IN THE LATE 1980s, the Polish labor movement known as Solidarity grew so powerful that it did what many had thought impossible: It peacefully forced the Iron Curtain back. In my own family, this meant not only a blessed end to the occupation that had lasted since the Allies had handed Poland over to the Soviets to keep the peace; it also meant, more practically, that my mother could go back to Poland for the first time since she had left, in 1947, at the age of eleven.
In the summer of 1990, my older brother, my father, and I went with her. I was twenty-four, two months shy of moving to Indiana to start my new life in the academy. This was an astonishing time to be in Poland. A nation that had long been silenced and used by the Soviets had burst forth suddenly into noisy liberation. A country that had been painted gray by years of corrupt socialism was rapidly painting itself red and white again.
We found ourselves one day in a crowded city square—I think it was in Gdansk, a city on the Baltic coast—where an enormous crowd had gathered in happy anticipation. A ritual that was occurring all over Poland was about to be enacted here. A large crane had been used to carefully hoist a big statue of Lenin that for decades had been watching over the square. Ostensibly this statue was in the process of being moved by workers to a “safe location,” but everyone knew what was really going to happen. At the appointed time, the crowd drew back, the crane operator raised the statue a little higher, and the giggling crowd muttered the Polish equivalent of oopsie-daisy. A moment later, the crane operator raised his arm ceremoniously and pushed a button, dropping the statue and smashing it into a thousand pieces. A roar went up, bottles came out of jackets and bags, and singing commenced. Freedom. Were it not for the big Polish mustaches and all the vodka, I would have thought I was in Philadelphia in July 1776. In any case, I suddenly felt lucky to have grown up always conscious of the stark contrast between Poland under the Soviets and my life in America.
A couple of days later, we spent some time visiting my mother’s extended family in the place where she had lived in poverty throughout the war, a tiny farming village still comprised of only a handful of families. I was trying to follow the rapid-fire, happy conversations, but having ever learned only a few words of Polish, I spent most of my time trying to remember how I was related to each of these people. In the 1980s, some of the older ones had managed to visit us on tourist visas. As I watched these great aunts and uncles now sharing food with my parents, I remembered these same people sitting in our Long Island kitchen as my mother sewed twenties into the linings of their coats; she had explained to me that American currency would go a long way on the black market when they got home.
Noticing my brother and me sitting so quietly, my mother suggested that we take a walk with her around the area. (My father’s multiple sclerosis made it impossible for him to walk more than a few feet, so we left him with our cousins.) On the walk, our mother kept exclaiming how small the hills appeared to be compared to her childhood memories. I reminded her jokingly that there’s a reason for Poland’s name. (It means “land of the plains.”) My brother joked back that he was under the impression Poland’s name actually translated to “invade here.”
Suddenly, on a little hill my mother seemed to specifically remember, we came upon a perfectly tended single grave. I couldn’t make sense of this. First of all, Poles bury their dead in proper cemeteries, not on random hills. Second, it was pretty clearly the grave of a German soldier from the war, and yet someone had been carefully keeping it up all those years; the surrounding grass had been cut back, and flowers were placed around the stone.
I asked my mother what all this meant. She told us that, during the war, a village nearby had been found to be harboring Jews, and a Nazi officer had given one of his soldiers an order to kill everyone in the village. This was standard practice, meant as punishment and as a warning to others. But the soldier had refused. As a result, his officer had shot him dead, on the spot. Those who had somehow survived had honored the soldier with this burial.
My mother then quietly mumbled something religious in Polish and made the sign of the cross. Involuntarily, I made the same gesture.
When I was about sixteen, right around the time I gave up on Catholicism, my mother gave me a rare glimpse into the worldview presumably bequeathed to her by this war. While we were folding laundry together, perhaps knowing the guilt I was feeling over losing my religion, she suddenly said to me that she didn’t think dogma was particularly useful in most instances. In most situations in which you find yourself, she said, if you could stop and think clearly—think beyond your immediate self and beyond your predictable loyalties—you could tell what was the right thing to do and what was the wrong thing. Being good, she observed, meant being good to others, including strangers. And that was pretty much enough to live by. But how can you know the right thing to do? Human reasoning, she said—referring now explicitly to Socrates and Plato—human reasoning is imperfect. Human bias keeps us from perfect vision of what is happening around us. But the quest for truth—the quest to understand the world around us—must ultimately be how you enact the good.
