The Art of Challenging Contradictions to Provoke Truth Is What?
This article is part of the Revolutions and Counter Revolutions series, curated by Democracy Futuresas a joint global initiative between the Sydney Democracy Network and The Conversation. The projection aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.
Information technology is likewise office of an ongoing serial from the Mail-Truth Initiative, a Strategic Inquiry Excellence Initiative at the University of Sydney.
This essay is much longer than near Conversation manufactures, and so volition take some time to read. Enjoy!
We live in an unfinished revolutionary age of communicative abundance. Networked digital machines and information flows are slowly but surely shaping practically every establishment in which we live our daily lives.
For the first time in history, thanks to born inexpensive microprocessors, these algorithmic devices and data systems integrate texts, sounds and images in compact, easily storable, reproducible and portable digital form.
Communicative abundance enables messages to be sent and received through multiple user points, in chosen fourth dimension, real or delayed, within global networks that are affordable and accessible to billions of people.
My book Democracy and Media Decadence probed the contours of this revolution. Information technology showed why new information platforms, robust muckraking and cross-edge publics are among the heady social and political trends of our time. Information technology proposed that the unfinished revolution is dogged by politically threatening contradictions and decadent counter-trends. The drift toward a world of "post-truth" politics is amidst these troubling trends.
What exactly is meant past the term post-truth? Paradoxically, post-truth is among the well-nigh-talked-about nonetheless least-well-defined meme words of our time. Most observers in the English language-speaking world cite the 2016 Word of the Yr Oxford English Dictionaries entry: post-truth is the public burial of "objective facts" by an avalanche of media "appeals to emotion and personal belief".
In People's republic of china and in the Spanish-speaking world, respectively, commonplace talk of hòu zhēnxiāng and posverdad pushes in this management. The popularity of the German language postfaktisch (post-factual) usage captures much the same meaning. Selected every bit discussion of the yr by the German linguistic communication lodge Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache (GfdS), it refers to the growing trend of "political and social discussions" to be dominated past "emotions instead of facts".
The GfdS adds:
Ever greater sections of the population are ready to ignore facts, and fifty-fifty to accept obvious lies willingly. Non the claim to truth, but the expression of the 'felt truth' leads to success in the 'post-factual age'.
Post-truth communication
A byword that has gone viral so quickly surely deserves careful attending and crisper definition, especially if we are not to exist thrown off balance by a global miracle that sets out to do precisely that.
We can say that "post-truth" is not simply the opposite of truth, however that is divers; it is more complicated. It is better described as an omnibus term, a word for communication comprising a salmagundi or assemblage of different but interconnected phenomena.
Its troubling potency in public life flows from its hybrid qualities, its combination of unlike elements in means that defy expectations and misfile its recipients.
Postal service-truth has recombinant qualities. For a offset, it is a type of communication that includes old-fashioned lying, where speakers say things about themselves and their earth that are at odds with impressions and convictions that they harbour in their mind's centre.
Liars endeavor alchemy: when someone tells lies they wilfully say things they "know" not to be true, for issue. An example is when Donald Trump claims there was never a drought in California, or that during his inauguration the weather cleared, when really light rain fell throughout his address.
Postal service-truth also includes forms of public soapbox commonly called bullshit. It comprises advice that displaces and nullifies concerns about veracity. Bullshit is hot air talk, verbal excrement that lacks nutrient. It is shooting off at the mouth, backed by the presumption that information technology is acceptable to others in the conversation.
Post-truth depends as well on buffoonery, bits and pieces of colourful communication designed to attract and distract public attention and to interrupt the background noise of conventional politics and public life. The bric-a-brac component of post-truth includes nonsense moments, jokes and boasting. It embraces clever quips, pedantry and wilful exaggerations (similar Marine Le Pen's clarification of the European Union every bit "a huge prison").
