Farewell to reality - WHY WE’RE POST-FACT by Peter Pomerantsev
This equaling out of truth and falsehood is both informed by and takes advantage of an all-permeating late post-modernism and relativism, which has trickled down over the past thirty years from academia to the media and then everywhere else. This school of thought has taken Nietzsche’s maxim, there are no facts, only interpretations, to mean that every version of events is just another narrative, where lies can be excused as ‘an alternative point of view’ or ‘an opinion’, because ‘it’s all relative’ and ‘everyone has their own truth’ (and on the internet they really do).
The twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for new-ness’ wrote the late Russian-American philologist Svetlana Boym, ‘but by the proliferation of nostalgias . ..
Post-modernism first positioned itself as emancipatory, a way to free people from the oppressive narratives they had been subjected to. But, as Ferraris points out, ‘the advent of media populism provided the example of a farewell to reality that was not at all emancipatory’. If reality is endlessly malleable, then Berlusconi, who so influenced Putin, could justifiably argue, ‘Don’t you realize that something doesn’t exist – not an idea, a politician, or a product – unless it is on television?
if everyone is lying then anything goes, whether it’s in your personal life or in invading foreign countries. This is a (dark) joy. All the madness you feel, you can now let it out and it’s okay. The very point of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit, the joy of pure emotion, often anger, without any sense
As his army blatantly
annexed Crimea, Vladimir Putin went on TV and, with a smirk, told the world
there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. He wasn’t lying so much as saying
the truth doesn’t matter. And when Donald Trump makes up facts on a whim,
claims that he saw thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the Twin Towers
coming down, or that the Mexican government purposefully sends ‘bad’ immigrants
to the US, when fact-checking agencies rate 78% of his statements untrue but he
still becomes a US Presidential candidate – then it appears that facts no
longer matter much in the land of the free. When the Brexit campaign announces
‘Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’ and, on winning
the referendum, the claim is shrugged off as a ‘mistake’ by one Brexit
leader while another explains it as ‘an aspiration’, then it’s clear we
are living in a ‘post-fact’ or ‘post-truth’ world. Not merely a world where
politicians and media lie – they have always lied – but one where they don’t
care whether they tell the truth or not.
How did we get here?
Is it due to technology? Economic globalisation? The culmination of the history
of philosophy? There is some sort of teenage joy in throwing off the weight of
facts – those heavy symbols of education and authority, reminders of our place
and limitations – but why is this rebellion happening right now?
Many blame technology.
Instead of ushering a new era of truth-telling, the information age allows lies
to spread in what techies call ‘digital wildfires’. By the time a fact-checker
has caught a lie, thousands more have been created, and the sheer volume of
‘disinformation cascades’ make unreality unstoppable. All that matters is that
the lie is clickable, and what determines that is how it feeds into people’s
existing prejudices. Algorithms developed by companies such as Google and
Facebook are based around your previous searches and clicks, so with every
search and every click you find your own biases confirmed. Social media, now
the primary news source for most Americans, leads us into echo chambers of
similar-minded people, feeding us only the things that make us feel better,
whether they are true or not.
Technology might have
more subtle influences on our relationship with the truth, too. The new media,
with its myriad screens and streams, makes reality so fragmented it becomes
ungraspable, pushing us towards, or allowing us to flee, into virtual realities
and fantasies. Fragmentation, combined with the disorientations of
globalization, leaves people yearning for a more secure past, breeding
nostalgia. ‘The twenty-first century is not characterized by the search for
new-ness’ wrote the late Russian-American philologist Svetlana Boym, ‘but by
the proliferation of nostalgias . . . nostalgic nationalists and nostalgic
cosmopolitans, nostalgic environmentalists and nostalgic metrophiliacs (city
lovers) exchange pixel fire in the blogosphere’.
Thus Putin’s
internet-troll armies sell dreams of a restored Russian Empire and Soviet
Union; Trump tweets to ‘Make America Great Again’; Brexiteers yearn for a lost
England on Facebook; while ISIS’s viral snuff movies glorify a mythic
Caliphate. ‘Restorative nostalgia’, argued Boym, strives to rebuild the lost
homeland with ‘paranoiac determination’, thinks of itself as ‘truth and
tradition’, obsesses over grand symbols and ‘relinquish[es] critical thinking
for emotional bonding . . . In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland,
for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can
breed monsters’.
