texts at all but, how particular people feel, and whose feelings matter. Many of the bills against Critical Race Theory and other subjects have made this clear, stressing the affective dimension in language that specifically prohibits anything that would make someone uncomfortable because of their race.  Of course the irony of this is that the people pushing for these bills are often those who want the freedom to assert openly racist ideas, ideas that, as Stuart Hall reminds us, have long since been scientifically discredited. 

Given the study cited above, it would be interesting to see how the incorporation of the insights of feminism, anti-racism, anti-colonialism in academia, brought about by the student protests of the sixties, has changed the affective composition of the university as well. As contested knowledges become part of the curriculum they also contest some of the ways people feel about the world.  Requirements to consider diversity, to incorporate different perspectives and points of views, may feel like an affront to some. What I am speculating is that there might be a parallel between what happened in the university and in journalism, a parallel in that what is perceived as bias is perhaps better described as something that contradicts the way that things should feel. This is all very rough and speculative. Most importantly it does not distinguish between the university as it exists, in all of its myriad forms, and a particular image of the university in discussions in the media. 

What I can say is this: "bias" is a word that gets bandied around a lot, in classrooms and in discussions of classrooms, and to me the word always carries with it a strong epistemic burden. To say someone is biased is to claim that you know the truth of the matter in question, gender roles or the role of race in history, to use the two examples above, and know that the person speaking or writing on the manner deviates from that truth because of their preexisting opinions. To call someone biased is to claim to know a lot, but that is not how the word is often used, it is often just used whenever someone says something that one does not want to hear. Of course such claims are not limited to conservative critics, but, at this moment, those critics are the ones that have the force of the news media and the state on their side. A student who failed an essay by arguing that gender is a spectrum, or is itself an entirely social construct, would not have access to the same avenues of mobilization. 

No one likes to have what they already think and believe challenged. Which is why Spinoza cites Ecclesiastes on this point, "He who increases knowledge increases sorrow." Of course Spinoza cannot be satisfied with such an answer, and he needs to start from our limit of power in order to increase it. I would imagine that this is true of the journalists mentioned above, and some of the academics, one does not cover corruption in local politics or the history of racism in the US to simply make people feel bad, but to ultimately challenge and change those things, to go from a what we think will make us happy, to what will truly make us happy. However, one has to first know the world, know its real limitations and problems, before one can change it. Secondly, the capacity to change it demands not just knowledge, but the capacity to act on it. Without that education can be a real bummer, and no one likes that.