Post truth

Thinking Activity: post Truth 

 

This blog reflects my understanding of the word- ‘Post-truth.

What exactly is meant by the term post-truth? Paradoxically, post-truth is among the most-talked-about yet least-well-defined meme words of our time. Most observers in the English-speaking world cite the 2016 Word of the Year Oxford English Dictionaries entry: post-truth is the public burial of “objective facts” by an avalanche of media “appeals to emotion and personal belief”.

        

 

The Oxford Dictionary defines the word ‘Post-truth’ as,

"relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief".

The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase post-truth politics. The popularity of the German postfaktisch (post-factual) usage captures much the same meaning. Selected as word of the year by the German language society Gesellschaft für Deutsche Sprache (GfdS), it refers to the growing tendency of “political and social discussions” to be dominated by “emotions instead of facts”.

The GfdS adds:

Ever greater sections of the population are ready to ignore facts and even to accept obvious lies willingly. Not the claim to truth, but the expression of the ‘felt truth’ leads to success in the ‘post-factual age’.

The Oxford Dictionaries define “post-truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In this, they underline that the prefix “post” is meant to indicate not so much the idea that we are “past” truth in a temporal sense (as in “postwar”) but in the sense that truth has been eclipsed—that it is irrelevant. These are fighting words to many philosophers, but it is worth noting that this is much more than an academic dispute. So is post-truth just about lying, then? Is it a mere political spin? Not precisely. As presented in the current debate, the word “post-truth” is irreducibly normative. It is an expression of concern by those who care about the concept of truth and feel that it is under attack.

The concept of truth in philosophy goes all the way back to Plato, who warned (through Socrates) of the dangers of false claims to knowledge. Ignorance, Socrates felt, was remediable; if one is ignorant, one can be taught. The greater threat comes from those who have the hubris to think that they already know the truth, for then one might be impetuous enough to act on a falsehood. It is important at this point to give at least a minimal definition of truth. Perhaps the most famous is that of Aristotle, who said: “to say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.”

There are other interesting relationships one can have with the truth. In his delightfully brash yet rigorous book On Bullshit, philosopher Harry Frankfurt makes the case that when one is bullshitting, one is not necessarily lying but instead may just be demonstrating a careless indifference toward what is true. Is that what Trump is doing? And there are other, more partisan, attitudes that one can have toward truth as well. When Gingrich claims that how we feel about the murder rate is more important than FBI statistics, one suspects he is just being cynical; he is a kind of enabler for post-truth.

If one looks at the Oxford definition, and how all of this has played out in the recent public debate, one gets the sense that post-truth is not so much a claim that truth does not exist as that fact are subordinate to our political point of view. The Oxford definition focuses on “what” post-truth is: the idea that feelings sometimes matter more than facts. Thus post-truth amounts to a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it or not. And this is a recipe for political domination.

Post-truth communication

We can say that “post-truth” is not simply the opposite of the truth, however, that is defined; it is more complicated. It is better described as an omnibus term, a word for communication comprising a salmagundi or assemblage of different but interconnected phenomena. Post-truth has recombinant qualities. For a start, it is a type of communication that includes old-fashioned lying, where speakers say things about themselves and their world that are at odds with impressions and convictions that they harbour in their mind’s eye.

Liars attempt alchemy: when someone tells lies they wilfully say things they “know” not to be true, for effect. An example is when Donald Trump claims there was never a drought in California, or that during his inauguration the weather cleared when actually light rain fell throughout his address.

Complaints against post-truth are often robust, loud and couched in high moral tones. Post-truth is said to be the beginning of the end of politics as we’ve known it in existing democracies.

There is talk of an emergent “post-truth era”. More than a few critics warn that the spread of post-truth is the harbinger of a new “totalitarianism”. Others speak of populist dictatorship or “fascism-lite” government.

The descriptors are questionable and display little understanding of the historical origins of the present drift towards government by gaslighting. Politics as the art of evasion, befuddlement and engineered public silence isn’t new. Lying in politics is an ancient art. Think of Plato’s noble lie, or Machiavelli’s recommendation that a successful prince must be “a great pretender and dissembler”, or Harry Truman’s description of Richard Nixon as:

… a no good, lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he’d lie just to keep his hand in.

