It's the Same Old Story

 

Plato and Aristotle, ontology and epistemology, red and blue, in the School of Athens: you can see a hint that craftsman Raphael had a preference.

In epistemology—the philosophy of how we know things—it's been commonly understood that there are three basic kinds of knowledge, best known in the 1949 formulation of Gilbert Ryle: 

• propositional knowledge or knowledge-that a particular thing is true (I know Oxford is in Oxfordshire);
• procedural knowledge or knowledge-how to do something (I know how to finger-pick "Gospel Ship"); and
• acquaintanceship knowledge or knowledge-of something that you're familiar with (I know the 1-train stop at Columbus Circle)

In today's column, noted epistemologist David F. Brooks ("How to Destroy Truth") offers a remarkable new picture in which it is possible to know something without knowing whether it is true or not, and reducing the types of knowledge to two.

Great nations thrive by constantly refreshing two great reservoirs of knowledge. The first contains the knowledge from the stories we tell about ourselves.

This is the knowledge of who we are as a people, how we got here, what long conflicts bind us together, what we find admirable and dishonorable, what kind of world we hope to build together.

This kind of knowledge isn’t merely factual knowledge. It is a moral framework from which to see the world. Homer taught the ancient Greeks how to perceive their reality. Exodus teaches the Jews how to interpret their struggles and their journey....

The second reservoir of knowledge is propositional knowledge. This is the kind of knowledge we acquire through reason, logical proof and tight analysis. Some of this knowledge is empirical knowledge that can be established by carefully using evidence. No, the 2020 election was not stolen. Some of this knowledge is contained in powerful ideas that can be debated: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Only one of these two types is called "propositional knowledge", but both consist of propositions, like "Achilles was very angry with Agamemnon for stealing his slave girl" or "We got here from England, except for those who didn't". Or alternatively both are acquaintanceship knowledge, since you can know them without knowing very much about them; thus I doubt that Brooks used reason, logical proof, tight analysis, or empirical evidence to conclude that the 2020 election was not stolen; he just read it in The Times like the rest of us and assumed, correctly, that there was no reason to doubt it.

I guess the first type could be called "narrative knowledge", because it's endowed, as Terry Pratchett would say, with narrativium. While propositional knowledge may be either true or powerful and debatable, like the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto, narrative knowledge is generally only debatable or outright false (it's possible that Achilles, if he existed, captured a slave girl called Briseis, but we'll never know, while we can be sure George Washington never chopped down that cherry tree with his little hatchet). This clarifies the possibility that both types are actually acquaintanceship knowledge. Ryle would complain that we do not know the cause of Achilles's anger or the occasion of Washington's confession to his father, but he would admit that we more or less know of them, and in the same way Brooks knows of the security of the 2020 election—he's acquainted with it, though he probably doesn't know how to prove it (but procedural knowledge doesn't exist at all in Brooks's system, or rather is too vulgar to discuss, so let that pass).

The other big characteristic of narrative knowledge is its function in providing a "moral framework" for the great nation it comes from, assuming it always comes from a great nation (though Classical Greece was not a nation of any kind but an assortment of city-states and settlements), which raises another question: if the false story of Washington and the cherry tree is an object of acquaintance knowledge, something we know-of, the moral that arises from it could be a true or debatable proposition, a thing we might know-that, if it is true, the proposition that when you've done a bad thing you shouldn't try to hide it from your father, because we Americans find honesty of this kind to be honorable, unlike people from some other great nations, perhaps, where people lie to their fathers with abandon. 

The same may be said for the first sentence of the Communist Manifesto, which in fact is a very short story, from which we can learn where we of the proletariat came from and how we got here and eventually what kind of world we hope to build together, even though Brooks calls it an example of debatable propositional knowledge.

I'll get back to this point, if there is one, if I remember.

In the end, though, Brooks feels, epistemology isn't that important. Trump may not be capable of producing propositional knowledge, but he produces narrative knowledge that  enables him to succeed even among some students at elite schools, the ones who fail to become censorious and intolerant because their education hasn't given them the analytic skills they need. What???

But Donald Trump doesn’t get away with lies because his followers flunked Epistemology 101. He gets away with his lies because he tells stories of dispossession that feel true to many of them. Some students at elite schools aren’t censorious and intolerant because they lack analytic skills. They feel entrapped by moral order that feels unsafe and unjust.

