Truth: it seems such a deceptively straightforward word and concept. It is about facts, what actually happened, what can be proved to have happened: no problem there, most of us would think. Facts and events can be interpreted in different ways and reported on in different ways (as they most definitely are by spin-doctors of all political parties, for example), and the minute we move into the process of interpretation then some complications inevitably do arise, a point I will be returning to frequently over the course of this book. But that we are dealing with facts and real events when it comes to truth is not at issue, it is simply taken for granted: even spin-doctors have to work within those parameters, as they strive to direct our attention to the aspect they have decided shows their party and its policies in the best possible light. You may see them differently to me, they mean something very different to each of us, yet we agree that they actually occurred, that they describe states of affairs in the world that can be checked on. Truth is something that can be established, and that we expect to be present in our dealings with others; when it is not, then we find it dismaying, as if a social contract has been broken. Then why is it that post-truth has come to play such an important role in contemporary public life? In particular, why has it become such a widely used approach within the political world, where the accusation of âfake news â to discredit opponents is increasingly being heard? Surely to go beyond truth is to enter the realm of lies, and reasoned argument ought to be enough to overcome such a desperate, one could even say insulting, tactic? Sadly, that does not appear to be the case any more, and a post-truth culture has developed around us in a very sinister way that is fast threatening to become the norm. No doubt each generation has its own particular spectre haunting it, as Karl Marx argued the mid-nineteenth century did with communism , but post-truth is turning into ours, and we are struggling to work out just what it demands of us in response. 1 Guaranteeing that âtruth will outâ is becoming a trickier exercise day by day, a seemingly endless game of hide and seek, where no sooner is one post-truth being addressed with a view to dispelling it than another pops up to pull oneâs attention away. That is not supposed to be the way that public discourse operates.
Post-truth is the backdrop against which politics is now being conducted, and that creates a large-scale problem for Western liberal democracy , given that belief systemâs emphasis on reason as the key to improving the human condition. Reason, however, is not where post-truthâs interest lies: persuasion by whatever linguistic means necessary is its goal, and it has to be conceded that it has become very effective at this technique. Too effective, in that it is beginning to dictate the terms of political debate in various arenas, and for liberal-minded individuals like myself that is a regressive step for our culture to have taken. It certainly does not seem to be the way to improve society and our collective quality of life; rather its effect is to promote division and rancour amongst us, generating a toxic atmosphere in the public realm, in which even quite basic respect for other viewpoints is beginning to seem like a thing of the past. In such a climate political extremism tends to thrive, and that is never a good state for a democratic system to find itself becoming stuck in. We have been there before and we know how badly that can unfold: the days of fascism and communism , of world war and cold war, are not that long ago. It is worrying to note that the far right of the political spectrum is asserting itself in a way that the West has not seen since those totalitarian theories were in the ascendant, and post-truth has become integral to its methods, a strategy designed to mislead and confuse its opponents. Post-truth has to be recognised as an ideological movement, therefore, one that is out to dominate the public realm by undermining the accepted character of political discourse. It is a process that goes way beyond mere spin-doctoring: this is a take-over bid.
