Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Post-Truth,
Scepticism & Power
Stuart Sim
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2019
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Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Ben Hayes for all his help and advice in developing the
project; to Brendan George and the team at Palgrave for providing such
a supportive context for dealing with the material; and to Dr. Helene
Brandon for providing much-needed encouragement over the course of
the writing process, as she has done so consistently down the years.
v
Contents
Index 171
vii
1
Introduction: Truth Will Out?
become such a widely used approach within the political world, where
the accusation of ‘fake news‘ to discredit opponents is increasingly being
heard? Surely to go beyond truth is to enter the realm of lies, and rea-
soned argument ought to be enough to overcome such a desperate, one
could even say insulting, tactic? Sadly, that does not appear to be the
case any more, and a post-truth culture has developed around us in a
very sinister way that is fast threatening to become the norm. No doubt
each generation has its own particular spectre haunting it, as Karl Marx
argued the mid-nineteenth century did with communism, but post-
truth is turning into ours, and we are struggling to work out just what it
demands of us in response.1 Guaranteeing that ‘truth will out’ is becom-
ing a trickier exercise day by day, a seemingly endless game of hide and
seek, where no sooner is one post-truth being addressed with a view to
dispelling it than another pops up to pull one’s attention away. That is
not supposed to be the way that public discourse operates.
Post-truth is the backdrop against which politics is now being con-
ducted, and that creates a large-scale problem for Western liberal
democracy, given that belief system’s emphasis on reason as the key to
improving the human condition. Reason, however, is not where post-
truth’s interest lies: persuasion by whatever linguistic means necessary
is its goal, and it has to be conceded that it has become very effective
at this technique. Too effective, in that it is beginning to dictate the
terms of political debate in various arenas, and for liberal-minded indi-
viduals like myself that is a regressive step for our culture to have taken.
It certainly does not seem to be the way to improve society and our
collective quality of life; rather its effect is to promote division and ran-
cour amongst us, generating a toxic atmosphere in the public realm,
in which even quite basic respect for other viewpoints is beginning
to seem like a thing of the past. In such a climate political extremism
tends to thrive, and that is never a good state for a democratic system to
find itself becoming stuck in. We have been there before and we know
how badly that can unfold: the days of fascism and communism, of
world war and cold war, are not that long ago. It is worrying to note
that the far right of the political spectrum is asserting itself in a way
that the West has not seen since those totalitarian theories were in
the ascendant, and post-truth has become integral to its methods, a
1 Introduction: Truth Will Out?
3
and Levitsky and Ziblatt sound a salutary warning as to what this sit-
uation requires of us: ‘Our generation, which grew up taking democ-
racy for granted, now faces a different task: We must prevent it from
dying from within’.4 For another recent study, that means we have to be
careful not to allow ourselves to be dragged down ‘the road to unfree-
dom’ by the demagogic forces that are beginning to assert themselves so
insistently all around us.5
Situating oneself as within, but critical of, the liberal democratic tra-
dition does bring up the issue of post-liberalism, which has been attract-
ing quite a bit of interest of late. Various commentators have suggested
that is where we are now heading ideologically in the West, claiming
that liberalism’s flaws have weakened it to such an extent, that it can no
longer be relied on to provide the social or political stability we have
come to expect of it as a political project.6 There is much debate over
how the term should be interpreted, which depends to a large extent
on where one puts the emphasis—on the ‘post-’, or on ‘liberalism’?
Post-liberalism could be used to describe either an anti- post-truth or a
post-truth position, and I will be returning to the problems it poses at
various points throughout the book.
Notes
1. ‘A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the
Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
spectre’; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
[1848], ed. Frederic L. Bender, New York and London: W. W. Norton,
1988, p. 54.
2. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History
Reveals About Our Future, New York: Viking, 2018, p. 1.
3. See David Runciman, How Democracy Ends, London: Profile, 2018. See
also Yascha Mounk, The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in
Danger & How to Save It, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2018.
4. Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, p. 231.
5. Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America,
London: Bodley Head, 2018.
6. See, for example, John Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political
Thought, New York and London: Routledge, 1993.
7. Jonathan Barnes, The Toils of Scepticism, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1990, p. ix.
8. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference [1967], trans. Alan Bass,
Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978, p. 279.
9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Introduction to Jacques Derrida, Of
Grammatology [1967], trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore,
MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976, p. xvii.
10. Jean-François Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming [1979],
trans. Wlad Godzich, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.
References
Barnes, Jonathan, The Toils of Scepticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990.
Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference [1967], trans. Alan Bass, Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1978.
Gray, John, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought, New York and
London: Routledge, 1993.
1 Introduction: Truth Will Out?
9
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History
Reveals About Our Future, New York: Viking, 2018.
Lyotard, Jean-François, and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming [1979], trans.
Wlad Godzich, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto [1848], ed.
Frederic L. Bender, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988.
Mounk, Yascha, The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger &
How to Save It, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Runciman, David, How Democracy Ends, London: Profile, 2018.
Snyder, Timothy, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, London:
Bodley Head, 2018.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Introduction to Jacques Derrida, Of
Grammatology [1967], trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Baltimore, MD
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
2
The Post-Truth Landscape
As one of the article’s authors put it: ‘False news is more novel, and peo-
ple are more likely to share novel information’.2 Truth-value does not
seem to come into the equation when novelty enters the scene, as the
unscrupulous will be delighted to hear: the result being what one com-
mentator has referred to as self-perpetuating ‘networks of ignorance’.3
Critical thought is being swamped by this phenomenon at present, and
is largely being discounted by the disaffected anyway, since they are
innately suspicious of intellectuals and what they represent, preferring
to go with gut feeling instead. The latter is part of human nature, and
all of us respond to it, and act upon its promptings, at many points in
our life (sometimes wisely, sometimes not). Whether it is acceptable for
it to play a dominant role in the political process is a far more conten-
tious matter, however, that demands some very serious thought.
The situation we now find ourselves in has been neatly summed up
by Angela Nagle, who has bemoaned the fact that, ‘we see online the
emergence of a new kind of anti-establishment sensibility expressing
itself in the kind of DIY culture of memes and user-generated con-
tent that cyberutopian true believers have evangelized about for many
years but had not imagined taking on this particular political form’.4
The implication is that it is the darker side of human nature that is
rapidly coming to dominate on the net, and that the net is peculiarly
adapted to this development. Yet another instance where technology has
had unexpected consequences that make a mockery of its early ideals,
which invariably concentrate on the positive effects it will bring while
ignoring the possibility of any negative occurring as well (‘technochau-
vinism’, as this has been dubbed5). Given our collective dependence on
the net, that is a very troubling trend to have to report. In that ‘DIY
culture’, where expert or specialist opinion is treated as irrelevant, post-
truth and fake news have become the common currency, and it poses
a massive problem for anyone still possessing what is now probably to
be described as an old-fashioned Enlightenment-style liberal sensibility,
with its expectation that certain conventions of respect and trust will be
adhered to in public discourse. How do you respond to opponents who
are manifestly, and quite deliberately, not playing fair? And who have no
intention of ever doing so either? That is very much a twenty-first cen-
tury dilemma, as is whether this is what being post-liberal has to mean.
2 The Post-Truth Landscape
13
If it is, then it is a very bleak future that awaits us: perhaps technopessi-
mism is the attitude we should be adopting.
But post-truth also has a pre-history, running back through vari-
ous forms of what has been called ‘denialism’, where events and phe-
nomena (such as the Holocaust or climate change), are rejected out of
hand, usually for cynical political or ideological reasons. Just to con-
fuse the issue further, as noted previously, philosophical sceptics have
long denied that we can ever establish the final truth of anything any-
way, arguing that truth is relative—and can only be relative, such is its
nature. I will be outlining some of the various forms that post-truth has
taken historically, with the aim of constructing a defence of truth that
can be used against the post-truth community—even if we still have to
acknowledge the power of arguments from scepticism, which always
hangs around on the philosophical periphery with its nagging puzzles
and problems. Ensuring that truth will out is no straightforward pro-
cess, and there are many pitfalls in the way. We need to understand
how post-truth works, and its insidious role in human relations, so I
will open the account with a survey of what the landscape of post-truth
currently looks like, before going on to consider its historical record and
the many forms it has taken. As will become apparent, the post-truth
landscape is varied and a very considerable presence in our lives—far
more so than we are probably aware, or would want to admit. There is a
host of deeply angry sub-cultures out there that we have no choice but
to engage with eventually; that is, if we want truth to be given its due.
Being Post-Truthful
Post-truth means establishing a worldview then refusing to back down
from it, or accept any evidence that questions its rightness. Once
adopted, positions will be rigidly adhered to, oblivious to any objec-
tions that are raised. It sets out quite deliberately to appeal to prejudice
and to reinforce this however it can, being extremely cavalier with facts.
Cavalier right down to the level of inventing them if that is felt to be
useful to the line of argument being pursued—as it so often proves to
be in terms of capturing attention (the novelty effect in action again).
14
S. Sim
That is what being post-truthful can sanction, and it is, to say the least,
frustrating to be on the receiving end of such bad faith on the part of
our fellow citizens. Ultimately, post-truth is about exerting power and
control over others, and closing off debate—to the point of silencing
the opposition altogether if that is at all possible. It works on your emo-
tions, not your reason; indeed it is expressly designed to bypass your
reasoning faculty, hence its appeal to the unscrupulous, who are out
to arouse deep-seated prejudices that spring more from our emotions
than our rational thought-processes. Gut feeling is what is wanted, and
that means post-truth can very easily create something of a mob men-
tality, featuring the ‘new kind of anti-establishment sensibility’ rightly
identified by Nagle as one of the most dangerous phenomena to emerge
in recent times. It is a sensibility that is depressingly prone to making
death threats in its desire to shut down opposition. Even if these remain
at the status of threats only (and it is to be sincerely hoped they do) it
demonstrates the level of anger and anti-democratic sentiment that is
there to be conscripted under the banner of post-truth, as well as the
extent of the change for the worse that has taken place in public life
of late. Death threats push political disagreement past any acceptable
democratic standard, and represent a particularly disturbing comment
on our culture. You have to wonder why anyone would think they ever
could be an acceptable tactic in expressing an opinion on others’ views.
People generally shy away from making such threats in public situations
(it would be a conversation-killer if nothing else), but when it comes to
quite a few of our fellow citizens, the net’s sheer impersonality seems to
strip away their inhibitions about acting in that way. And once posted,
such messages can embolden others to follow suit. Lives of quiet desper-
ation are a thing of the past now that anyone can go online, and intim-
idate others through indulging their darkest fantasies: ‘kill all normies’
becoming the rallying cry, as Nagle reports.6
Although there has always been an element of the post-truth
approach present in political life (politicians have long been notorious
for saying whatever it takes to be elected, and saying it with all appar-
ent sincerity as well), it has undeniably moved up a gear of late. Two
words alone would be enough to demonstrate why this state of affairs
has come upon us: Donald Trump. The contemporary post-truth
2 The Post-Truth Landscape
15
boastful fashion that grates with anyone outside his loyal constitu-
ency: he is, in his own words, a genius. It is a technique that cheerlead-
ers like Coulter are only too willing to deploy in their turn. In Trump
We Trust pictures America as having been on the brink of anarchy and
moral bankruptcy before Trump arrived on the scene, well on the way
to becoming a ‘pathetic, third-rate, also-ran, multicultural mess’, having
formerly been ‘the greatest nation in history’.12 The book is one long
rant on this theme, of a supposed golden age that has been trashed by
devious liberals. Democrat politicians (and voters too) are portrayed as
more or less enemies of the state, with only the genius of Trump stand-
ing between them and a collapse into utter chaos. It is partisan poli-
tics at its most partisan. The most worrying point is that millions and
millions of Americans appear to have embraced this narrative of alter-
native facts enthusiastically, turning Trump-trust into a highly potent
political weapon in the process. Martyn Percy has made the interest-
ing suggestion that Trump’s political success has led to ‘a market-driven
approach to truth’ in American life.13 Basically, from that perspective
truth is what works; that is, whatever sells your point of view to the
public most effectively, and beats off all competitors. It is truth reduced
to persuasion.
Politics has always had its dirty side, but Coulter pushes it farther
than most. Exaggeration is piled on exaggeration: President Obama, for
example, becoming ‘a feckless incumbent who wrecked health care and
whose foreign policies had resulted in Islamic lunatics murdering the
American ambassador in Benghazi less than two months before the elec-
tion’.14 Post-truthers are not the only ones to exaggerate, pretty well any
of us is capable of doing so on occasion. This is all too likely to occur
in our conversation with others, for example, when it is very easy to get
carried away by our own rhetoric in the heat of the moment and make
rash statements; but we will usually own up to having gone too far in
that direction if it is pointed out to us dispassionately enough—and
we have calmed down a bit afterwards. The possibility of there being
any dialogue with commentators like Coulter, however, is just wishful
thinking. Such individuals are not even pretending to listen to what
others have to say, or in giving their views the benefit of the doubt;
express a contrary opinion to theirs and the shutters come down fast.
20
S. Sim
what Jean-François Lyotard has called the ‘differend’, where neither side
can accept the other’s rules of engagement and thus reach any kind of
acceptable compromise.15 Disagreements like this can be defended if we
are dealing with real events, which always invite differing interpretations
as to what they mean in a larger context, but not invented ones, which
can only distort any debate that ensues. Interpretation and lying are
incompatible activities—a very obvious point which should not really
need stating, but we are going through strange times.
Post-truth appeals strongly to conspiracy theorists, but again, such
theories can have elements of truth in them, even if these are combined
together in a highly speculative manner that can stretch credibility
more than a bit. A conspiracy to someone like Ann Coulter is a wel-
come liberalisation of public life to others. Not all of us are left seething
by affirmative action legislation, gay marriage, or government-backed
health plans; for many of us such things are the mark of a civilised
society properly attentive to its citizens’ needs, and thus deserve to be
supported to the hilt. Then too, it is worth remembering that much of
what happens in the world cannot be unproblematically categorised as
truth or non-truth, as is the case with opinion, which may or may not
turn out to conform precisely to the facts. Yet we continue to express
opinions on a regular basis in our conversations with others; although,
as opposed to the post-truth crowd, we may well alter or even reject
these altogether after hearing a range of other opinions stated and com-
paring them to our own. Debate can sometimes lead us to change our
minds, and that is a healthy state of affairs, one that democracy vitally
needs in order to function properly. In fact, it would be difficult to
imagine a democracy where people did not reflect on their beliefs in
that way, and on a regular basis. Post-truth, however, sets out to prevent
such reflection from happening with its supporters, insisting that they
just continue to trust what the Trump camp (and its equivalents else-
where) says instead. Debate is off the agenda for such dogmatic believ-
ers. Post-truth has a very shadowy identity, therefore, shuffling along a
spectrum between truth and lies: rather like the deconstructive concep-
tion of the sign, ‘half of it always “not there” and the other half always
“not that”’, post-truth can be described as ‘not quite this’ and ‘not quite
that’, a conundrum for commentators to decipher.
2 The Post-Truth Landscape
23
Alt-Right, Alt-Facts
The alt-right has become a prominent player on the American polit-
ical scene of late, expertly tapping into a vein of racial prejudice that
is never very far under the surface of American life, sad though that is
to observe, and it makes extensive use of fake news to spread its white
supremacist-biased views. White supremacism is on the rise in both the
USA and Europe, and there is clearly a sizeable readership on the look-
out for alt-right material and its battery of alt-facts. The fake news story
has become increasingly part of the post-truthers’ armoury, and there
is now what amounts to an industry dedicated to the manufacture and
dissemination of fake news. In his study of the alt-right phenomenon,
David Neiwert speaks of ‘the rivulets of hate mongering and disinfor-
mation-fueled propaganda flowing out of right-wing media for at least
a decade’ now, and how this has built up a loyal, and substantial, audi-
ence. Radio ‘shock jocks’ and Fox News have been in the forefront of
this assault on liberal values, as their continuing popularity (and noto-
riety) attests.17 You can begin to think that just about anything goes in
this market, as long as it can make trouble for your opponents; truth
is almost incidental to the exercise. Aside from shock jocks and Fox,
there are also many online news sites around and not all of them can
be trusted to be dealing in facts either. Breitbart News has become par-
ticularly notorious, although it is by no means the only source of such
material, and the cumulative effect on the public realm of the many alt-
right sites to be found in the USA should never be underestimated. One
instructive example that brings this point home very forcefully is the
infamous ‘Pizzagate’ episode.