Lying in politics isn't new, but digital media decadence is. Thomas Cizauskas/flickr

Some things don’t change. Still, there are several things that are unusual about the gaslighting trends of our time. Each is bound up with the unfinished communications revolution.

The digital merging and melding of text, sound and image, the advent of cheap copying and the growing ease of networked information spreading across vast distances in real-time are powerful drivers of post-truth decadence. New techniques and tools of communication are its conditions of possibility; they enable its production, rapid circulation and absorption into the body politics of democracies, and well beyond.

Think of photoshopped materials and mashups, web applications and pages that recycle content from more than one source to create a single new service displayed in a single graphical interface. Trump’s first campaign advertisement showed migrants allegedly crossing the Mexican border; in fact, it was an image of migrants crossing from Morocco to Melilla in North Africa

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Then consider impostor news sites (using URLs such as abc.com.co) and fantasy news sites, such as WTOE 5 News, which created the “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Trump for President” story, built using such tools as Clone Zone.

Post-truth spreads; it knows no borders. So, for instance, many Muslims living in countries as far apart as Britain, Pakistan and Indonesia understand that they are among the targets of the project of attacking “fake news” and making America great again. There’s yet another novelty of our period: the production and diffusion of post-truth communication by populist leaders, political parties and governments. The historical record shows that our times are no exception to the old rule that populism is a recurrent autoimmune disease of democracy. Some people fall for the promises not because they “naturally” crave leaders, or yield to the inherited “fascism in us all”. Among the strangest and most puzzling features of the post-truth phenomenon is the way it attracts people into voluntary servitude because it raises their hopes and expectations of betterment.

What’s the difference between lies and post-truth in politics?

In the public imagination politicians are professional liars par excellence, or as the writer, George Orwell once put it: “Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”

In her essay Truth and Politics, published in The New Yorker in 1967, the philosopher Hannah Arendt was already lamenting the fact that politics and truth don’t mix. But even Arendt was aware that not all lies are the same. There are lies that are minimal forms of deception, a micro-tear in the fabric of reality, while some lies are so big that they require a complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture, a shift to another reality. In today’s terminology, Arendt was alerting us to the difference between a lie, and the 2016 Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year – “post-truth”.

One way to understand the difference between lies and post-truth, which I’ve written about in a new paper, is that a liar denies specific facts that have precise coordinates in space and time, whereas post-truth questions the very nature of truth. A liar knows the truth, and, by trying to persuade us of an alternative narrative, a liar is paradoxically honouring the truth, whereas post-truth allows no last refuge for the truth.

Clinton versus Trump

This distinction between a lie and post-truth becomes more clear by comparing two recent American presidents, Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. At a White House press conference on January 26 1998, Clinton famously said:

I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time; never.

           

Clinton’s statement, given the subsequent revelations and a semen-stained blue dress, is disconcerting. It’s possible that Clinton did not consider his intimate interactions with Lewinsky as a “sexual relation”, but that is unlikely – it would require a phenomenal effort of self-deception, or ingenuity, to defend that position with honesty and integrity. Clinton was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice because he lied under oath, but he was ultimately acquitted in a Senate trial.

This is the major difference between a lie and a post-truth. While a lie subverts a specific truth, post-truth tries to subvert truth itself. Trump’s abhorrence of truth is reflected in the remarkable claim by one of his lawyers, Rudy Giuliani, that “truth is relative”. Giuliani was talking on NBC News about the request by special counsel Robert Mueller for an interview with Trump regarding the Russia investigation. Giuliani raised concerns that Trump could perjure himself because “truth isn’t truth.”

We can cope with politicians lying, but we cannot afford the risk of allowing politicians to delegitimise truth.

Post-truth is a murky concept, but it should not be confused with a lie. Post-truth is much more devious and dangerous to the democratic fabric of our society. The prefix “post” in post-truth refers to the claim that a specified idea has become redundant and therefore can safely be discarded. Post-truth is the belief that truth is no longer essential, that truth has become obsolete.

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