• • •
WHEN I JOINED the early intersex-rights movement, although identity activists inside and outside academia were a dime a dozen, it was pretty uncommon to run into evidence-based activists. Even rarer were data-oriented scholars who purposely took on advocacy work. Today, all over the place, one finds activist groups collecting and understanding data, whether they’re working on climate change or the rights of patients, voters, the poor, LGBT people, or the wrongly imprisoned. It’s also pretty easy to find university-based, data-oriented scholars in medicine, climate studies, and law who spend much of their time out of the ivory tower going to legislatures, courts, and policy meetings to advocate for marginalized individuals and endangered populations. Attention to evidence in the service of the common good is at perhaps an all-time high. People doing advocacy are smarter, and the smartest people often now do advocacy.
The bad news is that today advocacy and scholarship both face serious threats. As for social activism, while the Internet has made it cheaper and easier than ever to organize and agitate, it also produces distraction and false senses of success. People tweet, blog, post messages on walls, and sign online petitions, thinking somehow that noise is change. Meanwhile, the people in power just wait it out, knowing that the attention deficit caused by Internet overload will mean the mob will move on to the next house tomorrow, sure as the sun comes up in the morning. And the economic collapse of the investigative press caused by that noisy Internet means no one on the outside will follow through to sort it out, to tell us what is real and what is illusory. The press is no longer around to investigate, spread stories beyond the already aware, and put pressure on those in power to do the right thing.
The threats to scholars, meanwhile, are enormous and growing. Today over half of American university faculty are in non-tenure-track jobs. (Most have not consciously chosen to live without tenure, as I have.) Not only are these people easy to get rid of if they make trouble, but they are also typically loaded with enough teaching and committee work to make original scholarship almost impossible. Even for the tenure-track faculty, in the last twenty years, universities have shifted firmly toward a corporate model in which faculty are treated as salespeople on commission. “Publish or perish” was the admonition when I was in graduate school, but today the rule is more like “external funding or expulsion.” (I am, as I write, facing this myself at Northwestern.) Our usefulness is not measured by generation of high-quality knowledge but by the volume of grants added to the university economic machine. This means our work is skewed toward the politically safe or, worse, the industrially expedient. Meanwhile, administrators shamelessly talk about their universities’ “brands,” and lately some are even checking to see if their faculty are appropriately adhering to “the brand.” Yet more evidence of a growing and scary corporate mentality. Add to this the often unfair Internet-based attacks on researchers who are perceived as promoting dangerous messages, and what you end up with is regression to the safe—a recipe for service of those already in power.
The pressure to get ever more grants and to publish early and often has also led to a system wherein work is often published before it’s ready—before it is really finished and, more important, before it is really checked. Indeed, as I’ve wandered from discipline to discipline, I have again and again come across a stunningly lazy attitude toward precision and accuracy in many branches of academia. (Legal scholarship is the one notable exception.) Outsiders to academia would probably be shocked to overhear the conversations I have with science, medicine, and humanities scholars and journal editors about the need to fact-check work. It’s not that they argue with me. They ask me what I’m talking about. The push is to get the work out, to get that publication line on your productivity report, to score the high impact factor—all goals born of a system that supports individual competition for funding over the common need for a reliable body of knowledge. Who needs fact-checking when accuracy is not rewarded and sloppiness is rarely punished?
Perhaps most troubling is the tendency within some branches of the humanities to portray scholarly quests to understand reality as quaint or naive, even colonialist and dangerous. Sure, I know: Objectivity is easily desired and impossible to perfectly achieve, and some forms of scholarship will feed oppression, but to treat those who seek a more objective understanding of a problem as fools or de facto criminals is to betray the very idea of an academy of learners. When I run into such academics—people who will ignore and, if necessary, outright reject any fact that might challenge their ideology, who declare scientific methodologies “just another way of knowing”—I feel this crazy desire to institute a purge. It smells like fungal rot in the hoof of a plow horse we can’t afford to lose. Call me ideological for wanting us all to share a belief in the importance of seeking reliable, verifiable knowledge, but surely that is supposed to be the common value of the learned.
What privilege such people enjoy who can say there is no objective reality, no way to ascertain more accurate knowledge! I know from experience, these are people who typically claim to speak on behalf of the marginalized and the oppressed, yet they have not sat and learned enough anatomy and medicine to know what a clitoroplasty actually involves in terms of loss of tissue and sensation; they have not witnessed what happens to the minds and bodies of scholars falsely accused of crimes against humanity; they have not had to watch prenatal dexamethasone being advertised as “safe for mother and child” while knowing from a literature search that there is not a single decent scientific study to support such a claim. If they don’t want to believe that there’s an objective reality as to what a glucocorticoid does to a four-week-old embryo, then how are they to understand how much the truth matters to justice? These must be people who have never had to fear enough to desperately need truth, the longing for truth, the gift of truth. Surely, the “scholar” who thinks truth is for children at Christmastime is the person who has never had to fear the knock of the secret police at her door.