In the closing stages of the 2016 presidential campaign several right-
wing news sites specialising in fake news started spreading a story,
picked up from Twitter, that a paedophile ring involving Hilary Clinton
supporters was being run out of a pizza parlour (Comet Ping Pong)
in Washington, DC: Pizzagate, as it came to be known. The reports
claimed that hacked emails by Clinton officials contained code words
that signalled paedophile activities were being conducted there: ‘cheese
pizza’, of course, stood for ‘child pornography’. The story continued to
2 The Post-Truth Landscape
25
taken. The industry is willing to take that risk, and it seems unlikely
that it will not go on playing post-truth games with the public in this
fashion, since they appear to have the desired effect as a rule; the pur-
suit of profit has at best a rather tenuous relationship to truth, and we
are complicit with this to a certain extent. Advertising cannot totally be
trusted, therefore, and we know this, but it is allowed to get away with
it most of the time. For most of us, life is too short to engage in endless
fact checking of advertising claims, and the advertisers know they can
depend on this.
possibly can, thus fuelling the country’s culture wars. There is no ques-
tion that under Trump’s presidency those wars have become far more
intense and ill-tempered. It is no longer a silent majority out there, not
with a wealth of social media permanently available to make their many
grievances known the second they come to mind—as well as a chorus
of death threats designed to scare off their opponents for good measure.
This intensification certainly wins the approval of the alt-right move-
ment, for whom the more againstness there is at work in American soci-
ety then the better. Mike Wendling has described the alt-right as ‘held
together by what they oppose: feminism, Islam, the Black Lives Matter
movement, political correctness, a fuzzy idea they call “globalism” and
establishment politics of both the left and right’.22 For this group, there
is no middle ground at all in ideological matters; politics is a bitter con-
test in which your opponents are to be remorselessly ground down by
whatever tactics prove to be necessary. It is a game of winners and losers,
and losers are to be despised. The point is to destroy all opposition to
your beliefs and policies, ruling out any idea of compromise with what
you take to be the enemy within; not exactly in the spirit of democracy,
where compromise is the basis of most political negotiation. Indeed, it
is difficult to envisage a democracy where compromise did not play a
vital role. The ideal for the alt-right, however, is for the other side to
be silenced altogether, with ‘hate mongering and disinformation-fueled
propaganda’ well to the fore in the process. Post-truth veers naturally
towards totalitarianism: opposition is little better than treason from this
viewpoint (Brexit unleashed similar reactions from the right-wing media
in the UK, with accusations of betrayal becoming quite common, and
ever more hysterical in tone).
The world according to Breitbart is a very disturbing place to con-
template, where the future of Western civilisation is pictured as
being under severe threat from sinister forces both within and with-
out. Conspiracy is once more the watchword, and from the Breitbart
perspective it is working tirelessly all around us. Under those cir-
cumstances, the more extreme your language and claims the better:
post-truth and fake news need no more justification than that. The
post-truth of Breitbart is aided and abetted by the claims of ISIS to be
responsible for every act that is labelled terrorist. In some cases there
32
S. Sim
is proof to back this up, but much of the time the individual, or indi-
viduals, carrying out the attack appears to have acted independently of
any outside control: at best ISIS has been an influence on, rather than
a direct controller of, such events. Every such action around the world
can be claimed by ISIS, however, without there having to be any defi-
nite evidence to back it up. In classic post-truth style they have become
ever more cavalier with such claims, working on the time-honoured
principle of whatever serves your cause use it, and let others fret about
the implications. The fact that ISIS does make such claims can then
be seized on by organisations like Breitbart as proof that their line of
argument is entirely correct, and that the Western way of life faces a
dire existential threat from Islam. Post-truth has created its own little
self-contained world in such cases, where fake news is chasing fake news
in order to score ideological points, with both sides feeling vindicated
by whatever the other does. Both sides have a vested interest in claiming
there is a coordinated campaign of terrorist attacks being carried out.
Unfortunately, the effect of all this is to raise tensions worldwide, and
entrench each side even further into its own beliefs: they are all being
told exactly what they want to hear. Differends do not get much more
explicit than that—nor as vigorously engineered for ideological effect.
Bannon has extensive experience in the polarisation field, having
made several provocative documentaries before becoming involved with
Trump’s political career. These have been described by the film critic
John Patterson, as ‘a rightwing version of Michael Moore’, although
as he pointedly goes on to remark, without the ‘essential decency’
of Moore’s work to temper the angry polemic.23 Given that Moore is
such a detested figure on the alt-right, one can imagine just how much
credibility that judgement would have with Bannon and his support-
ers. The documentaries have attacked fairly obvious targets for the alt-
right, such as Hilary Clinton, the Occupy movement, and that hardy
perennial of conservative politicians worldwide, the 1960s (the gift that
keeps on giving for this constituency), as well as delivering sympathetic
portraits of right-wing political icons such as Ronald Reagan and Sarah
Palin. It is not the point of view involved in such work that is at issue,
right and left are both valid positions on the political spectrum after all
(even social democrats have to concede that, although I agree that they
2 The Post-Truth Landscape
33
might not do so all that willingly), but whether it invents what it needs
to put across its message. When that happens then we enter the domain
of post-truth.
There are various other sites specialising in fake news that can vie
with Breitbart in the notoriety stakes, such as newsexaminer.net. This
site came into the mainstream news with the death in September 2017
of one of its primary contributors, Paul Horner, who had claimed a
large amount of the credit for Donald Trump being elected, through a
series of stories he had posted on the site during the presidential cam-
paign (that President Obama was gay and a radical Muslim, for exam-
ple, just to add a little spice to the ongoing birther controversy). Horner
defined himself as a political satirist, but at points like this it can feel
as if one if entering a hall of mirrors, wondering if anything you see,
or read, is real. If one can trust what Horner said, and that is always
going to be difficult in cases of this nature, then his satire has backfired,
having been read as if it were real and not the exercise in irony that he
claimed it was intended to be (he even stated in an interview after the
election that ‘I hate Trump’, which was a bit late for such a declara-
tion24). The line between satire and malicious mischief is not necessarily
all that precise, however, and if nothing else Horner makes us aware of
the risks involved in plugging into the fake news network in any way.
If there is an audience out there all too ready to take at face value any-
thing and everything that fits their prejudices, then satire in such a con-
text becomes a highly dangerous game to play. The culture wars are bad
enough without interventions like these, which simply raise the para-
noia level on the right.
It is the existence of ready-made platforms for such as Horner to uti-
lise that makes post-truth so potent a technique in current society. In
the past, post-truth was much more restricted in terms of its audience
and dissemination, but now its power and reach has expanded enor-
mously, and it is available to anyone who wants to stir up controversy
through airing their prejudices—with the added attraction of remain-
ing anonymous. More than anything, the alt-right is, as Mike Wendling
emphasises, ‘a creature of the internet’.25 The issue of whether what you
read is real keeps cropping up, with the case of Jenna Abrams constitut-
ing a particularly salutary tale. Abrams’ Twitter contributions, defiantly
34
S. Sim
such as that run with the apparent collusion of the Russian government.
The evidence pointing to extensive use of doping, intended to improve
athletes’ performances at several Olympics and World Championship
events over the past few years, is now fairly damning; and it has led to
some sanctions being imposed. Yet it continues to be met with blan-
ket denials, or evasions, by those in official positions, who are quick to
claim that it is false—good old fake news coming to the rescue yet again
(Vladimir Putin is as fond of the tactic as Donald Trump is). A standard
response to the charge is to claim a conspiracy by either the media or
aggrieved competitors; aggrieved because they were beaten by Russian
athletes at major athletics meetings—bad losers, in effect. Although the
Russians are by no means the only ones under suspicion of sharp prac-
tice in this area, just the most organised to date; this is very much an
unfolding story, likely to rumble on for years yet, given what is at stake
reputation-wise.
The results of the various events, the medals awarded etc., constitute
a form of post-truth. The evidence strongly indicates that the rules of
competition were broken, and broken knowingly, which should have
invalidated the results; but in most cases they stand—at the very least
for several years, until the evidence cannot realistically be denied any
more, as when confessions materialise from those most closely involved
in the doping process. Unfortunately, such confessions are fairly rare,
and the Russian government is still failing to admit complicity in the
doping system used to circumvent the testing regime used before the
2016 Olympics, which ingeniously featured suspect urine samples dis-
appearing (under cover of darkness in closed testing centres) and being
replaced by clean ones, thus clearing doped athletes for competition
after the samples had been relabelled. Alternative samples neatly sup-
plied the alternative facts that the situation required.
Cheating when it is caught out, and then repeatedly denied in favour
of an alternative narrative set up to further your own devious schemes,
does look very much like post-truth in unashamed action, and the ath-
letics world is in a state of considerable confusion over how to deal with
it—or how to prevent every Olympic Games or World Championship
event that comes along turning into a subject of suspicion as the results
appear. Meanwhile, public trust is being eroded ever further, and as the
36
S. Sim
cycling world has found, this can be extremely hard to win back. Titles
won in this area almost immediately arouse suspicion, given that doping
has been so rampant in the sport for years, with many of its star com-
petitors later revealed to have been serial offenders.
Conclusion
Fake news is also a key tactic in propaganda, and it was used extensively
in recent history by both fascist and communist regimes (critics would
define what the alt-right in America has been churning out over the last
few years as basically propaganda, too). The Soviet Union provides a
very revealing example of just how effective post-truth can be, as it was
a society sustained internally by a steady diet of fake news and post-
truth political practices for seventy-odd years; the Communist Party
proved to be expert at this method of running a state. Perhaps the dop-
ing allegations should be viewed as a legacy of that period, evidence of
habits that have been hard to shake off, even with communism removed
from the scene. North Koreans are being fed with a similar diet to the
present day, kept in the dark by the regime there about what is going
on in the rest of the world, or how they are viewed by other nations.
When post-truth is backed up by totalitarian political power, then it can
become a very formidable opponent, a very real threat to the democratic
ideal. Post-truth can, therefore, have very substantial geopolitical conse-
quences, which I will now go on to consider.
Notes
1. Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, ‘The Spread of True and
False News Online’, Science, 359, Issue 6380 (9 March 2018), pp.
1146–51.
2. Sinan Aral, quoted in Zoe Kleinman, ‘“Fake News Travels Faster”,
Study Finds’, BBC News (9 March 2018), www.bbc.co.uk/news/tech-
nology-43344256 (accessed 14 March 2018).
2 The Post-Truth Landscape
37
19. See Chapter 6, ‘A Bitter Pill? Healthcare and Greed’, of Stuart Sim,
Insatiable: The Rise and Rise of the Greedocracy, London: Reaktion,
2017.
20. Nigel Hawkes, ‘A Brief History of Post-Truth in Medicine’, The British
Medical Journal (16 September 2017), p. 393.
21. Both quoted in Dorian Lynskey, ‘Taking a Knee and Trump: The New
Era of Total Protest’, The Guardian, G2 (25 September 2017), pp. 6–8.
22. Mike Wendling, Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House, London:
Pluto Press, 2018, p. 3.
23. John Pattterson, ‘For Haters Only: Watching Steve Bannon’s Documen
tary Films’, The Guardian (29 November 2016), www.theguardian.
com/us-news/2016/nov/29/steve-bannon (accessed 27 September
2017).
24. ‘US “Fake News” Kingpin Paul Horner Found Dead at 38’, BBC News
(27 September 2017), www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-4142287
(accessed 29 May 2018).
25. Wendling, Alt-Right, p. 5.
References
‘Computer Says No’, New Humanist (Summer 2018), pp. 16–7.
Coulter, Ann, In Trump We Trust: How He Outsmarted the Politicians, the Elites
and the Media, New York: Sentinel, 2016.
DeNicola, Daniel, Understanding Ignorance: The Surprising Impact of What We
Don’t Know, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017.
Hawkes, Nigel, ‘A Brief History of Post-Truth in Medicine’, The British
Medical Journal (16 September 2017), p. 393.
Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics: And Other Essays
[1965], London: Jonathan Cape, 1966.
Kleinman, Zoe, ‘“Fake News Travels Faster”, Study Finds’, BBC News (9
March 2018), www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43344256 (accessed 14
March 2018).
Kosko, Bart, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic, New York:
Flamingo, 1993.
Lipstadt, Deborah, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and
Memory, New York: Free Press, 1994.
2 The Post-Truth Landscape
39
Lynskey, Dorian, ‘Taking a Knee and Trump: The New Era of Total Protest’,
The Guardian, G2 (25 September 2017), pp. 6–8.
Lyotard, Jean-François, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute [1983], trans. Georges
Van Den Abbeele, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988.
Nagle, Angela, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to
Trump and the Alt-Right, Alresford: Zero, 2017.
Neiwert, David, Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump,
London and New York: Verso, 2017.
Pattterson, John, ‘For Haters Only: Watching Steve Bannon’s Documentary
Films’, The Guardian (29 November 2016), www.theguardian.com/
us-news/2016/nov/29/steve-bannon (accessed 27 September 2017).
Percy, Martyn, ‘To Know Trump’s Faith Is to Understand His Politics’, The
Guardian, Journal Section (7 February 2018), p. 4.
‘Q & A: Ann Coulter’, The Observer, New Review Section (2 October 2016),
p. 4.
Sim, Stuart, ed., The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism [2001], 3rd edn,
London and New York: Routledge, 2011.
———, Insatiable: The Rise and Rise of the Greedocracy, London: Reaktion,
2017.
‘US “Fake News” Kingpin Paul Horner Found Dead at 38’, BBC News (27
September 2017), www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-4142287 (accessed
29 May 2018).
Vosoughi, Soroush, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, ‘The Spread of True and False
News Online’, Science, 359, Issue 6380 (9 March 2018), pp. 1146–51.
Wendling, Mike, Alt-Right: From 4chan to the White House, London: Pluto
Press, 2018.
Wolff, Michael, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, London: Little,
Brown, 2018.
3
The Pre-History of Post-Truth
to go to war on that basis? One suspects that future historians may well
decide that somewhere along the line post-truth came into play; that it
was in someone’s (or some group’s) interest within the administration
for weapons of mass destruction to be thought to exist, in order forci-
bly to try and bring about regime change in a politically volatile area.
Could it be that it furthered someone’s career, or ideological obsessions,
in which case a little licence was felt to be required? The end can always
be made to justify the means for such enthusiasts.
The Bush administration had a distinctly post-truth cast to it, as
can be noted when one of its senior figures (claimed to be Karl Rove,
Deputy Chief of Staff), batted away criticism of the administration’s for-
eign policy by asserting that: ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act,
we create our own reality. … [W]e’ll act again, creating new realities’.1
In other words, the government would believe exactly what it wanted
to believe, and proceed accordingly, requiring the rest of the world to
conform to it as of right: so if it said that weapons of mass destruction
existed, then de facto they must. The failure to find them was inciden-
tal; the claim stood. To an outside observer that looks like the kind of
conclusion to be expected of the post-truth mentality; the unaccept-
able face of power politics, where arrogance is on blatantly open display.
Rove’s point could have been put far less aggressively, by saying that
America’s foreign policy was going to conform to its interpretation of
the state of geopolitics, which is only to be expected of any nation. But
‘reality’ has altogether more sinister overtones: other nations’ concep-
tion of reality is simply being denied any validity at all, as if no ‘empire’
need be bothered by such trifles. Not just might makes right, but might
makes reality. ‘We are the masters now’ is the unmistakable message that
is being communicated. Another type of fundamentalist belief comes
into operation at such points.
Earlier examples of post-truth with serious political impact can be
found in the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
The former, published in The Daily Mail in 1924, purported to be an
attempt by the Communist International in Moscow to support the
Labour Party cause in the forthcoming General Election in the UK.
