Description:
Arming Americans to defend the truth from today's war on facts
Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America's ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.
In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the "Constitution of Knowledge"--our social system for turning disagreement into truth.
Brief description:
Jonathan Rauch is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, a senior writer and columnist for National Journal, and a writer in residence at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of several books on public policy, culture, and economics, including Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working. His work has appeared in The New Republic, The Economist, Harper's, Fortune, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Slate, among other publications. He is vice president of the Independent Gay Forum and lives near Washington, D.C.
Review Quotes:
"Thanks to a global epidemic of nihilistic trolling, manipulative disinformation, and addictive outrage, modern democracies are facing an existential challenge: it's not merely that their citizens don't agree on politics, they don't agree on the nature of truth itself. In The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch offers an original definition of this epistemological crisis, as well as a range of innovative solutions. It's no exaggeration to say that this is a book that anyone who cares about truth and democracy needs to read."
--Anne Applebaum, author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism