This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, August 2nd, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Between disinformation, cancel culture, a pandemic where science is among the first casualties,

it's important to take stock of what we know,

and take stock of why we know it.

Jonathan Rauch's new book, The Constitution of Knowledge, digs into why exactly our current

fights over truth aren't exactly new, and he offers

a way to get back to a respect for the process of creating new knowledge.

You have a lot to say in this book and a lot of it hinges upon the election of

2020 and the information wars that have really only intensified in the last couple of years but something that made me

I don't know it gave me a little bit of comfort and maybe it shouldn't have was that this fight about knowledge and when we know that we're acquiring

knowledge and when maybe we just suspect that we're acquiring knowledge is not

altogether new that this is a very long-term struggle.

It's ancient.

It goes back literally thousands of years and in its modern form, it goes back to the time of Galileo, who as you'll recall was

in prison for practicing science. So there's absolutely nothing new about the reality wars,

which is the conflict over who gets to decide what's true in a society and whether

there are right ways and wrong ways to do that and in fact there are there's the liberal way and then there's all the other ways and the book argues the liberal way is better.

So how do you get, how do you propose people adopt or re-adopt or buy in fully to the liberal way.

And if you wouldn't mind, describe what that is.

Yeah, I'll back up a bit and give you the bumper stickers for the three big points of the book and then we can come

back to the question you just asked.

...