In a recent article  for Slate,  Farhad Manjoo offers a critical look at WikiLeaks  through the lens of the release of Afghanistan war logs. Manjoo asks, “Is radical transparency compatible with total anonymity?”.  With total anonymity of sources, which means that even WikiLeaks does not know and cannot know the sources of the leaks it provides, WikiLeaks has become “an opaque, insular organization” and has “shrouded itself in secrecy.”  As if the pejorative ‘insular’ and ‘shrouded’ and ‘secrecy’ were not enough, this is “a problem” Manjoo informs us, since “most whistle-blowers” have “some sort of agenda” and this agenda is “part of the story” and “could provide valuable context.”  Manjoo concludes, “would many leakers balk if WikiLeaks began asking them simple questions? Let me offer a few suggestions: Who are you, how did you find this document, and why are you leaking it now?”

As one who has been on the WikiLeak side of this kind of criticism (an experience originating a mild theme for my book in progress), I felt compelled to offer a reply.  I have not in the past spent much time on the political.  Perhaps I am finally getting drawn in, or perhaps it is not just politics at stake here. This issue regards our appreciation, or lack thereof, for the endearing role totalitarianism has played through human history, particularly with respect to the gruesomely attained discovery of that still globally rare and precious form of life we call freedom.  Freedom to think, freedom to know, freedom to talk, freedom to act.  Freedom from unknown microphones in one’s bedside phone and freedom from imprisonment and torture for failure to whoop it up for the local big-mouthed pathological monomaniac.  I speak of a Freedom not only for the guru or the state sponsored saint or the patriarch or the dear leader or all those deluded murderous tyrants we apparently cannot live without. I speak of a Freedom of the human mammal, which, by categorical definition, possesses some extent of at least a rough similarity to my own consciousness, emotions, and nervous system.

In answer to Manjoo’s question then—and I am glad he asks it—‘NO’, I do not think many leakers would “balk.”  They after all are in a position of simply trying to find a way to “balk” about their own immediate affiliations and social ties and daily life routines without the ramifications of, on the mild end of the whipping stick, the fine-tuned mechanisms of discrimination, shunning, ridicule, shame, and psychological torture.  These leakers would hardly have the arrogance, motivation, emotional energy, or concern to “balk” at WikiLeak for asking such questions.  These would-be leakers would simply not leak, but go on, oppressed by their knowledge of the truth that powerful people have so far succeeded in keeping under wraps.  The suggestion that “most whistle-blowers” have some “sort of agenda” is an insult to all those men and women who have suffered for the cause of truth.  I do hope that Manjoo’s easy dismissal of this possibility from even a quick reference does not reflect his own inability to empathize with this kind of “agenda”.  As WikiLeak alleges, globally, “Whistleblowers account for around half of all exposures of fraud.”  It is hard to imagine that this important source of truth in the world is primarily guided by private ambitions or more neutral selfish drives like “agendas”, irrelevant if not counter to, the knowledge of the truth. 

As for the charge of insularity and secrecy:  How does this smear—that is all it can be, right or wrong: a smear apt to cue strong emotions—fall even near the argumentative crux?  The military needs a mechanism to secure some information.  In this case, this mechanism failed. This was only ‘secret’ information though. So far, we have seen no ‘top secret’ information.  We have laws about leaking this information.  The leaker still stands the risk of discovery and prosecution according to law and under the protections of the U.S. Constitution—although the leaker is currently ‘innocent’ and will remain so until declared guilty by someone other than Obama and James Jones—while Wikileaks has established itself even more as a safe source to leak important information from within oppressive regimes throughout the world.

Manjoo stays clear of this more sticky point of law and the peculiar power of the executive branch and military to the more interesting epistemological point: how do we know? How do we know why the documents were leaked, or if these are all the relevant documents or if the documents have been tampered?  But the argument here is mangled.  Manjoo confuses two kinds of evidence: the evidence of primary documents and the evidence of testimony.  Understanding the source indeed will provide narrative context and such context is always “helpful”—as well as entertaining—but after 90,000 of official military documents have been presented to the court of public opinion, such “helpfulness” diminishes up an asymptotic curve.  The media has been concerned about what these documents say, with the interpretive context well secured over the fact that they do not know who leaked, why, if these are all the documents and, prima facie, if they have been tampered. And alternatively, the government simply wants the leaker’s head on a stick, regardless of who he is and why he leaked the information.  Manjoo has therefore simply played into the hands of the authoritarian and helped weaken our always tentative grasp on freedom.  

I leave you with Wikileak’s nailing of the epistemological point:

WikiLeaks believes that best way to truly determine if a story is authentic, is not just our expertise, but to provide the full source document to the broader community – and particularly the community of interest around the document. So for example, let’s say a WikiLeaks’ document reveals human rights abuses and it is purportedly from a regional Chinese government. Some of the best people to analyze the document’s veracity are the local dissident community, human rights groups and regional experts (such as academics). They may be particularly interested in this sort of document. But of course WikiLeaks will be open for anyone to comment.