Apparently written by a key figure in the Comintern, Grigory Zinoviev,
the Letter is now generally thought to have been a forgery; but it
3 The Pre-History of Post-Truth
43
formed by the Protocols into the twenty-first century. Even when there
are well-publicised denunciations to be taken into account, conspiracy
theory always seems able to find an audience, which again raises awk-
ward questions about human gullibility—especially in the aftermath of
the Holocaust. If you do not believe that the Holocaust even occurred
of course (taking your line from such as David Irving perhaps), then
you can just sidestep such issues altogether, making it very easy indeed
to take Jewish conspiracies on board. Then you can agree wholeheart-
edly with the sentiments expressed in the series of articles Ford ran in
The Dearborn Independent under the heading of ‘The International Jew:
The World’s Foremost Problem’. You are creating your own reality; after
which whatever you want will always fit in. Conspiracy theorists are
adept at that process.
Conspiracy and Post-Truth
Conspiracy theory trades heavily on post-truth, therefore, weaving a
narrative out of a mixture of facts and fiction in order to create polit-
ical capital. Notorious recent examples include the claims that it was
the American government that was responsible for the 9/11 attack on
the World Trade Towers in New York (in order to discredit the Muslim
world being one suggestion, although there are others); or the ‘birther’
controversy over Barack Obama, aimed at proving he was ineligible to
be President under American law because of being born outside the
country. Despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary, these are sto-
ries which still have their adherents, and that continue to circulate on
the net, picking up new believers along the way. They do so along with
a host of other old faithfuls, such as the faked moon landing (filmed
somewhere in the American desertlands apparently3), plus any number
of explanations as to the Kennedy assassination—the CIA, the FBI, the
Mafia, just take your pick (or come up with your own, and you will
undoubtedly find some support for it if you post it online). Conspiracy
theories never really seem to die out altogether; new recruits to the
cause just keep on emerging over the years, only too eager to suspend
their disbelief. The current one as I write is the Las Vegas massacre of
3 The Pre-History of Post-Truth
45
contents in any way, insisting that it stocks the work only in the name
of free speech.4 That there is still a market for the work is a disturbing
comment on twenty-first century society: one would like to think that it
is mainly made up of those actively working to discredit it, rather than
potential believers seeking reinforcement for their prejudices, but that is
probably a forlorn hope. The document sets out a comprehensive plan
by a sinister group of Jewish rabbis, meeting in secret in a graveyard (the
macabre Gothic setting is a significant part of the story’s appeal, given
that genre’s popularity in the period), to take over the world by means
of steadily infiltrating, and ultimately controlling, the political system,
the financial industry, and the media, undermining Christian values
systematically along the way. It is a ridiculous, even risible, tale, yet an
astonishingly large number of readers, over several generations, have
been convinced by it.
Conspiracy theory is one of the major themes of Umberto Eco’s fic-
tion, as in The Prague Cemetery, which speculates on how something like
the Protocols could have come about and found such wide acceptance,
despite their totally spurious nature. Eco portrays a nineteenth-century
European society where antisemitism is all but a default setting, and
anything that claims to provide proof of Jewish-led conspiracies against
Christian society and its values is eagerly pounced upon. It is a society
only too willing to be told that the ‘International Jew’ is the ‘World’s
Foremost Problem’. The narrator’s grandfather is steeped in the stand-
ard prejudices against the Jews, passing these on to his grandson as if
they were received truth: ‘“They are the most godless people,” he used
to say. “They start off from the idea that good must happen here, not
beyond the grave. Therefore they work only for the conquest of this
world”’.5 There was nothing positive to be said about the Jewish race;
they were, respectively, ‘vain’, ‘ignorant’, ‘greedy’, ‘ungrateful’, ‘insolent’,
‘dirty’, ‘unctuous’, ‘imperious’, ‘slanderous’, and driven by ‘uncontrol-
lable lust’.6 Not surprisingly, the narrator, Simone Simonini, reports
that after a childhood of exposure to such views, ‘I dreamt about Jews
every night for years and years’, and it becomes his life’s work to foster
as much prejudice and resentment against them as he can—not diffi-
cult to do in such an antisemitic milieu.7 The Jews were a convenient
3 The Pre-History of Post-Truth
47
scapegoat to blame for the many troubles that will beset any society, a
way of reducing a complex series of problems into something apparently
manageable; if they all spring from the same source, then they become
easy to address. Thus we have the satirical song from the Berlin caba-
ret scene of the 1930s by Friedrich Hollaender, entitled ‘The Jews Are
All to Blame for It’, where the Jews are held responsible for absolutely
everything that is going wrong in German life, right down to the most
trivial of everyday annoyances. It was a satire that only too accurately
reflected what was widely believed at the time: a joke much too close for
comfort in that respect. Post-truth has traditionally resorted to scapego-
ating in this fashion, and unfortunately enough all too often it works,
persuading a substantial part of the public to take the claims it makes
seriously.
Simonini is an expert forger and undercover agent, much in demand
by unscrupulous governments for those services, and he becomes the
major source of the Protocols, producing material like this to order for
his political clients: ‘So this is my trade? It’s a marvellous thing, creat-
ing a legal deed out of nothing, forging a letter which looks genuine,
drafting a compromising confession, creating a document that will
lead someone to ruin’.8 He is under no illusion as to what he is doing,
being entirely willing to fuel the antisemitic prejudice all around him in
European society by producing appropriate ‘evidence’ of Jewish deceit.
Whatever he cannot find in older documents and antisemitic narratives
(concerning secret societies such as the Templars, the Freemasons, and
the Illuminati, all held to have been infiltrated over the years by the
Jews), he blithely invents, or lifts from the plot of novels by such popu-
lar authors of the time as Eugene Sue, and it always seems to fit in with
what the general public believes: ‘I realised the most attractive news to
fabricate would be what these idle minds were expecting, rather than
what the newspapers reported as solid fact’.9 Post-truth could hardly
be more neatly described than that: novelty to meet demand. It is very
much a market-driven practice.
Eventually the Protocols take on their final form, picturing the rab-
bis convening in secret at night in a cemetery in Prague, where they
lay out their objectives, as luridly imagined by Simonini: ‘Ours is an
48
S. Sim
Conspiracy and Gullibility
The issue of gullibility does need to be addressed at some point, as con-
spiracy theories will not work without that trait being present to a sig-
nificant degree in its audience. You have to want to find an explanation,
no matter how far-fetched it may appear to others, that will reinforce
your prejudices, something that will fit in seamlessly with those and
give you a focus for your anger. When conspiracy theory offers just that,
connecting various events together such that no loose ends are left to
puzzle over, then it is gratefully received by those of that disposition.
It provides the reality such believers want. Instead of mystery and con-
fusion, there is now a recognisable force behind events such as the JFK
assassination or the 9/11 attack—or whatever it is that is bothering
you. Rather than being an isolated individual, you now become part
of a movement with a clearly delineated mission. You and your fellow
believers know the truth, it is just others who are failing to see, or are
being too stubborn to admit, what is self-evident to you. The empower-
ing aspect of this should not be underestimated.
It is all too easy to sound elitist or morally superior when discuss-
ing such a subject as this, however, because it is undeniably judgemental
about others’ reasoning ability. Gullibility, I suspect most of are inclined
to think, is what other people are guilty of, not ourselves. We know bet-
ter, we cannot be misled and manipulated so easily, we can spot truth
or falsity when confronted by them. Conspiracies do happen, and his-
tory has its fair share of them, so they cannot be dismissed out of hand
as mere fictions. Whether they constitute an all-purpose explanation for
almost everything that goes on politically is, however, another issue alto-
gether. Conspiracy theory reduces the complexity of human interaction
to seductively simple formulations: ‘The Jews Are All to Blame for It’.
Everything that goes to make up that ‘It’ is part of their master plan, so
all we have to do is to foil their attempt to carry it out, and our society
will be saved: simple and straightforward. That is an illusion of course,
but for believers it suggests a course of action that promises to end their
frustration about things going wrong in their world—and some things
always will, that is destined to be the human lot in every age. Which is
50
S. Sim
Authoritarianism and Post-Truth
Authoritarian regimes in general have made extensive use of post-truth
to maintain their grip on power, as can be seen in the various fascist
and communist governments that held sway over the course of much of
the twentieth century (Islamic fundamentalist governments presumably
could qualify as this century’s heirs). The Nazi Party were past-masters
3 The Pre-History of Post-Truth
51
displayed. Only capitalist workers were exploited, not Soviet ones. Any
dissident voices that arose to question this state of affairs were soon
silenced, meaning that the Soviet people existed inside a bubble, with
only the vaguest idea of what was really taking place in the rest of the
world, or how their lifestyle compared to that of countries outside the
Soviet orbit. Evan Davis suggests that the impact of propaganda can be
overestimated:
That does depend on access to a wider reality, however, which the Soviet
Union proved could be overridden by a state determined enough to
impose its own version of reality on the population—and prepared to
be utterly ruthless in maintaining it, as Stalin’s reign of terror in the
1930s amply proved. Granted, fake news eventually ceased to work in
this context, but it took over seventy years to reach that critical point
and the era of perestroika and glasnost in the 1980s that presaged the end
of Soviet rule.
The Soviet system did not just rewrite history to fit Marxist theory,
they invented it when it suited the regime’s interests to do so. One of
the most blatant examples of this is outlined in Catherine Merridale’s
book Lenin on the Train, about Lenin’s journey to St. Petersburg in
1917, and the famous arrival at the Finland station in the capital that
ended his exile from the country. During Stalin’s reign the artist M. G.
Solokov painted Lenin’s arrival at the station, being greeted by cheering
crowds. Behind him as he alights from the train is Stalin, looking on
approvingly at the scene. In reality, Stalin was not part of Lenin’s party
on the train (reportedly, he was not even present at the station, being
otherwise engaged in the city at the time), but as Merridale observes,
post-truth was well engrained in the Soviet lifestyle by this point: ‘With
no regard for history (but a keen sense of self-preservation), the artist
added Stalin to the scene’.15 It is not only guile that lies behind the
3 The Pre-History of Post-Truth
53
move into post-truth, fear can do so too. Stalin well knew he had not
been at that historic event, as did anyone else who actually had been
there to witness Lenin being greeted, but it was patently in his inter-
est for that piece of news to be faked to enhance his reputation. The
implication was that Stalin was always destined to be Lenin’s heir, and
to spur the Soviet Union on to even greater heights than his predecessor
had, subtly suggested by the artist placing him higher up in the painting
than Lenin, who is waving to the crowd as he steps down off the train.
As Merridale tartly remarks, ‘[s]uch lies were not unusual by the 1930s’,
by which time the Soviet system was in full post-truth mode, and it
was expedient to be seen to be in alignment with this.16 Dictatorships
are always attracted to the post-truth game, well aware of its power in
moulding and controlling public opinion, and in situations like that,
post-truth begets yet more post-truth, in the process obscuring reality
even further.
It was the existence of totalitarian dictatorships such as the Soviet
Union that prompted George Orwell to write 1984, picturing a future
England run on post-truth lines, where the rulers really have created
their own reality, using techniques such as Newspeak to enforce that
reality on the population:
them, believing instead in the ‘realities’ that the ISAs were so assidu-
ously promoting, with Althusser asserting that ‘it is ultimately the rul-
ing ideology which is realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses….
[N]o class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time
exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses ’.22
As a consequence of the successful hegemony exercised through the
ISAs, the expected collapse of the capitalist system was being delayed,
but it would still arrive once the system’s resources and support had
been further exhausted: Marxist reality would ultimately prevail. While
this was a plausible enough argument initially, it was an explanation
which began to wear a bit thin as several generations passed with no
worldwide revolution breaking out to prove the Marxist case. The ISAs
appeared to have commendable staying power—as they still do in
the aftermath of the debilitating 2007–2008 credit crash, when even
socialism is hardly much in evidence in the Western political system at
present. With Communism now little more than a fading memory, cap-
italist hegemony has to qualify as one of the most successful ideologi-
cal techniques of modern times, posing a serious problem for Marxist
theorists.
It was a general theory which was to be subjected to a withering
critique in the 1980s by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, helping
to establish a post-Marxist school of thought which wanted to move
beyond the post-truth mentality embedded so firmly within Marxism,
with its demand that doctrines be followed to the letter and never
questioned by the movement’s members. In their book Hegemony and
Socialist Strategy Laclau and Mouffe argued that this obsession with pro-
tecting the authority of the original theory, by insisting that it will even-
tually come right in its predictions, was holding up left-wing thought
from addressing the many significant social changes taking place all
around the globe, which it could turn to its advantage. Since these
changes were not conforming to Marxism’s overall conception of his-
tory, this suggested to Laclau and Mouffe that there needed to be some
fundamental reappraisal of the Marxist scheme:
nature of the forces in conflict, the very meaning of the Left’s struggles
and objectives—have been seriously challenged by an avalanche of histor-
ical mutations which have riven the ground on which those truths were
constituted.23
be more important than telling the truth, so the story was quietly bur-
ied, and the post-truth option called on instead. Whether this decision
falls under the head of what has been called the ‘noble lie’ is, at best,
contentious; but it does show how seductive an option post-truth can
be when the governing authorities have a secret they want kept.
Conclusion
Unless you are an unabashed post-truther, to survey the current land-
scape of post-truth can be a fairly depressing experience when you start
assessing the conduct it is regularly involving in the political domain:
the conduct of Trump, Coulter, Bannon, et al., and their aggressively
partisan politics of againstness designed to demonise their opponents.
Politics is often referred to, even by politicians themselves, as a dirty old
game, and history amply affirms this, but it does seem to have become
much dirtier in recent times, and to be showing few signs of arresting
the process. Societies in the modern, post-Enlightenment age, at least
in principle—and at least in the West, anyway—are committed to
the idea of progress, both materially and politically. This vision is not
always adhered to, however, and to look back at the twentieth century
is to note several regressive phases in terms of Enlightenment ideals—
such as human rights, and respect for other cultures and lifestyles. The
Holocaust and the Second World War are prime examples of socio-
political regression, as the Stalinist period in Russian history very obvi-
ously is too. The optimistic way of interpreting such episodes is to point
out how we managed to overcome these very considerable setbacks and
reform Western social and political life along Enlightenment project
lines, restoring the belief that politics should be guided by a respect for
truth; the pessimistic, to point out that we appear to remain very prone
to repeating such regressions.
I would read post-truth as the most visible symbol of yet another
significant regression, where ideals derived from our Enlightenment
heritage are once again being trashed by reckless individuals in favour of
deeply dubious ideological aims. The political scientist Larry Diamond
has gone so far as to suggest that a ‘democratic recession’ has set in.27
3 The Pre-History of Post-Truth
59
Who would have thought that white supremacy would become more
mainstream in countries like America, explicit fascist references and
all? Or that high-profile politicians could use fake news tactics with
such impunity? Or indeed, find such a large audience that would take
them at their word, and believe in what they said so uncritically, accept-
ing wholesale the bizarre concept of alternative facts? Something has
changed within the public realm, and it is a work in progress to find out
how this can best be answered. Regardless of where you place yourself on
the liberal democratic spectrum, whether at its conservative or socialist
end, you have to be worried at where this change might lead: the death
of democracy always has to stand as a distinct possibility. Diamond
remains relatively hopeful this will not happen, because ‘[d]emocrats
have the better set of ideas’, but also counsels that, ‘[i]f the current mod-
est recession of democracy spirals into a depression, it will be because
those of us in the established democracies were our own worst ene-
mies’.28 Unfortunately, very often we appear to be just that at present.
The repeated recourse to post-truth, fake news, and alternative facts
in the political arena is surely a sign of a society going seriously wrong,
and it does not provide all that much comfort to record that there are
precedents for such behaviour when we look back in history. The more
pertinent question to ask is why we seem to keep making the same mis-
take of falling for schemes claiming to create their own reality, in spite
of the many lessons that the past can offer on the matter. Religious his-
tory delivers yet more evidence of how that process works, and that will
be the next topic for consideration.
Notes
1. Quoted in Ron Suskind, ‘Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of
George W. Bush’, The New York Times Magazine (17 October 2004),
www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/chwe/austen/suskind2004.pdf
(accessed 20 February 2018). Suskind reported these remarks as part
of a conversation he had with Rove, who has since denied saying them.
Presumably, one of them must be right, which suggests we are straying
into post-truth/fake news territory at some point here.
