The previous episode in this series treated the issue of free speech and censorship, with particular focus on the media. I deferred the topic of the social media that pose a new and different set of challenges, especially the problem of who could possibly monitor the content of such a chaotic array of sources. Traditionally, the public sources of information about local and world events consisted of newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, journals and magazines, and other publications that have professional journalists as well as publishers and editors in a position to select and certify the reliability of that information. The major difficulty of that tradition is that those professionals generally answer to higher authorities that often favor economic interests and political forces that undermine rather than foster democracy. The advantage of the social media is that individuals who lack political power and do not have deep pockets can reach a large audience with divergent perspectives. In the past decade, especially since Donald Trump began to use Twitter and other social media to spread his version of world events, there is little control over what is shared instantly with millions of people. Elon Musk, who now owns Twitter, has taken this phenomenon to a new level. Democracy only works if the people have access to the truth, but the Internet and other recent innovations in technology (such as the widespread use of cell phones) leave the people without a clear way to navigate in that ever-expanding sea of information and opinion.
Consider a recent example that shows the need for and lack of such guidance. On March 7, 2023, the New York Times reported that “new intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year, a step toward determining responsibility for an act of sabotage that has confounded investigators on both sides of the Atlantic for months. U.S. officials said that they had no evidence President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine or his top lieutenants were involved in the operation, or that the perpetrators were acting at the direction of any Ukrainian government officials” (Adam Entous, Julian E. Barnes, and Adam Goldman, The New York Times, March 7, 2023).
This attack on the natural gas pipelines, which link Russia to Western Europe, occurred in September of 2022. It posed the question of who was to blame—Moscow, Kyiv, London, and Washington were all mentioned as possible answers to that question in The New York Times report from March 7. The story said that this “has remained one of the most consequential unsolved mysteries of Russia’s year-old war in Ukraine.” The Times report continued: “Ukraine and its allies have been seen by some officials as having the most logical potential motive to attack the pipelines. They have opposed the project for years, calling it a national security threat because it would allow Russia to sell gas more easily to Europe.”
That account prevails in most of the so-called “mainstream media.” A recent newcomer to the social media has a radically different version. Seymour Hirsch, who has a long career in the mainstream media, including The New York Times, has turned to the social media to tell a story he is quite sure would be declined by the gatekeepers used by his former employers, even though his track record is impressive. Hirsch played a major role in reporting on the My Lai massacre and its cover-up in Vietnam in 1969 (for which he received a Pulitzer Prize in 1970), the Watergate Scandal when he worked for The New York Times, and on the torture at Abu Ghraib for The New Yorker. A recent addition to the social media is called Substack, which regularly publishes blogs by contributors such as the writer Margret Atwood, Heather Cox Richardson—a historian, and the filmmaker Michael Moore. Substack calls itself a “new economic engine for culture,” describing its mission this way:
We have always believed that the internet’s powers for good could be realized if they were tied to a business model that produces better incentives than what the dominant online media platforms currently offer. When we started this company five years ago, we thought that the world might look a little different if readers and writers, rather than the companies that want to sell them stuff, were the customers. And we believed that interesting things could happen if writers were rewarded for building trust with readers rather than making viral content.
Seymour Hirsch has embraced that alternative, which he used to explain who is responsible for the Nord Stream pipeline attacks:
Last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning.
Two of the pipelines, which were known collectively as Nord Stream 1, had been providing Germany and much of Western Europe with cheap Russian natural gas for more than a decade. A second pair of pipelines, called Nord Stream 2, had been built but were not yet operational. Now, with Russian troops massing on the Ukrainian border and the bloodiest war in Europe since 1945 looming, President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for Vladimir Putin to weaponize natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions.
Asked for comment, Adrienne Watson, a White House spokesperson, said in an email, “This is false and complete fiction.” Tammy Thorp, a spokesperson for the Central Intelligence Agency, similarly wrote: “This claim is completely and utterly false.”
Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community about how to best achieve that goal. For much of that time, the issue was not whether to do the mission, but how to get it done with no overt clue as to who was responsible.
There was a vital bureaucratic reason for relying on the graduates of the center’s hardcore diving school in Panama City. The divers were Navy only, and not members of America’s Special Operations Command, whose covert operations must be reported to Congress and briefed in advance to the Senate and House leadership—the so-called Gang of Eight. The Biden Administration was doing everything possible to avoid leaks as the planning took place late in 2021 and into the first months of 2022.
President Biden and his foreign policy team—National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State for Policy—had been vocal and consistent in their hostility to the two pipelines, which ran side by side for 750 miles under the Baltic Sea from two different ports in northeastern Russia near the Estonian border, passing close to the Danish island of Bornholm before ending in northern Germany.
These two accounts seem to be contradictory. How could they both be true?
