Post-Truth Imaginations

New Starting Points for Critique of Politics and Technoscience

Kjetil Rommetveit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429627125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book engages with post-truth as a problem of societal order and for scholarly analysis. It claims that post-truth discourse is more deeply entangled with main Western imaginations of knowledge societies than commonly recognised. Scholarly responses to post-truth have not fully addressed these entanglements, treating them either as something to be morally condemned or as accusations against which scholars have to defend themselves (for having somehow contributed to it). Aiming for wider problematisations, the authors of this book use post-truth to open scholarly and societal assumptions to critical scrutiny. Contributions are both conceptual and empirical, dealing with topics such as: the role of truth in public; deep penetrations of ICTs into main societal institutions; the politics of time in neoliberalism; shifting boundaries between fact – value, politics – science, nature – culture; and the importance of critique for public truth-telling. Case studies range from the politics of nuclear power and election meddling in the UK, over smart technologies and techno-regulation in Europe, to renewables in Australia. The book ends where the Corona story begins: as intensifications of Modernity's complex dynamics, requiring new starting points for critique.

Part 1Foundations

1 Truth as what kind of functional myth for modern politics? A historical case study

Brian Wynne

DOI: 10.4324/9780429053061-3

It is here that philosophy is seen in actual fact to be placed in a precarious position, which is supposed to be firm although neither in heaven nor on earth is there anything from which it depends or on which it is based. It is here that she has to show her purity as the authoress of her own laws – not as the mouthpiece of laws whispered to her by some implanted sense or by who knows what tutelary nature…

(Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, 1785)¹

Introduction

The Introduction to this volume has explained the various ways in which “post-Truth” has emerged in both academic and popular cultures, as a mainstream idiom to describe the destabilisations of democratic politics (and its supporting knowledge order), since around 2016. It has also identified the main currents of social and political theory, and of historical, sociological and philosophical research into scientific knowledge which help illuminate these unforeseen and unsettling contemporary developments.

Post-Truth language is unacceptable for many reasons, but a central one is its entirely false presumption – that the current era was preceded by an established era of “Truth” that guaranteed an acceptably civilised democratic social order, one now under threat – or liberation – because that presumed universal authority of “Truth” has been broken. Justified argument against the false claim for post-Truth as history only risks inadvertently reinforcing the whole misbegotten frame of meaning within which it sits. This is an inevitable implication of the “post-…” prefix. This bowdlerises the supposed history of how modern human social orders maintain their apparent orderliness (Burrow, 2020), and drastically limits what is imaginable as mutually respectful collective human knowledge-orders.

The separate factors that have brought about this syndrome may be worth proper study; but this chapter is more modestly tangential. I take a different starting point, digging beneath the claims, counter-claims, and accusations, to begin to explore the question begged by the post-Truth term. This historical question asks what kind of Truth was given authority in resolving major late-20th century political controversies over the most powerfully iconic technologies of the modern era, nuclear. In post-war decades, this combined military-civil nuclear networked series of technologies was barely seen as a question of political choice. Instead, nuclear development fell under the universal ideological spell of scientific-technological determinism (McDermott, 1969; Schwarz Cowan, 2010). Modern science was given the role of revealing necessity to politics from nature – far beyond “only” informing collective human responsibility and choice. “Necessity” incorporates meaning as well as fact.

Thus a nuclear choice – military and civil – was not seen as human choice but as natural necessity. Under the further pressures of Cold War nuclear arms-race competition, aspirant global superpowers like Britain and France curtailed society-wide democratic rights of freedom of information, critical debate, inclusive and continual negotiation of “the public interest”, and open science under the greater perceived urgent military-nuclear need. Civil nuclear technology decisions were also presumptively private to the overwhelmingly powerful strategic expert cadre that controlled the very heart of a nuclear weapons-prioritised British “parliamentary-democratic” government.

From the late 1940s onwards, it was stated without demur in public that policy decisions were made by (scientific) Truth-determined advice, combined with overriding (nuclear) national security need. However, this façade of deterministic necessity concealed an extremely ambitious, indeterminate, and high risk, but far from democratically deliberated and chosen, military-nuclear state political vision for the future. Moreover, this basic form prevailed in British policy-making, scientific expertise and debate, not only across the crucial nuclear (civil power and military weapons) domain. It also took shape in the rapidly expanding broader economic, scientific, technological, and commercial innovation domain, across fields like chemicals, plastics, food, consumer goods of all kinds, energy, transport, pharmaceuticals, and telecommunications. This long-lasting flood of science-intensive new technologies required new regulatory processes and decisions, often subject to public controversy. This huge and novel economic- political agenda and its institutional forms developed over these same decades as nuclear technology, with many of the same institutional-cultural habits.

An important one of these routines that intensified and became taken as given over those decades, was the overextension of the authority given to science in policy decisions about new technologies. This was the gradual and unnoticed change in the role of science, from informing public debates and policy decisions, to default author of public concerns and meanings (Wynne, 2014).²

Science and Technology Studies developed from the early 1960s³ study, initially of scientific knowledge-production in its own private communities like laboratories, enlarging later to scientific expert knowledge in public arenas – the latter a mushrooming proliferation from roughly 1970 of frustratingly irresolvable controversies over “the Truth” as assumed public authority (Nelkin, 1979; Jasanoff et al., 1995). Long-established assumptions that scientific knowledge naturally led to consensus were left in question as attempted scientific methods and procedures failed time and again, over decades, to stem the flood.