60
S. Sim
4. Ibid., p. 3.
2
25. For some of the critical voices on Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxism
see Part I, ‘Redefining Marxism: The Reception of Laclau and Mouffe’,
in Stuart Sim, ed., Post-Marxism: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1998, pp. 13–68.
26. See Huw Lemmey, ‘Something to Shout About’, New Humanist
(Summer 2018), pp. 62–5, for a defence of propaganda as a way of
organising support for government policies.
27. Larry Diamond, ‘Facing Up to the Democratic Recession’, Journal of
Democracy, 26 (2015), pp. 141–55.
28. Ibid., p. 154.
References
Althusser, Louis, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster,
London: NLB, 1971.
Ball, James, Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, London: Biteback,
2017.
Davis, Evan, Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can
Do About It, London: Little, Brown, 2017.
Diamond, Larry, ‘Facing Up to the Democratic Recession’, Journal of
Democracy, 26 (2015), pp. 141–55.
Eco, Umberto, The Prague Cemetery, trans. Richard Dixon, London: Vintage,
2012.
Frankfurt, Harry G., On Bullshit, Princeton, NJ and Woodstock: Princeton
University Press, 2005.
Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin
Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards
a Radical Democratic Politics [1985], 2nd edn, London and New York:
Verso, 2001.
Lemmey, Huw, ‘Something to Shout About’, New Humanist (Summer 2018),
pp. 62–5.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto [1848], ed.
Frederic L. Bender, New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988.
Merridale, Catherine, Lenin on the Train, London: Penguin, 2016.
Orwell, George, 1984 [1949], Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.
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The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2009.
Sim, Stuart, ed., Post-Marxism: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1998.
Suskind, Ron, ‘Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush’, The
New York Times Magazine (17 October 2004), www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/
faculty/chwe/austen/suskind2004.pdf (accessed 20 February 2018).
Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London and New York: Verso,
1989.
4
Faith, Truth and Post-Truth in Religious
Belief
Ask a believer if his or her religion is true, and you will almost undoubtedly
receive an unequivocal ‘yes’ in reply—and possibly also be treated to a
list of reasons why. To be a believer is to have a sense of certainty as to
what one believes in. That is how faith works; it banishes doubt and
insecurity from believers’ lives, assuring them that there is a divinity
looking out for their welfare, one that can always be depended upon to
ease their troubles. That, to them, is a truth that holds firm, whatever
may happen in the world at large. But is it that straightforward? One
could even define monotheistic religion as a form of post-truth, since it
cannot admit any doubt to exist about its doctrines, and denies that its
position can be challenged by sceptical thinkers (traits shared by both
Christianity and Islam, for example), or by any other monotheisms
either. Monotheistic religions emphasise the need for faith, taking this
to be the mark of true religious belief. Faith demands an uncritical
belief in doctrine, and particularly in the sacred texts from which the
doctrine is drawn (such as the Bible, or the Qu’ran), demanding that
this be passed down intact from generation to generation and followed
to the letter: its principles are not really up for discussion. Thus adher-
ents to Christianity have to believe in a series of miracles—virgin birth,
and no amount of cultural change can alter what its contents say; they
are assumed to be as true now as when they were first written, and will
remain that way for eternity, explaining everything you need to know
about the nature of being if you read the text carefully enough (hence
the importance placed on Bible study). It is the task of the clergy to
be such readers and pass on their findings to their flock. This can have
some interesting implications. For creationists, it means that the Earth’s
age is to be computed from the various generations of humankind men-
tioned in the Bible, which, depending on the writer, gives a figure of
somewhere between 6000 and 10,000 years (Bishop James Ussher pro-
vided a lead here, when he calculated in the seventeenth century that
the Earth was created in 4004 B.C.). No amount of argument from the
scientific community will make any difference to the committed crea-
tionist, for whom truth lies in the Bible, not in science. Science must
conform to the Bible, rather than the other way round. Several billion
years of the Earth’s existence, and the scientific proof behind that (in
geology, for example), has to count as fake news, and there are alterna-
tive facts ready and waiting to take over: just turn to Genesis and start
counting the generations up to the coming of Christ, then add the two
millenia since. Alternative facts ready to be widely disseminated as well,
as creationism is on the syllabus of many schools in the American edu-
cational system—plus some in the UK too, in the faith school network
that has been developed in recent times. It is presented in that context
as if it were a scientific theory in its own right, deserving at the very
least equal consideration with the official scientific line: a good example
of what Matthew D’Ancona has described as ‘pernicious relativism dis-
guised as legitimate scepticism’.1
Creationists, however, would see themselves as anything but relativist.
Their position is that God must have had a purpose to make it look as if
the Earth was several billion years old, and it is up to them to work out
a plausible explanation for consumption by the devout, not to suggest
that the Bible could be wrong, or in competition with other authorities.
Any scepticism should be addressed to the scientific explanation, which
is starting from entirely the wrong premise. Physics is relegated to the
status of false consciousness. Not all Christians are as literal as this, I
freely admit, and many nowadays in our more secular age take a more
66
S. Sim
pragmatic view towards their faith and its requirements; but creation-
ism is nevertheless a logical outcome of belief in the Bible as revealed
truth. Science is little better than fake news to creationists; they are not
going to be swayed by its arguments, no matter how detailed. The Bible
becomes the standard against which all other claims and explanations
are to be judged, an eternally reliable source of knowledge as far as the
devout are concerned. As the well-known hymn puts it, I know that
Jesus loves me, because it says so in the Bible: no further proof needed.
Looking back through history, the main monotheistic religions have
traditionally been harsh on those of a sceptical turn of mind, when it is
a question of raising doubt about any of their fundamental doctrines.
Scepticism, for confirmed monotheists, is a form of heresy, and here-
tics are to be dealt with as a danger to the faith. To go against doctrine
was to declare oneself as evil, quite possibly an agent of the devil tasked
with undermining the beliefs of the faithful, and that could lead to your
death as punishment. Scepticism, however, has some very pertinent
points to make about religious belief and the assumptions on which it is
based; assumptions such as the self-evident truth of the sacred texts, and
the existence of a divine being to guarantee this. To a sceptic these are
both unsubstantiated, since they have to be taken on trust alone, thus
raising the spectre of an infinite regress: what guarantees the existence of
the divine being, and so on back, level after level. No fully-fledged scep-
tic would stop at the Bible, or the Qu’ran, as a source of truth beyond
all possible doubt; nor accept that those works conclusively prove the
existence of God as the ultimate guarantor of that truth. Even when
Christian philosophers set out to prove the existence of God, they do so
with a definite bias towards a positive conclusion, rather than to inspire
real doubts amongst believers about the issue. Indeed, only a confirm-
atory answer would be acceptable to their religious peers; any disproof
would be rejected, a case of needing to go back to the drawing board
and construct a more convincing argument. God just has to exist, that
is the whole point of the religion, and proving this is so is the whole
point of religious philosophy; the exercise is meant to reinforce belief,
not to question it. From a sceptical point of view, this is all just too
neat; a case of prejudging what the result of your proof has to be, some-
thing that both philosophy and science consistently warn against. To
4 Faith, Truth and Post-Truth in Religious Belief
67
territorial claims are the stronger. Neither side is of a mind to drop its
claims, each being utterly convinced it has God on its side. Christian
fundamentalists campaign against legislation which sanctions abortion
and gay marriage, arguing that biblical teaching outlaws such activities.
The Christian right in America wields a considerable amount of power
on the political scene, and uses this to put pressure on candidates for
election to support their stance on such policies (as one might suspect,
atheists do not fare well in such a system). Catholicism opposes contra-
ception because of certain passages in the Bible, despite the problems
that rapid population growth is creating in poor countries where the
faith is dominant. Relevant quotations can always be supplied to back
up these positions—although not ones that would persuade the scep-
tic, who would not accept the authority of the source. For the faithful,
however, quotations from sacred texts are truth, and considered to be all
that is required to clinch arguments with opponents. Fundamentalism
triumphs in such situations, which are not about debate, but with prov-
ing your reality is the only true one.
Whatever the sceptic might think of their doctrines, the major world
religions at least anchor themselves in historical figures and events that
are subject to some degree of verification. Jesus Christ and Mohammed
did exist, and are chronicled in various sources other than their respec-
tive religion’s sacred book, even if that does not prove everything that
is attributed to them—their divine mission, miraculous powers, etc.
Scientology, however, pushes us even further into the realm of post-
truth in its explanation of its origins. Given that the founder of the
religion, L. Ron Hubbard, was a writer of science fiction, it is perhaps
not surprising that scientology requires more than the usual amount of
suspension of disbelief. No historical proof can be offered at all for the
events, or the beings, that provide the basis for scientology (much the
same can be said of Mormonism too). That has not stopped it grow-
ing into a worldwide religion with a very substantial following, however,
including many high-profile international celebrities who campaign
vigorously on its behalf. Scientology requires belief in previous lives,
extending this notion out to extraterrestrial life, from where humankind
is claimed to be derived. This does seem to be taking us into a science
fictional realm. However, it could be said that the extraterrestrial option
4 Faith, Truth and Post-Truth in Religious Belief
69
Proof and Religion
The question of proof has to loom very large with religions in gen-
eral. If there is objective proof available about its historical figures and
sacred works, then a religion’s claims can be accepted—at least up to
a point. Sacred works do not on their own constitute objective proof,
they would have to be confirmed by other reliable sources—and also
conform to scientific laws, with all the obvious issues that raises about
miracles. (An enterprising believer might suggest that scientific notions
such as the Big Bang sound a bit like miracles too, as no underlying
cause can be identified for its occurrence. Attribute it to God, how-
ever, as Pope Pius XII did, and the problem disappears—for believers
anyway.2) In one respect, however, religion can avoid the accusation of
being based on post-truth principles: the existence of a divine being.
While it is not possible to prove the existence of God beyond all logical
doubt, despite the valiant attempts of generations of religious philoso-
phers, neither is it possible to disprove it conclusively. It has to remain
an open question as to whether there is such an entity, and it is an idea
which has kept recurring over the history of human civilisation, making
it difficult to ignore in any discussion on the nature of truth and belief.
There is no post-truth as such involved in this case, although that is not
the same thing as saying it is true that there is a divine being, because
there is neither a definitive proof nor disproof. Where no proof exists of
a claim (and this applies to all areas of human activity, not just religion),
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S. Sim
and it can be proved not to have happened, then we are in the realm of
post-truth. Alternative facts, as put forward by the Trump administra-
tion, can be subjected to this test; as can their monotonously frequent
claims of fake news made against their opponents. The only proof we
have of the Bowling Green massacre is Trump’s claim, no other record
of it exists; in which case it can be disproved. It had the desired impact,
however, and that it was not reported in the media was enough proof
to his followers that a conspiracy must be in operation against Trump.
You just cannot win with this group: Trump-trust is notoriously hard
to shake, being all but impervious to opposition. The alternative, that
perhaps there was no media coverage because there never was anything
of substance to cover in the first place, can be dismissed as fake news,
just as scientific proof about the Earth being billions of years old is dis-
missed by the Creationist camp. We find ourselves back in the hall of
mirrors. Creationism has to be considered a regressive step in terms
of religious belief, and yet despite the mental gymnastics it demands,
it continues to collect adherents. Christian bookshops can offer a wide
range of texts outlining the ‘truth’ of creationism, and these do sell—
particularly in America, where the movement is well entrenched within
the religious establishment.
Proofs for the existence of God within the Christian philosophical
tradition can sound very logical. Those of Anselm of Canterbury for
example, are painstakingly constructed, and dense in their reasoning.
God is here described as ‘something than which nothing greater can
be thought’, although that does not give us any very clear idea as to
what God actually is, remaining instead at the level of a fairly abstract
notion (a bit like the Big Bang in that respect).3 Yet for Anselm, to have
that abstract notion constitutes proof in itself of God’s existence: ‘And
surely that-than-which-a-greater-cannot-be-thought cannot exist in
the mind alone. For if it exists in the mind, even, it can be thought
to exist in reality also, which is greater’.4 To think otherwise, would be
to lapse into a logical contradiction: ‘greater’ has to include absolutely
everything or it cannot be defined as ‘greater’. For Anselm, the conclu-
sion to be reached from this line of reasoning is that ‘this being so truly
exists that it cannot be even thought not to exist. … And You, Lord,
are this being’.5 Even if we accept this argument, however (and it does
4 Faith, Truth and Post-Truth in Religious Belief
71
Postmodernism and Religion
There have been various attempts in recent years to reinterpret religion
through postmodern theory, in order to give it a less fundamentalist
character. Whether these resolve the issue of faith as a basis for one’s
worldview is another matter, postmodernists having little time for faith
or uncritical belief of any kind, but at least it opens it out to the chal-
lenge of relativist thought. John D. Caputo has been one of the most
enthusiastic advocates of a postmodern approach to theology, as in his
provocatively titled book What Would Jesus Deconstruct?6 Caputo is
highly critical of fundamentalist interpretations of Christianity, argu-
ing that they are inimical to the spirit of Jesus’s thought and teach-
ings, to the extent that Jesus would, in the event of a ‘second coming’,
most likely set about deconstructing the entire Christian church and
its teachings for its drastic misunderstanding of his gospel. Rather
than the omnipotent, vengeful God of so much fundamentalist theol-
ogy, Caputo’s God is, provocatively enough, a ‘weak force’.7 This con-
cept moves us away from religion as post-truth, and God as a weak
force manifestly does not require the same level of zealotry that fun-
damentalists feel is necessary to defend their belief against critics. The
second coming is also interpreted from a deconstructive standpoint, as
something that will always be ‘to come’, always deferred, never arriv-
ing in any believer’s earthly lifetime—following on from Jacques
Derrida’s claim that meaning can never attain ‘full presence’.8 This
sounds remarkably similar to Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of ‘relative
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S. Sim
could say much the same thing about Christianity.9 But no fundamen-
talist system really accepts the idea that there can be a legitimate post-
to it, or that its tradition has to be updated periodically to take account
of new trends of thought—especially if that update seeks to reinter-
pret its notion of certainty. Fundamentalism does not really go in for
degrees of certainty, never mind keeping only fragments of the origi-
nal creed as if it were a nostalgic reminder of the past: it has to be the
whole package. Caputo could even be described as anti-Christian from
that standpoint, since the Christian establishment will feel itself under
no obligation to justify its millennia-old beliefs to recently-developed
theories like deconstruction or postmodernism. Deconstruction hardly
suggests itself as the subject of a Sunday sermon.
Even so, there is another thought-provoking take on the relationship
between postmodernism and religious belief to be found in Lyotard’s
concept of paganism, where the polytheistic aspect of pagan religion is
seen as being far preferable to the monotheistic tradition in the sense
of being less doctrinaire. Lyotard has in mind paganism as it was prac-
ticed in the classical world, where city-states each had their own pan-
theon of gods: ‘I think that the relation between gods and humans is to
be thought of in terms of boundaries. And pagus always indicates the
country, the region…. It is the place where one compacts with some-
thing else’.10 There is no revealed truth or absolute truth in paganism,
‘it is’, as Lyotard interprets it, ‘a place of ceaseless negotiations and ruses’
with the gods inside the particular boundaries of one’s city-state.11
Polytheism lacks the authoritarian character of monotheism, and is a
more flexible system as far as the individual believer goes: far too flexible
for a religion like Christianity or Islam, who regard belief as something
far stronger than a compact that can be opted into or out of as the indi-
vidual chooses. Monotheistic gods expect obedience, rather than doing
deals with believers: power is not shared, it lies on the divine side of the
relationship only.
The pagan gods are equally engaged in ceaseless negotiations and
ruses with each other (the subject of many classical myths), meaning
that there never is any absolute truth to be identified, just positions rel-
ative to, and jostling with, each other. Full presence eludes them too.
This is not what monotheism has in mind at all, however; it is designed
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S. Sim
but they are not immune from the feelings that cause people to look
for it, even if they seek out meaning and purpose in different ways. The
positive side of religion can make its post-truths recede into the back-
ground, with adherents willing to take the latter on board in order to
gain the benefits of the former. And if these benefits include financial
success, that is another powerful incentive to keep on believing for
many; especially in such a materialistically oriented society as the USA,
where the notion of God as a capitalist would probably seem quite nat-
ural. The gospel being spread here is that it is the entrepreneurial who
will inherit the earth, not the meek (not surprisingly, Donald Trump
has close links with the ‘prosperity gospel’ movement).
