Why am I passionate about this?
I’m a writer and professor of literary studies whose work has been deeply involved in topics of truth, realism, and public policy. My recent book considers works of fiction that openly and honestly experiment with questions of uncertainty, identity, and risk in the supermodern present. This book draws from disciplinary discourses in law, finance, and economics, which similarly contend with competing claims to truth and value and dive deep into the circumstantial and speculative games that authors play when they write fiction about reality. I have my PhD in Spanish Literature (UVA), M.A. in International Affairs and Economics (Johns Hopkins Univ.), and a B.A. from Harvard University.
Virginia's book list on combating post-truth contagions
Why did Virginia love this book?
I found incredibly compelling the argument of how important humility and the willingness to admit what we don’t know are to democratic, liberal thought.
That we have become a society that rarely listens to ideas that challenge our own or that disrupt what we think we know to be true–is hugely dangerous.
As Lynch explores, more information has not led to greater certainty or confidence in the answers we find. What we are experiencing is not only a crisis of truth, but one of trust.
1 author picked Know-It-All Society as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Taking stock of our fragmented political landscape, Michael Patrick Lynch delivers a trenchant philosophical take on digital culture and its tendency to make us into dogmatic know-it-alls. The internet-where most shared news stories are not even read by the person posting them-has contributed to the rampant spread of "intellectual arrogance." In this culture, we have come to think that we have nothing to learn from one another; we are rewarded for emotional outrage over reflective thought; and we glorify a defensive rejection of those different from us.
Interweaving the works of classic philosophers such as Hannah Arendt and Bertrand Russell…