How Does My Marriage Harm Your Marriage?

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In 19 95, my father warned me not to become an advocate of same sex marriage. He said that it would destroy my reputation as a journalist. 20 years later, it's nationally legal, two thousand 15 and not even very controversial. We did that through moral conversation. And in fact, it works incredibly quickly by historic standards. But you have to have an environment where these arguments can happen.

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.