No, of course that can't be what he's saying. He's saying that some students at elite schools are censorious and intolerant, just as Trump does get away with his lies, but not for the reasons you might expect. It's another bothsides case: Trump creates bad moral order with his narrative skills, and the students react badly to it. You'd be censorious and intolerant too, in a moral order like that, or David Brooks would. He'd probably be downright cranky.

Part of the blame goes to conservatives who try to whitewash history. Part goes to progressives who tell such a negative version of history that it destroys patriotism. But the core problem is our failure to understand what education is.

And what is education, master? Well, Grasshopper,

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” David Hume wrote. Once you realize that people are primarily desiring creatures, not rational creatures, you realize that one of the great projects of schooling and culture is to educate the passions. It is to help people learn to feel the proper kind of outrage at injustice, the proper form of reverence before sacrifice, the proper swelling of civic pride, the proper affection for our fellows. This knowledge is conveyed not through facts but through emotional experiences — stories.

Reason is the slave of the passions, and therefore education ought to boss people's passions around, and make them more proper—isn't that what slaves are for? Like Jeeves preventing Bertie from growing a mustache.

But the thing is, you know, if I can wrench that tongue out of my cheek for a moment, Brooks at this point is beyond idiocy but there is something we can do with all this confusion, and it's relevant to some of our current preoccupations, because in the first place Ryle's actually schema is relevant.

Namely, it's true that everything Brooks knows is acquaintanceship knowledge (and he tends to know it wrong, like Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, or better does not know it but acts familiar with it anyway). which is a gentleman's knowledge, nothing so down and dirty as propositional or procedural knowledge. The sort of knowledge one ought to pick up in an elite college, which will make you more clubbable in adult life, but nothing strained or clinical. Of course he doesn't think about the non-elite colleges, because they're just always outside his field of vision and he can't imagine anything very pleasant out there. 

Nevertheless you can study ancient Greek (propositional knowledge, or as I was brought up to call it "declarative knowledge") or learn guitar (procedural knowledge) at an elite college, or a state school, as fate determines, and you can probably get a gentleman's education as well either way. But, as the epistemologists will tell you, the distinction isn't quite cut-and-dried; you need some declarative knowledge to start learning how to do things, and you need procedure (think of lab work, for example) to acquire most kinds of declarative knowledge, and all the gentleman's knowledge may not really be knowledge, in the sense that its accuracy is not guaranteed, but it is an invaluable resource for acquiring some, as Dr. Google and I have learned through the years.

Which brings me to the thing I want to say about the criticalities, Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory. Critical Race Pedagogy, and so on: that if you think it's too depressing ("so negative it destroys patriotism") it's because you're misunderstanding it as a quest for declarative knowledge (as if "the United States was born with the first landfall of a slave ship from Africa in 1619" was intended as a simple fact rather than a rhetorical device) when it is a quest for procedural knowledge; not how bad is it, but how can we fix it? That's what makes it, as I was explaining, "critical". 

Of course it's also critical in the ordinary language sense too: you must explain that it's broken if you want to justify fixing it. But it's the most optimistic thing you can do, and the most practical and American! It's so American it was created in New York by immigrants (mostly Jewish, seeking safety from the Third Reich), looking for ways to improve the here and now instead of waiting for the Revolution, and by the descendants of the enslaved Africans refusing to give up on America, as Nikole Hannah-Jones says, and the promises made by Thomas Jefferson!

What's negative and unpatriotic is the pejorist attitude of William F. Buckley, Jr., holding that everything is getting continually worse and people just need to stop doing anything before the change becomes unbearable, or Donald Trump's refrain of, "It's a disaster, they're laughing at us, American carnage" and so forth.

As to the role of stories, of course stories, and I mean fiction as well as gossip and autobiography, are necessary to emotional and intellectual life. Brooks's primary error is his continual anti-democratic assumption that some central authority must make up everybody's story for them, though. Wrong! Listen to the stories that are bubbling up around you! I loved this wonderful thread from Jamelle Bouie counting white Southerners of the postbellum whose statues could decently adorn our public places

This guy is a troll but I must say there are plenty of southerners to honor in this time period. Richard H. Cain of South Carolina, Josiah T. Walls of Florida, and of course Robert Smalls, also of South Carolina. https://t.co/camsvjm0Lu

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) July 2, 2021

The stories you need are there, and if you don't see them you're looking in the wrong places.

Check Driftglass for the bothsidery strain.