THE NATION : THE CULTURE WARS : How We Know What We Know: Logic Meets Illogic at Simpson Trial

Here is one possible scenario: Sometime this fall, a few weeks after O.J. Simpson is either acquitted or his jury hangs, Barbara Walters (or will it be Diane Sawyer?) will fix him with that patented look of pained concern. “You know, O.J., there are still many people who think you are guilty,” Walters/Sawyer will say, measuring each word. “What do you say to them?” And Simpson will shake his head incredulously and flash that smile and say, “I can’t help what people think. All I know is, no jury has convicted me and, in my heart, I know I didn’t do it.”

George Orwell told us there would be days like these--days when lies would pass for truth, and truth for lies; days when language would be denatured of all meaning; days when the foundations of knowledge would begin to crack. But Orwell was warning us against repressive, totalitarian behemoths with the power to scramble our logical coordinates and substitute new coordinates by fiat. It turns out Orwell was wrong. He should have been warning us against the shenanigans at the Los Angeles Criminal Courts Building.

Whatever racial, legal and cultural repercussions follow from the trial of the former football star for double homicide, there is one Orwellian consequence that may be more serious than the rest and yet has been discussed not at all. That is the trial’s effect on our epistemology.

Epistemology, from the Greek word for knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with the methods by which we come to know things. Within its province are how the mind grapples with fact, how one tests the truthfulness of a proposition, how the senses relate to the mind--in short, everything that tells us how we know what we know.

Admittedly, this may seem arcane, the stuff of soporific graduate seminars. But, as Orwell realized, epistemology is fundamental to who we are and how we function as a society. Change the rules of epistemology, and you change the culture. Make people doubt what their reason tells them to be true, and you have altered reality. Just look at the old Soviet empire.

In fairness to Simpson, our epistemology has been undergoing change long before this trial. From this country’s inception, Americans have been paranoid. And, now, for more than 20 years, we are immersed in a culture of distrust. We have not only become wary of everything we see and hear, but we have become increasingly susceptible to the most outrageous leaps of illogic, because in a world where the rational is under steady attack, the preposterous fills the vacuum. Some people actually believe the Oklahoma City bombing was a government frame-up. Then again, some believe Simpson was hitting golf balls at 10 o’clock the night of his wife’s murder.

If we have come to distrust every scrap of information we receive, our suspicions have only been intensified by the chief delivery system of that information: television. Television, as the critic Neil Postman has eloquently argued, creates its own epistemology. It changes how we come to know things. Television is interested in images, not discourse, in sensations, not ideas. It fragments and decontextualizes. More, since television images are malleable, TV makes one question whatever one sees. It is a medium, in Postman’s words, where “all assumptions of coherence have vanished.”

Because we live in a world fashioned by television, television’s epistemology has inevitably inflicted itself upon us, and the Simpson trial, as America’s most popular TV show, is the very archetype of television epistemology. We watch the Simpson trial on TV the way we watch everything else on TV. The cast returns, but each episode is new and self-contained. Facts from previous episodes don’t have to connect with facts from later episodes. Discontinuities abound. Technical information is lost because it isn’t telegenic. Impressions alone count: defense attorney Johnnie L. Cochran Jr.’s confidence, criminalist Dennis Fung’s bumbling, Simpson’s struggling with the gloves as if he were trying to shove his feet into baby booties.

Moreover, we know from other TV shows that, in the end, none of the facts matter, anyway. Perry Mason will induce the real culprit to confess. Or Matlock will discover some shard of evidence that will reverse the heretofore logical conclusion. That’s what Cochran--clearly this trial’s Perry Mason--understands. He is appealing to the new epistemology of dysfunction inculcated, in part, by years of TV watching, while poor Marcia Clark is forced to toil in the fields of the old epistemology--where facts must connect and parse. And he knows that epistemology is what is on trial--not Simpson.

Just a few years ago, the Rodney G. King trial gave us a preview of what this sort of epistemological chaos looks like. Look closely at that videotape, said the defense attorneys in the first trial, where a black man was clobbered senseless by white policemen. What do you see? If you think you see a supine black man being beaten by white officers, look again. Are you seeing everything? Could the black man actually be resisting? Are your senses trustworthy? The largely white jury answered “no.” Now, ironically, Simpson defense attorney Cochran must try the same ploy with his largely black jury--only it is their sense, not their senses, that is being tested.

Theoretically, of course, a trial, like Simpson’s, should be an epistemological laboratory where the aim is to weigh evidence, to separate fact from fiction, to determine, as best one can, the truth “beyond a reasonable doubt.” But Cochran and the members of Simpson’s defense team cannot--and frankly should not--appeal to common sense. Their job is to get Simpson acquitted, and one can hardly blame them when, in the face of an overwhelming case against their client, they keep flinging motes in the jurors’ eyes in the hope that the jurors finally will not see what is plainly before them. Colombian drug lords who can’t tell dark-haired Faye Resnick from blonde Nicole Brown Simpson? A vast police conspiracy against Simpson by the very department that pampered him for years? Sloppy police work, sloppy lab work? An arthritic Simpson? All motes.

So it is a testament to the new epistemology that nearly every legal expert, as well as the vast majority of the general public, are predicting that the Simpson jurors will either acquit him or deadlock. Virtually no one is predicting a conviction. More important, in the larger court of public opinion, millions of Americans--21% of white Americans, 78% of blacks by the most recent ABC poll--profess to believe in Simpson’s innocence. “Maybe the most overwhelming circumstantial case in the history of American jurisprudence” is how one savvy attorney described the evidence against Simpson to me. And maybe the greatest single outbreak of epistemological impairment, too. This is not to say the old epistemology was infallible, it was simply the most reliable system devised to make sense of the world.

Meanwhile, each day, Cochran and company, with the assistance of the tabloid media, encourage us to abandon the old logic. Each day, we are taught to distrust not just the obvious facts but our own ability to process them. Each day, what we think we know recedes. Or to paraphrase one dismissed juror, just because the police found a sock with Nicole Simpson’s blood on it in the defendant’s bedroom doesn’t mean he committed the murder. What does it mean?

Put simply, everything in this trial, so far--every article of physical evidence, every laboratory report, every blown alibi, every witness save Rosa Lopez, every far-fetched defense theory--should, I believe, by the rules of the old logic, point to Simpson’s guilt.

Those of us from the old epistemological school are dismayed that this conclusion isn’t taken as a matter of course. We not only argue with the new epistemologists over his guilt, we now assume his eventual exoneration. When the King-beating defendants were acquitted in the first trial, there was at least a ready explanation: racism. If and when the largely black jury fails to convict Simpson, do we chalk it up to race again or do we chalk it up to some larger failure of epistemology?

Will we say that many of our fellow Americans are unable to synthesize information? That many were afraid to call him guilty because his persona as a charming celebrity was too overwhelming? That they were waiting for Cochran to squeeze a last-minute courtroom confession out of some Colombian drug lord?

Or will we simply say that a frightening number of Americans no longer know how to know?*

*

There will be other pieces offering contrasting views on the Simpson trial in future weeks.