The philosophical question that I wish to explore concerns how ordinary citizens can find a way out of this maze of conflicting claims. The branch of philosophy that deals with the nature of knowledge and truth is called “epistemology,” a field that, in the modern world, has revealed severe attacks on truth and knowledge itself from two opposite directions. On one side, is a position I would call “absolutism,” which assumes that there is a body of knowledge that simply needs to be distributed or propagated. This position is often found in religious traditions that do not support democracy or are even hostile to it. The current regime in Hungary, led by Viktor Orbán, is a clear example of this approach. In this case, religion and politics merge, as became clear when he spoke last August in Texas as the opening speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). He called on the delegates to destroy liberal democracy and establish what he calls “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.” At the other extreme on the question of knowledge is a movement generally known as postmodernism, which takes several different forms but is united by the notion that truth is relative. Essentially, this means that the quest for knowledge is futile, especially when it comes to questions about values such as justice and goodness. Its recent history in the field of politics gave us the term “fake news,” which usually means that any claim that differs from that of the speaker should be dismissed. What matters is not truth or reality but the ability to persuade people concerning ideas and actions promoted by the persuader. That can be done by a variety of means that do not require us either to acquire knowledge or even acknowledge that it exists. Force, manipulation, and deception often work quite well to obtain the desired results.
I think that there are two important ways by which we can find an alternative between these two extremes. The model of knowledge I favor is called “dialectic,” which was already well developed in ancient Athens by Plato. Truth and reality are not the starting point but goals in the quest for knowledge. Plato’s character Socrates continues to be the best example for how that process works. First, and above all, the participants in that quest should not pretend to know what they do not know. Difficult as it sometimes is, this is the only path open to finite human beings. This is the core of “Socratic wisdom.” To see how it works, let’s return to the current example concerning the explosions last year on the Nord Stream pipeline. Even though the mainstream media rightly do not pretend to know who is responsible, we can begin with what we do know: (1) Three explosions have rendered the pipelines useless until they are repaired. (2) Either the United States was involved, or it was not involved. (3) Either Ukraine was involved, or it was not involved. Even though a cogent case was not immediately available, the Socratic approach calls for continuing the inquiry until a reasonable answer can be found. Even though U.S. officials claimed that Seymour Hirsch’s account placing responsibility on the U.S. is completely false, the March 7 story from The New York Times reports that “new intelligence reviewed by U.S. officials suggests that a pro-Ukrainian group carried out the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines last year.” That claim is, in fact, logically consistent with the Hirsch’s account concerning who planted the explosives. The actual explosions did not take place until three months later, and it may not have been detonated by the U.S. Navy. But, as Hirsch claims, the U.S. seems likely to bear responsibility for planting the explosives. Even if it was not Ukraine but a “pro-Ukrainian group” that detonated the explosives, the disruption in Russia’s gas sales to Europe is clearly to Ukraine’s advantage.
My primary concern is not to solve the mystery of the pipeline explosions but to show that the public can, through critical thinking, get beyond the limitations of a single news source. In this case, combining the resources of The New York Times and a new social media outlet seems to move us closer to a cogent account of what happened. This explanation may, of course, be refuted tomorrow, but that is true of many important beliefs. This example also shows that the social media, despite their obvious flaws, might also serve as a positive contribution in our quest for truth in a democracy.
Some might ask how can anyone, with the various pressures from their work, their family responsibilities, and all the other demands from their busy lives find the time and energy it takes to think through such questions? Even more to the point, how can we expect critical thinking of this sort from every citizen? In response to the first question, I think that proper use of the social media, such as Substack, can make a positive contribution by expanding our choice of where to get information, analysis, and exposure to more than a single point of view. This does not mean there is no place for the traditional media. It is important for every citizen in a democracy to go beyond the comfort zone where the media tell us what we want to hear. But this does not require us to become full-time journalists. Two or three perspectives, especially once we know where to find them, should suffice.
As for acquiring the skills required for critical thinking, that is the responsibility of our educational system. In the United States, we expect every citizen to complete secondary education and we provide it free for all. The kind of critical thinking required for thinking through most moral and political issues can and should be provided for everyone by the time they reach voting age. It is no more difficult and far more important to understand and practice those skills than it is to learn grammar or mathematics. These elements are all essential, and all should be universally expected and provided for full citizenship. Contrary to the model of education that seems to prevail among the “cultural warriors” that are currently gaining so much attention from the media, the purpose of Socratic inquiry is to help people, all people, think for themselves about the values we share as human beings. These values are universal, not limited to any single race, gender, economic class, or geographical location. Whether conservative or progressive, it is not the proper role of the educational system or its administrators to tell students what to think on any topic. What matters is knowing how to think and to put that kind of knowledge into action.