Religious post-truth is defensible, therefore, in a way that the alt-
right version never could be: at the very least, the religious one is made
in good faith (even if misguided, as the non-believer would see it),
which is hardly something that could be said of the alt-right with its
divisively racist bias and fascist overtones. This is not to absolve religion
from the damage that fundamentalism, creationism, or the notion of
holy war can do, but to suggest that the psychology underpinning post-
truth always needs to be taken into account, and that some psychologies
are more dangerous than others. White supremacism has to be seen as a
far greater social menace than creationism, unhelpful though the latter
undoubtedly is in educational terms in terms of its conflict with science.
There is the less positive point to make about religion, however, that
conspiracy theory is also in the business of providing people with post-
truths they want to hear, and for much the same reasons, that it gives
meaning to their life and brings them within a community of like-
minded believers: the Simoninis of this world well understand that.
Even if religious post-truth can be defended to some extent, as above,
the psychology is much the same in each case: a need to find an all-
purpose explanation, and the sense of security that brings—no m atter
how illusory that may be. To sceptics, it never could be anything but
illusory, as it lacks definitive proof for its claims; but as long as that
psychological need persists, then post-truth will have a receptive audi-
ence for its narratives in much the same manner that religion continues
to do. The tenaciousness of post-truth is clearly evident in each area.
Some Christians do warn against the implications of that tenaciousness;
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S. Sim
Notes
1. Matthew D’Ancona, Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to
Fight Back, London: Ebury Press, 2017, p. 2.
2. Pius speaks of ‘the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth
from nothing a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of chem-
ical elements split and formed into millions of galaxies’, from which
he concludes that: ‘Therefore, there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists’
(‘The Proofs for the Existence of God in the Light of Modern Natural
Science’ (1951); quoted in Simon Singh, Big Bang: The Most Important
Scientific Discovery of All Time and Why You Need to Know About It,
London and New York: Fourth Estate, 2004, p. 360). Even an atheist
would have to admit that this constitutes a neat conjunction of science
and theology.
3. Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, in Arthur Hyman and James J.
Walsh, eds, Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic,
and Jewish Traditions, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1973, pp. 149–51
(p. 150).
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of
Postmodernity for the Church, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic,
2007.
4 Faith, Truth and Post-Truth in Religious Belief
77
References
Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, in Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh, eds,
Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions,
Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1973, pp. 149–51.
Caputo, John D., The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press, 2006.
———, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?: The Good News of Postmodernity for the
Church, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2007.
D’Ancona, Matthew, Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back,
London: Ebury Press, 2017.
Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference [1967], trans. Alan Bass, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978.
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S. Sim
Laclau, Ernesto, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, trans. Jon
Barnes, et al., London and New York: Verso, 1990.
Lyotard, Jean-François, and Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming [1979], trans.
Wlad Godzich, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.
Percy, Martyn, ‘To Know Trump’s Faith Is To Understand His Politics’, The
Guardian, Journal Section (7 February 2018), p. 4.
Quaker Faith and Practice: The Book of Christian Discipline of the Yearly Meeting
of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain, 5th edn, qfp.quaker.
org.uk/chapter/1 (accessed 10 April 2018).
Singh, Simon, Big Bang: The Most Important Scientific Discovery of All Time
and Why You Need to Know About It, London and New York: Fourth Estate,
2004.
5
Philosophical Scepticism and Its
Arguments for Relativism
we know what to believe and what not? Or how to defend the position
we find most credible? We would appear to be back with truth as anar-
chy, a situation which on the face of it could be turned to advantage by
the post-truth community, all but licensing them to claim whatever it is
they wanted to.
The most famous work of classical scepticism to survive is Outlines of
Scepticism (c. 200 A.D.) by Sextus Empiricus. For this thinker (building
on the work of earlier sceptics in a line running back several centuries
in Greek classical philosophy), truth was an illusion, because there was
no way of discriminating between the value of one or other instance of
it, leading him to claim that there was no point in even trying to do so:
‘The chief constitutive principle of scepticism is the claim that to every
account an equal account is opposed; for it is from this, we think, that
we come to hold no belief ’.1 Sextus Empiricus seemed quite sanguine
about being left in that position, one where ‘a suspension of judge-
ment’ leads ‘afterwards to tranquillity’, although not everyone would
be.2 One critic of classical scepticism has suggested that ‘perhaps some
people need a good hearty dose of naive Dogmatism (as religion appar-
ently comforts the bereaved)’, to enable them to negotiate the trials and
tribulations of everyday existence.3 Politically and ideologically Sextus’s
tranquillity amounts to a counsel of despair, as such passivity leaves the
field open to one’s competitors, and it is easy to see how post-truthers
might try to capitalise on this outcome by appealing to your prejudices
as a way of skirting round the problem of having doubts: dogmatists
need little more encouragement. It would be a case of believe in what
your feelings tell you and act accordingly, the antithesis of what most
philosophers think we should be doing in such situations—but, it has
to be admitted, one that does have a wide appeal. Post-truth would not
have been able to gain such a foothold were that not so. And as noted
before, any of us are more than capable of being carried along by our
emotions on occasion, and making decisions that in looking back on
we might well regret. The confirmed post-truther, however, is highly
unlikely to experience regret about trusting to his or her gut feeling.
Reflection on other possible outcomes is not a post-truth characteristic:
prejudice is proof against such a trait.
5 Philosophical Scepticism and Its Arguments for Relativism
81
Theories of Truth
There are various theories of truth in philosophy that would seem to
prevent the problem of relativism or post-truth from arising: corre-
spondence theory and coherence theory, for example. Correspondence
theory works on the principle of truth being a case of whether state-
ments are describing accurately states of affairs that exist in the world. If
you cannot indicate what that correspondence is then you cannot claim
that what you say is a truth, it requires that corroboration to justify
acceptance by others. Coherence theory takes truth to be a matter of
coherence within a system of belief, which makes it particularly appli-
cable to areas like mathematics and formal logic, where it is critical that
all the system’s symbols have a fixed value as to what they stand for, and
set rules as to how they can operate. Rather more problematically, how-
ever, it is a theory that can also be used within the area of religion. In
that latter case, the system itself depends on beliefs which do appear to
fit the description of post-truth, and as the previous chapter indicated,
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S. Sim
once we get into the issue of faith and doctrines derived from sacred
books, things become very murky as regards truth. It is in the nature
of religions to be coherent, to hang together as a system of belief; but
the evidence for the truth of their doctrines, other than being present
in their sacred books, and the tradition of commentary that has grown
from that over time, is not going to be enough to persuade the non-
believer who is not starting from a position of faith. Miracles will always
constitute a sticking point for the latter. Whereas faith counts more
than reason on one side, the opposite applies on the other; coherence is
being judged according to different criteria by each side. Another differ-
end asking to be pondered over.
It can also be said of correspondence theory that the followers of such
political figures as Donald Trump really do seem to believe that what he
says describes actual states of affairs; it matches their vision of the world,
whereas what his critics say does not. In that world, the Bowling Green
Massacre really did take place, instead of something far more mundane
(the arrest of two suspects charged with being radical Islamists, with
no violent action ensuing), helping to make Trump’s case that terrorist
outrages were becoming more common in the USA, so action urgently
needed to be taken against Muslim immigrants. Furthermore, Trump’s
supporters believe his claim that there is a media conspiracy against
him, meaning that such events are not reported; the correspondences
are being suppressed by the liberal media. Conspiracy theory neatly fills
in the gaps here. Trump-trusters would also contend that their beliefs
are coherent, and could no doubt reel off exactly why. Something along
the lines of, ‘In Trump We Trust’ because otherwise the country will
continue to fall apart, thanks to the debilitating effect on public morals
of liberal policies: Obama has already tried to wreck the healthcare sys-
tem, etc. The likes of Coulter can always come up with the appropriate
chapter and verse on this, to keep the grievance level running high.
Any objections that this is not the way either theory of truth really
works philosophically speaking (and philosophers can offer much
tighter versions of both4), are hardly likely to change the opinion of
the committed Trump enthusiast. A very basic, if somewhat naive,
interpretation of both coherence and correspondence can be turned to
advantage by the post-truth camp, who can then feel vindicated in the
5 Philosophical Scepticism and Its Arguments for Relativism
83
trust they hold in Trump. Everything would neatly fit in; thinking it
possible that they may be mistaken is not on their agenda. Post-truthers
are nothing if not strong-willed in persevering with their beliefs; ‘naive
Dogmatism’ is not to be commended in their case.
Bayesian analysis puts forward yet another method of dealing with
the problem of uncertainty, basing itself on probability, and what we
can infer from this. It has been described as ‘a rigorous method for
interpreting evidence in the context of previous experience or knowl-
edge’.5 In the absence of certainty, therefore, there are degrees of
probability, based on our knowledge of past events and the reason-
able expectations we have built up because of this. Each episode of
confirming evidence can combine with our prior beliefs (in scientific
laws, for example), so that we can infer a higher probability of those
beliefs being true the next time around. Truth is still provisional, but
there is a probability that can be assigned to it, based on past instances,
making it reasonable to go on believing in it—as with a given scien-
tific law. It is never an absolute guarantee, as a contradictory instance
is always theoretically possible, but it is enough to work with in most
sets of circumstances that we are likely to encounter. We might con-
clude from the use-value of Bayesian analysis that it is the desire for
certainty (particularly absolute certainty) that creates difficulties, and
that this is more of a psychological problem than a philosophical or
scientific one. Since they are very often operating at the boundaries of
what we know, an absence of certainty is something that scientists are
quite used to coping with; their task then becomes to find ways round
that, not to give up on their researches and retreat into the world of
Sextus Empiricus.
Bayesian analysis is now being used very widely in the sciences, par-
ticularly with regard to statistics and the practice of computation. While
it does not yield certain truth, it does provide a basis for continuing
on in its absence, and most importantly, what we can infer from the
information available to us at any given moment as to what we can
believe with a reasonable degree of confidence. It is not a case of being
mistaken to believe in probability, which for Bayesians is as close to
certainty as we can hope to get. James V. Stone has summed up the
system’s benefits as follows:
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Being provisional need not mean that all discourse is thrown into a
state of disarray and knowledge rendered useless, or that there are no
ways of settling disputes. Probability from this perspective is a much
stronger position than we might initially think it ever could be, involv-
ing informed rather than random guessing, the latter being the kind of
criticism that scepticism and relativism are often subjected to.
Informed guessing means that we are still left with relativism, but it is
not as open-ended as the more radical sceptics are prone to claim. There
is no need to withdraw into the state of tranquil passivity recommended
by Sextus Empiricus—nor to revert to naive dogmatism to avoid that
fate either. The key to our informed guessing is information:
of gray scores between 0 and 1’.14 Facts, for Kosko, are ‘partially true’
or ‘partially false’—as opposed to logic, which is ‘100% true or 100%
false’. But he insists there is no overlap between the spheres of opera-
tion of facts and logic: ‘never the twain shall meet’.15 Post-truth cannot
take advantage of this ‘partial’ quality, however, because it is decidable
whether its claims are right or not: evidence either way can be cited.
Fake news is not fuzzy: the Bowling Green Massacre is not just partially
false, it is false. In Baggini’s terms of reference, what we are dealing with
here is a supposed truth only, and evidence can be brought to bear on
it to reveal that this is so; there is a real truth about the supposed one.
Trump-trusters will just ignore the evidence, but that does not render
it undecidable. Informed guessing and dogmatism lie at opposite poles
to each other when it comes to decision-making. There has to be a fact
before we can speak of it being partially true or partially false, and fake
news cannot meet that criterion, meaning that we have no basis for
informed guessing in such cases. Sounding true, or even just plausible,
is not enough to take us into the range of partiality.
It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that
we do not know whether it will rise. There is no compulsion making one
thing happen because another has happened. The only necessity that
exists is logical necessity.18
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always
stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or
shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any
time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the per-
ception…. I may venture to affirm of the rest of mankind, that they are
nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which suc-
ceed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux
of movement.21
Even Hume, it would seem, cannot resist ‘a good hearty dose of naive
Dogmatism’ on occasion.
Truth and Evidence
It will have become clear by now that in most areas of life truth is a
matter of evidence, rather than purely logical deduction as it is carried
out in mathematics or formal logic. Post-truth and fake news can only
be disproved by providing evidence to the contrary of what they are
claiming, evidence that can be independently verified, or by exposing
their lack of evidence for their claims. This is how scientific truth works
as well, by investigating what evidence can be found for its theories;
even when these have been reached through mathematical calculations,
they still need to be tested, as Rovelli emphasises:
[T]he theory gives predictions about things we have not yet observed,
and we can check whether these are correct, or not…. This is what
92
S. Sim
Notes
1. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Scepticism, trans. Julia Annas and
Jonathan Barnes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 4.
2. Ibid.
3. R.J. Hankinson, The Sceptics, London and New York: Routledge, 1995,
p. 306.
4. See, for example, Joshua Rasmussen, Defending the Correspondence
Theory of Truth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014; Ralph
C.S. Walker, The Coherence Theory of Truth: Realism, Anti-Realism,
Idealism, London and New York: Routledge, 1988.
5. James V. Stone, Bayes’ Rule: A Tutorial Introduction to Bayesian Analysis,
Sheffield: Sebtel Press, 2013, p. 1.
6. Ibid., p. 9.
7. Ibid., p. 120.
8. Ibid., p. 128.
9. Julian Baggini, A Short History of Truth: Consolations for a Post-Truth
World, London: Quercus, 2017, p. 10.
5 Philosophical Scepticism and Its Arguments for Relativism
95
References
Baggini, Julian, A Short History of Truth: Consolations for a Post-Truth World,
London: Quercus, 2017.
Hankinson, R.J., The Sceptics, London and New York: Routledge, 1995.
Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature [1739], ed. D.G.C. Macnabb,
Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1962.
Kosko, Bart, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic, London:
Flamingo, 1993.
Kuhn, Thomas, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1962], 2nd edn, Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
96
S. Sim
Relativism became very popular again in the latter part of the twentieth
century amongst postmodernist and poststructuralist thinkers like Jean-
François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, for whom
it became a way of challenging the power structures in our culture. If
there was no overall standard for truth then that meant such structures
were based on unsubstantiated assumptions, thus undermining their
credibility and the authority this gave them over the general public.
This was a line that was pushed hard by poststructuralists and postmod-
ernists, who saw themselves as taking on the establishment across the
fields of politics and the arts. As we have noted, relativism taken to its
extreme means that no one belief can be considered any better than any
other, and that creates a very considerable problem with regard to value
judgements, raising the issue of whether these are still possible within a
relativist framework where clinching evidence would appear to be ruled
out. Clinching evidence or not, however, value judgements cannot be
avoided; so how can we justify them? A comparison of the treatment
of relativism in the work of Lyotard and Derrida in particular can be
very revealing in that respect, and it has important implications for any
analysis of the post-truth phenomenon. Deconstruction can be a very
Deconstruction and Relativism
Deconstruction undermines the notion of truth, and consequently any
ideological claims, putting it at variance with Lyotard’s more politically
oriented approach to the topic. Derrida’s line throughout his work is
that deconstruction is neither theory nor method: ‘deconstruction, as I
have often had to insist, is not a discursive or theoretical affair, but a
practico-political one, and it is always produced within the structures
100
S. Sim
the quandary that extreme versions of relativism can always leave us in.
Criticism becomes yet another activity based on a false premise: that it
can reveal the true meaning of any text, that it is just a matter of decod-
ing what goes to make up its structure. Thus his claim that ‘literary
criticism is structuralist in every age, in its essence and destiny’.14
Derrida is careful to distance himself from the critical tradition in
general, insisting that this is not what deconstruction is ever about,
although that has not prevented a school of literary criticism from
developing out of deconstruction. Deconstructive critics, however, tend
to be more concerned with cataloguing ambiguity and gaps in the texts
they study than in explaining what their meaning might be, whereas
for mainstream literary criticism that is the primary task to be under-
taken.15 One side looks for the gaps in presence, where the sign fails to
be a unity, remaining ‘half not there’ and ‘half not that’; whereas the
other is trying to pin down presence to render the text more accessi-
ble to its audience. Given such a marked divergence in objectives, it is
hardly surprising that the literary studies establishment has been no less
critical of Derrida than the philosophical one has: accusations of charla-
tanism are not uncommon.
