This one Scottish philosopher has the TRUTH about post truth politics. Click to find out who.
In the post apocalyptic novel A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, a group of monks living in the deserts of New Mexico take it upon themselves to preserve the knowledge of civilisation in the face of social collapse. The monks in the desert reconstruct what they believe the relics of society bestowed upon them represent. Although many of their deductions are wrong, they develop a series of functional truths in which scientific rationalism and doctrine co-exist.
The novel is used by the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre in his analysis of the way truth (or knowledge) functions in ostensibly rational societies, pointing out that the quest for truth in public life is essentially a false one. What’s more, MacIntyre argues we can indeed rationalise most things if we want to as long as we are aware of a few basic narrative strands. The persuasive aspects of such rationalisation depend on our ability to argue, but also the discursive conditions we are in.
The discursive conditions of contemporary British politics are simultaneously both fertile and poisonous. So deep is the mine of information, both factual and opinionated, available that by the time you have sifted through it in search of grains of truth it is too late. There has been a lot of outrage against the ‘untruths’ of the Leave campaign, and the temporary nature of the promises made, but socially at least all truths are temporary.
In classical Greece rhetoricians used doxa, popular opinions or common knowledge, to persuade the people. This annoyed Plato no end, as he supposedly saw it as intellectually dishonest and an obstruction to true democracy, complete with his Corbyn beard. The people calling for a more honest, truthful politics are like those turning up their noses at Athenian Sophists, but now the task is still more impossible thanks to the multitude of knowledges that exist in modern society. You build stories, rationale, indeed your whole world view not from the truth but from what you have presented to you. In the pre-modern world there was relative consensus about certain things, and knowledge moved slowly; today however we live in an place which is neither heterodox nor orthodox, but multidoxological.
One of the frustrations commonly expressed by sincere well meaning activists, from environmentalists to anti-poverty campaigners, is that their factual and verifiable statements are ineffectual. There is no shortage of information on global warming, or on child poverty or economic performance in the UK, and in the simple rational world we would discover something, relay it, and change accordingly. This dream is partly to do with something called emotivism, which is an idea popularised by rationalist philosophers that what you say and what that saying does are the same thing. This is of course demonstrably untrue — if you comment about the weather to a stranger you can be trying to do any number of things, and actually informing someone about the weather is very very far down the list. Still though, this little act has to be situated in a material reality, and the reason it is such a good example is that weather is the ultimate relational narrative. Everyone experiences it, and by and large people experience it the same way.
In the world of many truths, one certainty is that knowledge may be flexible, but rhetorics are material too. If you are going to lie, or even tell someone something truthful, then it has to correspond to some kind of material reality (even if the materiality is transferred, as in newspaper reports of mass immigration juxtaposed with the experienced reality of failing state healthcare). Unlike the weather, people experience the economy, the educations system, and all other kinds of institutions in radically different ways. If you want to tell a story about any of them to everybody then there is absolutely no way you could do so with any coherence. Instead you have to pretend there is an arch narrative, which is when you start combining overlapping discourses, with mixed results.
Which brings us back to the supposed ‘post-truth’ world of the Brexiteers (for this reading of the situation we can partly blame people like George Lakoff, the American communications academic who has posited a rational/emotional dichotomy between Left and Right based on the US politics of the 1990s). It is a nice idea, but one not borne out in reality when you apply it to many situations. Rationalism is, ultimately, itself a kind of belief system and one of the doxa of European modernity. What you choose to do with it is another matter entirely. In A Canticle for Leibowitz, the monks think themselves rational, but operate in a world in which society at large is still pre-enlightenment. So is there a way out of the darkness, a resurrection of truth or reason? The biggest lesson is that if you know something to be good or true, just telling that to people is not always the best way of making it material.
A few days before the EU referendum there was a story that surfaced on social media, to be reprinted in newspapers including the Metro and the Times and on the BBC website, about a Welsh-speaking hijab-wearing woman on a bus in Newport. As one headline put it, this was the ‘perfect’ story, just as the stories of immigrants blocking school places or the 350m a week to be spent on the NHS were perfect in their own way.
Welsh speaking hijab lady seems to have been no more real than the Brexiteer promise of spending money on the NHS. Whether she exists or not is actually fairly immaterial, she had a purpose and she served it. Moreover, in social terms at least, she was created from a particular discursive subset of internet users. These people, or the discursive worlds they inhabit, are not going anywhere. Most upsettingly, such fluid unregulated discourses can have terrifying material impacts, like the white-supremacist murder of Joe Cox, at the point where the rhetorical and material world overlap. From the evidence presented it appears as if the rationale about reality constructed by her killer lacked only a material outlet, and Jo Cox became that outlet.
One of the things apparent from the current outcry is that people are increasingly exasperated in their efforts to understand or make sense of everything that is happening. The number of exponentially growing hot takes in the opinion market (in place of actual news) are like crowd-sourced post mortems of pop sociology.
The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has built a whole career on pseudo archival trips through neoliberal history which tend to string together zeitgeisty topics with observations on media and modernity to confuse and persuade. What Curtis so cleverly does is claim that modernity has robbed us of any coherent truth and then string out very simple linear narratives through the fireworks of quasi-archive footage, claiming that his truth is more valid than all the ‘mainstream’ truths he has just debunked. The archive film assembled by Curtis to make his point is no more genuine than the iconography of wars past hauled out by jingoistic Brexiteers, and in different circumstances artefacts and histories mean different things to different people. You can even take things that were once true in context and re-present them for entirely different ends. It is in the moment of consumption that they become true, because it is in that moment they achieve some kind of instrumental value.
So how do you regulate the post-truth society? If you want to act morally, as a journalist, or as a politician, then you have to be aware of this medial agency and navigate the doxa of society as best you can with some kind of moral project intact. Perhaps unintentionally, Curtis hits the nail on the head. You don’t tell the truth, but you tell a story about the things that are true.