Liberal democracy certainly has its faults, and it must always be considered a work in progress, open to change and the introduction of new ideas to improve its performance; but the alternative that is being offered by post-truth is a direct challenge to all liberal democracyâs good points. It could only lead to an authoritarian, even dictatorial, society that goes severely against the grain of the Westâs Enlightenment inheritance, bringing into play some of the most questionable aspects of human nature. Working to ensure that âtruth will outâ, in some acceptable form, is a serious business with critical implications for our society; as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have warned us, democracies can âdieâ, and the post-truth movement definitely sets up that dire possibility: âOver the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States â but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other placesâ. 2 Other commentators, such as David Runciman , have begun to explore this issue, expressing the same kind of fears about the pressures building up within the Western democratic system. 3
Liberal democracy is a fairly broad church, and there are aspects of it I would not want to defend too far. I lean towards the social democratic form of it (and the more socialist the better), where the state plays an important role in keeping capitalist economics in rein, with a robust welfare system in place to protect societyâs weaker members, rather than the market-driven, libertarian inclined model that has been largely dominant in the West for the last few decades. When liberal democracy is used over the course of my argument, it is not to be taken as implying uncritical support for every form it could take; but even in the types I do not care for, such as the current libertarian one, there is usually at least a residual commitment to Enlightenment values to be noted that is signally missing in post-truth circles. There should be no place for post-truth within any type of liberal democracy , so liberal democracy can be read here as shorthand for anti- post-truth. The adversary is quite clear, and Levitsky and Ziblatt sound a salutary warning as to what this situation requires of us: âOur generation, which grew up taking democracy for granted, now faces a different task: We must prevent it from dying from withinâ. 4 For another recent study, that means we have to be careful not to allow ourselves to be dragged down âthe road to unfreedomâ by the demagogic forces that are beginning to assert themselves so insistently all around us. 5
Situating oneself as within, but critical of, the liberal democratic tradition does bring up the issue of post-liberalism , which has been attracting quite a bit of interest of late. Various commentators have suggested that is where we are now heading ideologically in the West, claiming that liberalismâs flaws have weakened it to such an extent, that it can no longer be relied on to provide the social or political stability we have come to expect of it as a political project. 6 There is much debate over how the term should be interpreted, which depends to a large extent on where one puts the emphasisâon the âpost-â, or on âliberalismâ? Post-liberalism could be used to describe either an anti- post-truth or a post-truth position, and I will be returning to the problems it poses at various points throughout the book.
Scepticism, Relativism and Truth
Truth is currently under concerted attack, therefore, and with a very specific political agenda lying behind the process. Those of us who still believe in the power of reason, and want to promote it as much as possible in the public sphere, clearly have a considerable problem with post-truth and the ideas and attitudes it is insinuating into our culture. Just to complicate matters, however, we have to ask ourselves if perhaps we have a problem with truth itself too, in which case the issue becomes far murkier than it first appears. From the beginnings of Western philosophy truth has been a subject of much debate amongst practitioners, particularly the issue of what criteria could guarantee the truth of any proposition. The concept of truth had to be based on something itself known to be true beyond all possible doubt in order to provide that guarantee. Some philosophers in classical Greece began to claim that no such criteria would ever be found, that instead we were trapped in an infinite regress: whatever it was that guaranteed the concept of truth had to be guaranteed by something else in its turn. It was a process that could never end, meaning that at best there were only degrees of truth, or perhaps just beliefs of a greater or lesser degree of usefulness. How to determine what that degree was each time around constituted a vexing problem. This was the position of classical scepticism , and it has continued to be a powerful argument right through to the present day, one that cannot easily be dismissed as mere philosophical game playing. As one of the leading scholars in the field has put it, classical scepticism still poses some of the subjectâs âmost cunning puzzles and most obdurate problemsâ. 7 Truth, in other words, was to be treated as a relative rather than an absolute conceptâwith all the difficulties that brought in its train.
Many contemporary philosophers have adopted that stance of relativism , arguing that language is too imprecise to guarantee the truth of anything we say; therefore âtruth will outâ by no means applies across the philosophical spectrum either. That is the claim of followers of deconstruction and the work of the French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida , for whom meaning was to be considered in a constant state of flux, altering subtly from statement to statement over timeâand from participant to participant in the process of discourse. As Derrida put it, meaning never attained âfull presenceâ. 8 âSuch is the strange âbeingâ of the sign [the combination of the signifier and signified; that is, of word and concept]: half of it always ânot thereâ and the other half always ânot thatââ, as one of Derridaâs translators, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , puts it. 9 What you thought your statement meant, and what your listener thought it did, could be very different indeed, therefore, and so on down the chain of communication. Truth under such a dispensation is a variable quality, never anything fixed, or at all fixable; it keeps shifting around, regardless of our intentions, and it can never reach the state of being beyond all possible doubt. We may well want to be truthful in our utterances, but language will undermine us every time around: that, for deconstructionists, is just the way discourse works, and we have no choice but to accommodate ourselves to that. The implications of such a position for politics and ideology are quite alarming, in that apparently we can never aspire to absolute truth in our value judgements in those areas. Certainty of knowledge would seem to be an unattainable desire, a mere chimera.
Take this line of argument to its logical conclusion, and no value judgement can have any greater claim to validity than any other: we simply have no way of deciding between them logically. If all truths are relative, then how do we know which is the best ...