Anti Corruption Activism and Investigative Journalism

General
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Just in the last few weeks I’ve had a few meetings with international NGOs in the space of anti corruption and investigative journalism with view to surfacing their frustrations and suggesting new models.

They all suffer from under-funding, increasingly subject to denials or delays in accessing freedom of information (FOI), targeting by the power, loss of engagement and diminshed shock impact of revelations. Since there’s no meaningful social appreciation of what they are doing and high risk of physical, legal, financial and psychological threats/harms - it’s no wonder they suffer from low morale.

Broadly they have little faith in the ability to affect a positive change in the system, yet, they are still alligned with traditional ideals of journalism that are not valid anymore. They celebrate their symbolic little victories - but it’s only a drop in the ocean.

I’m actually quite shocked how disillusioned they seem to be and yet totally dismissive of new models!

The core value proposition is:
Coonfronting injustice, holding power accountable, and enabling social transformation by mobilising people, disrupting harmful norms, and demanding systemic change.

The grand narratives are:
“The truth will set us free”
“Public awareness leads to accountability” - but not valid anymore

I tried to address the following points:

  1. Funding
  2. Political power
  3. Alignment with progressive interest groups
  4. Multi media content
  5. Focus on local corruption as opposed to top down approach

I thought that these groups should be concerned with capacity building and empowerment and they should align themselves with some progressive sources of economical and political power.

Unfortunately, they all seem very rigid and sticking to the values that their audience doesn’t value as much anymore. Anyone has any thoughts about this?

Are radical realism, systems thinking, co-creation and experimentation the way forward?

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My starting point for a response is Y. N. Harari’s distinction between 'information as truth" and “information as power”. (See Nexus for more on that). My understanding is that most social formations over long history have been more interested in information as power, most of the time. Whatever stories keep the current hierarchy in place are most acceptable in most situtations. Information as truth, by contrast, has generally been a specialized pursuit. Where truth starts to matter more widely is when it starts to produce technical results that are hard to argue with.

Case in point - the current US administration is clearly bent on information as power and considers scientific investigation as wasteful. The public at large will start caring more about science again when diseases like polio start their inevitable comeback.

So in the face of story manufacture in the service of power, how did truth telling get any vogue at all? It took specialized, distributed networks, outside the grasp of any particular sovereign, to get fact-based narratives a wide hearing. The early modern scientific “republic of letters” network is a good example. Persecute a Descartes in France, he shows up next in Amsterdam or Sweden. Information as truth favors distributed networks.

Therein lies my advice to the independent journalists of the future. Confronting power with truth is off target. Power, in general, cares little for that and will just attack and imprison. Aim truthful information instead at networks who care about such matters.

That may seem like a counsel of doom pending the development of some inevitable AI matrix to keep all remaining humans perpetually stupefied (an ultimate endgame for information as power). My hypothesis - and hope - is that distributed global networks of truth-aligned humans can find ways around that and regenerate a different sort of civilization through the process of navigating collapse. We’ll need something like independent journalism to support that process.

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I’m careful about the notion of truth - one might say that we all have personal truths and distill information into narratives that coherently fit our individual context.

Latour analysed truth and factuality and made that distinction. Foucault rejects the ideal of a “God’s eye’s view” and Nietzsche wrote - “There are no facts, only interpretations”.

Bourdieu claimed that every perspective is directed linked to a worldview and, more recently, Dave Snowden in his Cynefyn framework claims that complex systems are characterised by competing coherent hypotheses that are difficult to analyse.

Therefore, it might be the case that chasing “independent” truth is a wild goose chase and, ultimately, one needs to take an ideological position in the struggle.

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Hmmm. Good to be …

… but how about making distinctions – though probably not black-and-white ones – between different degrees of objectivity? I can imagine an ideal journalist working tirelessly to uncover what has been hidden, perhaps deliberately. There are certain kinds of truth – what happened, rather than anyone’s interpretation of it – that people do tend to agree on, and without which I can’t see how any legal system could possibly operate.

Indeed…

and clearly this is what often happens. But this position does look to me more postmodern than metamodern.

Do Cynefin, for sure, when we are talking about high complexity. There are realms where what is happening cannot be reduced to anything less than complex, and sure then we can go there. Equally, there are more common sense realms where I suggest society might well fall apart without a common conception of reality.

And I see as important what Robert points to:

Isn’t it indeed true, in a sense easily agreed by us, that this is what happens? Isn’t it observably true that, often, those in power try to conceal what is actually happening, to the detriment of those with less or no power?

So I find myself broadly in line with

Though if people wish to risk being attacked or imprisoned for attempting to reveal what needs to be revealed, I can see that as a noble self-sacrifice, but not an ethical norm of any kind.

And, yes, ideally, tell the emergent truth to those who care. The danger to look out for here, maybe plays back into something more Martinesque: echo chambers etc. are build from people telling others “truths” that they want to hear. Don’t we want to tell our truths to exactly those who don’t want to hear them? To do that effectively needs great skill, and I’m no expert at that!