• • •
GALILEO COULD NOT have been put under house arrest for suspicion of grave heresy in America. Sounds banal, I know—but as we face a time when we are mature enough to understand that activism aimed at social progress but conducted without facts amounts to a pointless waste of resources, and the people best poised to do fact-collection are under siege from multiple sides—this is worth meditating on for a moment.
Galileo could not be arrested for suspicion of grave heresy in America. Why is that?
The reason is that the activists who founded the United States—the Founding Fathers—understood the critical connection between freedom of thought and freedom of person. They understood that justice (freedom of person) depends upon truth (freedom of thought), and that the quest for truth cannot occur in an unjust system. It’s no coincidence that so many of the Founding Fathers were science geeks. These guys were rightly stoked about the idea that humans working together had it in their power to know and to improve the world—scientifically, technologically, economically, politically. These were men of the Enlightenment who had broken through dogma into a fantastic new vision for humankind: crowdsourcing. No longer would knowledge and power flow from top down, following archaic rules of authority and blood inheritance. In science as in political life, the light of many minds would be brought to bear to decide together what is right and is just. In such a system, a man arguing for a new vision of the universe could never be arrested merely for the argument, no matter how much it threatened those in power.
So here’s one tiny historical story I wish that activists and scholars today would return to—because it would help them see why they have to value the same things.
America, 1776: The Declaration of Independence is finally signed, formally renouncing British rule and articulating a new vision of human liberty. There was no Internet in 1776, of course, to spread the good news, so the news had to be spread by other means. Knowing that the people of Philadelphia needed to be informed of the monumental turn of events, John Nixon climbed up on a platform and read the declaration aloud to an assembled crowd.
Here’s the thing: The platform Nixon climbed up on had been erected seven years earlier, and not for political purposes. It was put up in 1769 by the American Philosophical Society (the scientific society founded by Benjamin Franklin) so that one of their members, the astronomer David Rittenhouse, could make formal observations of the transit of Venus—the passage of that planet across the face of the sun. Rittenhouse was working with the support of his peers to further the post-Galilean understanding of the universe. The platform was put up to look at the sky.
One scientist in 1769, following in Galileo’s footsteps, wanting simply to know more about the stars, had literally set the stage for another man in 1776 speaking to the people the truth of their core freedoms.
If—as the investigative press collapses and no longer can function as an effective check on excess and corruption, and people live and die forever inhabiting self-obsessed corners of the Internet, and the government and the ad-selling Google industrial complex ever increase surveillance on us, and we can’t trust people in the government to be our advocates or even to be sensible—if we have any hope of maintaining freedom of thought and freedom of person in the near and distant future, we have to remember what the Founding Fathers knew: That freedom of thought and freedom of person must be erected together. That truth and justice cannot exist one without the other. That when one is threatened, the other is harmed. That justice and thus morality require the empirical pursuit.
• • •
I WANT TO SAY TO ACTIVISTS: If you want justice, support the search for truth. Engage in searches for truth. If you really want meaningful progress and not just temporary self-righteousness, carpe datum. You can begin with principles, yes, but to pursue a principle effectively, you have to know if your route will lead to your destination. If you must criticize scholars whose work challenges yours, do so on the evidence, not by poisoning the land on which we all live.
To scholars I want to say more: Our fellow human beings can’t afford to have us act like cattle in an industrial farming system. If we take seriously the importance of truth to justice and recognize the many forces now acting against the pursuit of knowledge—if we really get why our role in democracy is like no other—then we really ought to feel that we must do more to protect each other and the public from misinformation and disinformation. Doing so means taking on more responsibility to police ourselves and everybody else for accuracy and greater objectivity—taking on with renewed vigor the pursuit of accurate knowledge and putting ourselves second to that pursuit.
I know that a lot of people who met me along the way in this work thought I’d end up on one side of the war between activists and scholars. The deeper I went, however, the more obvious it became that the best activists and the best scholars actually long for the same kind of world—a free one.
Here’s the one thing I now know for sure after this very long trip: Evidence really is an ethical issue, the most important ethical issue in a modern democracy. If you want justice, you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice.