The Enlightenment is now truly and properly over. Of course, both historically and culturally, it has been over for quite some time, at least since the Romanticism. However, even the romantics aspired for some higher Truth , albeit subjective and not necessarily rational. Truth still existed as an aspiration, even with a capital ‘T’. In a very roundabout way, the Enlightenment still lingered, later inspiring positivist thinking and progressivist ideologies. Indeed, ‘modernity saw the ascent of reason , the birth of the modern sciences, with their search for ‘objective knowledge about the world’ (Berthon and Pitt 2018: 220), seemingly leaving no room for alternative , emotion - or belief -based social worlds. Nevertheless, we now increasingly have to deal with a post-truth condition. Admittedly, establishing such an absolute distinction—indeed, an opposition—between the present and the preceding historical and cultural tradition might seem pretentious (and it perhaps is) but this opposition nevertheless serves a serious purpose, namely, isolating the essence of the present condition and exploring the ways of thinking and acting that set the present age apart, to a degree embracing an otherwise bold assertion by Berthon and Pitt (2018: 220) that ‘rationality is a function of particular cultures and times’. Indeed, it must be accepted that ‘[e]very society has its founding legends that bind it together, shape its moral boundaries and inhabit its dreams of the future’ (d’Ancona 2017: 31), those legends standing beyond verification and factual accuracy. The Enlightenment and the scientific revolution have displaced the primacy of myths with hard facts that, however, cannot have the same emotional‚ even visceral‚ appeal. Hence, post-truth does signal something that is both ‘post’ and a return, a re-legitimation of arguments based on their emotional appeal and symbolic value and subjective rather than impersonal truth . To that extent at least, the Enlightenment is really dead. After all, this book is about a foundational rupture characterising the social world that we live in.
It might well be that ‘[y]earning for “Truth ” […] is one of those cyclical things’ that come to the fore of attention ‘when we feel we’ve somehow lost the collective ability to distinguish truth from lies, fact from opinion ’ (Marsh 2017: 192). Of course, as Baggini (2017: 7) correctly notes, the very fact that post-truth is talked about demonstrates that truth still matters. That is entirely correct. However, the mere fact that something is the object of enquiry does not automatically mean that it is a current feature of our lives. For example, the fact that Medieval or Ancient Greek studies are vibrant disciplines does not imply that we still live in Ancient Greece of the Middle Ages. In fact, as will be demonstrated in this book, truth is not discarded completely, i.e. post-truth does not have to involve discarding truth and embracing lies; it refers, instead, to the blurring of distinction between the two. Hence, it is the ambition of this book to move beyond the ubiquitous oversimplifications of post-truth as well as narrow emphasis on its crudest manifestations, such as ‘fake news’. Instead, post-truth is seen as deeply embedded in everyday practices and developments (most notably, mediatisation) and innermost human drives (primarily, the striving for pleasure as a means of persevering in existence). Hence, what matters is how we experience and emotionally connect with information . Moreover, there is a need to resist apocalyptic diagnoses of e.g. ‘cynicism and defeatism’ in the acceptance of our inability to distinguish between truth and lies (Baggini 2017: 7–8), which presumably leads to relativism that only further reinforces post-truth . In fact, there is very little passivity in the visceral following of post-truth narratives displayed by audiences across different countries. In fact, the power of post-truth lies precisely in inciting optimism and action in the audiences, even if that inspiration is escapist in its nature. Thirdly, the book aims to demonstrate that post-truth is universal regardless of political conviction, challenges assertions that e.g. ‘the great political schism to divide Western societies switched from being a left-right one to being about liberalism and populism’ (Davis 2017: xii). Instead, one should be careful not to overly ideologize the division or think of it in terms of incommensurable dichotomies. This is also not a book about Trump (although he often lurks in the background) or bullshit (so often used in catchy titles of publications on post-truth ). The author’s aim is to simply craft (and graft) an understanding of post-truth that is as fine-tuned as possible, achieved primarily by bringing it within the ambit of political theory and media and communication studies but also drawing from domains such as aesthetics and neuropsychology. Hence, this book also manifests a need for interdisciplinarity in order to develop new and creative ways of thinking about politics (also see e.g. Ryan and Flinders 2018: 145).
The need to better conceptualise post-truth is even more pressing in the light of likely future developments, particularly should we approach what is now known as post-work: a situation where technological factors (primarily, automation and artificial intelligence) as well as environmental pressures cause a shift away from current working patterns to an extent that human labour is either eliminated or reduced to a minimum‚ maximising available free time. However, contrary to the utopian future of artisanship, joyous leisure and engagement in meaningful social and cultural activities painted by the optimists (see, characteristically, Beckett 2018), this will be an environment in which the demand for enjoyment and immediate gratification prevails, and the extra time available will have to be structured through new routines and narratives, leaving even more nodal points for post-truth narratives to enter circulation.
But what does it mean to construct a political theory of post-truth ? The answer to that question is inspired by Michael Freeden’s book The Political Theory of Political Thinking (2013). Freeden locates politics in a field of concepts that are essentially contestable and, therefore, need to be decontested, the latter seen as ‘the process through which a decision is both made possible (accorded an aura of finiteness) and justified (accorded an aura of authority )’ (Freeden 2013: 73). Following from this assertion, it is not surprising that there has to be ‘an explicit or implicit competition over the control of political language’ (Freeden 2013: 72), which Freeden associates with ideologies while this book accords largely the same function to order-inducing narratives or any sort. Nevertheless, it is agreed that the main endeavour is to ‘monopolise meanings concepts carry’, such control being ‘a basic feature of thinking politically’ (Freeden 2013: 73). As a result, one of the key foci of this book is precisely on how post-truth narratives work in helping structure the world to give it an attractive aspirational meaning. Moreover, decontestation naturally points towards another observation—that ‘[t]he underlying rationale of politics is the quest for finality and decisiveness’, although this quest is ‘permanently frustrated by the slippery and inconclusive circumstances in which that quest occurs’, always having to ‘confront contingency, indeterminacy, and plurality, and make do with partial, temporary, and disintegrating arrangements, even when they are not immediately visible as such’ (Freeden 2013: 22). It is indeed agreed in this book that inconclusiveness, contingency, indeterminacy, and plurality are the underlying features of political life, and that is precisely where post-truth narratives come into play, supplanting these actual conditions with a fantasy of mastery and coherence, endowing the world with seemingly undeniable sense and purpose.
To the political domain pertain the actions of first ‘constructing a symbolic sovereign collective identity’ and then, within that group, according significance to key variables, particularly through ‘ranking social aims, demands, processes, and structures in order of importance and urgency’; creating, disbanding, and evaluating subgroups, articulating ‘cooperative, dissenting, competitive, or conflictual conceptual and argumentative arrangements for groups’ as well as determining policies, collective plans, and visions for the future (Freeden 2013: 35). This broad process of creating the conditions and frameworks for collective human life and its ordering provides the backdrop for the analysis of the main features and roles of post-truth in today’s societies.
Ultimately, the ordering function of politics is, in line with Freeden’s argument, seen as being about provision of imaginary finali...