Establishments of Knowledge and Post-Truth: A Critical Review
By Kaitao He
“I get really pissed off when people give out about crime going up but the numbers are definitely going down. And then if you go ‘the numbers are going down’, they go ‘but the fear of crime is rising’ … But so what? … Zombies are at an all-time low level but the fear of zombies could be incredibly high. Doesn’t mean you have government policies to deal with the fear of zombies”
- Dara O’ Brian
During an interview with CNN reporter Alysin Camerota at the 2016 Republican National Convention, American politician Newt Gingrich uttered the line “as a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel and let you go with the theoreticians”.This frank reflection on the state of information, its falsification and the role of truth in American society, particularly from the perspective of a prominent politician, is symptomatic of a post-truth society’s faltering relationship with establishments of knowledge, such as academia or journalism. This essay will scrutinise the quote and its context in order to ascertain its significance in relation to the concept of post-truth. Furthermore, it will conclude that the ever-growing distance between people’s perception of truth and traditionally reliable establishments of information is exacerbated by emotionally inflammatory rhetoric and falsification.
The discernment of the role and state of truth in the contemporary American society can offer some insight into the ways through which political beliefs and opinion are shaped. Scholars have designated the period in which contemporary society resides as one dominated by post-truth. In theorising about truth and contemporary rhetoric, James Crosswhite remarks that post-truth is when “truths have lost their power to inform public discussion”.Stuart Sim contributes a similarly bleak definition as post-truth, the “backdrop” to contemporary politics, can be defined as “persuasion by whatever linguistic means necessary is its goal”.The Oxford Dictionary’s adoption of post-truth as it’s 2016 word of the year serves as yet another testament to its dominance. Based on these obligatory presuppositions that preface every contemporary paper on post-truth, the state of truth and objective reasoning is quite clear; it seemingly no longer holds the same value in politics nor society. This however, is different to the notion that truth no longer exists or no longer holds value. Truth is, after all, dependent on reality and thus lends itself to relativism and it is the dominant tactic of manipulating this subjectivity for personal, commercial or political gain that marks a post-truth society. Lee Mcintyre sums up this symptom of a post truth society quite aptly when he remarked that the “real problem” is the “overarching idea that – depending on what one wants to be true – some facts matter more than others”. Thus, the lines along which manipulators of truth operate are drawn and the quote from Gingrich, a man with considerable political influence, therefore serves as the perfect reflection of the contemporary role of truth in shaping American political opinion; “As a political candidate, I’ll go with how people feel”.
In a post-truth society, the most effective manipulations of people’s perception of truth are often accompanied by, and derives from the falsification (or denial) of reality as well as emotionally inflammatory or toxic rhetoric. These practices are prolific in contemporary American political discourse with Gingrich’s quote standing, yet again, as testament to this fact. Speaking to the infamously inflammatory nature of contemporary political discourse, John Duffy contributes a diverse set of features common to “toxic rhetoric”, particularly “dishonesty” or “the intentional use of language to deceive, dissemble, or manipulate by distorting or falsifying empirically verifiable facts”. Gingrich’s blatant prioritisation of the perceived feeling or threat of increased violent crime over factual statistics serves to obscure the “empirically verifiable fact” that violent crime is on the decline. Furthermore, when Gingrich distances the “liberals … set of statistics” with reality or “where human beings are”, he discredits them and their sources of information as untruthful. This is a reflection of the entrenched presence another feature of “toxic rhetoric”, the “demonization” or “representing [of] individuals, groups, or ideas as evil, corrupt, cowardly, malevolent or in some other manner as morally debased”.However, one individual practicing these tactics alone is hardly enough to justify the conclusion that the contemporary American society exists in a post-truth era. Rather, it is due to an overwhelming choir of voices with varying degrees of extremity, exploding in size with the increasing relevance of social media in social as well as political circles.With this unvetted, often unfiltered and unaccountable platform, the proliferation of toxic rhetoric flourishes, and by extension, so do post-truth practices.
As a result of the aforementioned post-truth practices, the rift between truth and the traditionally reliable establishments of knowledge production grows by eroding trust and inflating scepticism. Journalism, despite having never enjoyed the same level of credibility as academia, is one example of an embattled establishment of knowledge. A 2018 article by Matt Carlson, though overly defensive of journalism and the presence of journalistic rigour, acutely identifies some of the threats post-truth poses to the public’s trust in journalism; “partisan selective exposure, an emergent sector willing to deliver partisan content, and a traditional sector anxious over … its ability to deliver news”. In comparison to social media and other similarly democratic sources of “truth”, journalism is a source of filtered information, bound by certain levels of accountability, professionalism and occasionally, expectations of reliability. Similarly, academia shares constraints on the information it produces, and an even higher responsibility to produce reliable and objectively truthful doses of knowledge. Yet, it shares the same woes of a post-truth society as journalism. Barnacle, Schmidt and Cuthbert, whilst quoting Shafik, laments on this situation as they recognise that “there is actual hostility expressed to ‘experts’ presented as part of a distant and malevolent elite”.This situation can be best described as a symptom of the populist strain of post-truth distancing from the traditional establishments of knowledge, or a consequence of Gingrich’s attack against independent “crime-fighting organisations”, “theoreticians” or “theoretically” correct statistics.
The post-truth habit of disregarding and discrediting of these sources on the basis of inflammatory rhetoric, falsified information and bent truths will emphatically lead to serious consequences for contemporary society. Perhaps comedian Dara O’ Brian put it best when he said “Zombies are at an all-time low level but the fear of zombies could be incredibly high. Doesn’t mean you have government policies to deal with the fear of zombies”.