There is plenty of rough speech. The contrast with the honey words and smiles of Bill Clinton, Felipe González, Tony Blair and other politicians from yesteryear is striking. The grotesquerie comes in abundance. Geert Wilders specialises in causing problem, every bit when he dubs mosques "palaces of hatred".
Disturbingly, there's abundant talk of the importance of "truth", by which is usually meant utterances whose veracity is self-confirming, thus proving that truth can attract rogues. In that location is canis familiaris-whistling. There is evidently bad taste, as when a newly elected president enters the Houston Astrodome, crammed with traumatised homeless people who have narrowly survived a hurricane, and says: "Thanks for coming."
Hair-splitting and wilfully setting things aside are common. The Israeli consul-general in New York, Dani Dayan, does this well, but the genius of evasion is surely Zoltán Kovács, the Orbán government's spokesman. When subjected to forensic questioning by reporters about Hungary'due south imprisonment and brutal maltreatment of refugees and operations by vigilante citizens' "hunter patrol" border forces, he likes to say:
What you are trying to portray here is not-existent, a gross simplification. Next question.
And that's that.
Engineered silence
The silencing is not incidental. Post-truth performances feed on their production of silence. They remind us, in the words of Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, that:
… the stupendous reality that is linguistic communication cannot be understood unless we begin by observing that speech consists above all in silences.
The proponents of mail-truth communication enjoy things unsaid. Their barefaced and bluster is designed not only to attract public attention.
It simultaneously hides from public attention things (such as growing inequalities of wealth, the militarisation of democracy and the accelerating death of non-man species) that it doesn't want others to notice, or that potentially arouse suspicions of the style and substance of post-truth politics.
This engendered silence is not just the aftermath or "leftover" of post-truth communication. Every moment of post-truth advice using words backed by signs and text is actively shaped by what is implied, or what is not sayable.
The communicative performances of the postal service-truth champions are thus the marginalia of silence: mere foam and waves on its deep waters.
That is why the current hyper-concentration of journalists and other public commentators on "breaking news" stories about "simulated news", "alternative facts" and missing "bear witness" is and so potentially misleading.
Their fetish of breaking news turns them unwittingly into the poodles of post-truth and its silence about things less immediate and less obvious, deeper institutional trends, "slower" events marked by punctuated rhythms.
Vaudeville and gaslighting
Treating mail-truth as a species of pugnacious politics dressed in a coat of many colours, as a bricolage of lies, bullshit, buffoonery and silence, helps us grasp its vaudeville quality.
When thought of equally a public functioning led by a bandage of politicians, journalists, public relations agencies, recollect tanks and other players, mail service-truth is an updated, state-of-the-art political equivalent of early 20th-century vaudeville performances.
Old-fashioned vaudeville featured strongmen and singers, dancers and drummers, minstrels and magicians, acrobats and athletes, comedians and circus animals. Information technology was a bear witness. Post-truth is equally a bear witness. Directed confronting conventional styles of performance, it is an orchestrated public spectacle designed to invite and entertain millions of people.
Merely post-truth is much more than entertainment, or the "art of contrivance" or the "dictatorship of illusion" mediated by the production and passive consumption of commodities.
While the genealogy of post-truth is partly traceable to the globe of corporate advertising and market-driven entertainment, it has thoroughly political qualities. In the easily of the powerful, or those aptitude on climbing the ladders of ability over others, the mail-truth miracle functions as a new weapon of political manipulation.
Post-truth is not only about winning votes, siding with friends, or dealing with political foes. It has more than sinister effects. It is a gaslighting exercise.
Drawn from George Cukor'due south award-winning Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, the term gaslighting is here defined as a weapon of the will to ability. It is the organised endeavour past public figures to mess with citizens' identities, to deploy lies, bullshit, buffoonery and silence for the purpose of sowing seeds of doubt and confusion among subjects.
Gaslighting is typically a preferred tactic of narcissistic and ambitious personalities bent on doing whatever it takes to gain and maintain a position of reward over others.
