Post-Truth?

Facts and Faithfulness

Jeffrey Dudiak

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781666706482
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

In Post-Truth? Facts and Faithfulness, Jeffrey Dudiak explores the fissures and fractures that vex our so-called "post-truth" era, searching for a deeper, dare we say truer, understanding of the cultural forces that have led North American society to become so polarized. Eschewing the kind of easy responses that trade pluralistic solidarity for tribalistic certainty, Dudiak diagnoses a deeper breakdown in social trust as the underlying issue that has everyone today scurrying for comforting, ideological cover. In this context, Dudiak reminds the reader that truth is more, and runs deeper, than simple correspondence to the facts.

chapter 1

Post-truth: Facts and Faithfulness

1. The post-truth era

Back in 2005, when people still used to watch TV, before everybody under thirty simply ignored cable and started watching YouTube instead, Stephen Colbert, the comedian who is currently the host of “The Late Show” on CBS, had a television program on Comedy Central called “The Colbert Report” in which he played the role of a conservative talk-show host, confusingly named Stephen Colbert, in which he nightly mocked advocates of right-wing politics by pretending to be one of them, their foibles and blind-spots coming vividly to life across Colbert’s hilarious parody. One of Colbert’s recurring bits was to accuse—by pretending to advocate for—the presidential administration of the time, that of George W. Bush, and conservatives in general, of relying not upon the truth, but rather upon something Colbert called “truthiness.” According to Colbert, with regard to truthiness: “We’re not talking about the truth; we’re talking about something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist.”1 And Wikipedia defines truthiness (its word of the year in 2005) as “a truth ‘known’ intuitively by the user without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination or facts.” The “character” Stephen Colbert—as opposed to the actor Stephen Colbert, who played the character Stephen Colbert—would often mockingly advocate for some inane political position on the show—say, for instance, the Bush administration’s denial of climate change—by appealing to what his “gut” told him, over against what all of the reasoned evidence suggests.2

But “truthiness” has affected not only the political right. Rather, we are told that we live in a post-truth era. Lagging a full decade behind Colbert’s keen, if comically framed, identification of this qualifying characteristic of our Zeitgeist (the spirit of our times), and in “honour” of the political climate exemplified and ratcheted up by the Trump administration, “post-truth” was named the Oxford Dictionaries’ “international word of the year” in 2016.3 It is there defined as: “Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

The word “post” here means “after,” in the sense that “post-traumatic stress disorder” is something that one suffers “after” some traumatic event. We are also told that we live in a “post-Christian era.” That means that we live after the time when Christianity, at least in our western culture, could be assumed to have appeal for everyone (or at least almost everyone). A couple of generations ago one could still appeal to the Bible to make a point about some or other matter of public policy, and that would carry weight; anymore, such an appeal no longer has traction with a sufficient number of people to be effective. That is what it means to live in a post-Christian society. It is not that no one is a Christian anymore; it is not even that the majority of the population are no longer Christian; rather, it is that Christianity can no longer be assumed as a sufficiently broad, shared point of appeal that it can be relied upon as a touchstone for adjudicating political controversies. Similarly, we are told that we live in a post-modern era, meaning that the shared assumptions of the historical period referred to as modernism can no longer be relied upon to attract general consensus. About that I will have more to say in the next chapter.

For now, let us focus on what it means to live in a post-truth world, that is, in our world, the one that you and I, according to this observation, inhabit today, a world in which we (as a society) really do not believe in truth anymore. That does not mean that no one believes in truth anymore, but that there are no longer any authorities who are capable of providing us with truth claims that are acknowledged to be true by a broad general consensus, truths upon which we all basically agree. That state of affairs affects everyone, whether we agree with it or not, whether we like it or not. It affects me, and it affects you.

Consider the following questions. When a politician tells you something, do you believe that it is true? I suspect that most of you are pretty suspicious of what politicians say. Why? Because you know that a lot of the time a politician is going to say what they need to say in order to get elected, or re-elected, rather than because it is true. Okay, but what about your pastors? When your pastor tells you something, do you automatically believe that it is true? Many of you have grown up in contexts where you were not really allowed to question religious authority, because to do so was to risk your salvation, but many of you do anyway. Why? Because your pastor has a point of view that is not necessarily your own. You have your own life, and experiences, and ideas. Further, when your parents tell you something, do you necessarily believe that it is true? Your parents grew up in a different era, way back when phones were plugged into a wall, when pot was illegal, and they do not even know the difference between Drake and Kanye, so how could what they say be true to your reality? Or, as another of my favourite comedians, Woody Allen, has one of his characters say: “Everything our parents said was good is bad: sun, milk, red meat, . . . college.”4 And, while we are on the subject of college, what about your professors? Do you believe that what they say is true just because they say so? I certainly do not, and I am one. Even the claims of science, the authority with respect to what is true for the past two or three centuries (a subject to which I will return in more detail in chapter two), are in question in our age. Whether or not there is human-induced global warming is in genuine question in very many quarters, despite what over 97 percent of climate scientists are saying.5 Moreover, do not scientists keep changing their minds, anyway? I remember as a kid being scared out of my wits because scientists were predicting the oncoming of another ice age, and I laid in bed at night designing in my mind something like a huge electric hair dryer with which I planned to save my neighbourhood from the encroaching threat. Now I have to lie in bed at night and imagine employing a giant ice cube! And even if you do trust in scientific authorities, what happens when they contradict each other, as they very often do?

