The Internet of Us Read Free Page B

as there have been mobs. That’s why my mom used to ask, in response to my whine that “everyone else is [doing, saying, believing] something” that, “If everyone jumped off a bridge, would you jump off too?” Well, hopefullynot, but the history of humanity might suggest otherwise. We not only tend to follow others’ actions, we also seem all too willing to go along with what they believe. We trust their testimony, even when we shouldn’t.
    My mom’s skepticism about the reliability of testimony has deep roots in our culture. The seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke snarled at the idea that you can know something merely because someone else tells you: “I hope it will not be thought arrogance to say,” he begins, “that perhaps we should make greater progress in the discovery of rational and contemplative knowledge if we sought it in the fountain . . . of things in themselves, and made use rather of our own thoughts than other men’s to find it.” He goes on, “The floating of other men’s opinions in our brains makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true. What in them was science is in us but opiniatrety.” 8 Locke’s point seems to be that real knowledge only comes from your own personal observations, or use of your memory, logical reasoning, or so on. Real knowers, he seems to say, are self-reliant: they drink from the fountain of “things in themselves.” That is, they believe only when they have, or least can easily obtain, reasons—reasons based on personal observations and critical thinking—for one side of the given issue or another.
    An emphasis on self-reliance makes sense given that Locke was a founding figure of the Enlightenment, known for celebrating the individual’s political rights and autonomy. For Locke, citizens had a natural right to their property, and the government needed to be relatively standoffish with regard to how people used that property. This trumpeting of the rights of the individual had a natural epistemic correlate, call it Locke’s command: thou shalt figure things out thyself. The sentiment is echoed again and again throughout the period. Kant, in fact, defined enlightenment partly in terms of it: as humanity’s “emergence from a self-imposed immaturity”—immaturity due to lack of courage to think for oneself as opposed to going with the flow. 9 One could not even enter the British Royal Society without passing under their motto (then and now) of nullius in verba (“take nobody’s word for it”).
    These sentiments were largely a reaction to an older idea—that all knowledge requires deferring to, and trusting, authority. Education in the sixteenth century was still very much a matter of mastering certain religious and classical texts, and what you knew came from those, and only those, texts. But as it became apparent that these texts were often wrong (think of Galileo’s and Copernicus’ discoveries, for example) the method of consulting them for knowledge came to seem naive. Thus by 1641, we find Descartes wiping away such methods with the very first sentence of his most famous book: “Some years ago I was struck by the large numbers of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them.” 10 Descartes sat down and attempted to reconstruct what he really knew—using only materials that he could find with his own mind—and he implicitly urged his reader to do the same. In other words, don’t trust someone else’s say-so; question authority.
    This is still good advice—to a point. That’s because, really, “Locke’s command” is impossible to follow strictly. We can’tfigure everything out for ourselves. So, if we interpret Locke as telling us that you only really know that which you