Justus For All

Jeff Goldstein looks at differing naratives for the Libby verdict:

Two commentators, two different sets of “facts.”

I have also noted this dissonance, and in more then just the Libby trial and it is worrying to me.   While I think it pretty clear that in this case it is ‘the left’ that is distanced from reality, I don’t think it is a left vs. right phenomenon, a lot of the excessive anti-Clinton rhetoric coming out of the right in the 90s demonstrated just as much seperation from reality as what we see from the left in the case.

I think that the root of the problem is that most of the politcal disagreements we have can’t be empiraclly solved and because empiracal solutions with proof have had great success in solving problems in other realms, we have trouble discerning that.

While I forget sometimes, I do try and remember that my political biases cannot be ‘proven’ in the vast majority of cases.  They are a result of either my values, which are unamenable to proof, or my interpretation of how very complex systems interact, and with any complex system, replication and definitive proof is typically impossible.

That leads us to overstating  the ‘proof’ on our side, and in some cases even selecting the ‘facts’ that we like to simplify the system and give us the certainty we crave.  It is a mental shortcut, which can have very bad results.

It would probably benefit us all to remember that tax policy, healthcare, environmental issues and even the decision to go to war all take place in a very complex environments where abolute certainty about cause and effect is impossible to achieve.  If we can remember that, then perhaps we will feel less of a need to simplify reality by ignoring inconvenient facts and inventing naratives.

If we can do that, our political debates will probably be more productive.