The word ‘post-truth’ is irreducibly normative

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, “truthiness” was treated as a big joke, but people aren’t laughing anymore.

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? That there really is a case to be made for alternative facts? The 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 leftwing relativist and postmodernist attacks on the idea of truth from decades ago have now simply been co-opted by right-wing political operatives. 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.” 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 “falsehood,” as opposed to a lie, for the mistake is not intentional.

The 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 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 another 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?

In its purest form, post-truth is when one thinks that the crowd’s reaction actually does change the facts about a lie. Even though it seems important to illuminate their differences and understand that there are many ways one can fit underneath the 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 leaders are in denial over basic facts, the consequences can be world shattering.

If one looks at the Oxford definition, and how all of this has played out in recent public debate, one gets the sense that posttruth is not so much a claim that truth does not exist as that facts are subordinate to our political point of view. The Oxford definition focuses on “what” posttruth 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 confirmable 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? The 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 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.

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: Trump. In a world in which politicians can challenge the facts and pay no political price whatsoever, posttruth 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. 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.