What is the epistemology of the most influential person who is unaware of the meaning of the term?

I was reading the letters in response to Slavoj Zizek's intriguing op-ed in the New York Times, when an insight on the Bush administration dawned on me. The first letter-writer, apparently a reverend, pulled up the boring old canard that of course atheists can be just as atrocity-prone as religious fanatics (wow, quite a stirring defense of the faith sir), because look at the Nazis and the Soviets! To which the all-too obvious reply is, it is not religion that enables people to regard their fellow mankind as sub-human, and to act like sub-humans themselves - it is dogmatism.

The Nazis and Soviets were just as dogmatic as the Catholic and Protestants of the thirty-years' war, as the witch-burning Puritans, as the disgustingly anti-Semitic Ferdinand and Isabella and Martin Luther, as the Wahhabists and Taliban and al Qaeda, as the Iranian clergy-fascists and purely Orwellian cult of the Dear Leader of Pyongyang. The Nazis and Soviets happened to be ruled by dogmas without traditionally religious themes, but that is just surface gloss.

The core of all dogmatism, that each of those societies and leaders of societies hold in common, is emotional-instinctual epistemology. They decide what to believe is true based on what instinctually and emotionally feels true. They are societies built on truthiness.

At the opposite of dogmatism, is the reliance on rational epistemology: deciding what to believe is true based only on what you can reason out in your mind, based on systematically gathered observational evidence, actively working to contradict and re-test assumptions and ideas, with an awareness of the trickiness of human perception and the tremendous capacity of the human mind to fool itself and to want to fool itself. Rational epistemology is the root of science, of law, and of democracy. It is a lot tougher than instinctual epistemology, because the latter is our natural state, while the former requires education, cleverness, devotion to curiosity, and hard work.

Once you accept your epistemology, everything else falls into place. Having chosen one option, you perceive and understand the world according to a set of arbitrarily accepted axioms initially selected for their emotional appeal, and compartmentalize away or simply deny or ignore all objective evidence that does not confirm your axioms, though you seize upon and proclaim the truth of any selective evidence you can interpret to support your pre-set beliefs.

Or having chosen the other option, you engage in a continual feedback loop of learning more about the world around you, and using your increasing understanding to continue to learn still more, you are able to tolerate ambiguity and learn from your mistakes, you are intellectually honest and humble in the face of all that still remains to be discovered. Rational epistemists will always have the intellectual humility to acknowledge the absence of claims to absolute authority and the potential validity of unfamiliar observations and experiences related by others; and to use reason to pursue the truth together. Yes: actual, objective truth. Which is why there is no such thing as American and Arabic and Japanese and African physics and biology (despite the navel-lint-picking of the (emotional-instinctual-epistemological) Strong program). There is only physics and biology.

(This also despite my law school mentor, who taught that there is no truth, there are only arguments. Shows what comes from not starting with a physics degree I guess.)

Part of the fallout of this is that, because the initially seized-upon assumptions of the instinctual epistemists are arbitrarily selected or imposed, instinctual epistemists are doomed forever to remain in insoluable conflict with one another.

It seems like the political fault lines in America have split generally along that rift between the epistemologically rational and the epistemologically instinctual. That is a far more relevant picture for today's political divide than the tired old hag of left and right. There is certainly no shortage of emotional-irrational epistemists on today's left - but the modern Republican party has enforced and achieved an astonishingly pure hegemony of emotional-irrational epistemology, in which reason-based epistemology is emphatically unwelcome.

This is true despite a variety of emotional-instinctual epistemologies working side-by-side within the modern GOP establishment; not only the fundamentalist Christian epistemological group, but also the Reaganomics trickle-down fundamentalist believers, the anti-science "intelligent design" and "global-warming-is-a-conspiracy" fundamentalist believers; the simple "liberals(or)gays-are-the-source-of-evil" hate-driven fundamentalist believers; etc.

As for what type Bush is, I think that's a trick question. This is just my impression, but I don't think he really has core beliefs of his own; I think his pride in leadership by delegation extends to delegating decisions on what basic assumptions to base his worldview on. I think that's the only explanation for his strange transformation from moderate, easy-going governor; that was just due to his temporary absorption of the worldviews of the lieutenants he happened to surround himself with in Austin. His very different nature after becoming president was a reflection of the very different nature of the people he surrounded himself with in Washington: mainly Cheney and Rumsfeld, although he had enough room to internalize all the modern GOP emotional-instinctual epistemologies listed above.

