BY JOHN K. WILSON

I interviewed Jonathan Rauch, the author of The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth (Brookings Institution Press, June 2021) via email about his new book. Here are some upcoming online events with Jonathan Rauch about The Constitution of Knowledge:

• FIRE Faculty Network, June 8, 4pm ET
• Competitive Enterprise Institute, June 9, Noon ET
• Unison Events, with Steven Pinker, $25, June 10, 7pm ET
• American Purpose, June 11, Noon ET
• National Constitution Center, with Martha Minow and Jeff Rosen, June 15, Noon ET
• Politics and Prose, with Nadine Strossen, June 24, 6pm ET
• Commonwealth Club, June 29, 1pm ET

John K. Wilson: You cite an Arvai/Wilson study about property damage from humans and deer as evidence that most people are “emotional.”(25) I think the irrationality here is not the people, but the researchers. If a person breaks into your home while you’re sleeping but steals nothing, is it rational to say, “I don’t care because I suffered no economic harm”? People view human and deer damage differently because humans are morally responsible for their crimes, and because humans escalate their crimes. Nobody is afraid that next time, the deer might bring a gun. Is it possible that you overestimate how emotional and irrational people are because it fits your presumptions?

Jonathan Rauch: Sure, it can be rational to give different emotional valences to different kinds of things. Wilson and Arvai acknowledge this in their study: “the over-weighting of affect in this case does not necessarily result in a low quality decision.” There may be good reasons people are more afraid of snakes than cars, even though cars are much more dangerous. It seems downright bizarre to be more scared of bathtubs than Al Qaeda-style terrorism, even though bathtubs kill many more people. There is such a thing as rational irrationality. We’re not Mr. Spock.

Still, at the end of the day, those valences should not license us to change the math or disregard the facts.

Remember, no matter how high Wilson and Arvai cranked up the harm done by deer relative to the harm done by crime, “we could not get people to take action on deer overpopulation,” Arvai reports. “It was as though people simply couldn’t get past the emotional tug of the problem — crime — no matter what empirical data we presented about it.” Even accounting for reasonable emotional valences, can total disregard of facts be the right answer?

Or consider a classic study by Dan Kahan, Ellen Peters, Erica Dawson, and Paul Slovic. They gave subjects a data set and asked them to do some moderately challenging arithmetic. But there was a trick: some subjects were told they were calculating the effectiveness of a face cream in treating a rash, others that they were calculating whether banning concealed handguns reduced or increased crime. Not surprisingly, subjects who were more numerate did better on the face-cream problem than subjects who were bad at math. But on the politically loaded concealed-carry question—remember, interpreting the exact same data—ideology trumped numeracy. In fact, the more numerate people were, the more they got the wrong answer when the right answer clashed with their politics. As the researchers summarized, highly numerate subjects seem to “use their quantitative-reasoning capacity selectively to conform their interpretation of the data to the result most consistent with their political outlooks.” In other words, smart people are better at cooking the books and fooling ourselves.

Humans can be more and less rational, and we can be rational in ways that don’t show up in logic or math. But we are never as rational as we believe. That’s why we need the reality-based community: to tell us what we don’t want to hear.

John K. Wilson: You write, “Marginalizing bad ideas and foolish talk is the reality-based community’s secret weapon.”(258) Isn’t that just cancel culture by another name? If deplatforming dumb people is only wrong for tactical reasons (it gets them more attention), then what is the principled difference between the marginalization you support and the cancel culture you oppose?

Jonathan Rauch: There’s no bright red line between criticism and canceling, or between marginalization and punishment. That’s why I use a diagnostic approach, listing seven warning signs that you’re being canceled (for example, punitiveness, secondary boycotts, and lying). In particular cases, we may have to argue about who has crossed what line. These days, however, it’s usually pretty obvious.

John K. Wilson: You cite many examples of campus censorship, but almost none of them are leftists being silenced. Do you think censorship of the left is not a problem on campus? Or do conservatives need to be protected more because they’re a marginalized minority on campuses?

Jonathan Rauch: The premise is wrong. Many (perhaps most) of the people I cited and interviewed as experiencing canceling and chilling are on the left: Rebecca Tuvel, for example, and Sam Foer, and many professors and students who are not quoted by name. They’re just not on the illiberal, authoritarian segment of the left.

An important change happening right now is that progressives have realized that they get no safe-conduct from canceling. In fact, they are often the most tempting targets, because conservatives are more inured to controversy. A Cato Institute poll last year found that a third of Americans worry about losing their job or job opportunities if they’re open about their political beliefs, which is a pretty remarkable finding; just as remarkably, this level of fear spans the left-right spectrum, including those who identify as very liberal. Also striking: just in the three years from 2017 to 2020, the share of strong liberals who are afraid to say what they believe for fear of offending someone rose 12 percentage points, to 42 percent!

Remember, canceling is about intimidating and dominating the target population. It’s information warfare. Cancelers do not want to mark out safe harbors. They want to lay a minefield that leaves everyone chilled and over-cautious.

As progressives realize that they, too, are targets, I’m cautiously hopeful that they will become more willing to push back. If left-leaning resistance grows, coercive tactics will become hard to sustain, and might even collapse.

John K. Wilson: What do you think should be the primary focus of faculty to help defend truth? Do they need to speak out publicly as individuals? Do they need to reform departments from within to promote intellectual diversity? Do they need to band together with other faculty to take on bad policies and actions from administrators? And how will the decline of tenure-track positions affect the ability of faculty to do this?

Jonathan Rauch: All of the above. It’s not just one thing; it’s lots of people doing different things. And, crucially, groups. Mobilizing groups to organize and support individuals is essential, because an organized minority beats a disorganized majority every time. I’m heartened to see a significant counter-mobilization already under way.

And yes, like so many others, I’m very concerned about the displacement of tenure-track faculty by administrators, adjuncts, and others who are often more ideological, less acculturated to the values of science, and/or more vulnerable to political pressure. This is eroding the integrity of the university and mortgaging the academy’s future, and I don’t for the life of me understand why faculties are not putting up more of a fight. Maybe you can tell me!