‘Post-Truth’ was Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year. Here is a quick explanation of that choice:
Here is the OED definition of the word: “orig. U.S. Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping political debate or public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Examples include
- 1992 Nation (N.Y.), 6 Jan. 13/1 Dictators up to now have had to work hard at suppressing the truth. We, by our actions, are saying that this is no longer necessary… We, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world.
- 2004 R. Keyes Post-truth Era i. 15 In the post-truth era we don’t just have truth and lies, but a third category of ambiguous statements that are not exactly the truth but fall short of a lie.
- 2012 Guardian 11 Sept. 36/3 The press is grappling with so-called post-truth politics, or the tendency among candidates in election year not just to twist the facts but to keep blatantly doing so even when they’re caught.
- 2016 Herald (Glasgow) (Nexis) 17 Nov. 15 Social media has become a post-truth nether world in which readers willingly participate in their own deception because it feels good.
And here is the opening of a New York Times piece from August 2016, titled “The Age of Post-Truth Politics,” written after the Brexit vote:
Facts hold a sacred place in Western liberal democracies. Whenever democracy seems to be going awry, when voters are manipulated or politicians are ducking questions, we turn to facts for salvation.
But they seem to be losing their ability to support consensus. …
The sense is widespread: We have entered an age of post-truth politics.
But not everyone is on board. A compelling counter comes from Slate’s science & culture writer LOL Something Matters” (January, 2018) has this telling blurb: “We’ve been told that facts have lost their power, that debunking lies only makes them stronger, and that the internet divides us. Don’t believe any of it.” And the piece ends with this message: “It’s time we came together to reject this bogus story and the ersatz science of post-truth. If we can agree on anything it should be this: The end of facts is not a fact.”
If we are indeed living in a post-truth era, some historians would like to point out that this is not a new phenomenon. As Yuval Noah Harari puts it,
In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, whose power depends on creating and believing fictions. …
So if you blame Facebook, Trump or Putin for ushering in a new and frightening era of post-truth, remind yourself that centuries ago millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Qur’an. … Some fake news lasts for ever.
I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that’s exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it fake news in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath). …
… you cannot organise masses of people effectively without relying on some mythology. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. In fact, false stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people.
Otherwise put, “asking why we believe lies raises vast questions about human psychology and history, which did not appear from nowhere in 2016 or emerge with the invention of the web.” The urgent desire to answer such questions, while still trying to figure out what (if anything) may be unique about the kind of post-truth era we are supposedly in, is evident from the fact that in 2017 alone three books bearing the title “Post-Truth” were published:
- Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, by James Ball
- Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It, by Evan Davis. (A great review of this plus d’Ancona’s book can be found here.)
- Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, by Matthew d’Ancona, who also pitches his take in this talk:
Then, in 2018, sociologist Steve Fuller digs deeper and gets more philosophical about the subject in his Post Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game. Here is Fuller on post-truth at The Philosopher’s Zone:
And here is Fuller (along with others) on post-truth at BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed:
Generally, those who take a historical and/or philosophical approach tend to bring up post-modernism as what somehow underpins our alleged post-truth mentality. But Is Post-modernism to Blame for Our Post-Truth World? That, to say the least, is up for debate:
Regardless of whether you understand what post-modernism is all about, your commonsense will tell you that it’s silly to pin our post-truth state, if we indeed live in one, on a single historical movement. It may be more practical, and likely more helpful, to look at how identity politics and certain structural features of our current political system may have served to distort our perceptions of facts. Two recent, mutually complementary podcasts have some refreshing insights (and related studies) to offer on that subject.
The first podcast is from Freakonomics, titled America’s Hidden Duopoly. The interviewed researchers argue that, contrary to the cliché complaint that our political system is broken, “the Republicans and Democrats constitute a wildly successful industry that has colluded to kill off competition, stifle reform, and drive the country apart.” In that connection, we may see post-truth politics as a product of the political industrial complex.