Authority has always it seems been grounded in some form of Grand Truth, be this Divine, or natural – revealed from somewhere beyond negotiation, by actors (Priests: Judges: Monarchs: Scientists) whose authority comes from their supposedly unique, unmediated access to that suprahuman domain. As anthropologist Mary Douglas (1975) put it, social authority is always founded in nature, time, money, or God. Reference to some form of extra-human source of external law always seems necessary for what are humanly determined commitments to enjoy universal authority. Truth as collectively authorised authority is ambiguous because it is founded on a fiction over the determinative source of the law thus authorised. In pursuit of wider authority, it may be insistently communicated as revealed to be final, but it is never closed – the conventional binary between Truth and falsehood is simplistic and misleading. Truthfulness as a heuristic process seems better than Truth as a supposedly black-or-white condition.

References to such external non-human agencies as sources of human collective Truth and Law can thus be recognised as myths, in which multivalency and ambiguity are essential qualities. While projecting an unacknowledged untruth of some kind, they may also nevertheless be functional in other important respects for society. Socrates’ Noble Lie is an example – that the unfalsifiable idea of God may be what maintains a peaceful, caring, and unified society, despite its difficulties of universal and direct demonstration. Truth is more than exclusively the reductionist version of validated knowledge that normal science provides. Therefore, following science’s instrumentalist turn, “what works, is true”, myths may be both false and true (if the myth as social authority helps maintain that crucial public good).

To explore these ambiguities, I use a now historical case-study (Wynne, 1982, 2011) of the 1977 UK Windscale Public Inquiry (WPI) into a globally controversial new international nuclear spent oxide-fuels reprocessing plant, THORP. This important formal process was keystone of an escalating three year conflictual political process to reach a democratic political decision, immediately concerning the THOR plant itself, but actually, as a big potential leap for military and civil nuclear technology, about the future of an integrated nuclear arms and energy complex itself and its then-ascendant imaginary and aspirations for human society. This whole period, from 1975 (when THORP was first made public, in a planning application to Cumbria County Council) to 1978, was marked by: fears of political breakdown and disorder; intense media debate; protest marches; peace camps and attempted invasions of nuclear sites; lobbying of members of local and national government; an intensive five-month legal-scientific-public inquiry, headlined “The Inquiry Into the Future of the World” (UK Daily Express, 1977) with international public, media, and scientific participation; the High Court Judge Chair’s formal report and recommendation to government; and a parliamentary debate and vote in favour of THORP. The latter three major official UK government processes were all initially presumed unnecessary by the government, but hurriedly initiated in succeeding U-turn responses to the unforeseen, intense public outcry against the presumption in favour of the nuclear plans.

THORP was an untried part of the globally networked nuclear fuels weapons materials cycle. Its imagined future development into fast-breeder reactors, global exchange of nuclear materials, including global industrial production and transport of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium isotopes, and radioactive wastes – “The Plutonium Economy” – was taken for granted by nuclear proponents and their political allies. THORP was then the key step into an elaborate, nuclear-utopian, technoscientifically ordained future. Yet at the same time, from the early 1970s, public protest against nuclear technology in Britain as elsewhere internationally was suddenly mushrooming, from a preceding “golden age” of the 1950s–1960s where apparently awestruck public approval prevailed. As the THORP plan emerged into public view with presumptive government support, the unprecedented confrontation between the aspirant superpower UK, and the anti-THORP US Carter government, further inflamed an escalating international inferno.

I examine how a particular form of Truth was established as effective political authority in this, the most important, yet intensely contested domain of modern big nuclear technology, at what was an especially sensitive historical moment. In the 1960s and 1970s, many democratic industrial societies beyond the few nuclear states were confronting unprecedented challenges over how to govern the post-war tsunami of scientifically intensive new technologies, both state-promoted and private together. Attempting to distance, even divorce, its civil power generation from its primary and continuing weapons role, in Britain nuclear arms was the foremost of these many other controversies involving scientific knowledge, and the first to be confronted with organised international opposition, including mass protest and violent modes of state response in Germany and France. This opposition combined such widespread popular direct action with more peaceful but equally influential and authority-disruptive critical science.

From my full participation in and detailed analysis of the 1977 WPI and of the whole three-year process (1975–1978) from local planning proposal to final democratic decision, I described as myth, the form of Truth constructed to give authority to the political decision approving THORP. I also described the widely acclaimed rationality of the process of inquiry as a ritual of rationality. This combined both legal and multiple scientific cultures, which inscribed and delivered that mythical Truth, whose authority depended on denial of its ritual character. However, I disavowed the common view that my description of the inquiry conclusion as myth meant a claim that it was “fake”. I declined that mistake because the decision to be made for or against THORP (and maybe the whole UK, even an international nuclear future) was a matter of political choice, not of revelation. The point of its ritual quality was to underpin this (functional) myth as revealed Truth.

The mythical – and false – dimension of the judicial conclusion was not his conclusion in favour of THORP. It was his false account of it as the unpolitical revelation of a pro-THORP, pro-nuclear, pro-trustworthiness of industry and government regulatory agencies, independently existing Truth.

My key point was that: yes, the judicially chaired inquiry process and consequent judicial report contained many detailed and some major falsehoods, misrepresentations, and deletions of specific counter-THORP arguments, but at a different level of analysis, this elaborate,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: post-truth – another fork in modernity’s path
• PART 1 Foundations
• PART 2 Inquiries
• Index