So, the question is, whom do you believe? Or, whom do you not believe? Why? On what authority? And why trust that authority? Truth is confusing, at best. Some of us believe that there is a truth, but that it is hard if not impossible to find, because truth is always being manipulated by those with the power to make us believe that something is true when it is really just in their best interest to make us believe that it is true. This is a position called cynicism, which asserts that there is a truth, but I am always suspicious of anybody’s claim that what they say is the truth, because everybody is always spinning the truth, and I am always afraid that I am being played. Others of us believe that while there may be a truth, it is impossible for us, for us human beings with our finite perspectives and our limited brain capacity, to discover it, at least in any way that would be full enough to constitute “the truth.” This position, that it is in principle impossible to know the truth, is called skepticism. And once we admit that no one has certain access to the truth, we get relativism, the idea that there really is no truth that is true for everybody at all; rather, the truth is always relative to, that is, it depends upon, the position and preferences of the one claiming such truth. Muslims have their truth and Christians have a different truth. What is true for you is not necessarily true for me; every group, even every individual, has their own perspective, so has their own truth. So whether I am suspicious of those who claim to provide me with the truth (as in cynicism), or suspicious of our human capacities to really know the truth (as in skepticism), or suspicious of the very idea of objective truth itself, that is, that there is a truth that is true for everybody (as in relativism), ours is a time when we are, in light of all of the confusion and ambiguity, at least tempted to trust our guts, our intuitions, our emotions, and personal preferences, rather than any outside authority’s attempts to provide us with the truth. Given all of these complications, all of this confusion around truth, is not my truth as valid as any other, at least for me? And even if we do, as individuals or small groups, trust certain authorities to supply us with reliable truths, we no longer as a culture share trust in the same authorities—and that lack of shared trust causes many to question the viability of truth altogether. That is what it means to live in a post-truth age. So if you have some serious suspicions, or at least reservations, about truth, you should not be surprised. That is what it means to be part of our post-truth culture today. That is our reality.

2. Truth matters

So we all inhabit, and our young people are coming of age in, a time when there is every reason to have doubts about the truth, to suspect that we cannot really know the truth, that what we are told is the truth is just some form of manipulation, or that the truth is really just a name for what we happen to believe here and now. That is our cultural mood, and if students today are sometimes under-prepared in terms of certain academic fundamentals, they are all products of over-exposure to media and are all keenly attuned to our cultural environment. For this reason, if you are still in the first three or four decades of life, you, more than any generation before you, are worldly-wise, street-smart, and you have imbibed the cultural suspicion about the truth as if through your pores. Many of you suffer under your doubts about the truth, almost afraid to admit them, while others of you embrace these doubts and wear them like a badge of sophistication and courage, revelling in your nouveau existentialist chic. Or you have decided that it is all too much for you, and you focus on what you can control, like binge-watching “The Office” or “Breaking Bad.” But as products of your times, you cannot but have your doubts. And I want to assure you that that is not entirely a bad thing (although you may not believe that I am telling you the truth either!). There is a good reason why you have your doubts. The rest of us do, too. I hope to explain to you later why I think that is.

But before we get to that, I want to suggest to you that even though you will have your doubts about truth, and regardless of all of your doubts, the truth matters to you, and it matters a lot.

So, by way of example, let us imagine that you have decided to attend university. Why? Because somebody told you that being at university will improve your prospects for a better life, and you believed them. In fact, you are investing a lot of your life to attend university, betting that the promise that university will make your life better is true. You are investing a good deal of money in order to go, and chances are that in order to afford it you will be working jobs that make being at school more challenging, and taking out loans that you will one day have to repay. Perhaps you are blessed that a parent or grandparent is helping you with the costs, but that is not free either, because it is money you will not be getting in your inheritance later. Or you have scholarships or grants and somebody else is making this investment on your behalf. But it is not only the money. Being a university student requires a huge investment of your time and energy. You need to study, write papers, complete assignments, prepare for exams, and do all of that under the pressure of time and the expectations of your family and your professors and yourself. There will be times when things will just not be working out, when you will be frustrated with what you do not understand and just do ...