Their betoken is to disorient and destabilise people. They desire to harness people's self-doubts, ruin their capacity for seeing the world ironically, destroy their capacity for making judgements, in club to drive them durably into submission.
When (for case) gaslighters say something, only later to say that they never said such a matter and that they would never accept never dreamed of saying such a thing, their aim is gradually to turn citizens into mere playthings of power.
When that happens, the victims of gaslighting no longer trust their own judgements. They buy into the tactics of the manipulator. Non knowing what to believe, they give up, shrug their shoulders and fall by default under the spell of the gaslighter.
Consider the double act of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte and his old right-hand gaslighter, Ernesto Abella, in the sequence of events triggered past the murder (in November 2016) of Rolando Espinosa, the elected mayor of Albuera, an island community some 575 kilometres from Manila.
When asked by journalists to explain what had happened, Duterte reportedly said:
He was killed in a very [questionable way], but I don't care. The policemen said he resisted arrest. Then I will stick with the story of the police because [they are] under me.
Espinosa was in fact shot in detention, within a law jail cell.
Duterte continued:
I might go down in history as the butcher. Information technology's upward to you.
And then:
Since I accept zero to testify, I just use extrajudicial killing. [That'due south because] I take no credentials to boast well-nigh.
The intended meaning of these utterances (to put things mildly) was oracular, so mystifyingly opaque that they served as the cue for Abella to strut his stuff: to go on air and to say that this or that never happened, that Duterte never said what people heard him say, that Bisaya-speaking Duterte got lost in translation when speaking in Tagalog, to assert at Malacañang printing conferences that his intentions are good and that he is utterly sincere, whereas his enemies are wilful dissemblers, fools and toads.
Abella insisted he provided not "crumbs", but "meat, deboned". Armed with his favourite phrases, "let's just say" and "allow'due south put it this way", he described his job as "completing the sentences" of his leader, to "impart his truthful intentions".
In this murder case, Abella said, "it is … a thing of the leadership style and the messaging way of the president". He added:
This is his messaging style to underline his intention. He is serious about it [the drug menace]. Notwithstanding, it'south just meant to underline his seriousness in making sure that nobody is corrupt and involved in criminality.
What makes post-truth different from the past?
The meandering rhetoric is designed to exorcise and beguile, which is why the critics of post-truth are sounding alarms and issuing stern warnings near the unsafe charms of the vaudeville testify of political mendacity, nonsense, buffoonery and silence.
They emphasise that political lying and bad manners spiced with talk of "false news" and "alternative facts" are sinister, a frontal challenge to the basic autonomous norms of open and plural communication amid citizens.
Complaints against post-truth are often robust, loud and couched in high moral tones. Mail service-truth is said to exist the beginning of the end of politics equally we've known it in existing democracies.
There is talk of an emergent "post-truth era". More than a few critics warn that the spread of postal service-truth is the harbinger of a new "totalitarianism". Others speak of populist dictatorship or "fascism-lite" government.
The descriptors are questionable, and display picayune agreement of the historical originality of the present drift towards government by gaslighting. Politics as the art of evasion, befuddlement and engineered public silence isn't new. Lying in politics is an ancient art. Think of Plato's noble lie, or Machiavelli'southward recommendation that a successful prince must be "a great pretender and dissembler", or Harry Truman's description of Richard Nixon as:
… a no good, lying bastard. He tin lie out of both sides of his oral fissure at the same fourth dimension, and if he e'er caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in.
Some things don't alter. Notwithstanding, there are several things that are unusual almost the gaslighting trends of our time. Each is bound up with the unfinished communications revolution.
The digital merging and melding of text, sound and paradigm, the appearance of cheap copying and the growing ease of networked data spreading across vast distances in existent time are powerful drivers of postal service-truth decadence.
New techniques and tools of communication are its status of possibility; they enable its production, rapid apportionment and absorption into the body politics of democracies, and well beyond.