When he does get on to the subject of truth itself, Derrida makes it
seem like an unrealisable state of affairs. Reflecting on a statement by
Paul Cezanne in a letter to a friend that, ‘I owe you the truth in paint-
ing and I will tell it to you’, Derrida expresses deep scepticism about the
concept:
‘the truth in painting’ … could mean and be understood as: truth itself
restored, in person, without mediation, makeup, mask, or veil. In other
104
S. Sim
words the true truth or the truth of the truth, restituted in its power
of restitution, truth looking sufficiently like itself to escape any mispri-
sion, any illusion; and even any representation – but sufficiently divided
already to resemble, produce, or engender itself twice over, in accordance
with the two genitives: truth of truth and truth of truth.17
The notion that truth is divided suggests it can never be pinned down
with precision, that it can never convey its meaning unproblematically:
a consistent theme throughout Derrida’s work. He goes on to speak of
‘truth-effects’, which pretty much describes what post-truthers are striv-
ing for in order to establish some semblance of credibility with their
audience; as if the appearance of truth was all that mattered, the abil-
ity to produce effects to generate the required emotional response.18 As
long as fake news has the effect of truth, then that will suffice for sup-
porters of such as Trump. For the deconstructionist, however, all that
truth-effects do is mask the lack of full presence in meaning; they can
never be anything other than a pretence.
It is passages such as the above two from The Truth in Painting that
have gained Derrida the notoriety that he enjoys within the philo-
sophical world. He is deliberately problematising the concept of truth,
whether in the context of the arts or in more general usage, which is
what one would expect from a radical sceptic. The more he holds forth
on truth, the more obscure an entity it seems. The implication is that
truth will always elude us, meaning that we have no basis for value
judgement: it is Sextus Empiricus updated.
How do you decide to do or not do? … You add up a lot of things and
weight each thing to some degree. Then you go with the average or ‘cen-
troid’ or center of mass. You do not solve math equations[.] … You do it
by feel. You feel or intuit the center of mass. It pulls you or inclines you.28
oeuvre). You can conduct a dialogue with a pragmatist, since you are
both positioning yourselves within philosophical history; but you can
hardly do so against a deconstructionist who claims to have no method
at all, to be effectively outside that tradition altogether and engaged in
the practice of destabilising discourse in general, regarding it as ‘an old
cloth that must continually, interminably be undone’.30 There are very
different language games going on here. Lyotard, however, very defi-
nitely has roots in that history, as The Differend in particular demon-
strates, with its ‘Notices’ on various philosophers such as Plato and
Kant, positioning Lyotard with regard to their work. A deconstruc-
tionist, however, is claiming to be rootless, and the academic philo-
sophical world has been predictably very critical of the deconstructive
movement because of that claim. For Lyotard, being a relativist does not
mean being outside philosophical history; it means arguing your case
from within it, rather than writing it off as based on false principles.
The absence of absolute certainty in your discourse does not absolve you
from the need to engage politically; you strive to reach as much rela-
tive certainty there as you can, and see what can be achieved with that.
Deconstruction does not argue against such political involvement, but
it gives you far less to go on in justifying the courses of action that you
choose to follow. Extreme relativism does not translate well into pol-
itics, and that is never going to be an acceptable situation for such a
political animal as Lyotard, for whom it would simply be giving carte
blanche to your dogmatically inclined opponents.
cannot say that Heidegger’s thought “leaves open” the question of his
silence on the Holocaust [as another contributor to the Heidegger Affair
had alleged]. It seals it hermetically’.39 Such silence becomes a form
of post-truth: a denial of what has happened. Heidegger has signally
failed to bear witness to the differend between a Nazi-led Germany
and the Jews, and that is a philosophical as well as an ideological fail-
ing in Lyotard’s view. It is as if for Lyotard the Heidegger of the right
cancels out the Heidegger of the left. Socio-political context just cannot
be ignored in this way, and it is one’s philosophical duty to ensure that
does not happen.
Lyotard’s commitment to a ‘philosophical politics’ comes through
very strongly at such points, since its objective is to give a voice to
the concerns of those who are being prevented from doing so by the
metanarrative ruling over them: the victims of the Holocaust become
a prime example of that category. There is always a political dimen-
sion to be acknowledged within the philosophical world, no less than
in any other area of human activity, and Heidegger must be held to
account for his part in this—even if it is just his silence after an event
that cannot simply be erased from history. Forgetting is for Lyotard
another form of denialism, and that has to render Heidegger’s philo-
sophical thought suspect. Philosophers, he insists, cannot turn a blind
eye to the political world; they have a responsibility to become involved
there on behalf of others (his own writings on the Algerian revolution
against French rule in the 1950s, for the Socialisme ou Barbarie jour-
nal, are exemplary in that regard, making clear his support for ordinary
Algerians, who were not always being well served by their own revolu-
tionary leaders40). Relativism does not permit one to opt out of moral
dilemmas. Even if discourse cannot guarantee absolute truths, relative
certainty is enough to condemn fascism. When it comes to such topics
moral neutrality is impossible, and sides must be taken; forgetting has
to count as bad faith, and an unforgivable instance of it when it comes
to Nazism.
The Jews become for Lyotard the most blatant example of the scape-
goating tendency so prevalent in Western culture, which could be used
against almost any group that a majority chose to turn on. Hence his
6 Postmodern Relativism: Jean-François Lyotard …
113
use of the term ‘the jews’, which he argued could be applied more
widely to oppressed minorities throughout history:
It seems to me … that ‘the jews’ are within the ‘spirit’ of the Occident
that is so preoccupied with foundational thinking, what resists this spirit;
within its will, the will to want, what gets in the way of this will; within
its accomplishments, projects, and progress, what never ceases to reopen
the wound of the unaccomplished.41
Lyotard points out that what tends to happen in such situations histori-
cally, when a particularly divisive differend develops within a culture, is
that the stronger of the two sides works to impose its will on the other,
ignoring its concerns and discriminating against it when disputes occur.
Metanarrative dogmatism encourages such a move, since it believes
its ‘truth’ is universal, and that all opposition to it is misguided. This
is what happens when, for example, colonisers and their colonised sub-
jects clash—a recurrent state of affairs throughout the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries that has left a legacy of ill-will running into the cur-
rent century. The political system is set up by the colonisers to judge
all conflicts between the two parties according to its own set of rules,
suppressing the latter group by armed force if necessary and refusing
to acknowledge the validity of any of its complaints. Truth becomes a
matter of power under these circumstances, and Lyotard is quite une-
quivocal in defining this as a ‘wrong’, because ‘the rules of the genre of
discourse by which one judges are not those of the judged genre or gen-
res of discourse’.44 The side making the judgement is failing to respect
the legitimacy of the other side’s position, and that is one of the key
criteria for the assessment of morality in Lyotard’s world; cultural dif-
ference must always be respected in order to minimise the risk of differ-
ends arising.
A more pessimistic way of interpreting this concept would be to
see society as a multitude of mutually exclusive differends, none able
to compromise with any other in real terms: a situation of dogmatists
confronting dogmatists. Politics from that perspective would be a bat-
tle between a series of truths, or post-truths, with very little possibility
6 Postmodern Relativism: Jean-François Lyotard …
117
the rulers would not allow to be transgressed by any dissident group: ‘It
is common knowledge that the seventeenth century created enormous
houses of confinement; it is less commonly known that more than one
out of every hundred inhabitants of the city of Paris found themselves
confined there, within several months’.46 We were not dealing in truths
when it came to ideology, therefore, but with power: the relative bal-
ance of power between factions in a society, and the struggle to be the
dominant one within that ensemble. Those with that dominant power
could dictate what was to count as truth in their society—as Lyotard
had pointed out was the standard pattern with differends historically.
Foucault is often accused of overstating the case about truth’s rela-
tionship to power, which is the criticism that Baggini levels at him: ‘the
force of his argument is severely diminished if we conclude that truth
is nothing more than the exercise of power. … We must be careful not
to confuse the frequent capture of truth by power with an equation of
truth and power’.47 This is a crucial distinction, and one that Foucault’s
supporters do not always make. Yet although power is a social con-
struct in Foucault’s reading, that does not mean every form of it is to
be treated as equally acceptable ideologically. Some versions are clearly
preferable to others for Foucault—those that respect difference in its
various forms (social, political, sexual, ethnic, etc.), as cases in point.
He was, after all, an activist on behalf of various causes throughout his
life—the gay community and prisoners, for example; like Lyotard, he
was a constructive thinker. It could be argued, therefore, that Foucault’s
relativism, like Lyotard’s, still enables value judgements to be made, and
that it is not the recipe for anarchy that opponents on the metanarra-
tive side so often claim it to be. Relative certainty can be claimed once
again, and the necessity for it becomes very clear when having to face
up to ideological metanarratives: scepticism alone will not be enough
to undermine the authority they have built up over a period of genera-
tions. There is a certainty as to what thinkers like Lyotard and Foucault
are against, if nothing else, and that does differentiate them from clas-
sical sceptics like Sextus Empiricus, who simply opts out of the busi-
ness of choosing altogether. A relativism that incorporates some method
for making value judgements is one that can be turned on post-truth—
digital desperadoes and all.
6 Postmodern Relativism: Jean-François Lyotard …
119
Conclusion
The postmodernist thinkers discussed above are all relativists, who take
truth to be a problematical entity, but crucially in the case of Lyotard
(and at least implicitly in Foucault) an entity that we have to engage
with in order to make value judgements possible. Politics demands that
for Lyotard, otherwise cultural difference is placed at risk. The point of
scepticism is to raise doubts in your mind with regard to things that
you take for granted (and Derrida clearly succeeds in doing that in his
self-consciously iconoclastic way), not to sanction the introduction of
alternative facts because truth is relative. As Lyotard’s work demon-
strates, not all value judgements are to be considered ideologically
acceptable just because truth is relative either. Philosophical relativ-
ism need not lead to the free-for-all envisaged by Matthew D’Ancona,
therefore, even if it does problematise the status of truth, asking us to
look closely at how it is being used and what it is being used to justify.
This is an exercise that all social constructs should be put through—
including, critically, post-truth. ‘To conflate the lying of the Trump
era with “the questioning of truth”’, Peter Salmon warns, ‘is to become
complicit in a neat trick’.48 Relativism ought to concentrate our minds
about what is going on when we are making value judgements; whether
we really are justified in reaching the decisions we do in such situations,
and can justify them to others as well (sceptical others in particular).
It may only be relative certainty we end up with, but that is still some-
thing worth achieving in the current climate; that, plus informed guess-
ing, gives us a reasonably sound basis from which to take on the tricks
of the post-truth community.
Notes
1. Matthew D’Ancona, Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to
Fight Back, London: Ebury Press, 2017, p. 92.
2. Peter Salmon, ‘The Moment of Truth’, New Humanist (Spring 2018),
pp. 26–31 (p. 26).
120
S. Sim
References
Baggini, Julian, A Short History of Truth: Consolations for a Post-Truth World,
London: Quercus, 2017.
Barthes, Roland, S/Z: An Essay [1970], trans. Richard Miller, New York: Hill
and Wang, 1974.
———, Image Music Text, ed. and trans. Stephen Heath, London: Fontana,
1977.
Bloom, Harold, et al., Deconstruction & Criticism, London and Henley:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.
D’Ancona, Matthew, Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back,
London: Ebury Press, 2017.
Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference [1967], trans. Alan Bass, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978.
———, Positions [1972], trans. Alan Bass, London: Athlone Press, 1981.
———, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond [1980], trans. Alan
Bass, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
———, The Truth in Painting [1978], trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian
McLeod, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
———, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, trans.
Peggy Kamuf, ed. Christie McDonald, Lincoln and London: University of
Nebraska Press, 1988.
Farías, Victor, Heidegger and Nazism [1987], trans. Paul Burrell and Gabriel R.
Ricci, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989.
Foucault, Michel, Madness and Civilization: A History of Madness in the Age of
Reason [1961], trans. Richard Howard, London: Tavistock, 1967.
6 Postmodern Relativism: Jean-François Lyotard …
123
And some said, let them live; some, let them die:
Some said, John, print it; others said, Not so:
Some said, It might do good; others said, No.1
Bunyan was a clergyman, and a very devout believer whose major con-
cern in life was to pass on the truth of the Bible in his preaching. He
had already published his autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief
of Sinners, giving a detailed account of his spiritual development and
how it led him to the ministry, an activity he took with the utmost seri-
ousness, choosing to go to prison for several years in the 1660s rather
than give up lay preaching, as the law of the time required.2 Such a
figure would be particularly sensitive to any charges of putting his reli-
gious mission at risk. To invent a story could be construed as invent-
ing lies, and to some of Bunyan’s Puritan peers, those who cautioned
him to ‘let them die’, that is what his fictional efforts appeared to be.
Bunyan convinced himself to go ahead and publish, however, insisting
to his readers that the narrative had valuable life-lessons to pass on to
them, that it really had the power to ‘do good’ in the wider world and
so should be given the benefit of the doubt:
this Story differs from most of the Modern Performances of this Kind,
tho’ some of them have met with a very good Reception in the World: I
say, It differs from them in this Great and Essential Article, Namely, That
the Foundation of This is laid in Truth of Fact; and so the Work is not a
Story, but a History.5
truth in the manner of Trumpian fake news. This is truth within a fable
as it should be; narrative designed to help us further develop our moral
sense, and improve our understanding of the world and relations with
our fellow human beings. Trump-trust falls well short of that.
It is those aspects of fictional narrative that led the American pragma-
tist philosopher Richard Rorty to argue that fiction should be consid-
ered a source of knowledge; one that in his opinion was more important
to us in learning how to deal with our world than philosophy was.
Rorty was a proponent of ‘a post-Philosophical culture’, where literature
and the various other arts were to be viewed as more meaningful than
yet more analysis of the ‘good old metaphysical problems’ that philoso-
phy has traditionally concerned itself with: ‘are there really universals?’,
etc. (the staples of a university degree in the subject for generations of
students).8 As he crisply summarises it: ‘Mathematics helps physics
do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its’.9 Ethical problems
are standard themes in literature, and they give readers much food for
thought as to how to deal with them in their own lives—far more so
than philosophy, with its fairly abstract principles, does, in Rorty’s view.
Rorty is not one to become obsessed about the concept of truth, or
with trying to work out watertight theories for it. Outside of profes-
sional philosophical circles such metaphysical problems mean very little,
whereas the need to make value judgements and choose between com-
peting courses of action matters a great deal. Far better to be ‘postmet-
aphysical’ instead, so in typically provocative fashion he writes off the
entire discourse surrounding truth in philosophical history10:
Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the
Good, or to define the word ‘true’ or ‘good,’ supports their suspicion that
there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course,
have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found some-
thing interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of
‘number.’ They might have found something interesting to say about the
essence of Truth. But in fact they haven’t.11
Relativism is not a problem in the real world for Rorty, only in the
philosophical one, and there are far more pressing issues to address
132
S. Sim
a part only, the aim being to discourage overly close identification with
their characters: ‘The actor must show an event, and he must show him-
self. He naturally shows the event by showing himself, and he shows
himself by showing the event. Although these two tasks coincide, they
must not coincide to such a point that the contrast (difference) between
them disappears’.14 The plays all have a didactic purpose (revealing
Brecht’s communist beliefs in the main), and are designed to make their
audiences think rather than simply have their emotions stirred, which
to Brecht was a fault to be found in most dramatic productions. We
are not meant to sympathise with a Mother Courage beset with misfor-
tunes, therefore, but to see her plight as the product of an ideologically
corrupt society that inevitably works to the disadvantage of the individ-
ual by distorting human relations.15 Mother Courage is as obsessed with
money and profit as her ideology is, and she will be made to suffer for
this, losing all her children as a result. There is a truth within the fable,
and that is far more important than the fable itself: Bunyan could agree
on this point, if that is not too far-fetched an authorial comparison to
make. The fable is to be treated as no more than a vehicle for the didac-
tic message it contains—a distinctly anti-capitalist, pro-communist
one, very much designed to help ethics do its job. To ensure that this
is how it is received, the audience must be kept aware at all times that
it is merely a fable it is watching, and that it is inviting them to reflect
on their ideological beliefs. In his own way, Brecht too feels the need to
justify inventing narratives for public consumption; writing carries that
kind of responsibility.
