Reasons to hope we are in a post truth world

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The defenders of liberal enlightenment — surely a worthy cause in our stupid age — are given to blaming our current predicament in the moronic now on our loss of confidence in objective truth.

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

Untruthiness is a heresy

“Without truth there is nothing —” Even classic untruthists have been at pains to deny it. Darwin, Kuhn, Hume etc such has been the collective fear of the establishment.

Truths do exist within power structures. “The establishment”, be It the government, academy, business, the guilds or the church, exists to build out and defend it's own truth.

Fears of untruthiness arise when one power structure starts infringing on the territory of another one. For years, the liberal arts power structure chuntered happily along, confined to the critical studies modules of sociology and feminist studies departments. Only the white collar revolution — a side-current of the information revolution, whereby manual workers, forced off the production line, had no choice but to educate themselves , and reorganised into weaponised human resources departments, have these tenets started to interact with those of the guilds.

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 they haven't. Externalities. Fairness of opportunity, the exclusion from “the guilds” of those at the margins. This is how complex systems work.

If your sacred cow value is under attack from a conflicting viewpoint from outside your power structure, 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 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 at 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.

The Spanish Inquisition asas 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

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.