Alas, the narrative is constructed otherwise. Most of today’s narratives are. Thus early critics of the Rolling Stone story were treated as doubting not the story, but the narrative. If they thought this particular exercise of journalist craft seemed full of errors and unlikelihoods, they were minimizing the problem of sexual assault itself. This approach is a classic example of the fallacy of the false dilemma: There is actually no inconsistency in believing simultaneously that sexual assault is a serious problem and that this particular account doesn’t hang together. Similarly, there is no inconsistency in simultaneously believing that the detainee program was wrong and accepting that it might occasionally have produced actionable intelligence. It’s only our own lack of moral seriousness that causes us to confuse the two.
When disputes over facts are misconstrued as disputes over principles, the entire project of Enlightenment democracy it at risk. The liberalism of the Enlightenment rested critically on the supposition that agreement on the facts was a separate process from agreement on the values to be applied to them. The social theorist Karl Mannheim, in “Ideology and Utopia,” argued that we would never be able to separate the two, that we would always wind up seeing the facts through the lens of our preformed ideologies. Thus liberal democracy, in the Enlightenment sense, was bound to fail.
Let me here avoid the false dilemma. As a believer in democracy, I want Mannheim to be wrong. But our increasing elevation of preformed narrative over hard-eyed pursuit of truth suggests that he may turn out to be right.
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