For the love of God, stop talking about "post-truth"

There was never a golden age of objectivity, and today’s epistemological problems result from competing visions of reality, not a conflict over the value of truth.

This week, I am speaking on a panel at an event on “The Politics of Post-Truth?”. As part of the event, each speaker gives a ten-minute presentation. This is mine:

Most people have encountered some version of the following narrative:

We are living through an “epistemological crisis,” a crisis of disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theories. Whereas politicians, pundits, and the public used to respect facts, there is now mass deception and delusion. In this post-truth era, populist demagogues spread blatant lies, voters prioritise emotion over reason, fake news runs rampant, and nefarious algorithms suck citizens down rabbit holes, trapping them in echo chambers where comforting delusions are repeated, reflected, and reinforced.

In other words, we now inhabit a reality in which many people have lost touch with reality, either by design or deception.

Judging by its continued influence since 2016, this narrative appeals to many people, especially liberals and progressives bewildered by recent political events and trends. However, it is deeply confused. It obscures our political and epistemological challenges and directs our attention away from possible solutions.

When was the truth era?

First, if this is the post-truth era, when was the truth era? If we are living through an epistemological crisis, when was the golden age of knowledge, understanding, and objectivity?

Lies, propaganda, bullshit, spin, dogmatism, sectarianism, self-serving ideologies, and unfounded conspiracy theories are as old as humanity, as are complaints about their role in politics.

When Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” its term of the year in 2016 after two surprising populist revolts, it defined it as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

There is nothing novel about such circumstances. Roughly 2,400 years ago, Plato based his criticism of democracy at least partly on the ease with which reason is corrupted by emotions and ordinary people come to support demagogues.

And even if you ignore most of human history and focus just on the period in liberal democracies immediately preceding 2016, the best explanation of the good old days is a bad memory—in this case, a strange amnesia about truly shocking epistemic failures.

Consider, for example, the role of falsehoods about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s ties to Al Qaeda in the invasion of Iraq or the role of false theories about economics and finance in the global financial crisis several years later.

The truth is not self-evident

In response, people sometimes say: “Yes, lies, propaganda, and mistakes are ancient, but the outright denial of self-evident facts—of obvious, incontrovertible, undeniable, self-evident truths—is a recent development.”

This brings me to a second point: The truth is rarely self-evident in politics.

When it comes to topics of public opinion—the economy, geopolitics, climate change, immigration, social class, gender, power, politicians’ intentions, and so on—the truth is complex, ambiguous, and often disagreeable.

Moreover, we never have direct access to such truths.

Firstly, we rely almost entirely on others to learn about reality. What we believe depends on which sources of information—which communities, pundits, organisations, journalists, writers, commentators, politicians, institutions, and so on—we trust and listen to.

Secondly, we rely on interpretation. To make sense of a vast, complex reality, we must interpret it through selective, low-resolution mental models, which organise information within simplifying systems of categories, stereotypes, and narratives.

In addition, humans are not disinterested truth seekers. Our political opinions are frequently biased by self-interest, partisanship, and the desire to win approval and status within our social networks.

Because our access to reality is heavily filtered and biased in these ways, political opinions are always fallible. This explains why many ideas regarded as self-evidently true throughout history—most obviously, racist, patriarchal, religious, and nationalist myths—are viewed by many today as self-evidently false.

And yet… our opinions rarely feel like fallible interpretations of complex truths.

Most people instinctively endorse what psychologists call “naive realism”.

We treat our opinions as objective, impartial, disinterested, unmediated reflections of self-evident facts. To quote Raymond Geuss, we act as if the truth lies “there on the street in the sun waiting to be observed by anyone who glances in its general direction”.¹

Given this, we assume that those who do not see the truth—those we disagree with—must either be lying, delusional, or brainwashed.

They do not merely endorse what we take to be false views. They have abandoned a concern with truth altogether. They are post-truth.

Polarisation and populism are not post-truth

This is not to deny that brazen lying and propaganda occur—as I have already noted, such things are ubiquitous throughout human history—or to claim that all beliefs and perspectives on reality are equally accurate.

For example, when Donald Trump recently asserted during a presidential debate that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating people’s pets, that was categorically false.

To stick with American examples, the same is true of Kamala Harris’s—and before her Joe Biden’s, and before him almost the entire liberal establishment’s—claim that Trump once referred to white supremacists and neo-Nazis as “fine people”, which is a misrepresentation of what he said.

For politicians, pundits, and parties to get away with—and often benefit from—asserting falsehoods like those, society must undoubtedly have deep epistemological problems. And the fact that these problems are not wholly novel does not make them any less concerning.

Nevertheless, such problems do not emerge from a conflict in broader society between those who value truth and those who do not. They emerge from sharp disagreements over what the truth about various matters is and, at a more fundamental level, over which people and institutions are trustworthy sources of truth.

Polarisation

One aspect of this conflict concerns what is often called “polarisation,” sharp divisions between competing communities and factions in politics and broader culture wars—whether left versus right, Remainers versus Leavers, cosmopolitan liberals versus traditionalists, or social justice activists versus anti-woke culture warriors.

Such tribal conflicts are undoubtedly a source of error and misperception. They always have been.

Once we identify with a political or cultural tribe, we tend to eagerly embrace its orthodoxies, praise those who rationalise, enforce, and spread those orthodoxies, and demonise the members and ideas of rival tribes as stupid, evil, or irrational.

This makes us highly receptive to false claims when they support our tribe’s favoured narratives. Even when we know such claims are not exactly true on the specifics, we often give them a free pass if we think they send the right message—if they celebrate the righteousness of our causes and convictions or discredit and vilify the right enemies.

This political tribalism is a deep problem. However, it is not illuminated by speaking of a conflict between those who value truth and those who do not. This way of speaking is a symptom of polarisation, not an analysis of it. It involves demonising those who do not belong to the right team and delegitimising their perspective.

Populism

A similar lesson applies to “populism.” Although this term means different things to different people, it typically picks out a widespread rejection and distrust of establishment institutions, including knowledge-generating institutions like science, public health, and mainstream media.

So understood, populism is also a source of error and misperception. Despite the many faults and failures of establishment institutions, they—that is, modern science, public health, professional journalism, and so on—provide the only way of securing knowledge about the world in complex, modern societies.

Rejecting such institutions wholesale and “doing one’s own research” does not liberate one from error; it almost guarantees error.

Nevertheless, people distrust establishment institutions not because they have abandoned the value of truth but because they do not view such institutions as reliable sources of truth.

That is undoubtedly a problem. However, a self-satisfied establishment narrative that belittles supporters of populism as perpetrators or victims of post-truth is more likely to exacerbate this problem than solve it.

To solve it, we must build trust in institutions—most importantly, by making them more trustworthy.

1. Quoted in Michael Hannon’s excellent article on the topic.