Reasons to hope we are in a post truth world

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This is a narrative. Feel free to reject it or adapt it. It’s not like I can stop you.

Too long; didn’t read

Commentators are given to bemoaning the loss of confidence in truth — we are hostages to “personal truths” that cannot be gainsaid — this is threatening our consensus and ultimately, the integrity of polite society.

But there has never been much consensus even on trivial points — if there were we would hardly spend so much time talking about them —

Oh, woe, the loss of truth

The defenders of liberal enlightenment — surely a noble cause in our stupid age — are given to blame the current predicament — call it the great delamination, the moronic now — on a collective loss of faith in truth.

Nothing, runs the complaint, is objectively true any more. This opens the way for all kinds of personal delusions that somehow gain priority over erstwhile our eternal verities — consensus values by which collectively we used to navigate the manifold vicissitudes of this mortal coil.

Examples of this: from the liberal left: Helen Pluckrose, John Bennet, Kathleen Stock. From the reactionary right: Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson. Fake news.

Was it ever thus?

The argument turns out to rest upon a few questions that don’t deserve to be begged.

Such as, really?

What was this consensus, and when was it, because JC sure can’t remember it. Was it some time before the end of history, before the Cold War — hang on, the Second World War — hang on, before the rise of Fascism — First World War — Colonial era? The JC is no more than an armchair historian, but has a hunch you would have to go back a fair way to find this elysian utopia of shared truth. And what was this concord about?

Has there ever been a time in which we did not endlessly fascinate on matters of philosophy, social justice, politics, science, business, fashion, etiquette, and form? When did we start writing op-eds, forming oppositions, organising demonstrations, lobbying, campaigning and writing in? Was there ever a time where the tabloids were not full of scandal? What did we take about then?

Philosophical and political pissing matches go back to the dark ages. They are no closer to their resolution than ever. Even that arbiter of justified knowledge, Science continues to change its mind about fundamental things. Even apparently mechanical, mathematically measurable things.

Human beings disagree about everything. (Says your correspondent, a self-styled contrarian). One could go on. But it is less tedious to say, no, Truthists — you claim some kind of mythical prior general accord between all people that has recently been upset — it is up to you to prove it. Where was it? What was it? How did critical studies, as you say, bigger it up? Receipts and plausible substantiation, please.

“Untruthiness” is a heresy

One thing all our ceaselessly squabbling factions do agree upon — even the critical theorists, ironically, enough — is that there is a truth. It is just what that truth is that we differ oon.

“For, without truth there is nothing —”

Hence the is a single consensus that binds us all. Relativism is heresy. Even classic untruthists have been at pains to deny their relativism: Darwin, Kuhn, Smith, Hume etc — all swear bling they are not relativists. such has been the collective fear of the establishment.

Local truths

Truths do exist within power structures. That is the only place they exist. “The establishment”, be It the government, academy, business, the guilds or the church — each exists precisely to build out and defend its own truth.

These kind of truths work because all participants share a language, conventions and rules of construction under which the truths operate. There is a voluntary social contract. The social enterprise which governs that truth we call a paradigm or a power structure. Critical theorists don't like being described as “power structures”, because they complain when other people form them, but they are. Let's call them social enterprises because they seems more cuddly.

Fears of “untruthiness” — notice how the complaint is not untruth per se, but untruthiness in concept — arise when one social enterprise infringes on the territory of another.

This can happen because social enterprises are by no means mutually exclusive, and each of us occupies many. They have different shapes and sizes, degrees of generality, cohesiveness and trust. There is immediate family (tight, permanent, cohesive and high trust), extended family, the kids’ school, the cricket club, tennis club, work, the JC readership, the barber’s, LinkedIn, Twitter, even down to the underground carriage he happens presently to be riding in (loose, unspecific, transient and low, but by no means zero, trust). There are conventions on the tube. Where you can stand, who gets to sit, what one should and should not do (don't talk!). There are submerged rules too: what would happen if we all got stuck here over night in the dark?

We layer and interlock our varying social enterprises , dynamically banging out behaviour to suit and, depending on which ones we happen to be engaging in at a given time, may behave very differently. The point: this is all very fluid.

This is no bad thing, per se

It is good to challenge our conventional wisdom. The critical theory paradigm has made — and continues to make — the guilds think long and hard about things until now they haven’t had to. Externalities. Fairness of opportunity. The exclusion from “the guilds” of those at the margins. The guilds have updated themselves. This is how complex systems work.

If your sacred cow value is under attack from a conflicting viewpoint from outside the social enterprise that mandates it, we would expect you to complain, first, about the post-truth world. But isn’t that to go crying to Matron? Isn't the grown-up thing to do to listen, adjust where necessary and restate your idea in the marketplace of ideas?

