How philosophy tackles ‘post truth’
As little as two months ago, if you said ‘post truth’ to me, I’d have looked at you like a puzzled Michael Gove on the morning after Brexit. I like to think I’m fairly clued up on the day-to-day drama of politics, but this particular expression… it just wasn’t in my lexicon. What a difference a Brexit and a Trump make. Now, it’s everywhere. It seems every opinion piece, every editorial, every Tweet, constantly barks on about the incoming disaster that is post-truth politics.
I am not trying here to explain the reasons for it (they’re too complicated), nor am I trying to gauge how disastrous it really is (it is), but am trying to merely make sense of the term, and to offer a way in which philosophy might help.
As a philosophy graduate, I’ve been conditioned to twitch nervously whenever I hear the word “truth” — you see philosophers, quite like politicians, don’t really agree on what ‘truth’ is, so when we band around this expression, ‘post truth’, I have always nodded sagely, made some agreeable grunt, and gone away happily thinking I know what it means. But then I thought about it, probably more than I should, and decided I wasn’t sure at all.
I’ve since come to the conclusion that a better expression for the idea ‘post truth’ would actually be ‘meta’ truth (although I admit that a post in the dark recesses of Medium is unlikely to change an entire zeitgeist on this one…). The word post means ‘after’ and the word meta means ‘above’ or ‘beyond’. When people mean post truth, they seem to mean those political statements which are untouched by rational argument, which are held and accepted regardless of (even against) the evidence available. In this sense, they are above and beyond truth, since there is no seeming ‘truth maker’. There is no actual state of affairs which can make that idea true or false.
Examples are plenty. Take Leave campaign’s now notorious claim:
We send the EU £350 million a week.
Organisation after organisation said the figure was misleading — the evidence was presented — but still the belief and the statement held.
Take Corbyn supporters belief:
Corbyn is an effective and competent leader of the opposition.
With the brief exception of the Panama Papers, poll trends put him consistently behind a woeful Tory party, when all previous opposition leaders have been ahead. Still, though, his supporters hold true to the belief that he’s the Left’s best hope.
Then, take (an easier example) Trump’s claim:
Obama was not born in the United States.
It’s a sad reflection of US Politics that the White House felt the need to actually produce Obama’s birth certificate, but still Trump refused to accept the evidence, seeming to claim the whole thing was a bit of a prank.
All this made me think of Popper, and specifically his theory of Falsification. Most people won’t, because they are normal human beings, have spent their Sundays wading through tracts of Popper, but I think most should be familiar with his basic idea. According to the theory, a proposition, theory or hypothesis is only as strong as how far it can resist any falsifying evidence. Science, experience, ‘experts’ and evidence cannot verify a theory, but they falsify it. Popper wrote almost exclusively about science, and, although I risk annoying philosophers, I believe his theory can be easily applied to politics too (a political science after all…?).
Let us, for example, take the statement:
“The Conservative Party always cut public services”
Now, this is a statement in the mould of certain scientific hypotheses (e.g. “the speed of light is constant” or “ all right angles are congruent.” ), in that it is phrased in universals and so can be treated in a similar way we would scientific laws. Popper claims that no amount of evidence will make this statement true, but only more likely. The statement can, though, be falsified by presenting at least one counterexample. With the above case , I can give you time after time after time when the Tories have indeed made public service cuts, but that doesn’t make the ‘always’ true. All I have to do, then, is provide one case when they didn’t cut public services, and the statement is falsified. Popper would argue, then, that in this example, the statement is perfectly meaningful and sensible — open as it is to argument and evidence.
How, then, can we apply Popper to this notion of ‘post-truth’ or ‘meta-truth’ as I suggest? The answer is that politics is entering a philosophically meaningless stage. Popper argued that those statements which cannot be falsified by any evidence or argument are meaningless.
Popper famously attacked Marxism and Freudianism in this way. Is a man kind? It’s because of his upbringing. Is a man mean? It’s because of his upbringing. Since we all have upbringings of sort, every possible trait acts only to verify Freudianism. Nothing can falsify it. If I presented you man who was kind, in spite of having a mean upbringing, Freudians reply ‘he was just negatively responding to his upbringing’. The evidence is denied, or its twisted to support the theory. It’s a classic case of “make the facts fit our theory” and not “let the facts make the theory”.
Popper saw this with Marxism too. Marx and Marxists actually made some quite definite and scientific predictions and positions (Popper actually thought Marx’s writing themselves were scientific and meaningful), such as the inevitable monopolisation of state-protected business and the collapse of capitalism. However, when evidence is provided that these did not happen as Marx predicted (thanks to the rise of Keynesianism, neo-liberalism and the welfare state), it is explained away as being ‘betrayed by traitors’ or we ‘misunderstood the dialectic’ or ‘just give it more time’. Those following the current debate in the Labour party might recognise the tone of some of these arguments.
It should not be hard to see these trends in the current political climate. The Daily Mail recently blamed poor exchange rates on ‘money lenders’ and utterly denied it might have something to do with Brexit (that they backed) — a classic case of denying falsifiable evidence. Boris Johnson, who arguably won the referendum for Leave, actually claimed the pound was stable post-Brexit — denying potentially falsifying evidence that Brexit wouldn’t damage the economy. When Chuka Umunna suggested that Corbyn did considerably less than other Labour MPs in the EU referendum, you only have to look at Twitter to gauge how the evidence is ignored — Umunna is a Tory, a double-agent, and a Blairite. Everything but accepting the possibility the evidence might falsify their theory that Corbyn did all he could in the EU referendum. There are more examples and many again in US Politics (after-all, the US just do everything bigger…)
So, what has been the point of all this? What can philosophy and Popper really teach us? Well, I suggest that Popper’s theory offers a simple test for anyone who reads a paper, who watches a debate, or who hears a politician. It’s a test for interviewing journalists, and for just about anyone who has a passing interest in politics and who fears these trends. My solution is to ask a very simple question: “what evidence would I have to provide to make this position false?”. If there is no obvious answer, that position, according to Popper, and to my mind, is meaningless, it’s vacuous, and should be dismissed without further thought.
It’s something I do, and thought you might want to do too.