I don’t see any clear resolution here, but I wouldn’t want in any way to dismiss the idea, and ideal, of seeking to know and pass on the kind of truth that “will set you free”.

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I want to come back to

It could be seen as a grand narrative, sure, when wedded to a normative view of “truth”. But how about seeing it differently? Turn it round … what sets you free is the truth. What sets you (anyone) free? What do we need to be set free from? It’s quite different from a kind of postmodern “your truth”. The truth which sets us free is often, in my estimation, something that we really don’t want to hear. We are stuck, just because we don’t recognise the relevant truth.

Scientific truths may set you free from harmful superstitions. But scientific truth isn’t ever going to set you free from meaninglessness. We need something more meaningful. Onwards, not backwards.

Anyway, this, to me, is a juicy line of enquiry.

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Here’s an example. I spent the morning discussing matters philosophical and theological with a group of Bahá’í friends. My own spirituality - such as it is - is thoroughly polyglot and not formally committed to much of anything (other than where the spirit guides me moment to moment), but I’ve developed a fascination with Bahá’í as a relatively recent addition to the roster of revealed religious. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that great Bahá’í teachers possessed a species of truth. It’s instructive how that truth evolved its relationship to established clerical and secular authority over the generations.

  • the Báb proclaimed the end of Islam (in Mecca, no less) and after a few years was executed.

  • his follower, Baháʼu’lláh, received divine revelation while imprisoned in a dank Tehran dungeon. He decided to keep that to himself, for awhile, however. He was then exiled to Ottoman Iraq and remained the rest of his life under house arrest or imprisonment in various Ottoman territories. Nevertheless, he was able to communicate with followers and his movement grew.

  • Baháʼu’lláh’s son, ʻAbdu’l-Bahá, was appointed his authentic interpreter and allowed to leave the Ottoman prison city of Acca. ʻAbdu’l-Bahá went on world tour and the faith spread more.

  • Shoghí Effendi, ʻAbdu’l-Bahá’s grandson, was appointed Guardian of the faith. Shoghí Effendi set about to organize governance of the new religion via representative institutions. After the passing of Shoghí Effendi in 1957, the affairs of the Bahá’í have been governed through a process that strikes me as having affinity to a Habermasian public square.

  • the current 12 principles of the Bahá’í faith scarcely differ much from my own more securely inspired vision of “what the world needs”. Which probably explains why I like to hang out with Bahá’ís!
    Lights of Unity - 12 Principles

So … back to our original point. I’m fascinating how the vision of someone like the Báb, who at first blush seems an extreme fanatic, evolves decades later into a set of principles that seem well aligned recent metamodern philosophizing. Nowadays, my friends meet in public libraries and martyrdom is not really in the offing. How did truth find its way around power? Also, are there any generalizable lessons here, beyond the experience of this one particular faith?

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Latour, Foucault, Bourdieu and post-Nietzschean thought in general fall under the heading of the “post-modern”, a rubric that also often is applied to Harari himself. My associates (case in point: Brendan Graham Dempsey) are more metamodern in outlook, and more open to some emergent notion of “truth” and truth seeking.

Having a spent a few days last fall (virtually and then in person), in the company of Dave Snowden, I would not exactly align Snowden with the notion that truth is relative. Snowden does indeed loathe pre-conceived master narratives. But it’s not like Cynefin avoids empirical data gathering and grounded research models to interpret such data. Snowden’s critical views of the leading lights of metamodernism is that they practice too much theory, and not enough data gathering. (In Seattle, I heard Snowden skewer Vervaeke, Henriques, and McGilchrist all in the same sentence!) Nevertheless, across the lunch table, I smiled at Snowden and shared that I do in fact like to hang out with the Metamuggles. So my views on Cynefin vs metatheory allow for both/and.

In this article I used Snowden to crack the practical problem of how to introduce metatheory to students without making them sit through 50 hours of Meaning Crisis YouTube first.

My “ah ha” on that one is we all now dwell in the Cynefin Chaotic, so the indicated action learning loop is: act-sense-respond. Don’t just theorize - do something! Of course, the careful reader will note that I justify the framing of the whole world now being Cynefin Chaotic through the work of meta-theorist par excellence Peter Pogany. So it’s not like I’m uninfected by big ideas. I just figured out that big ideas can wait their turn while we all lean into passion and intuition and tight little action loops to get our collective feet on the ground. There is plenty of truth-seeking available through this process. The question of “what does the world need?” demands serious investigation. Where I align with Snowden the most is in not putting immediate action discernment on perpetual hold while we theorize the world and try to derive some master plan from whatever the theory indicates. Where I align with Brendan Graham Dempsey (and other metamodernists), is on the notion of emergence. I fully expect ground level action-learning to promote the emergence of more expansive consciousness and global collaboration models. It’s just that I’ve arrived at such views more through abduction and induction than deduction.

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