In 2002 and early 2003, the US government repeatedly assured everyone that its planned invasion of Iraq would go swimmingly. “The people will be enormously relieved and liberated,” said Donald Rumsfeld. “I think it will go relatively quickly… weeks rather than months,” said Dick Cheney. Six months into the occupation, Richard Perle announced: “A year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush.” History does not record the subsequent level of his amazement when such an honour failed to materialise. But the question that can still nag today is: how did they get it so wrong?
The perceived rise in “fake news” over the past few years is often discussed as though it were a natural phenomenon, like an increase in the frequency of earthquakes. Commentators have focused primarily on how the consumers of fake news might arm themselves against it. But what if the thing that really needs to change is the way the masters of disinformation think? The philosopher Quassim Cassam introduces his tightly argued book with the question of how the architects of the Iraq War convinced themselves that it would be such a triumph, and his answer is that they were personally, and culpably, defective in reason: they suffered from “vices of the mind”, which include “arrogance, imperviousness to evidence, and an inability to deal with mistakes”. These he defines as “epistemic vices”, because they are to do with one's attitude to acquiring and maintaining knowledge.
This is a more granular, and useful, diagnosis than the simple assumption that the Bush regime were all inveterate liars, or stupid. Rumsfeld in particular was many things, but he was not stupid. And instead of calling him a liar, we may more productively say of him what Cassam later says so persuasively of Boris Johnson, that he exhibits “epistemic insouciance”. This is “an indifference or lack of concern with respect to whether [his] claims are grounded in reality or the evidence”. The concept is related to the philosopher Harry Frankfurt's portrait of the bullshitter, who differs from the liar in that he doesn't care whether what he says is true or not. And so, Cassam explains, “Epistemic insouciance is the attitude… that makes one a bullshitter and thereby causes one to spout bullshit.” But the epistemically insouciant man, he argues, is not simply indifferent to truth and evidence, he holds an active contempt for them: “Contempt for the truth, contempt for experts, and, in the case of politicians, contempt for the public.”
Read Full Article »