The flight into
techno-fantasies is intertwined with economic and social uncertainty. If all
the facts say you have no economic future then why would you want to hear
facts? If you live in a world where a small event in China leads to livelihoods
lost in Lyon, where your government seems to have no control over what is going
on, then trust in the old institutions of authority – politicians, academics,
the media – buckles. Which has led to Brexit leader Michael Gove’s claim that
British people ‘have had enough of experts’, Trump’s rants at the ‘lamestream’
media and the online flowering of ‘alternative news’ sites. Paradoxically,
people who don’t trust ‘the mainstream’ media are, a study from Northeastern
University showed, more likely to swallow disinformation.
‘Surprisingly,
consumers of alternative news, which are the users trying to avoid the
mainstream media “mass-manipulation”, are the most responsive to the injection
of false claims.’[1] Healthy scepticism ends in a search for
wild conspiracies. Putin’s Kremlin-controlled television finds US conspiracies
behind everything, Trump speculates that 9/11 was an inside job, and parts of
the Brexit campaign saw Britain under attack from a Germano-Franco-European
plot.
‘There is no such
thing as objective reporting,’ claim the heads of Putin’s propaganda networks
Dmitry Kiselev and Margarita Simonyan, when asked to explain the editorial
principles which allow for conspiracy theories to be presented as being equally
valid to evidence-based research. The Kremlin’s international channel, RT,
claims to be giving an ‘alternative’ point of view, but in practice this means
making the editor of a fringe right-wing magazine as credible a talking head as
a University academic, making a lie as worthy of broadcast as a fact. Donald
Trump plays a similar game when he invokes wild rumors as reasonable,
alternative opinions, couching stories that Obama is a Muslim, or that rival
Ted Cruz carries a secret Canadian passport, with the caveat: ‘A lot of people
are saying . . .’[2]
This equaling out of
truth and falsehood is both informed by and takes advantage of an
all-permeating late post-modernism and relativism, which has trickled down over
the past thirty years from academia to the media and then everywhere else. This
school of thought has taken Nietzsche’s maxim, there are no facts, only
interpretations, to mean that every version of events is just another
narrative, where lies can be excused as ‘an alternative point of view’ or ‘an
opinion’, because ‘it’s all relative’ and ‘everyone has their own truth’ (and
on the internet they really do).
Maurizio Ferraris, one
of the founders of the New Realism movement and one of postmodernism’s most
persuasive critics, argues that we are seeing the culmination of over two
centuries of thinking. The Enlightenment’s original motive was to make analysis
of the world possible by tearing the right to define reality away from divine
authority to individual reason. Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ moved the
seat of knowledge into the human mind. But if the only thing you can know is
your mind, then, as Schopenhauer put it, ‘the world is my representation’. In
the late twentieth century postmodernists went further, claiming that there is
‘nothing outside the text’, and that all our ideas about the world are inferred
from the power models enforced upon us. This has led to a syllogism which
Ferraris sums up as: ‘all reality is constructed by knowledge, knowledge is
constructed by power, and ergo all reality is constructed by power. Thus . . .
reality turns out to be a construction of power, which makes it both detestable
(if by “power” we mean the Power that dominates us) and malleable (if by
“power” we mean “in our power”).’
Post-modernism first
positioned itself as emancipatory, a way to free people from the oppressive
narratives they had been subjected to. But, as Ferraris points out, ‘the advent
of media populism provided the example of a farewell to reality that was not at
all emancipatory’. If reality is endlessly malleable, then Berlusconi, who so
influenced Putin, could justifiably argue, ‘Don’t you realize that something
doesn’t exist – not an idea, a politician, or a product – unless it is on
television?’[3]; then the Bush administration could
legitimise a war based on misinformation. ‘When we act, we create our own
reality’, a senior Bush advisor, thought to be Karl Rove, told the New
York Times in a quote Ferraris zeroes in on, ‘and while you’re
studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating
other new realities’.
