"We cannot rely on an election to solve our problems, when the president threatens the very integrity of that election."
-- Jerry Nadler, House Judiciary Committee Chairman
I in no way want to excuse what Trump is accused of doing, but this is misguided: alarmist and simplistic.
The President cannot threaten the very integrity of that election unless you don't have any faith in the American voter. He can spread all the lies and misinformation he wants, it is up to the people to decide. The same is true about Russia and all of the other candidates. It is true about the media as well. They can all try to mislead and misinform as much as they want; it is the voters who have the ability and responsibly to make their choices and to do so in a way that will make the government work.
I know that puts a lot of responsibility on people that are already busy and don't have much time to be well informed. And I add to the burden by saying that they need to be more than informed: they need to be knowledgeable and even wise. (Neil Postman does a great job of defining those terms in his book Building a Bridge to the 18th Century in the chapter titled Information.) That responsibility needs to be shared, but it is not. We tend to give away that responsibility to the media, the government, the politicians or even the algorithms that run our digital lives.
But in the end, we need to rely on the people to make informed decisions. That is the basis of democracy. Information technology has made that more difficult than ever because we are all more misinformed than ever, but we believe we are well informed. (See Postman on being informed and knowledgeable versus being ignorant in Amusing Ourselves to Death.) Being awash in information to the point of being paralyzed, helpless and apathetic or only being able to react with knee-jerk responses it not being informed.
Part of the problem with the people, the voters, is that we have all been educated in a way that didn't prepare us for the chaos of the age of information. We were taught that information is good; we weren't (and most students still aren't) taught that information is meaningless without context. This has a lot to do with the way that we understand what facts and truth are in the age of science.
Science finds facts and puts them together so we can know what is true. (In this way it is like any method of inquiry or thinking.) The scientific method is presented as a mechanical (and therefore unbiased and objective) process that scientists go through to find objective and unbiased facts and arrive at objective and unbiased truth. This kind of truth and facts-- because it is objective and unbiased-- needs no context. Or that is what we are often told, or at least led to believe. It is how we understand science and scientific facts and truths. There is a problem with that, and we make it worse when we take that understanding of truth into our everyday lives.
Science, when done well, is quite unbiased and pretty objective. However, it is also based on certain assumptions and values. These work for science, and they reinforce the idea that science is objective and unbiased. Everyday life, and the facts and truths of it, are different than that of a scientist in a lab and/or with the instruments they use to observe and measure. The context of science-- its facts, truths, assumptions and values-- exists next to but aside from the rest of our lives. It does what it does well, but it is not objective and unbiased completely. These work for science, but they should not necessarily be transferred into everyday life: not the idea of being unbiased, of being objective nor the assumptions or values.
The context of science is not the same context that we live in: not the one that other academic fields like sociology work in; not the one that we have interpersonal relationships in; not the one that politics operates in; and so on. These things have their own contexts with their own facts, truths, assumptions and values. As a result, we need to know those facts, truths, assumptions and values as much as possible to be not just informed but knowledgeable and maybe even wise in those areas.
That of course is not easy. But if we are educated to realize it is not easy, we will be more hesitant to think that things are obvious or self-evident. We will know that we need to be knowledgeable and not just informed. We will know when to listen to authorities who know the context and have knowledge and hopefully wisdom.
This means that we need to be more than just informed, and as a result it something that the internet cannot do. No matter how much information is there, it can't. No matter how good the algorithms are that sort that information, it can't. We need to know when we need to go beyond information and where and who to go to get more. This is something we have to be taught; it is a way of thinking and acting in the world-- especially on the internet.
Education should not just tell us facts, truth or information: at least not higher level education. Education needs to tell us not just what the facts are and what is true, but more importantly how and why they are true. This means understanding the context, which has to do with knowing the assumptions and values. That way, when the context changes, we can know and understand that the facts and truths may have changed, and maybe give us the ability to think about how.
If you think that the president can 'threaten the very integrity of an election' by digging up dirt on an opponent (even if that involves lies and abuse of power), then I think you don't have a very good opinion of the American people who will be voting in that election.
Maybe at this point we shouldn't have a very positive opinion about the ability of the American voters to choose their leaders. But laying the blame on Trump, or Russia or anyone else besides the voters is letting them off the hook and is really an insult to democracy.
The media has a part to play, and I think they are not living up to it. The politicians have a bigger part to play, and I think they too are falling far short. The people have the biggest part to play, and they are falling short too.
I am convinced that the fact that the people are falling short has to do with our understanding of what is going on and how we were educated-- both of which have been damaged by an over-emphasis on science and technology. It is the people and their education and understanding of things that needs to be the focus when we look into what is going wrong and how to fix it. Focusing on Trump, Russia or anything else is a scapegoat. It is a feelgood way to shift blame and fix symptoms while ignoring the problem.