The proper question then is, what flavor is Cheney and Rumsfeld's epistemology, which they also imbue onto Bush as his primary mindset. I used to have sort of an impression that they have a rational epistemology. Then in the last few days, I read Zizek's essay and the letters responding to it, and Don Rumsfeld's defense of the good Iraq war. Then it came to me: Cheney and Rumsfeld's epistemology is emotional-instinctual after all, based on axiomatic internalization of Leo Strauss. That’s why they are perfectly certain that they are always right, that they know better than everyone else; that their own ideas about how many troops to send in to Iraq or what the reception would be like or how to rebuild the country were infallible to the point that all contradictory experts' ideas were worthless. That’s why they see themselves as the heroes of a struggle to defeat the very concept of terror and rid the world of evil, and why they believe in the need for an all-powerful executive, for a disregard of “quaint” concepts of constitutional rights, and for an absolute right to govern in secrecy – all despite a wealth of contradictory evidence and despite any obstacle of existing law. The axiomatic, irrational Straussian worldview is the root cause of the antidemocratic thrust of this administration.

Of course, it’s just a hypothesis; we need more objective evidence to rationally evaluate the idea…

(* As for Rumsfeld's column in the Post, I found myself agreeing with much of it: the rationale for a free and democratic Iraq is as compelling today as it was three years ago. I remain deeply disappointed by the Michael Moore wing of administration critics who ignore the fact of atrocity and terror as a way of life for twenty million Iraqis before we invaded. No matter how many phones have been tapped, America today is a land of tremendous freedom and dignity compared with the truly atrocious Iraq under Saddam. The problem with Rumsfeld's column is I don't believe it represents what he really believes - otherwise they would not have distorted the evidence to make the case for war; they would not have ignored the well-attested need to go in with two and a half times as many troops; they would not have flushed away five years' worth of expert State Department planning for rebuilding the country; and above all, they would not have permitted, and apparently encouraged, the savage abuse of detainees - which was not only despicable, but strategically stupid, in surrendering the claim to clear moral superiority to the previous regime and in inspiring ordinary Iraqis to hatred against the occupation. If we had had leaders who avoided each of those mistakes and did the invasion right, Iraq would be peaceful and prosperous right now with almost no U.S. troops remaining.)

UPDATE: Eugene Robinson is one of many, I'm sure, who is also busy wondering about Cheney and Rumsfeld's perception of reality.

Heeere's the Truthiness...®

The Trademark Blog argues that Stephen Colbert should file a trademark application on "truthiness" as a source identifier of his persona, in the same way that Johnny Carson successfully argued for rights to "Here's Johnny" under his right of publicity (Carson v. Here's Johnny Portable Toilets, Inc., 698 F.2d 831 (6th Cir, 1983)).

However, the short post doesn't go into several substantive differences that might be crucial in distinguishing between the two fact patterns. For one thing, "truthiness" is a single word, rather than a phrase. Also, "Here's Johnny" contained an actual reference to Carson's name, lending weight to its status as a source identifier. "Truthiness" is also found in the Oxford English Dictionary with references to the early Nineteenth century, and the Macmillan English Dictionary's website recently featured "truthiness" as its word of the week (read all about the latest developments on "truthiness").

And, as the court emphasized, Johnny Carson had been associated with "Here's Johnny" for decades prior to the competitor's use; and the toilet maker even stipulated at trial that the public associated the phrase "Here's Johnny" with Johnny Carson, and that the toilet maker had chosen the term because of that association. (What ever happened to zealous representation...)

Colbert undoubtedly revived the word and gave it a new definition, but it's still an established word in the English language. That's not definitive, since it had definitely lapsed from common usage, and even in the first place was rare or dialectal, says the OED; there's a strong argument that the word "truthiness" had been abandoned from the public domain and was available to be appropriated as private intellectual property. The argument is even stronger if you argue for truthiness to be proprietary only as applied to Colbert's product or service, of an ironic news commentary program, in the same way that the word "fun" is proprietary to Carnival Cruise Lines as applied to advertisements for cruise ship services ("The Fun Ships®" etc. ...)