The second podcast is from Hi-Phi Nation, titled Chamber of Facts. Here is a partial, enticing description of the episode:
Do people of opposing political parties believe in different facts? The mantra at the moment is that they do, because of media echo chambers, motivated reasoning, and ideological blindspots. But a more careful look reveals a different answer, with perhaps even more startling consequences.
After a helpful philosophical discussion of what it means to “believe” something, the last part of the episode revolves around an interesting study about “expressive responding” in political surveys—i.e. when individuals intentionally and knowingly provide misinformation to survey researchers as a way of showing support for their political side—which may give the appearance, but only an illusory one, that people of opposing political parties believe in different facts.
Related Psychological Studies
The phenomenon just mentioned can be connected to a famous experiment in social psychology. It’s the Asch Conformity Experiment, designed by psychologist Solomon Asch to demonstrate the power of group influence. Here is a clip of the original experiments, conducted in the 1950s:
A related experiment, also from the 1950s, is Robbers Cave Experiment on intergroup conflict and co-operation, conducted by the psychologist Muzafer Sherif to test his hypothesis that context is everything: competition over scarce resources could drive people to enmity; place a common obstacle in their way, and they cooperate. Here is a clip of the experiment covering all its stages:
The part of the Robbers Cave experiment that focuses on intergroup conflict is singled out to be emphasized in a recent episode from On the Media, “Why We Are So Polarized.” While the emphasis is a bit misleading (since the original experiment actually ended with the more constructive and more hopeful stage, demonstrating the possibility of intergroup co-operation), the episode makes an interesting point: cultural and political identities—including but not limited to party affiliations—have become heuristics that allow voters to make quick choices in an increasingly complex world.
Strategic Responses
[1] from the journalists’ standpoint
Post-truth politics seems at least to be a felt experience on the part of many journalists, who find it especially challenging to do their job in the current political environment, with a president and his acolytes deliberately sowing doubts in the minds of the general public about journalistic integrity. Regardless of whether you agree that we live in a post-truth world, it’s important to hear from journalists who are sincerely trying to do their job to inform the public–with the conviction that having an informed public is vital to our democracy. Here are a few.
How Fake News Grows in a Post-Fact World | Ali Velshi
Journalism in a Post-Fact Era
The Future of News: Journalism in a Post-Truth Era
Media in The Post-Truth Age
[2] resisting being gaslighted
In “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,” Lauren Duca argues that Trump’s systematic attempts to undermine our certainty about truth amount to gas-lighting: “To gaslight is to psychologically manipulate a person to the point where they question their own sanity, and that’s precisely what Trump is doing to this country.” (Similarly, see this article and the book Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us, by Amanda Carpenter, a republican.)
The same point is illustrated in this video, “The White House Is Gaslighting The Media (And the Entire Country)”:
This article, “Post-truth politics and why the antidote isn’t simply ‘fact-checking’ and truth,” explicitly connects post-truth politics with gaslighting:
In the hands of the powerful, or those bent on climbing the ladders of power over others, the post-truth phenomenon functions as a new weapon of political manipulation.
Post-truth is not only about winning votes, siding with friends, or dealing with political foes. It has more sinister effects. It is a gaslighting exercise.
… It is the organised effort by public figures to mess with citizens’ identities, to deploy lies, bullshit, buffoonery and silence for the purpose of sowing seeds of doubt and confusion among subjects.
If that’s the case, what are we to do? Journalist Ariel Leve offers some general strategies for “How to survive gaslighting: when manipulation erases your reality,” as laid out in this video:
While Leve clearly has the Trump administration in mind, Michael Quirk admonishes us to toss out the “post-truth” talk as well, if we are serious about resuscitating truth and defending political integrity.
don’t let them gaslight you. By “them” I mean Trump and his base, their right-wing media enablers, and those critics like Barton Swain who [before Trump was elected called him ‘our first full-on “postmodern” presidential candidate’] give the former far too much credit for ushering in a supposedly postmodern “post-truth” regime. This is no time to get all wobbly about “truth”, “fact”, and “objectivity.” They are still meaningful, because discourse does not get off the ground without them. The post-truth regime is a mirage. The emperor has no clothes, so do not give him more power by fearing that the concept of truth has lost its resonance.