I was struck just now by the confluence of two pieces that are going around this morning. One is Barbara Fister’s Institutional Values and the Value of Truth-Seeking Institutions:
Even if the press fails often, massively, disastrously, we need it. We need people employed full-time to seek the truth and report it on behalf of the public. We need to defend the press while also demanding that they do their best to live up to these ethical standards. We need to call out mistakes, but still stand up for the value of independent public-interest reporting.
…
Librarians . . . well, we’re not generally seen as powerful enough to be a threat. Maybe that’s our ace in the hole. It’s time for us to think deeply about our ethical commitments and act on them with integrity, courage, and solidarity. We need to stand up for institutions that, like ours, support seeking the truth for the public good, setting aside how often they have botched it in the past. We need to apply our values to a world where traditions developed over years for seeking truth – the means by which we arrive at scientific consensus, for example – are cast aside in favor of nitpicking, rumor-mongering, and self-segregation.
The other is Eric Garland’s Twitter thread on how the U.S. intelligence community gathers and analyzes information:
<THREAD> I've been an intelligence practitioner for 20 years. What we're seeing is the *process* of intel in public. It's without precedent.
— Eric Garland (@ericgarland) January 12, 2017
In particular,
This is actually what I love about this work. You aggressively attack your own intellectual weakness. Assume it's wrong. Because it matters.
— Eric Garland (@ericgarland) January 12, 2017
Of course, if it is easy nowadays to be cynical about the commitment of the U.S. press to truth-seeking, such cynicism is an even easier pose to adopt towards the intelligence community. At the very least, spreading lies and misinformation is also in the spy’s job description.
But for the purpose of this post, let’s take the latter tweet at face value, as an expression of an institutional value held by the intelligence community (or at least by its analysts).
I’m left with a couple inchoate observations. First, a hallmark of social justice discourse at its best is a radical commitment to centering the voices of those who hitherto have been ignored. Human nature being what it is, at least a few folks who understood this during during their college days will end up working for the likes of the CIA. On the one hand, that sort of transition feels like a betrayal. On the other hand, I’m not Henry L. Stimson: not only is it inevitable that governments will read each other’s mail, my imagination is not strong enough to imagine a world where they should not. More “Social Justice Intelligence Analysts” might be a good thing to have — as a way of mitigating certain kind of intellectual weakness.
However, one of the predicaments we’re in is that the truth alone will not save us; it certainly won’t do so quickly, not for libraries, and not for the people we serve. I wonder if the analyst side of the intelligence community, for all their access to ways of influencing events that are not available to librarians, is nonetheless in the same boat.
Truth-seeking institutions and strange bedfellows by Galen Charlton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.