Conclusion
If we are going to talk about literary narrative as offering us truth within
a fable, then the criterion we ought to be using for this type of truth is
its social usefulness. Does it provide lessons that will help us deal with
the problems in our life? Can it, for example, genuinely help ethics
do its job, as Richard Rorty so confidently claimed, even if this pro-
vides no more than a relative certainty as to our decisions? Although
7 ‘Truth Within a Fable’? Fiction, Truth and Post-Truth
135
Notes
1. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Parts One and Two [1678, 1684],
ed. W.R. Owens, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 4.
2. John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners [1666], ed. W.R.
Owens, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.
3. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, p. 8.
4. Defoe, Daniel, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
[1722], ed. G.A. Starr, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, p. 1.
5. Daniel Defoe, Roxana: Or, The Fortunate Mistress [1724], ed. John
Mullan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 1.
6. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones [1749], ed. R.P.C. Mutter,
London: Penguin, 1985.
7. The book is split into an ‘Editor’s Narrative’ and the ‘sinner’ Robert
Wringhim’s ‘Memoirs’, which have been handed on to the Editor
many years later for publication: ‘I have now the pleasure of present-
ing my readers with an original document of a most singular nature,
and preserved for their perusal in a still more singular manner. I offer
no remarks on it, and make as few additions to it, leaving every one to
judge for himself ’ (James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions
of a Justified Sinner [1824], ed. John Carey, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1981, p. 93).
8. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980),
Brighton: Harvester, 1982, pp. xxi, xxix.
9. Ibid., p. xliii.
10. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989, p. xvi.
11. Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, p. xiv.
12. Ibid., p. 168.
13. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment [1866], trans. Oliver Ready,
London: Penguin, 2014.
14. Bertolt Brecht, quoted in Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht
[1966], trans. Anna Bostock, London: NLB, 1973, p. 11.
15. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of the
Thirty Years War [1941], trans. Eric Bentley, London: Methuen, 1962.
7 ‘Truth Within a Fable’? Fiction, Truth and Post-Truth
137
References
Benjamin, Walter, Understanding Brecht [1966], trans. Anna Bostock, London:
NLB, 1973.
Brecht, Bertolt, Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty
Years War [1941], trans. Eric Bentley, London: Methuen, 1962.
Bunyan, John, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners [1666], ed. W.R. Owens,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987.
———, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Parts One and Two [1678, 1684], ed. W.R. Owens,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Defoe, Daniel, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders
[1722], ed. G.A. Starr, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
———, Roxana: Or, The Fortunate Mistress [1724], ed. John Mullan, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment [1866], trans. Oliver Ready,
London: Penguin, 2014.
Fielding, Henry, The History of Tom Jones [1749], ed. R.P.C. Mutter, London:
Penguin, 1985.
Hogg, James, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner [1824],
ed. John Carey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
Rorty, Richard, Consequences of Pragmatism (Essays: 1972–1980), Brighton:
Harvester, 1982.
———, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989.
8
A Post-Liberal Society?
Yet another ‘post-’ has come in for a lot of discussion recently, and that
is ‘post-liberalism’. Various commentators have been speculating as to
whether the West is becoming post-liberal in its ideological outlook,
and also as to whether that is a good thing or not.1 It depends what
one understands by post-liberalism of course, and we are faced once
more with the slipperiness of the prefix, which can be interpreted either
as meaning to go beyond a concept, and possibly improve it to make
it more responsive to cultural change, or to reject it entirely: full pres-
ence would seem to be lacking here. Post-Marxism has already had to
go through that process with the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal
Mouffe, who regarded themselves in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy as
going beyond Marxism but retaining its spirit (being ‘post-Marxist’ yet
also ‘post-Marxist ’, as they defined their position2), while their detrac-
tors in the Marxist establishment accused them instead of contradict-
ing the theory’s main principles to the extent of becoming anti-Marxist:
a clear differend. It is an argument that has not gone away within the
field, where traditionalists have never forgiven Laclau and Mouffe, and
the movement of thought that developed out of their work, for the
divisions they have created on the left. We need to bear the slipperiness
as well as identity politics in general. Either of the latter two models could
be called post-liberal, or more correctly perhaps, post-liberal. Goodhart,
however, thinks post-liberalism should steer more of a middle course:
‘Tired polarities’ aside (although they would not appear that way to
the alt-right, who positively thrive on them as a way of positioning
themselves on the political scene), we know that free-market capital-
ism can take more socially responsible forms than the neoliberal one,
and frequently has done so in the past. In the aftermath of the Second
World War, for instance, a welfare state oriented model became quite
common throughout Western Europe, providing extensive coverage
in areas like healthcare and housing provision. Even right-wing polit-
ical parties went along with this ‘cradle to the grave’ notion, recognis-
ing its general appeal at the time in the aftermath of the turmoil of the
Depression and the War. Neoliberalism opposes that model, however,
with the very high levels of taxation it requires, and has been a key ele-
ment in the movement to wind it down, which has happened to a sig-
nificant extent in most of the European countries where it had been
implemented. Reduction of welfare spending has been a goal of most
European nations for several decades now, allowing taxes to be cut as
neoliberalism argues is necessary to foster growth in the business world
(if nothing else, it has been successful in fostering substantial growth
in managerial salaries and bonuses, as well as in share dividends). That
is a trend, however, that could be reversed: a post-neoliberalism, with
the ‘greater economic interventionism’ called for by Goodhart perhaps
(I am not so sure of his social conservatism, however). The alt-right
would present a powerful barrier to any such reform, since economic
interventionism of almost any kind is anathema to their cause. They
want to wind down the power of the state, propounding the creed
of small government, with regulation kept to a bare minimum—
little more than basic law and order in more extreme interpretations.
144
S. Sim
Post-liberalism will look very different depending on who wins this par-
ticular battle of ideas.
The European Union is also under pressure to re-examine its com-
mitment to freedom of movement of people—a policy most liberals
would agree to, in abstract anyway—because of the social tensions that
the policy is generating. The general shift of individuals from weaker
economies to stronger ones that the policy has involved is increasingly
producing feelings of resentment amongst the populations of the latter.
It was clearly a factor of some note in the Brexit referendum, bringing
out some intensely chauvinistic, bigoted sentiments as the campaigning
became ever more heated. Liberalism’s ideals are not always being shared
at ground level, so there is a receptive audience for the post-liberal
ethos—even by those who think of themselves as essentially liberal in
outlook. More worrying, however, is the changing attitude towards
human rights by professedly post-liberal thinkers, who have openly agi-
tated for action against immigrant groups and ethnic minorities, argu-
ing that their rights should be restricted—often basing their arguments
on fake news stories (Islamic culture has been particularly badly treated
on this score). Another key battle of ideas looms that will play a criti-
cal role in what post-liberalism ultimately comes to mean in the next
few decades. Some kind of balance needs to be struck between liberal-
ism and post-liberalism, but at the moment post-liberalism looks as if it
could be a serious threat to some of the most cherished ideals of liberal
democracy, in which case it has to be regarded as contributing to the
regressive tendency within contemporary culture already noted.
Liberal democracy does cry out for reform, as no political system
is ever entirely proof from this; but the issue is whether a post-liberal
programme is the way to achieve this, or whether it will just establish
the post-truth ethos even more firmly into the political mainstream
than it already is—with all the perils that would bring in its train. Post-
liberalism certainly appeals to the far right sensibility; indeed, for the
far right in the USA to be ‘liberal’ is the same as being unpatriotic, and
they use it as an insult, bandying it around frequently, especially dur-
ing election campaigns (Democrats are usually on the receiving end).
Liberal democracy, and particularly its social democratic form, is the
enemy as far as such thinkers go; that is what pressure groups like the
8 A Post-Liberal Society?
145
Tea Party were formed to campaign against, and they have become
important players in the internal politics of the Republican Party. The
far right in general leans towards social conformity and cultural homo-
geneity, and is more than willing to curb human rights in order to
achieve these aims. Extending those rights to others outside their cir-
cle tends, as they see it, to put their own privileges at risk, and they
will always be quick to defend those and the prejudices that underpin
them. The difference that poststructuralists and postmodernists cham-
pion so fervently is just as fervently hated by the far right, for whom
white supremacism is an article of faith, and diversity merely the road to
becoming the ‘pathetic, third-rate, also-ran, multicultural mess’ of Ann
Coulter’s fevered imagination. Difference versus homogeneity consti-
tutes a particularly intractable differend, and it is right at the centre of
the debate over what post-liberalism should be. Identity politics arouses
strong emotions for and against, and neither side is very much disposed
towards compromise.
Postmodern Liberalism?
John Gray’s Post-Liberalism is essentially pessimistic about liberalism’s
prospects, arguing that ‘the days of liberalism are numbered. Even as
it governs policy in the United States, liberalism is ill-equipped to deal
with the new dilemmas of a world in which ancient allegiances and
enmities are reviving on a large scale’.11 It is an assessment which rings
even more true now than when Gray made it in 1993; dilemmas have
just gone on piling up in the interim, courtesy of refugee crises, terror-
ist attacks, and financial crashes. His analysis is in part a response to
Francis Fukuyama’s claim in The End of History, published in the after-
math of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with it communism as
a geopolitical force, that liberal democracy has finally triumphed over
all other political systems.12 For Fukuyama, liberal democracy was to
be considered the high point of humanity’s development, and all that
remained was to wait until all of the world’s nations had caught up with
the West in that respect. Few thinkers would agree with that assessment
now (even Fukuyama has modified his views to some extent13), and the
146
S. Sim
For, though it may be only one of the diverse forms of flourishing our
species has achieved, a liberal civil society is the form of society in which
we have made our contribution to the human good; and, in defending it,
we defend the best in our cultural inheritance, and the best that the spe-
cies can presently hope for.15
Gray brings out the problem that any of us have to face when confront-
ing the alt-right from the side of liberal democracy: how to defend what
is best from the tradition of liberalism while recognising its many flaws,
and trying to disengage oneself from those, making clear one’s oppo-
sition. The result is a reluctant liberalism perhaps, but still a recognis-
able one. Defending liberal democracy can only go so far if it means
taking on board phenomena such as neoliberalism, or a system which
8 A Post-Liberal Society?
147
has allowed the alt-right and its post-truth tactics to worm their way
into the very heart of the democratic process and put it under severe
threat. Neither can supporting liberal democracy in its broader sense
condone the resurgence of white supremacism, or the generalised anti-
immigrant and anti-refugee sentiments that have become so widespread
in the last few decades throughout the West, all too often hiding behind
a dubious defence of freedom of speech. Siding with liberal democracy
is more a case of knowing what you are against than offering uncondi-
tional support for everything that has happened under that heading: a
form of againstness that can be recommended to the wider public with
a reasonably clear conscience. For Gray this is postmodern liberal con-
servatism, whereas I would want to amend that concept to postmodern
liberal social democracy, or postmodern liberal socialism, but his point
about the need to develop a new kind of sensitivity to cope with the
current situation stands. The goal would be ‘a society in which men and
women come to respect and cherish their differences and are ready to
act together to protect them’.16 All of the positions just outlined under
the label of postmodernism would be happy to support that, regard-
ing it as a basic building block of any society; whereas the alt-right,
with its hatred of multiculturalism, would be vehemently opposed.
Co-operation versus combativeness: difference and diversity are shaping
up to be critical areas of conflict in a post-liberal world, and attitudes
towards them as ideologically very revealing.
Illiberalism Rising
The rise of the far right throughout the US and Europe has brought in
its wake an upsurge of nationalism that is unashamedly extremist in its
aims, and has no intention of respecting or cherishing differences and
cultural diversity. Compromise with other worldviews amounts to sur-
render as far as they concerned. In Europe, this has involved a revival
of fascist-oriented political parties and movements that have made a
certain amount of headway on the mainstream political scene, and are
no longer to be treated as a mere fringe activity with negligible popular
appeal; instead, the appeal appears to be steadily widening. This trend
148
S. Sim
Which Post-Liberalism?
So it all comes down to what we understand by post-liberalism, which
in the standard manner of all ‘post’ descriptions is open to differing
interpretations as to its meaning. It can mean to develop liberalism so
that its weak points are addressed. Liberal democracy 2, perhaps, a new
improved version but with broadly similar ideals to its foundationalist
origins: a spectrum that could run from postmodern liberal conserva-
tism through postmodern liberal social democracy/socialism. Or it can
mean to turn sharply against liberalism, to the extent of ditching its
many positive achievements, such as the championship of human rights
and egalitarianism, in favour of a pre-liberal ethos that left the individ-
ual largely at the mercy of powerful vested interests: social conserva-
tism plus neoliberalism—and quite possibly extreme versions of each of
these. I would want to defend the notion of liberal democracy 2 (again,
interpreting this in a broad sense), but not any return to pre-liberal
values, and it is the latter that appears to be the goal of the post-truth
community. It is post-liberalism as a rejection of, rather than a develop-
ment of, liberal democracy that increasingly is being referred to in cur-
rent commentary, however, and that fits in with post-truth’s objectives.
It is not the improvement of liberal democracy that post-truthers seek,
but its replacement by a culture of militant againstness and a ‘positive
polarisation’ of the political landscape, where prejudice and gut feeling
are actively encouraged in the demonisation of such supposed enemies
as feminists, gays, and the Black Lives Matter movement. That can only
increase the threat of demagoguery in Western society, and it would be
naive to think that it could not infiltrate the system, or that it is proof
against any such move. Which post-liberalism wins this struggle for
public support can only have far-reaching implications for the future of
Western democracy.
152
S. Sim
Notes
1. See, for example, David Goodhart, ‘A Postliberal Future?’, Demos
Quarterly (17 January 2014), quarterly.demos.co.uk/article/issue-1/
a-postliberal-future (accessed 13 January 2018).
2. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics [1985], 2nd edn, London and
New York: Verso, 2001, p. 4. I discuss the ramifications of this distinc-
tion in the Introduction, ‘Spectres and Nostalgia; Post-Marxism/Post-
Marxism ’, to my edited collection, Post Marxism: A Reader, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1998.
3. Yascha Mounk, The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger
& How to Save It, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018, p. 2.
4. John Gray, Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought, New York and
London: Routledge, 1993.
5. John Gray, Liberalism, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986, p. 90.
6. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations, Books I–III [1776], ed. R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner, and
W.B. Todd, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
7. David Goodhart, ‘The Next Big Thing? Blue Labour and Red Tory: The
Age of Post-Liberalism’, Prospect (October 2011), www.prospectmaga-
zine.co.uk/magazine/blue-labour-red-tory (accessed 16 January 2018).
8. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge [1979], trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984, p. xxiv.
9. Gray, Post-Liberalism, p. 271.
10. Goodhart, ‘A Postliberal Future?’.
11. Gray, Post-Liberalism, p. 250.
12. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, London:
Penguin, 1992.
13. See Francis Fukuyama, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of
Prosperity, New York: Free Press, 1995, where the author is somewhat
more circumspect about the prospects for liberal democracy interna-
tionally, noting how resistant national cultures can be to large-scale
challenges to their traditional ways: ‘What cannot change nearly as
quickly is culture’ (p. 40).
14. Gray, Post-Liberalism, p. 284.
15. Ibid., p. 328.
8 A Post-Liberal Society?
153
6. Ibid., p. 271.
1
17. ‘Hate Speech Is Not Free’, New Scientist (24 February 2018), p. 3.
References
Fukuyama, Francis, The End of History and the Last Man, London: Penguin,
1992.
———. Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, New York: Free
Press, 1995.
Goodhart, David, ‘The Next Big Thing? Blue Labour and Red Tory: The Age
of Post-Liberalism’, Prospect (October 2011), www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/
magazine/blue-labour-red-tory (accessed 16 January 2018).