On the other hand, "truthiness" has already been carried away by multiple published sources in non-Colbert related discussions
(again, see here...), so Colbert's claim on the word under trademark or publicity right is attenuating rapidly - if he's going to claim it, he'd better do it soon - although it developing other associations would not be dispositive, as the court emphasized relative to Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch.

On yet the other hand, Colbert has acted quite vigorously to defend his association with the word... after the AP ran a story about "truthiness" being selected as the Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society without mentioning Colbert (not in the version of the story that syndicated nationally anyway), Colbert took time on each episode of his show the entire following week to lambast the AP for omitting reference to him - and got both the AP and the individual reporter each to run another story about Colbert's indignation and insistence that "truthiness" be associated with his show as its source. Outstanding tactics for preserving his claim!

But, one further issue: Colbert's entire campaign of indignation at being omitted from association with truthiness, including his comments as quoted in the later AP story, were all done in character, as the Stephen Colbert the blustery right-wing blowhard pundit TV show host character - which is entirely separate and quite different in practice from Stephen Colbert the person and actor (who is left-leaning, far friendlier, and far more easy-going). While it makes perfect sense for Colbert the character to go after a trademark right in "truthiness" like an attack dog, it's less certain Colbert the person would.

So, if he goes after a trademark right to the word "truthiness", it might be the first time a trademark is sought not just for a fictional character, but by a fictional character.

How might he exercise a legally valid trademark right in "truthiness"? I imagine, not to go after The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, or The Oprah Winfrey Show using it (with attribution to him, as they have) to further his commentary, with serious application to real-world issues. But, he might use it, hopefully, to keep it from being twisted around in the service of precisely what he intended to excoriate with it - as townhall.com tries to do, co-opting both truthiness and 1984 (!) to recycle banal condemnations of... political correctness.

That is at least, if not far more, damaging to Colbert's interests, as a port-a-potty with a "Here's Johnny" logo was to Carson's; it presents the real likelihood that persons unfamiliar with the Colbert Report will stumble on their first exposure to "truthiness" in the work of a Washington "Times" columnist and assume this right-wing usage accurately represents the views of the Colbert Report, therefore discouraging the potential interest of Colbert's potential audience. This is fundamentally different from the usage by the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, which have accurately represented "truthiness" and its identification with the Colbert Report, as intending to criticize the Harriet Miers nomination and the invasion of Iraq in particular, and incompetence, deceptiveness, and anti-intellectualism in general.

Ultimately though, this is the most crucial distinction between "truthiness" and "Here's Johnny": "Here's Johnny" was misappropriated for purely commercial use; "truthiness" has mainly been used in discussion of political and social issues. Therefore, the public has a compelling interest in continuing to use the word "truthiness" under statutory fair use - let alone the First Amendment, which can be avoided. To exclude the public from free use of "truthiness" in the way it's been used would be to hinder the public's interest in free discussion of compelling issues, of the Millsian free market of ideas, that is essential for a democracy.

On the other hand, "truthiness" T-shirts have popped up, and truthiness.com was registered the very day Colbert first introduced the word; and the Colbert Report already had a website, and Colbert-themed T-shirts for sale on the website, before the show premiered. The T-shirts didn't use the word "truthiness", but they revolved around a similar theme: one said "The Colbert Report: Truth with a Capital "C"", while the other said "Keep your "facts"; I've got Colbert". A video segment of the monologue in which "truthiness" was introduced was one of the first videos posted on the website. Therefore, where others have only a commercial interest in selling T-shirts or providing website services, they would be competing directly with the Colbert Report in an area of potentially purely commercial interest and without a substantive fair use defense (depending on how the competing T-shirts and website are done), and Colbert should be able to exclude them from using "truthiness" according to his right of publicity.

Colbert's best way to protect that right would be to hurry and file a trademark application. This would give him an advantage over Johnny Carson, who, the court noted, never registered "Here's Johnny" as a trademark.


NOTICE: This blog is intended as generalized commentary, not as legal advice. If you require legal advice, seek out the counsel of an attorney qualified in your jurisdiction.