In the hopes of populating a conceptual domain that contrasts with ‘faith’, it would seem – on the face of it at least – that the search be well served by sticking close to those realities we refer to as ‘knowledge’. But ‘knowledge’ is a word with a broad use; in addition to propositional knowledge – for example, ‘knowing that eggs are not green’ – we can also get to know a person (including God), know how to question a fool, or come to know what it is like to worship God in Holiness. We are already up to four kinds of knowledge here: propositional, personal, practical, and experiential. And the Hebraic mind was often quite satisfied with just the latter three. Thus, for a fundamentalism bound to the language of Old Testament scripture, emphasis may be properly placed on the knowledge of how to live in community, the knowledge of God the person, and the knowledge of what it was like to worship God and love the brethren.

Drawing exegetical support for this general point is not difficult. Consider, for example, one of the most important claims about knowledge in the New Testament, a reference to personal knowledge of God:

. . . that which is known about God is evident within them; for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks. (Romans 1:19-23)

Our Hellenistic tradition has often assumed this to be a reference to our natural ability to derive propositional knowledge about God. But this is a gross imposition on the text. Paul is not making the more difficult claim that all the non-Christians in Rome have propositional knowledge about the true God; this could have been disconfirmed with a simple probe of basic questions. Rather, this is a presentation of a more mysterious notion – more true to the apostle’s ethos – that there is a personal relationship felt on some level; a personal knowledge of God’s unique personality and divinity; a conscience, an impulse to respond in relational ways: “…even though they knew God they did not . . . give thanks.”  In addition to this innate, irreducible, and relational kind of knowledge, we are confronted with the possibility of the mystical, the numinous, a special connection to the transcendent.

Now recall last entry’s topic. This is Plantinga’s sensus divinitatus working, naturally, on half steam and grinding away on a number of broken gears and pulleys, but now knocked off its analytic armchair and handed over to the literati.

If the fundamentalist did know what it was like to worship the true God, did know how to live in community with wisdom, and did know the personal God in whom we live, move, and have our being, then it is not clear how much need there would be for the knowledge of facts about God to begin with. The skeptic’s point about knowing what you know might just be beside the point of knowledge.  Propositional knowledge of fact, pace Plantinga, is not properly basic; there is no need for a cognitive belief generating module to be zapped back into place by Big Brother. Rather, propositional knowledge is properly irrelevant.

But again, our concern about the tension between faith and reason is a very reasonable one, a very sound, practical concern resonating with the intuition of most over many centuries. So where do we turn to address this tension? I have already found armchair investigation of Belief (Part 1 & Part 2), Metaphor , and Narrative to give us nothing, and now Knowledge is also a dead end. I will therefore abandon philosophy proper altogether.  A new methodology awaits.

We have tried Belief (Intro & Part 1 and Part 2), Metaphor, and Narrative and have found nothing. The armchair exploration of these joints of nature have only reinforced the notion that there is only harmony between faith and reason. But before torturing, burning, shooting, and mutilating our philosophical armchair and moving on, we have one last domain to address: Knowledge.

Before getting right to the meat, however, I want to give a layman’s introduction to the work of the new reformed epistemology, best represented by Alvin Plantinga. I am most comfortable referring to Plantinga’s work only. Without Plantinga’s presence as a world class analytic philosopher in the 20th century, the contemporary philosophy classroom would have less patience for a conservative Christian point of view.  We would also be without the 20th century’s greatest effort to locate a philosophical harmony between faith and reason – capped off by Oxford’s 2000 edition of Warranted Christian Belief.  To the layman, the title might suggest an exploration of Belief, rather than Knowledge. However, in Plantinga’s game Warranted Christian Belief just is Knowledge. ‘Belief’ is the place holder and ‘Warranted’ is the war.

The backdrop to Plantinga’s argument is the traditional Justified True Belief model, a model that has been refined and rarified by countless too many analytic monkeys.  On this model, someone knows something if – and as any of the mathematical monkeys would say, only if - they have a true belief that is rationally justified in the right sort of way. Knowledge IS (=) Justified True Belief. It helps to symbolize (obviously): K=JTB. Here is the idea: Someone might have a belief that turns out to be true, but unless this someone also owns justification for that belief, the belief will not amount to something we would call ‘knowledge’.   On this traditional model, justification comes about when a belief is rooted in the right sort of evidence in the right sort of way; the evidence comes – as it must – in the form of other beliefs, and so the model is inherently internalistic; this is an example of epistemic internalism.

One would think that humans would not be needed for this project; I suspect that a software program could have been designed for the generation of many of the published articles. But there are some interesting nuances: What this internalism means is that that which confers the status of knowledge to a true belief is that which is in principle something within the conscious grasp of the individual. Hence, the individual has the ability to sweep his own epistemic house, so to speak (as Chisholm once put it).  This is a matter of one having special access to that which gives a true belief the status of knowledge.  Special access is closely related to the general meaning of ‘justification’: someone can in principle justify his own beliefs. (I will take the liberty to note that this conception fits well with other illusions, such as freedom, control, inherent moral goodness or evil, and general, robust conscious awareness).

But internalism might not be true. There is the possibility that that which confers the status of knowledge to a true belief is not something the individual in principle has special access to. This would be the position called externalism. Externalism is therefore simply the denial of internalism. Alvin Plantinga is an externalist and therefore spends some of his time simply arguing against the thesis of internalism and spends some of his other time arguing for just what it is that does confer knowledge status to a true belief.  For Plantinga, knowledge is warranted true belief, or K=WTB.  (more…)