Reasons to hope we are in a post truth world
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Philosophy
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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 —
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, because I 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? Philosophical pissing marches go back into the dark ages. They are still not resolved — apparently further from resolution than ever. Even that arbiter of justified knowledge, Science has continued to change its mind about fundamental things. Even apparently mechanical, mathematically measurable things. If we cannot agree on the greatest ever footballer — as objectively measurable a human achievement as there can be — Pele? Beckenbauer? Maradona? Messi? Rapinoe? — what chance have we with the conflict in Gaza or Ukraine?
One could go on. But it is less tedious to say, no, Truthists, your claim of mythical prior general accord is denied, pending your provision of receipts and plausible substantiation.
“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. 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.
Fears of “untruthiness” — notice how the complaint is not untruth per se, but untruthiness in concept — arise when one power structure infringes on the territory of another. For years, the “liberal arts” power structure chuntered happily along, confined to the critical studies modules of sociology and feminist studies departments where it originated. 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.
Enlightenment common sense
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.
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.