———. ‘A Postliberal Future?’, Demos Quarterly (17 January 2014), quarterly.
demos.co.uk/article/issue-1/a-postliberal-future (accessed 13 January 2018).
Gray, John, Liberalism, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986.
———. Post-Liberalism: Studies in Political Thought, New York and London:
Routledge, 1993.
‘Hate Speech Is Not Free’, New Scientist (24 February 2018), p. 3.
Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards
a Radical Democratic Politics [1985], 2nd edn, London and New York:
Verso, 2001.
Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
[1979], trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984.
Mounk, Yascha, The People vs Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger &
How to Save It, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.
Sim, Stuart, ed., Post Marxism: A Reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1998.
Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,
Books I–III [1776], ed. R.H. Campbell, A.S. Skinner, and W.B. Todd,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.
9
Conclusion: Countering Post-Truth
filtering out fake news, so that sets something of an example for others;
although the fact that it has been so lax in the use being made of its
data, does not exactly inspire a great deal of confidence in such organ-
isations’ commitment to making the net a more reliable source (as the
Cambridge Analytica scandal has revealed), and less a generator of tech-
nopessimism. That is not to say that filtering should be taken to the
lengths it has been in China, however, where state censorship is a real
problem, severely curbing freedom of speech and political opposition to
the ruling Communist Party. Yet a code of conduct with some degree
of monitored control from the public sector is long overdue; filtering’s
time has surely come, and one would feel that it ought to become a
priority of both the social media sector and Western governments. Post-
truth is at present being given far too easy a ride, and it is the ready
access to social media that turns this into such a critical issue. Anyone
can open a Twitter account, and anyone can invent a Twitter persona to
spread fake news that can proceed to have far-reaching political effects
(on national elections, for example). Having to find ways of reducing
the impact of fake news from a fake persona demonstrates just how des-
perate a situation we are now facing. Trolling has become a huge prob-
lem internationally, an organised industry expressly designed to distort
political debate for malicious ends, and the far right is becoming highly
sophisticated in its manipulation of the technique. A new Jenna Abrams
can come along at any minute, and as things stand we are very vulnera-
ble to such a development, particularly given the proven ability of fake
news to grab the attention of online readers and then go viral at speed
because of its novelty value.
More should be done at school level, too, to instill this sought-after
code of conduct into young people: it may not eradicate every instance
of post-truth, or the disposition towards believing it, but it could at
least raise awareness of what is going on and make some inroads into
the process. The more people there are who do care, and are repeatedly
being shown why they should care, then the less effect post-truth will
have on our political life. It is not the least depressing aspect of the post-
truth phenomenon that so many people are disposed to take in what
they are being told without bothering to check its factual content; not
everyone is interested in seeking out the truth at the expense of their
9 Conclusion: Countering Post-Truth
159
are pointed: ‘Is the information fact? opinion? propaganda?’, for exam-
ple, or ‘Is the information supported by evidence?’. Submitting the
Bowling Green Massacre to the latter question, or to the further query
‘Can you verify any of the information in another source?’, would soon
suggest that unacceptability was the only proper response in this case.
Even the mayor of Bowling Green has gone on record to deny that any
massacre took place in the town; although you would have to be scep-
tical about the report in the first place to seek out that information—
which rules out confirmed Trump-trusters.
While it would be difficult to evaluate every story on online news
sites by applying the Test Worksheet, its general principles could cer-
tainly be kept in mind, and if real doubts began to creep in then it
would be worth referring to its list of questions in more detail. If this
can sound somewhat long-winded and a tedious chore to have to
perform, it is only a formalised version of what many of us do in an
informal way when coming across reading material for the first time—
especially if it is making wild claims which do not seem to tally with
our everyday experience. When that happens, and the claims sound just
too novel, then we start to wonder if other sources are saying the same
thing, and generally try to find out. In effect, we are trying to determine
the level of accuracy involved, and checkable evidence really does need
to be forthcoming to decide that. That is precisely what is not being
looked for by supporters of the alt-right, however, who are prepared
to accept whatever fits their worldview without any further corrobora-
tion: ‘In Trump We Trust’ applies right down the line for this group.
Nevertheless, the point needs to keep being made about checkability,
since it constitutes a crucial aspect of ‘news literacy’, and that is a skill
which ought to be developed as much as possible, and as widely as pos-
sible. ‘In Trump We Should Not Trust’ without verification from sev-
eral other sources, and not just other alt-right ones either, since they
are generally all operating on the basis of Trump-trust; they constitute a
closed circuit in this respect, feeding off each other. News literacy used
to be largely a case of being sensitive to spin, of the interpretation that
was being imposed on events by commentators and vested interests, and
the mainstream media has been as guilty of engaging in this as almost
all political parties (particularly those in government) have. But news
9 Conclusion: Countering Post-Truth
163
Reflections on Regression
A society that has gone into regression about truth, and what it sym-
bolises culturally, can become better or worse: more respectful of truth,
or less. Regression is not a trend that can be ignored, it demands that a
stance be taken on it. Those of us who want to be on the respectful side
need to develop a battery of techniques that reveal the unacceptability
of the politics of againstness of the Trump-Coulter-Breitbart camp,
and the way in which it is poisoning the contemporary political scene.
That does not mean reverting to the same dirty tactics of fake news and
alternative facts that they deploy—even if these might well find a ready
audience with the anti-Trump constituency as appropriate revenge for
his antics (and there are some such unverified stories already doing the
rounds). Instead, it means painstakingly cataloguing everything ques-
tionable about what they are claiming, and getting it out into the pub-
lic domain over and over again to create a running commentary that is
always available for inspection. It has to be made clear what is invention
and what is interpretation: only the latter deserves to have a place in the
political arena, the former is bad faith at its worst that no amount of
underlying grievance can ever justify. Unless there is a concerted ongo-
ing challenge to post-truthers, then politics will continue to coarsen and
againstness will have won, leaving us with a system skewed towards a
particularly negative style of post-liberalism that will be dedicated to
the destruction of any opposition. Not everyone will change their views
about such matters, hardliners will no doubt continue to resist, deny-
ing the validity of evidence they do not like and holding fast to their
164
S. Sim
off is not a solution. Online death threats to those who oppose gov-
ernment policies, especially coming from the far right, also seem on
the way to becoming the new normal. Brexit is now yielding a steady
stream of these in the UK, and to criticise the Trump presidency in
the USA is to invite a similar response from an army of online post-
truthers, always ready to launch a viral onslaught against even the mer-
est hint of criticism of their heroes and their beliefs. There is no fuzzi-
ness about a death threat; it is there to be read by anyone. It is difficult
to legislate against such conduct, which the anonymity offered by the
net very much encourages: yet another peculiarly twenty-first century
dilemma for us all to ponder over.
Eventually, we come back to something very basic here, and that
is personal conduct. Only a shift in social behaviour can significantly
lessen the incidence of death threats and bullying tactics, and there is
no quick and easy route to achieving this end; although more can, and
should, be done to police the net for such posted material. To suggest
that at least part of the solution lies at the level of the personal might be
seen as a counsel of despair, especially in the toxic atmosphere of cur-
rent politics, where there is a growing desire to find a big idea to sort
everything out (given a recent history of big ideas like communism and
fascism, we should be careful what we wish for from this quarter, how-
ever). The sense of urgency behind that can be well understood, yet it
will only be through a change in social mores that we can find a way
out of the situation that we are currently stuck in, where post-truth
is in effect setting the agenda for public debate. To reiterate the point
consistently made throughout this book, we have to realise that post-
truth is an ideological movement, rooted in a notion of againstness that
is profoundly anti-democratic in character, and committed to generat-
ing as much division within society as it can to gain political advantage.
This is not just some esoteric philosophical debate about the concept
of truth that we are engaged in, but something culturally fundamental
that affects our everyday life; it is about power, who wields it, and how
accountable they are. Liberal democracy 2 and illiberalism are two very
different beasts, and unless we keep post-truth fatigue at bay we shall
find ourselves stuck with the latter; neither will it be an easy condition
to extract ourselves from once it has taken hold.
166
S. Sim
Conclusion
Even if we have to concede that truth will always be a problematical
entity to pin down with absolute precision, and that we may often have
to be satisfied with a Bayesian-style probability (based on the weight
of evidence available and the informed guessing that it sanctions), or
a Lyotardean relative certainty, even a degree of fuzziness perhaps, nev-
ertheless we can say what it is not, and that ought to be enough of a
basis on which to defend it from the anti-democratic schemes of post-
truthers anywhere. Relativism is no barrier to doing so; we could even
say that it offers extraordinary opportunities to find pragmatic ways
round the lack of absolute certainty, such that we can confront the
claims of post-truth with a degree of confidence. Post-truth is not just a
trend, it is a long-running historical phenomenon which has come into
its own in an era of social media with global reach and instant impact,
accompanied by political disillusion on the grand scale amongst the
general public. This has magnified its effect in a manner that conspiracy
9 Conclusion: Countering Post-Truth
169
Notes
1. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History
Reveals About Our Future, New York: Viking, 2018, p. 9.
170
S. Sim
2. See Arielle Dollinger, ‘Can Librarians Save Us from Fake News?’, vice.
com/…/pgwwgz/can-librarians-save-us-from-fake-news (accessed 2 January
2018).
3. See James Ball, Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, London:
Biteback, 2017.
4. Matthew D’Ancona, Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to
Fight Back, London: Ebury Press, 2017, p. 3.
5. Evan Davis, Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What
We Can Do About It, London: Little, Brown, 2017, p. 294.
6. Ibid.
7. ‘The CRAAP Test Worksheet’, legacy.juniata.edu/services/library/
instruction/handouts/craap (accessed 1 January 2018).
8. Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, p. 201.
9. Julian Baggini, A Short History of Truth: Consolations for a Post-Truth
World, London: Quercus, 2017, p. 107.
10. See Andrew Keen, How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital
Age, London: Atlantic, 2018.
References
Baggini, Julian, A Short History of Truth: Consolations for a Post-Truth World,
London: Quercus, 2017.
Ball, James, Post-Truth: How Bullshit Conquered the World, London: Biteback,
2017.
‘The CRAAP Test Worksheet’, legacy.juniata.edu/services/library/instruction/
handouts/craap (accessed 1 January 2018).
D’Ancona, Matthew, Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back,
London: Ebury Press, 2017.
Davis, Evan, Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can
Do About It, London: Little, Brown, 2017.
Dollinger, Arielle, ‘Can Librarians Save Us from Fake News?’, vice.com/…/
pgwwgz/can-librarians-save-us-from-fake-news (accessed 2 January 2018).
Keen, Andrew, How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age,
London: Atlantic, 2018.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History
Reveals About Our Future, New York: Viking, 2018.
Index
A B
Abrams, Jenna 33, 34, 158 Baggini, Julian 85, 88, 94, 106, 118,
alternative facts 16, 19, 28, 35, 57, 121, 122, 126, 166, 168, 170
59, 65, 70, 93, 119, 126, 161, Ball, James 60, 160, 170
163, 169 Bannon, Steve 30, 32, 58, 164, 168
alternative medicine 27–29 Barthes, Roland 101, 102, 111, 120,
Althusser, Louis 54, 55, 60 121
alt-right 17, 24, 25, 31–33, 36, 38, Bayesian analysis 83, 92, 93
48, 75, 143, 146–148, 150, BBC 34, 36, 38, 161
156, 157, 160, 162, 168 Benjamin, Walter 109, 136
Amazon 20, 45 Black Lives Matter 31, 148, 151
American Library Association (ALA) Blair, Prime Minister Tony 41
157, 160 Bowling Green Massacre 70, 82, 88,
Anselm of Canterbury 70, 76 157, 162
antisemitism 43, 45, 46, 48, 51, 126 Brecht, Bertolt 133–136
Aristotle 105 Breitbart News 24, 30, 48
atheism 74 Brexit 16, 17, 25, 31, 144, 161, 165
Foucault, Michel 97, 117–119, 122 Islam 31, 32, 63, 64, 67, 73, 102
Fox News 24
Fukuyama, Francis 145, 152
fundamentalism 37, 67, 68, 73, 75, K
114 Kant, Immanuel 108
fuzzy logic 17, 86, 87, 106, 107 Keen, Andrew 167, 170
Kennedy, John Fitzgerald (JFK) 44,
49
G Kosko, Bart 37, 87, 88, 94, 95, 106,
globalisation 114, 140, 148 107, 117, 121, 132
Goodhart, David 142, 143, 146, Kuhn, Thomas 92, 93, 95
149, 152
Gramsci, Antonio 54, 60
Gray, John 8, 140, 142, 145–147, L
152 Labour Party (UK) 42, 43, 48
Laclau, Ernesto 55, 56, 60, 61, 72,
77, 139, 152
H Lenin, V.I. 52, 53
Heidegger, Martin 98, 108–112 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 101
Hinduism 69 Levitsky, Steven 3, 4, 8, 156, 164,
Hitler, Adolf 43 169, 170
Hogg, James 129, 136 liberal democracy 2, 3, 15, 99, 140,
Hollaender, Friedrich 47 142, 144–147, 149, 151, 152,
Holocaust 13, 18, 44, 51, 58, 111, 155, 165
112, 126 liberalism 4, 140–146, 149–151,
Horner, Paul 33, 38, 98, 99 155, 156
Hubbard, L. Ron 68 libertarianism 3
Hume, David 88–91, 95, 107 Libraries Transform 157
Lipstadt, Deborah 37
Lyotard, Jean-François 6, 8, 22, 37,
I 71, 73, 77, 87, 95, 97–99,
identity politics 143, 145, 148 104–121, 142, 152
illiberalism 147, 149, 165
immigrants 50, 82, 113
internet 7, 25, 33, 157 M
Internet Research Agency 34 Marxism 51, 54–56, 72, 109, 120,
Irving, David 18, 37, 44 139, 142
ISIS 31, 32, 45 Marx, Karl 2, 8, 54, 60
174
Index
R
O Reagan, President Ronald 32
Obama, President Barack 19, 23, 33, relativism 5, 7, 65, 72, 79, 81, 84,
44, 45, 82, 159 90, 97–101, 103, 105–108,
Occupy 32 110, 112, 113, 117–119, 131,
Olympic Games 35 168
Orwell, George 53, 60 Republican Party (USA) 145
Roosevelt, Eleanor 30
Rorty, Richard 131, 132, 134, 136
P Rove, Karl 42, 59, 64, 87
paganism 73 Rovelli, Carlo 90–92, 95
Palin, Sarah 32 Runciman, David 3, 8
Index
175
Russian Revolution (1917) 48, 56 45, 48, 58, 70, 75–77, 82, 94,
104, 115, 119, 129, 130, 145,
148, 156, 159, 161, 162, 164,
S 165, 169
Salmon, Peter 98, 119, 122 Twitter 11, 24, 33, 158
scepticism 5–7, 13, 65, 66, 80, 84,
85, 91, 92, 94, 98–101, 103,
105, 113, 117–119, 168 U
Scientology 68, 69 Ussher, Bishop James 65
Second Gulf War 41
Second World War 58, 143
Sextus Empiricus 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, V
94, 98, 101, 104–106, 118 value judgement 6, 7, 74, 97–99,
Shakespeare, William 135 102, 104, 105, 108, 118, 119,
Smith, Adam 140, 152 131, 132
social democracy 141, 147, 151
socialism 55, 110, 147, 151
Socialisme ou Barbarie 110, 112 W
socialist realism 51, 54 Wendling, Mike 31, 33, 38
social media 25, 31, 34, 157, 158, white supremacism 24, 75, 115, 145,
166–168 147
Solokov, M.G. 52 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 89, 95
Sontag, Susan 109, 121 Wolff, Michael 25, 37
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 5, 8
Stalin, Josef 52, 53
Stone, James V. 83, 85, 94 Y
structuralism 23, 101, 102 Yale School 120
Suskind, Ron 59
Z
T Ziblatt, Daniel 3, 4, 8, 156, 164,
Tea Party 115, 145 169, 170
terrorism 23, 130 Zinoviev, Grigory 42
Third Way 142 Zinoviev Letter 42, 45, 48
trolling 34, 158 Žižek, Slavoj 50, 60
Trump, President Donald 14–16,
18–22, 25, 26, 30–35, 37, 38,