Retrieve of photoshopped materials and mashups, web applications and pages that recycle content from more than i source to create a single new service displayed in a single graphical interface. Trump's first campaign advertising showed migrants allegedly crossing the Mexican border; in fact, information technology was an image of migrants crossing from Morocco to Melilla in North Africa.
Then consider impostor news sites (using URLs such as abc.com.co) and fantasy news sites, such equally WTOE 5 News, which created the "Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Trump for President" story, built using such tools every bit Clone Zone and NowThis.
Ponder shareable made-upward news platforms (Macedonian teenagers making coin, Christian fundamentalists peddling the Spirit), meme launch pads (Twitter and Facebook) and parody accounts (The Onion, "America's Finest News Source").
There are as well the devoted fanzine platforms that specialise in hailing heroes and trolling opponents, the platforms that sit down for the first time in the White Firm press briefing room, platforms such as Gateway Pundit, Ane American News Network, Newsmax, LifeZette and the Daily Caller.
Some say none of this is new. From the showtime, they insist, daily newspapers printed gossip, rumours and lies. Orson Welles proved that radio could produce scams. Television receiver was a country weapon for mass-producing fabricated illusions; and so on.
But the sceptics underestimate the multiple means in which, in matters of truth and post-truth, the communications revolution is marked by novel dynamics that are producing novel effects.
Most plainly, the digital communications revolution tends to undermine space-time barriers so that the raw cloth of lies, bullshit, buffoonery and silence produced by gaslighters develops long global legs.
Post-truth spreads; it knows no borders. So, for instance, many Muslims living in countries every bit far autonomously as Britain, Pakistan and Indonesia understand that they are amidst the targets of the project of attacking "imitation news" and making America keen again.
At that place's something else that'south new: post-truth soapbox penetrates then deeply into our daily lives that what is commonly called the private sphere ceases to be private. Information technology's no longer a safe haven or a zone of counter-balance, in the way (say) it functioned equally the bespeak of resistance against full ability in the age of the typewriter or in George Orwell's 1984, where Winston was still able to retreat to a corner table to scribble, out of sight of Big Brother.
The colonisation of daily life by the so-chosen Internet of Things, digital robots that collect and spread information, guarantees that the geographic footprint of post-truth is vast and potentially total.
In that location'southward even so another novelty of our period: the product and diffusion of post-truth advice past populist leaders, political parties and governments. The historical record shows that our times are no exception to the old rule that populism is a recurrent autoimmune disease of republic.
The present-twenty-four hour period political irruption of populism is fuelled by the institutional disuse of electoral republic, combined with growing public dissatisfaction with politicians, political parties and "politics".
Reinforced by the failure of democratic institutions to respond effectively to anti-democratic challenges such every bit the growing influence of cross-border corporate ability, worsening social inequality and the nighttime money poisoning of elections, the decadence is proving to be a lavish gift to leaders, parties and governments peddling the mantra of "the sovereign people".
Populist figures otherwise as different every bit Viktor Orbán, Norbert Hofer and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan are oversized vaudeville characters. They are merchants of mail-truth, exploiters of trust and confidence artists who take advantage of the communications revolution.
They stir up multimedia excitement past calling for a public revolt by millions of people who experience bellyaching, powerless and no longer "held" (D.Due west. Winnicott) in the arms of society: people who are so frustrated or humiliated that they are willing to lash out in support of demagogues promising them dignity and a better future.
Some people autumn for the promises non because they "naturally" crave leaders, or yield to the inherited "fascism in us all". Among the strangest and well-nigh puzzling features of the post-truth phenomenon is the way it attracts people into voluntary servitude because it raises their hopes and expectations of edification.
Truth is the reply? Don't believe information technology
The most surprising long-term effect of communicative abundance and the spread of post-truth is arguably their reinforcement of the modern questioning and rejection of arrogant beliefs in truth.
