1. Journey into a closed world.
After law school, after taking the bar examination, but before starting my career, I toured Europe. My tour included Berlin. At that time, Berlin was divided between East Berlin and West Berlin. West Berlin was free. East Berlin was under a communist dictatorship, like the rest of East Germany.
Berlin was relatively little visited by tourists. It sat in the middle of communist Germany. You could fly there from free Europe, but flying there was expensive for a new graduate of law school or others of the young hoards that beset Europe in Summer.
The alternative was to take the train. The train had a downside. I was awoken twice in my night journey into Berlin. The first time, the green-jacketed policeman inspected my travel documents. The second time, he searched my luggage.
But West Berlin - that is, free Berlin - was great. There was a liveliness there. People were exuberant. They welcomed strangers. I had a good time.
East Berlin, under dictatorship, was different. Just on the other side of the checkpoint into East Berlin, the communists had built a modern shopping structure. Architecturally, it was impressive. But I recall that visitors to it were few. Perhaps the locals were discouraged from visiting it. Maybe they could not afford to buy the goods on sale there.
And when you left the lofty architecture of the shopping structure, the city soon became drab and grim. Drunks lay unconscious in gutters.
Yet the people that I briefly encountered seemed content. I bought a glass of beer from a street vendor. It cost the equivalent of twenty-five cents. I was astonished at its cheapness. The vendor was pleased to see my surprise, and she commented on the cheapness of goods under communism. Later that day, I bought a filet-mignon steak dinner, with beer, for about a dollar and a half.
I bought the dinner in a basement restaurant. When I walked in with my friend, the hubbub of the restaurant turned to stone silence and everybody there turned to stare at us. I suppose that their fascination focused more on my friend than on me. She wore a Grateful Dead T-shirt, with a glittery skull and snake. After we sat down, the sound of conversation again percolated though the dining area.
Of course my friend, with her garish T-shirt, would garner attention. She clearly was different from what the East Berliners were accustomed to see. In fact, there was a harsh sameness to everything in East Berlin.
Here’s an example of that sameness. Barber shops all had pictures in the windows. The pictures featured a young man with a trim beard and a trim mustache and combed-back hair. I don’t recall seeing any young man in East Berlin that did not have exactly that combination of beard, mustache, and hair.
The East Berliners that I spoke with claimed that they had freedom to voice their opinion, regardless of what it might be. But that freedom was largely irrelevant. This was true because the East Berliners had no access to opinions or facts that deviated from what they heard from government sources. None. So their political opinions were necessarily as uniform as their hair.
2. Journeys to other closed societies.
I have visited the Soviet Union, when it was still the Soviet Union. I have lived in China. I saw in those places the same limited access to opinions and news that existed in East Berlin. The Chinese government now is laboring to ensure that the internet does not deprive it of its monopoly on information and opinion. Brave Chinese men and women struggle against this information monopoly.
What I saw in East Berlin, the Soviet Union, and China was "epistemic closure". Basically, that means that the people there lived their lives in a mental bubble, with virtually no access to political opinions and political news that did not come from their communist governments.
3. Danger in America.
This concept of epistemic closure is relevant to America, too.
Conservative intellectuals have fretted about epistemic closure in modern American conservatism. They warn that talk radio and certain news outlets have become self-contained, closed circles of information. Talk radio and these news outlets even discourage curiosity about other sources by often and vehemently claiming that those sources are unfair and biased.
That is, these movement news sources seek to impose upon their target audience an embargo on ideas that don't come from them. They do this for the same reason that that communist regimes embargo non-communist points of view. It's a matter of power.
And this has conservative intellectuals worried. Without cross-pollination, without intellectual checks-and-balances, the intellectual vigor of the conservative movement will decline, and its ideas increasingly will become un-tethered to reality.
I have seen this closed-ness. Sometimes I communicate with conservative friends about current issues. In these friendly debates, my friends sometimes seem to think that all they have to do is work "ACORN" or "Solyndra" into a sentence, and then sit back and garner the glory of forensic victory. When I have a response, they sometimes seem surprised. And some of my conservative friends seem truly amazed that anyone might not despise President Obama.
This self-sequestering of information and ideas could lead to a widespread "paranoid style in American politics", to borrow a phrase made famous by Richard Hofstadter. (Google it if you’re interested. Or, there’s a link below.)
In short, epistemic closure exists under communism and in America. The difference between America and communist regimes is that communist regimes impose epistemic closure on their people; but in America, it is self-inflicted.
4. Democracy, heal thyself.
But democracy has the capacity to heal itself. People have natural curiosity that resists complete sequestration.
I saw this even in my China travels. One incident stands out. I was on a train with two American friends, and a small young man crossed the aisle and sat next to me. He explained in his so-so English that he was from North Korea. He vehemently expressed his loyalty to his "Dear Leader". But he needed or wanted confirmation or refutation of what he believed. That was clear in his questions and in his eyes.
For example, he asked our opinion about Kim Jong Il’s then-recent speech on the pillars of socialism. We told him that we had not heard of that speech. This appeared to stun him. But at least he knew. And the yearning for that knowledge had caused him to question us, whatever consequences he might suffer from reaching out to Americans in the presence of his Chinese hosts.
Any news sequestration in America is self-sequesteration. In times past, clubs and organizations prevented such self-sequestration. All variety of people would belong to such clubs and organizations, and there they would encounter a variety of ideas and opinions.
But the literal public square is little populated in our time. Some commentators have said that membership in organizations wanes in modern American society. Therefore, people are less likely to physically meet with people who can supply variety to one another’s diet of political opinion or political fact.
But even with the decline of such organizations, other forums arise. Chief among these are Facebook. I encounter on Facebook people with opinions far different than my own. And they encounter my opinions.
5. Conclusion.
Will Facebook save American political conversation? Will other vehicles of conversation arise? One would hope.
Otherwise, many of us are doomed to get our ideas from a closed loop of sources. That is to the life of the mind as inbreeding is to genes.
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http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy_theory/the_paranoid_mentality/the_paranoid_style.html
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