Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Extrapolating from the work of Immanuel Kant, in this paper I argue that knowledge and the ability to reason are the preconditions for freedom, that of individuals and of societies. Making a free choice implies knowing what we are choosing, and at least minimal reasoning about the advantages and disadvantages of our decision. A blind choice cannot be a free choice. In this sense, choices derived from propaganda, fake news, neuromarketing, neuropolitics, or deep surveillance technologies are free in appearance only. Though some aspects of collective reasoning are rapidly improving, most notably the speed of abstract processing as measured by IQ testing, others are declining. In an era when post-truths, fake news, and deep fakes spread at a rapid speed, the public ability to differentiate truth from falsity is declining, as I also argue in this paper. Threatening our ability to make knowledgeable choices, these declines threaten our freedom. And because democracy presupposes publics able to make knowledgeable and, in this sense, free choices, these emergent processes also threaten the socio-psychological underpinnings of this political system. In the last part of the paper, I suggest that the antidote to these already significant problems is sustained, effortful, and ongoing public literacy about society, the public ability to read the world itself. The humanities, for this reason, have an important, if not critical, role to play in an increasingly globalized world.