In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.—George Orwell
The phenomenon of “post-truth” rocketed to public attention in November 2016, when the Oxford Dictionaries named it 2016’s word of the year. After seeing a 2,000 percent spike in usage over 2015, the choice seemed obvious. Among the other contenders on the shortlist were “alt-right” and “Brexiteer,” highlighting the political con-text of the year’s selection. As a catch-all phrase, “post-truth” seemed to capture the times. Given the obfuscation of facts, abandonment of evidential standards in reasoning, and outright lying that marked 2016’s Brexit vote and the US presidential election, many were aghast. If Donald Trump could claim—without evidence—that if he lost the [1] election it would be because it was rigged against him, did facts and truth even matter anymore?
After the election, things only got worse. Trump claimed—again with no facts to back him up—that he had actually won the popular vote (which Hillary Clinton had taken by nearly 3 million votes), if one deducted the millions of people who had voted illegally. And he doubled down on his claim that—despite the consensus of seven-teen American intelligence agencies—the Russians had not hacked the American election.
One of his handlers seemed to embrace the chaos by arguing that “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.”
After being sworn in as president on January 20, 2017, Trump offered a string of fresh falsehoods: that he had the biggest electoral victory since Reagan (he didn’t); that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest in US history (photographic evidence belies this and Washington, DC, Metro records show subway ridership down that day); that his speech at the CIA resulted in a standing ovation (he never asked the officers to sit). In early February, rump claimed that the US murder rate was at a forty-seven-year high (when in fact the Uniform Crime Report from the FBI showed it to be at a near-historic low).
The latter seems particularly egregious because it picks up on an earlier fib that Trump had told at the Republican convention, while searching for a way to push the idea that crime was on the rise. When challenged on this, Newt Gingrich (who was [2] a surrogate for Trump at the time) had the following in-credible on-camera exchange with CNN reporter Alisyn Camerota:
CAMEROTA
Violent crime is down. Te economy is ticking up.
GINGRICH
It is not down in the biggest cities.
CAMEROTA
Violent crime, murder rate is down. It is down.
GINGRICH
Then how come it’s up in Chicago and up in Baltimore and up in Washington?
CAMEROTA
There are pockets where certainly we are not tackling murder.
GINGRICH
Your national capital, your third biggest city—
CAMEROTA
But violent crime across the country is down.
GINGRICH
The average American, I will bet you this morning, does not think crime is down, does not think we are safer.
CAMEROTA
But it is. We are safer and it is down.
GINGRICH
No, that’s just your view. [3]
CAMEROTA
It’s a fact. These are the national FBI facts.
GINGRICH
But what I said is also a fact. … The current view is that liberals have a whole set of statistics that theoretically may be right, but it’s not where human beings are.
CAMEROTA
But what you’re saying is, but hold on Mr. Speaker because you’re saying liberals use these numbers, they use this sort of magic math. These are the FBI statistics. They’re not a liberal organization. They’re a crime-fighting organization.
GINGRICH
No, but what I said is equally true. People feel more threatened.
CAMEROTA
Feel it, yes. They feel it, but the facts don’t support it.
GINGRICH
As a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel and let you go with the theoreticians.
One might imagine a no less chilling exchange in the basement of the Ministry of Love in the pages of George Or-well’s dystopian novel 1984. Indeed, some now worry that we are well on our way to fulfilling that dark vision, where truth is the first casualty in the establishment of the authoritarian state. [4]
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. In 2005, Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness” (defined as being persuaded by whether something feels true, even if it is not necessarily backed up by the facts) in response to George W. Bush’s excesses in relying on his “gut” for big decisions—such as the nomination of Harriet Miers for the US Supreme Court or going to war in Iraq without adequate proof of weapons of mass destruction. When the term was coined, “truthi-ness” was treated as a big joke, but people aren’t laughing anymore.