The possibility that post-truth politics is political party to the "good day to truth" is poorly understood, specially by critics of post-truth, who invariably rally to the cause of what they casually call truth.
Although the term is unremarkably left undefined, their attachment to truth helps explain why many academics, journalists and public commentators typically charge the "postmodernism" of recent decades of being the unwitting accomplice or agile foot servant of post-truth politics.
They are convinced that the "relativism" of the postmodernists unhelpfully adds to the confusion surrounding "truth" based on "bear witness" and "facts". What is at present urgently needed, they say, is the recovery of truth.
But what is truth? Truth is the antitoxin to post-truth, they reply. It is observable. Truth is saying or writing or visualising, somehow depicting things that stand for to "reality".
The champions of truth understood as adequation sometimes cite the Polish-American mathematician Alfred Tarski, who famously put things this way: the proposition that "snow is white" ("p") is truthful if and only if snow is white ("p is truthful if and only if p"). It's seeing linguistic communication as a conveyor belt, as a medium for recording a "reality" that is external to the observer.
Tough versions of the orthodoxy insist that bear witness is evidence, reality is real and "brute facts" exist independently of anyone's mental attitude toward them.
It's not just philosophers who speak in this fashion. Journalists, lawyers, more than a few academics, plenty of environmental activists and data scientists are in the truth trade.
Believers in truth, a discussion that is ordinarily left undefined, they have a habit of supposing that reality is all around them, out in that location, within arm's reach or just across arm's length, graspable and catchable through redescription, for instance in the form of data.
Such conceptions of "objectivity" neglect to rethink the whole thought of truth every bit a necessary condition of ridding the world of mail service-truth decadence. Their failure to cast doubt simultaneously upon both post-truth and truth, to meet them equally partners rather than equally opponents, ignores the need for a new geography and history of truth.
Truth varies through infinite and fourth dimension
The geography of truth highlights the spatial dimensions of truth-seeking and attempts to live the truth. What counts every bit truth varies from place to place.
The French Renaissance writer Montaigne famously said that what is truth on 1 side of the Pyrenees is falsehood on the other side. Foucault repeats the point in his account of the nascence of truth-telling (le dire vrai) within clinics and prisons.
Scholarly studies of the way cities (Escuela de Salamanca, Chicago School of Economics, Copenhagen School) have shaped what counts equally knowledge push in the same direction.
The geography of truth every bit matters within any given gild, at any given time. The Pitjantjatjara peoples of central Australia nonetheless today utilise a family of terms like mula and mula-mulani and mulapa to refer to a "true story" that is inscribed with both connotations of "a long fourth dimension" and calls for agreement between story tellers and listeners.
When Pitjantjatjara peoples speak of truth, they understand they are engaged in efforts to convince others of the rightness of their tradition. They recognise what mainstream white society usually forgets: that truth and trust are twins.
A new geography of truth would also notation that there are spaces of life that either have trivial or zero to practise with truth, or where references to truth are just out of identify (Bertolt Brecht one time remarked that if someone stood up in front end of a group of strikers and said ii+2=iv they would no doubt exist jeered), or where telling the truth has dangerous consequences, as when a Rohingya father lies to a Myanmar regular army patrol hunting women to rape by telling them on his doorstep he has no daughters.
What counts as truth varies non simply through space but also through fourth dimension. Truth has a controversial history; truth has never straightforwardly been truth. There is a history of truth that shows that what counts every bit truth varies through fourth dimension, but likewise (the corollary) that what is today taken as truth has not ever been so.
Ancient Greek understandings of truth as aletheia, a difficult word variously translated equally "disclosure" or "un-concealedness", are evidently different than Christian understandings of "the way and the truth and the life" (John 14:6) and the imperative to tell the truth, shame the devil.
The early mod European period was marked by bitter struggles over the significant of religious "truth", calls for religious toleration and the deployment, by believers in truth, of such tactics of deception as occultism, the Cosmic doctrine of mental reservation and Protestant casuistry.
