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An ethos of learning involves public commitments to deeper principles of epistemology and communication; such principles can inform specific approaches to addressing the many learning crises unfolding around us. The focus is then not about which ideas and beliefs are widely held, and whether they are “true facts or fake news.” The focus is on putting in place broader civic virtues and practices that support public sensemaking as a process capable of legitimately transforming and changing widely held ideas and beliefs. In so far as a society can be said to “advance” or to make “progress” in gen…
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectThe stance of epistemic humility is proposed as core to a new ethos for digital media in the 21st century. It is the core of a new ethos of learning. To be clear, the idea here is not that our society needs to be humble and learn a set of new specific ideas. It is not as if some curricula could be prescribed containing requisite beliefs, which if adopted by everyone would resolve the sensemaking crisis. That is not what is meant by a new ethos of learning. Rather, to draw from the work of Jürgen Habermas, arguably one of the most preeminent theorists of deliberative democracy in the 20th centu…
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectThis kind of humility implies a commitment to appropriate methods and rigor; it is a commitment to not just the right intent but also the awareness that the right capabilities and technologies matter.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectNeither hubris nor nihilism allow for learning. If you already know, you cannot learn.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectSometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between epistemic hubris and epistemic nihilism, because these reactions often result in similar behaviors. For example, an epistemic nihilist will also say things like “the science is settled”—only they don’t care if it really is. They have given up on notions of scientific truth; they are not naive believers in the accepted facts. But they understand the relation between knowledge and power, and use truth claims and “facts” strategically as aspects of political and economic strategy. This cynical manipulation of public sensemaking is one of the…
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience Projectscientists at the leading edges of many fields are speaking in terms of indeterminacies, probabilities, complexities, and incompleteness. The best scientists in fields that deal with hyperobjects, like epidemiology and ecology, rarely talk in terms of certainties, unless asked to do so by the press or political decision makers. The news media is largely structured so as to reduce complexity and indeterminacy into clear and agreed-upon certainties[14]. This mirrors the political and legal processes of liberal democracies, where complex issues must be reduced ultimately to a binding vote between…
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectWhile there are, of course, a limited number of situations in which the science can be settled, the majority of important issues involving complex public risks need to be understood as having indeterminacy as an inherent characteristic. This requires embracing uncertainty as unavoidable, while remaining oriented to understanding progressively more.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectOur situation may also promote epistemic hubris, the belief that some form of knowledge can in fact clearly and definitely explain and predict those things that are most important in the world. Indeterminacy is overblown, and even the thorniest problems have a clear answer that should be accepted by everyone. While the philosophy of science itself is committed to overcoming this form of hubris, scientific findings are often misused and misunderstood, especially in highly politicized contexts. In these contexts, epistemic hubris and nihilism form a dangerous symbiosis. Individuals and cultural …
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectThe response to these conditions has been a general sense of being overwhelmed, often resulting in epistemic nihilism. This form of nihilism is a diffuse and usually subconscious feeling that it is impossible to really know anything, because, for example, “the science is too complex” or “there is fake news everywhere.” Without a shared ability to make sense of the world as a means to inform our choices, we are left with only the game of power. Claims of “truth” are seen as unwarranted or intentional manipulations, as weaponized or not earnestly believed in.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectChanges in science, media, and the nature of our basic social structures (such as economics, politics, and warfare) have been building in complexity at an accelerating rate. Our ability to make sense of things can no longer keep pace.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectWithout a shared ability to make sense of the world as a means to inform our choices, we are left with only the game of power.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectOn the one hand, our situation has already elicited a retreat to certain forms of epistemic hubris, in which the indeterminacy of the science around certain complex issues is denied. The refrain that rings out in these cases is: “the science is settled.” Attempts to suggest otherwise in truly complex matters are met too often with unscientific dismissals; hence the ethic is one of hubris.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectPracticing Epistemic Humility: Towards a New Ethos of Learning
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectSocial and news media are not generally working in the interest of public sensemaking, and even when good work is produced, it remains subject to a broader environment riddled by the behavioral modification techniques of psychological warfare, as well as various forms of advertising. As a result, the capacity for responsiveness on the part of many populations was undercut. Polarization, misinformation, and mass modulation of behavior have transpired. What can be done?
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectEngagement is not the same as learning, and in many cases it is antithetical. Engagement is only one of the epistemically problematic design goals to which you are subject on a regular basis when using digital technologies.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience Projectthere is good reason to believe that the impacts of digital technologies will be more far-reaching than prior revolutions in communications technologies. One of the reasons for this is the emergence of digitally mediated psychological warfare, which has established a home within contemporary digital media. Propaganda has existed for as long as warfare itself. “Modern propaganda” has been around since at least the Thirty Years’ War, when the printing press enabled the first population-centric mass propaganda campaigns. Yet the possibilities and invasiveness of current techniques are distinct, e…
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience Projectthe media is responsible for framing the “official” expert discourse about the hyperobject of concern, translating the reality of the risk into the language of the general public. In this context, because the science is indeterminate while the political consequences are dire, the media tends to establish a single expert discourse. A simple consensus is summarized for the public, in the sense of being made salient, presentable, and credible. Predictably, there then emerges a “counter-expert discourse,” that thrives by pointing out the indeterminacy of the science, or other dimensions of the iss…
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectBeck gives the example of insurance markets that face the unpredictable and likely catastrophic dynamics of planetary climate change. How do you insure against whatever losses might be incurred during climate change-induced civilizational collapse? The nonsense of the question reveals the paradoxes of the risk society; we have no choice but to live with an indeterminate amount of risk, which remains invisible unless rendered for us by experts. Ordinary people are forced into positions that are uninsurable, vulnerable and carry unprecedented personal risk in the context of a widely distributed …
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience Projectstates and their civil societies are grounded in declared and demonstrated problem-solving capacities, as part of the modern project of improved technological methods of prediction and control. Democracies are further based on the idea that citizens need to be informed about the state of the world in ways that allow them to vote in favor of certain coordinated group actions. Because the risk society involves public sensemaking about uncontrollable and unpredictable hyperobjects, a crisis of legitimacy ensues in which experts and everyday citizens alike call the bluff. The modern state and corp…
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience Projecthe ethics that have governed the growth and flourishing of modern journalism and media are from another, prior society, and must be upgraded substantially to provide for the needs of the risk society.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectBeck’s basic thesis is that modern societies built up technologies and governance based on the prediction and control of natural and social processes, but that this approach to social life has now reached its limit. Dams and hospitals, scientific research and development, factories and schools: in many respects, the modern project succeeded at what it set out to do. Yet it was all the while creating unintended second- and third-order effects that would undermine the project in the long run, until ultimately, claims Beck, the modern period of social organization ended. These second- and third-o…
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectThis is an invisible risk that affects all life on Earth. It is only able to be officially determined as dangerous by experts, who themselves disagree on acceptable levels of danger. This disaster and its consequences, like Chernobyl before it, epitomize what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck outlines in his work on the risk society[8].
