Why assume people are smart? And why does that matter? It’s a starting point for just about everything else I do as a sociologist. I learned people are smart by spending over a decade of my life studying what they do and why they do it (and a lot longer than that interacting with them). What I mean is that people have reasons for doing what they’re doing that are as complicated and well thought out as the reasons you have for doing what you’re doing. Because I am a pragmatist, this wouldn’t matter if there wasn’t some benefit to assuming people are smart, so I offer three rules, things to gain from assuming that People are Smart, and not the opposite, based on all this.

Public trust must be earned and continually renewed for public education to continue to best function as a public good. To me, this means that I must show that I can be trusted not to unduly cross into other domains of social life in doing my job. In the words of literary critic Stanley Fish: do my job, don’t try to do someone else’s job, and don’t let anyone else do my job. In the words of W.E.B. DuBois, this ideal should be upheld to retain public trust in scholarship and to ensure that people in a democracy can best make use of knowledge. In the words of Max Weber, a founding voice in sociology (as is DuBois) and an intellectual hero, the closer to politics our subject matter comes, the more we are obligated to avoid partisanship, to save that for outside the classroom, where criticism is possible and there is not the power imbalance.
More practically (and perhaps cynically) speaking, institutions don’t survive because they are built on some vision of how people ought to be; they must be resilient in the face of how people actually are…

The real issue that confronts me when I consider the role of social media is the extent to which it may reproduce or facilitate “binary” thinking—“this” or “that”; us and them (my least favorite four-letter word is “they”). It’s hard to say something with nuance and qualification in a tweet. Memes, propaganda, and conspiracy theories do well in this sort of environment because they stimulate our brains in certain sorts of ways that cause instant, unreflective emotional reaction—it takes just a second to share or post something that viscerally stimulates but often hours to properly examine the claims being made. Those willing to engage in the work of carefully and skeptically examining claims, to be “informed and not just opinionated,” are perpetually disadvantaged in this kind of media environment; truth is the first and biggest casualty. That we talk admiringly now about “his truth” or “your truth” or “their truth” and telling, or seeking, “the truth” starts to sound quaint and old-fashioned reflects the kind of world that this media atmosphere has created.

I am going to start with an unfashionable idea: there is such a thing as truth, and over time, people who are willing to put in the time, effort, and hard work can get closer to it. I don’t care if anyone agrees with me, because if I am right, then the practical consequences of seeking truth (or not) will happen sooner or later regardless. I’m much more interested in why this idea has become unfashionable.