The public controversies well-nigh truth among Christians encompassed Luther'southward explosive, influential assail on popery as the sole interpreter of scripture in An Open Alphabetic character to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate (1520). They extended to Lessing's recommendation that we should thank God that we don't know the truth ("Sage jeder, was ihm Wahrheit dünkt, und dice Wahrheit selbst sei Gott empfohlen" ["Let each person say what s/he deems truth, and permit truth itself be commended unto God"]); and Tocqueville'south ascertainment that the modernistic democratic revolution powerfully calls into question then-chosen public truths virtually the "natural" inferiority of slaves and women.
Democracy doubts both post-truth and 'the truth'
The public sense that truth claims are contestable and mutable interpretations is undoubtedly bolstered by the multi-media communications revolution, and by the advent of new forms of monitory democracy featuring a plethora of mediated platforms where power is publicly interrogated and chastened.
Monitory republic promotes the growth of public spaces where uncertainty, doubt, scepticism, irony and modesty in the face of arbitrary ability are nurtured.
Wittgenstein's recommendation that saying "I know" should be banned so that people would be required to say "I believe I know" makes good sense under these weather condition. We could say that post-truth politics is the dark and messy side of an unfinished breakthrough shift in support of the pluralisation of people'due south lived perceptions of the world.
Yep, talk of truth is not disappearing, or dead. Just equally unbelievers continue to say "Lord help us" and "Jesus Christ", and despite Copernicus people nevertheless speak of the setting sun, so the language of truth lives on in people's lives.
Yet nowadays tropes similar "We hold these truths to be cocky-axiomatic" arouse public suspicions. The truth is out that truth has many faces.
What counts every bit "truthful data" is less and less understood by wise citizens as "hard facts" or as indisputable "evidence" or as chunks of "reality" to be mined from tv and radio programs, or from newspapers, digital platforms and "adept" regime.
In the historic period of communicative affluence and monitory democracy, "reality" is multiple and mutable. "Reality", including the lies and buffoonery and other forms of gaslighting peddled by the powerful, comes to exist understood every bit e'er "reported reality", as "reality" produced past some for others – in other words, as messages that are shaped and reshaped and reshaped again in the process of transmission and reception.
This disenchantment of truth has everything to do with commonwealth. Considered as a universal norm liberated from metaphysical foundations, equally a whole fashion of life committed to the defence of circuitous equality, freedom and difference, commonwealth in monitory class is the guardian of a plurality of lived interpretations of life.
The radical originality of monitory democracy is its defiant insistence that peoples' lives are never only given, that all things human are built on the shifting sands of space-time, and that no person or group, no matter how much "truth" or power they presently savour or want to claim, can exist trusted permanently, in any given context, to govern other people's lives.
Commonwealth is thus the best human weapon and then far invented for guarding against the "illusions of certainty" and breaking upward truth-camouflaged monopolies of power, wherever they operate. Republic is not a Truthful and Right norm. But the reverse: the norm of monitory commonwealth is aware of its ain and others' limits, knows that it doesn't know everything, and understands that democracy has no meta-historical guarantees. That is why it does not suffer truth-telling dogmatists and fools gladly.
Democracy is a living reminder that truths are never self-evident, and that what counts equally truth is a matter of interpretation. Recognising that in political life "truth has a despotic character", republic stands for a world beyond truth and post-truth.
This is not because all women and men are "naturally" created equal. Rather, it's because democracy supposes that no man or woman is good plenty to claim they know the truth and to rule permanently over their fellows and the earthly habitats in which they dwell.
You can read other articles in the series here.
The theme of truth, post-truth and the unfinished communications revolution is further explored in a recently published thepaper.cn interview, The Revival of Truth Isn't the Remedy for Mail service-Truth (available only in Chinese).
Source: https://theconversation.com/post-truth-politics-and-why-the-antidote-isnt-simply-fact-checking-and-truth-87364
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