With the largely fact-free campaign over Brexit in Great Britain—where hundreds of buses advertised the bogus statistic that the UK was sending 350 million euros a week to the EU —and the growing use of disinformation campaigns by politicians against their own people in Hungary, Russia, and Turkey, many see post-truth as part of a growing international trend where some feel emboldened to try to bend reality to fit their opinions, rather than[5] the other way around. This is not necessarily a campaign to say that facts do not matter, but instead a conviction that facts can always be shaded, selected, and presented within a political context that favors one interpretation of truth over another. Perhaps this is what Trump’s chief surrogate, Kellyanne Conway, meant when she said that press secretary Sean Spicer had intended to present “alternative facts” regarding the size of the crowd at the inauguration, when Trump seemed miffed by official US Park Service photos showing thousands of empty seats. So is post-truth just about lying, then? Is it mere political spin? Not precisely. As presented in 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. But what about those who feel that they are merely trying to tell the “other side of the story” on controversial topics? hat there really is a case to be made for alternative facts? he idea of a single objective truth has never been free from controversy. Is admitting this necessarily conservative? Or liberal? Or perhaps it is a fusion, whereby largely left-wing relativist and postmodernist attacks on the idea of truth from decades ago have now simply been co-opted by right-wing political operatives. he 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, [6] 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.”
Naturally, philosophers have fought for centuries over whether this sort of “correspondence” view is correct, whereby we judge the truth of a statement only by how well it fits reality. Other prominent conceptions of truth (coherentist, pragmatist, semantic) reflect a diversity of opinion among philosophers about the proper theory of truth, even while—as a value—there seems little dispute that truth is important.
For now, however, the question at hand is not whether we have the proper theory of truth, but how to make sense of the different ways that people subvert truth. As a first step, it is important to acknowledge that we sometimes make mistakes and say things that are untrue without meaning to do so. In that case, one is uttering a “false-hood,” as opposed to a lie, for the mistake is not intentional. he next step beyond this is “willful ignorance,” which is when we do not really know whether something is true, but we say it anyway, without bothering to take the time to find out whether our information is correct. In this [7] case, we might justifiably blame the speaker for his or her laziness, for if the facts are easily available, the person who states a falsehood seems at least partially responsible for any ignorance. Next comes lying, when we tell a falsehood with intent to deceive. This is an important milestone, for we have here crossed over into attempting to deceive an-other person, even though we know that what we are saying is untrue. By definition, every lie has an audience. We may not feel responsible for uttering a falsehood if no one is listening (or if we are sure that no one will believe it), but when our intent is to manipulate someone into believing something that we know to be untrue, we have graduated from the mere “interpretation” of facts into their falsification. Is that what post-truth is about? The lines between the stages above are perhaps unclear and it is a slippery thing to migrate from one to another. The first time Trump said that there were no per-inauguration conversations between his National Security Advisor and Russian officials could perhaps be attributed to willful ignorance. But when his own intelligence services then revealed that they had briefed him on exactly this—and Trump continued to deny it for two more weeks —one begins to infer intent. After Trump kept repeating his claim that he would have won the popular vote if not for millions of illegal ballots, the New York Times made the bold decision, just three days into his presidency, to print a headline saying that Trump had lied. [8]
There are other interesting relationships one can have with 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. Those political shills who “spin” the truth most favorably to their advantage, knowing full well (along with most everyone else) that this is what they are doing, are not just bullshitting, for there is clear intent to influence others. Yet post-truth also exists in an even more virulent form. his is when self-deception and delusion are involved and someone actually believes an untruth that virtually all credible sources would dispute. In its purest form, post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd’s reaction actually does change the facts about a lie. Pundits may argue over where Trump fits into this range: whether he is a deceiver, indifferent, cynical, or delusional. Yet all seem sufficiently hostile to truth to qualify as post-truth. As a philosopher, I cannot help but find all of these forms of post-truth deplorable. Even though it seems important to illuminate their differences and understand that there are many ways one can fit underneath the [9] post-truth umbrella, none of this should be acceptable to those who genuinely care about the notion of truth. But the tricky part is not to explain ignorance, lying, cynicism, indifference, political spin, or even delusion. We have lived with these for centuries. Rather, what seems new in the post-truth era is a challenge not just to the idea of knowing reality but to the existence of reality itself. When an individual is misinformed or mistaken, he or she will likely pay the price; wishing that a new drug will cure our heart disease will not make it so. But when our leaders—or a plurality of our society—are in denial over basic facts, the consequences can be world shattering. When South African President Thabo Mbeki claimed that antiretroviral drugs were part of a Western plot and that garlic and lemon juice could be used to treat AIDS, over 300,000 people died.
