Beware easy post-truth finger-pointing

The takeaway from the roundtable was that the identification of a historical or social condition should not be confused with endorsement of an epistemological or political doctrine.

Tarring the post-truthist/modernist with the claim “all is permitted” or “there is no truth” makes for a nice sound bite but does violence to a sophisticated argument for subjecting all truth-claims to more rigorous forms of verification. Invoking a transcendental, universal or objective authority to resolve contradicting stories or disputable facts is not sufficient.

Such certainty is ahistorical: the “self-evident truths” of America’s founding fathers, based on first principles of natural law and sanctified by heavenly commandments, can, fortunately for humanity, prove to be untrue; otherwise slaves would still be slaves, women would not have the vote, etc.

What is notably missing from the narcissism of Trump and solipsism of his fellow Truthers is any sense of ethical responsibility towards ways of seeing or being in the world that differ from their own. An ethics that begins in response to relativism necessarily entails a mutual recognition – rather than the eradication or assimilation – of difference and otherness.

This kind of ethics cannot be delivered by command from above or by invocation of universal principles; it emerges as a condition of co-existence among those who differ on such matters as the truth.

Other post-truth/modern encounters on ISA panels, at hotel bars and even a few street-side produced new questions. Why were so many scholars, who put a premium on material or structural explanations for global events, now eager to infer such power upon ideas, especially when they emanated from a marginal school of thought like post-modernism?

Why were so many of these same scholars willing to accept “slam-dunk” facts about war crimes and WMDs in the run-up to the Iraq War? To form unholy alliances in support of invasions that spawned many second- and third-order global crises, including the rise of ISIS and the nationalist fevers that fanned Trump’s victory?

If, as the exculpatory refrain goes, they only knew then what they know now. But a purblind adherence to rationalism and positive evidence that excludes affective or cognitive preferences keeps us from knowing the truth, both then and now.

How much history is needed, from Vietnam to Watergate to Iran-Contra to the Iraq War, to show that “fake news”, “alternative facts” and “post-truths” weren’t born of continental philosophy? That disproving a lie is no substitute for creating a counter-narrative? That more than sweet reason is needed to unmask false consciousness?

By the end of the ISA meeting, a kind of déjà vu had set in: had we not witnessed this conflation before, of diagnosis and disease? Where Baudrillard’s precession of simulation was deemed responsible for the Gulf War; Foucault’s critical regard of surveillance for the rise of Big Brother; Virilio’s elevation of pace over space for the erosion of the sovereign state; and Derrida’s insistence that nothing exists outside the text for everything else – except Nazism, which was Nietzsche’s fault.

A duty to re-enter the fray

Et voilà, it came to me on the long flight back to Australia. Post-truthists/modernists must re-enter the political fray, not only because they are best equipped to counter the simulations, surveillance, speed and signs of Trump and his followers.

We need to embrace rather than run from the “post-truth” debate because ideas, discourses and methods might not define the truth but they do matter in politics.

We need to challenge the political science “quants” whose polls got it so wrong, giving Bernie Sanders supporters and other independents the excuse to maintain political purity by not voting.

We need to challenge the neoliberals whose promotion of the idea of globalisation helped produce the economic inequalities and cultural resentments that “primed the pump”, as Trump would say, for his victory.

Most importantly, we must repudiate the petty narcissism of attacking those closest on the political as well as epistemic spectrum, and form a real popular front against the faux populism of Trump and the neofundamentalism of Mike Pence that is likely to follow Trump’s fall from power.

We must, in other words, become post-post-truth.


https://theconversation.com/trump-demands-a-post-post-truth-response-77563