These pronouncements, authoritative as they are strike one as somewhat desperately clinging onto this idea as the last bulwark against total degeneration — as if the world without objective truth can carry no meaning, represent no justice, and deliver no amity. As such, these arguments tend not to address the merits pro or con, but carry straight on to the obvious and dire consequences of letting them go.

But, as Let’s Go Europe once said of Naples, “Postmodernism has gotten a bad rap”.

Things claimed in its name are usually not, on closer inspection, quite so free of truthiness as they seem. And things we take as articles of enlightenment faith are not quite as truthy as they seem. So let us draw and have a closer inspection.

Definitions

Truthy
(adj.)
Having, or depending on, the quality of being true, for all times and all places, independent of linguistic or cultural context. Being transcendentally true.

Some of our examples might seem only to chip away somewhat gingerly at the edges — inconsequentially — but note well. Truthiness does not admit of degrees. Something that is Truthy in all cases but the odd exception '’is not Truthy at all. That is cheating. You can’t backslide. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

Truthiness and finitude

Truthiness as an attempt to impose a finite game.

No one expects the Spanish Inquisition

If we needed a good scheme for transcendental truth, we had one, and we tossed it. God. Speaking of whom — and his earthly instruments, the church (a social enterprise) we can see what happens if we go all in on Truthiness.

The Spanish Inquisition as a great example of what happens when the People in power are Truthy.

Truthiness as a logical, rational justification for autocracy.

Truthy things have a habit of being wrong

A lot of things the “collective conscious ” has held to be true for a very long time have turned out not to be.

Euclidean spacetime, for example.

But Euclidean spacetime not being true, per se, has not made it any less useful.

The scientific method is not incrementally converging on a truth. Special relativity is not a refinement of Newton, but an utter rejection of it. Newton’s fundamental notion of space and time is utterly wrong.

The “woke mind virus”

The things blamed on untruthiness tend to rely, covertly on truthy principles.

Examples

Scarier than the wokesters: the new millenarians

The doomsday cult of data

Like all evil empires, it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Robust relativism

“What there is, I believe, is an encounter. And an encounter is always two ways and involves two parties and each will come away from the encounter changed. So whatever it is that we think we find in the world around us is something that is partly given and partly contributed by ourselves. ... We are co creating the world all the time because of the way we attend to it.

— Iain McGilchrist

Not only do we ignore Truthiness every day of the week, but we must. Because the idea of Truthiness does not make sense.

The old “you have just refuted your own argument” canard.

This doesn't mean anything goes

We cannot just adopt our own truths unless we are obliged to see out our days in solidarity confinement in which case we have no choice but even then our experience of the universe will condition how we build our personal world. We test our ontology against how it works in practice. Our personal experience can falsify

But beyond that we are social animals and we build our world through a shared language, in which interpretation is a dynamic, shared, two-way, multilateral thing. It is its own complex system. We must seek consensus.

What happened then

We offer the alternative explanation that due to system effects of globalisation and the information revolution, we have been presented, daily, with the plain limitations of our historical conceptions of the universe. When you are sequestered amongst a bunch of like-minded people, this tends not to happen. This is a kind of analogue, antediluvian hive mind. Objerctive truth is groupthink from the inside.

The universal truths vouchsafed by a uniform collected experience of monocultural education, bangers and mash, a life down the mines, or on the factory floor, football on a Saturday and a retirement drinking warm ale down the working men’s club — apologies for the caricature, but it is the point, and “objective truth” is no less of a caricature, coming from the same place — was never going to survive contact with the multicultural modern world.

The places that have most embraced multiculturalism are, surprise surprise, in the Anglo-Saxon west: New York, London, California — and the places most supportive of that openminded tolerance are the most affluence and educated: no surprise, the universities. It is no wonder that these places should be seeing, up close, the clash of opposing narratives.

Now some might — do — argue that multiculturalism was a grave mistake — the JC, an immigrant, profoundly disagrees — but whatever you feel about it, you can’t unsee different ways of doing things. It is a hard genie to put back in the bottle.

We would, it seems to me, be better to figure out how to play the infinite game of keepy-uppy in light of our constantly changing circumstances. A key to doing that is to ease our grip on what we believe to be the eternal verities, at least insofar as conflicting views don’t affect us.

Will the civilised world end if others wear a burka, or for that matter a mankini, or identify as transgender? This is the general approach of pluralism and tolerance. Live and let live. For most of the terrain we inhabit this is an easy win: we don’t, actually intersect, so just just mind our own business. Does it matter tome that, inside her house, my neighbour is an antheist, or a Mormon, any more than she is vegetarian?

Nor should we be forced to intersect in ways we don’t want to. The honestly-held opinion of others is a controlling balance of viewpoints. Should we be obliged to do business with people whose values we do not share?

The human condition has always been the balance of rights and obligations in a world of limited space, time and resources. Globalisation has broken down the barriers but revealed at the same time the limitations of the values behind those walls. The challenge is how to adapt, not how to rebuild those walls.

See also

• Banter is good