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectIn the presence of wars, election cycles, short memories, and immediate, tangible things voters want, how is it even possible to do public sensemaking around such abstract and long-term issues?
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectThe longest running project at creating a long-term storage site for our nuclear waste, deep within Yucca Mountain in Nevada, was defunded during the Obama administration. It appears that mitigating the impact of the invisible risks posed by radiation is a difficult thing to push through already contentious government and military budgets[6].
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectCreating such a long-term storage facility requires unprecedented feats of engineering. It also requires unprecedented feats of communication, as the risks of what is contained within the storage site must be communicated across deep time to any future humans (or other intelligent biological lifeforms) that might stumble upon the site.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectGovernments are engaging in sensemaking and coordinated action around scientific and ethical realities at the extremities of deep time and scientific indeterminacy. While it has been common for human societies to consider the future consequences of their collaborative work, the scale and ramifications of our commitments to the future are staggeringly novel.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectThere is no definite plan on the part of world governments and energy companies detailing exactly what to do with all the nuclear waste that is being produced—that is, no plan to manage the disposal of nuclear waste for the complete ten thousand to one million years during which the materials will be dangerous to biological life[4].
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience Projectwhile scientists understand a great deal about nuclear fallout, at this point they do not know exactly what will happen if a catastrophic event occurs, how long its effects will last, or in what places they will be seen and felt.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectLiving Within Invisible Risks The radiation produced by nuclear waste is invisible to the naked eye. Below certain thresholds, the negative health effects of exposure to radiation take years or decades to be seen, which means the risk is undetectable to the average person until it is too late.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectNever before has society been so dependent upon the dissemination of highly sophisticated scientific information to understand and mitigate complex risks to public welfare. This leads us to consider a well-grounded sociological theory that suggests while societies have always faced risks, our society is outpaced by the complexity of the risks it faces. Our ability to learn about and mitigate risks lags behind their increasing complexity. In this situation, both scientific authorities and voices in the media take on unprecedented roles, with a new responsibility for providing the public with re…
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectWhen the complexity of the demands placed on this kind of public sensemaking increases, related sensemaking capacities have to increase too, or else the social system is “flying blind.” This leads inevitably to a state of crisis.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectWhat becomes of political choice and democracy in an age of hyperobjects? Historically, the state, academia, and the media have been legitimated in public perception by virtue of being “the ones who know and who can, thereby, predict and control.” The dawning age of hyperobjects might suggest that this form of legitimacy is over.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectFor example, a microscope is required to see a plant cell, and the process of photosynthesis is difficult to understand—yet a house plant is not a hyperobject just because a scientist understands it much better than the average person ever will. To be clear, hyperobjects constitute a distinct class of realities only recently discovered by scientists, which extend across vast physical and temporal scales, and which require specific technologies to disclose, such as complex measurement systems, that often did not exist before the 21st century. Understanding hyperobjects as a historically emergen…
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectThe list of hyperobjects in the news includes nuclear radiation, planetary-scale climate change, and pandemics, but the true list is much longer. Systemic injustice, world hunger, planetary-scale computational architectures, and bioregional zones (such as the Amazon rainforest), are further examples. Hyperobjects are so large, complex, nonlinear, multicausal, long lasting, and beyond human proportions that they disrupt effective public sensemaking and place great demands on individual psychology. As with climate change or radioactive waste, we all know that “it” is out there, but we can’t see …
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectOne end result of the massive technological and scientific enterprises of the modern world has been the discovery of realities that are so vast and complex that they exhaust even the best of our scientific measures and methods. They have been called hyperobjects by the ecological philosopher and literary critic Timothy Morton. The term refers to those objects of advanced science that we live with as part of everyday life, and yet which are nearly incomprehensible. Hyperobjects are discovered and revealed by leading scientific methods, literally rendered “visible” through data, and yet what the…
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectThere has never been more scientific information about more consequential issues than at the current moment. And it is by virtue of modern society’s successes in organizing certain kinds of “knowledge production” that we are plunged as individuals and groups into a state where information overwhelms us. This state shrouds the most important issues in a “cloud of unknowing”—or worse, a cloud of false claims to definitive knowledge.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience ProjectConsider the psychological position of the average citizen of a Western country today. For this individual, some of the most essential risks and decisions of their life involve invisible processes that require scientific explanation, often challenging to everyday experience. The vast majority are aware of and “believe in” the existence and consequences of important realities of public concern, such as nuclear radiation, climate change, and pandemics.
The Consilience Project | Challenges to Making Sense of the 21st Century - The Consilience Project