When President Trump maintains that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese government to ruin the American economy, the long-term consequences may be equally devastating, if not more so. Yet the real problem here, I claim, is not merely the content of any particular (outrageous) belief, but the overarching idea that—depending on what one wants to be true—some facts matter more than others. It is not simply that climate-change deniers don’t believe in facts, it’s that they only want to accept those facts that justify their ideology. Like all conspiracy theorists, they feel en-titled to a double standard whereby they simultaneously [10] believe (with no evidence) that the world’s climate scientists are part of a global conspiracy to hype the evidence on climate change, but then cherry pick the most favor-able scientific statistics that allegedly show that the global temperature has not gone up in the last two decades.
Deniers and other ideologues routinely embrace an obscenely high standard of doubt toward facts that they don’t want to believe, alongside complete credulity toward any facts that fit with their agenda. he main criterion is what fa-vors their preexisting beliefs.
This is not the abandonment of facts, but a corruption of the process by which facts are credibly gathered and reliably used to shape one’s beliefs about reality. Indeed, the rejection of this under-mines the idea that some things are true irrespective of how we feel about them, and that it is in our best interests (and those of our policy makers) to attempt to find them. I have previously characterized all this as a matter of “respecting truth,” by embracing those methods of inquiry—like science—that have customarily led to true beliefs.
If someone maintains that truth does not matter, or that there is no such thing as truth, I am not sure there is much we can say to them. But is that what the post-truth phenomenon is really about? If one looks at the Oxford definition, and how all of this has played out in recent public debate, one gets the sense that post-truth is not so much a claim that truth does not exist as that facts are subordinate to our political point of view. The Oxford [11] definition focuses on “what” post-truth is: the idea that feelings sometimes matter more than facts. But just as important is the next question, which is why this ever occurs. Someone does not dispute an obvious or easily confirm-able fact for no reason; he or she does so when it is to his or her advantage. When a person’s beliefs are threatened by an “inconvenient fact,” sometimes it is preferable to challenge the fact. This can happen at either a conscious or unconscious level (since sometimes the person we are seeking to convince is ourselves), but the point is that this sort of post-truth relationship to facts occurs only when we are seeking to assert something that is more important to us than the truth itself. 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.
But this perspective can and should be challenged. Do we want to live in a world where policy is made based on how it makes us feel rather than how well it will work in reality? he human animal may be wired to give some credence to our superstitions and fears, but this does not mean that we cannot train ourselves to embrace better standards of evidence. There may be legitimate theoretical questions about our ability to know objective truth, but this does not mean that epistemologists and critical theorists do not go to a physician when they get sick. Neither [13] should governments build more prisons because they “feel” that crime is going up.
So what to do? The first step in fighting post-truth is to understand its genesis. It may seem to some commentators that the idea of post-truth simply burst onto the scene in 2016, but that is not the case. The word “post-truth” may have seen a recent uptick—as a result of Brexit and the US presidential election—but the phenomenon itself has deep roots that go back thousands of years, to the evolution of cognitive irrationalities that are shared by liberals and conservatives alike. As previously suggested, it also has roots in academic debates over the impossibility of objective truth that have been used to attack the authority of science. And all of this has been exacerbated by recent changes in the media landscape. But in trying to understand the phenomenon of post-truth we are fortunate to have a ready-made road map to guide us. In the past two decades’ explosion of science denial on topics like climate change, vaccines, and evolution, we see the birth of tactics that are now being used for post-truth. Our built-in cognitive biases, academic hair-splitting on questions about truth, and exploitation of the media have already had a prior life in the right wing’s attacks on science. It’s just that the battle field now encompasses all of factual reality. Before it was a dispute over a disfavored scientific theory; now it is over a photo from the US Park Service or a videotape from CNN. [14]
Although it may seem alien and perplexing, the phenomenon of post-truth is neither opaque nor impenetrable. Yet neither is it so simple that it can be understood in a single word: rump. In a world in which politicians can challenge the facts and pay no political price whatsoever, post-truth is bigger than any one person. It exists in us as well as our leaders. And the forces behind it have been building up for quite some time. This is why I believe that we have our best shot at understanding post-truth by exploring the factors that led up to it. Although the Brexit vote and the US presidential election may seem inextricably tied up with post-truth, neither was the cause of it—they were the result.
Reflect on Your Reading
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