To make matters worse,
by saying that all knowledge is (oppressive) power, postmodernism took away the
ground on which one could argue against power. Instead it posited that ‘because
reason and intellect are forms of domination . . . liberation must be looked
for through feelings and the body, which are revolutionary per se.’ Rejecting
fact-based arguments in favour of emotions becomes a good in itself. We can
hear the political echo of this in the thoughts of Arron Banks, funder of the
Leave EU campaign: ‘The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact.
It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the
Trump success.’ Ferraris sees the root of the problem in philosophers’ response
to the rise of science in the eighteenth century. As science took over the
interpretation of reality, philosophy became more anti-realist in order to
retain a space where it could still play a role.
As I try to make sense
of the world I grew up and live in – a world framed in my case by Russia, the
EU, UK and the US – I don’t need to go quite so far back to find a time when
facts mattered. I remember facts seemed to be terribly important during the
Cold War. Both Soviet Communists and Western Democratic Capitalists relied on
facts to prove their ideology was right. The Communists especially cooked the
books – but in the end they lost because they couldn’t make their case any
longer. When they were caught lying they acted outraged. It was important to be
seen as accurate.
Why were facts important
for these two sides? Both projects were trying, at least officially, to prove
an idea of rational progress. Ideology, story and the use of facts went hand in
hand. Moreover, as the media entrepreneur and activist Tony Curzon Price has
pointed out to me that during a war, leadership and authority are important to
keep you safe. You look up to leaders for – and they weigh down on you with –
the facts.
Then came the 1990s.
There was no more progress to be striven for, nothing to prove. Facts became
separated from political stories. There was a happiness to this: it was a time
of hedonism and Еcstasy, a light-headedness where we could ignore the facts of
our bank accounts and take on as much debt as we liked. Without facts and ideas
the new masters of politics became spin doctors and political technologists. In
Russia, Tsarist and KGB traditions of forming puppet political movements were
fused with Western PR tricks to create a Potemkin-democracy where the Kremlin
manipulated all the narratives and all the parties, from far left to far right.
This began in 1996 when fake parties and fake news were used to save President
Yeltsin, and spread to become a model of ‘virtual politics’ imitated across
Eurasia (Trump’s spin doctor, Paul Manafort, worked in the world of the Kremlin
in 2005 to help mould the Putin-wannabe President Yanukovich in Ukraine).
In
the UK it was manifested in the outsized career of Alastair Campbell, an
unelected press spokesman, deemed to be so influential that the definitive
political satire of the period made him the locum of power in the country. In
the US it began with the first Gulf War, which Baudrillard described as a pure
media invention, through the razzamatazz of Bill Clinton and on to the second
Gulf War and Rove’s legendary ‘we create reality’ quote.
But for all their
cynicism, the spin doctors and political technologists were, at this point,
still trying to pull off an illusion of the truth. Their stories were meant to
be coherent, even if they were low on facts. When reality caught up – the
audience caught on to the illusion in Moscow and the stories about Iraq broke
down and the stock market crashed – one reaction has been to double down, to
deny that facts matter at all, to make a fetish out of not caring about them.
This has many benefits for rulers – and is a relief for voters. Putin doesn’t
need to have a more convincing story, he just has to make it clear that
everybody lies, undermine the moral superiority of his enemies and convince his
people there is no alternative to him. ‘When Putin lies brazenly he wants the
West to point out that he lies’ says the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan
Krastev, ‘so he can point back and say, “but you lie too”’.
And if everyone is
lying then anything goes, whether it’s in your personal life or in invading
foreign countries. This is a (dark) joy.
All the madness you feel, you can now let it out and it’s okay. The very point
of Trump is to validate the pleasure of spouting shit, the joy of pure emotion,
often anger, without any sense. And an audience which has already spent a
decade living without facts can now indulge in a full, anarchic liberation from
coherence.
[1] Data Mining Reveals How Conspiracy Theories
Emerge on Facebook, MIT Technology Review (Mar. 18, 2014),
http://www.technolo-gyreview.com/view/525616/data-mining-reveals-how-conspiracy-theories-emerge-on-facebook/
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-lot-of-people-are-saying-how-trump-spreads-conspiracies-and-innuendo/2016/06/13/b21e59de-317e-11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b7a0_story.html
see also
"Those who are obsessed by language finally come to the conviction that there is nothing but interpretation" Stanley Rosen in Hermeneutics as Politics (1987)
