Andrew Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the liberal left
the groundbreaking
work on “post-truth” was performed by academics, with further contributions
from an extensive roster of middle-class professionals. Left-leaning, self-confessed
liberals, they sought freedom from state-sponsored truth; instead they built a
new form of cognitive confinement – “post-truth”... More than 30 years
ago, academics started to discredit “truth” as one of the “grand narratives”
which clever people could no longer bring themselves to believe in. Instead of
“the truth”, which was to be rejected as naïve and/or repressive, a new
intellectual orthodoxy permitted only “truths” – always plural, frequently
personalised, inevitably relativised.
Under the terms of
this outlook, all claims on truth are relative to the particular person making
them; there is no position outside our own particulars from which to establish
universal truth. This was one of the key tenets of postmodernism,
a concept which first caught on in the 1980s after publication of Jean-Francois
Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge in 1979. In this
respect, for as long as we have been postmodern, we have been setting the scene
for a “post-truth” era.
“Post-truth” has been
announced as the Oxford
Dictionaries’ international word of the year. It is widely associated with
US president-elect Donald
Trump’s extravagantly untruthful assertions and the working-class
people who voted for him nonetheless. But responsibility for the “post-truth”
era lies with the middle-class professionals who prepared the runway for its
recent take-off. Those responsible include academics, journalists, “creatives”
and financial traders; even the centre-left politicians who have now been hit
hard by the rise of the anti-factual.
On November 16, 2016
Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been selected as the word
which, more than any other, reflects “the passing year in language”. It defines
“post-truth” 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 itself can be
traced back as far as 1992, but documented usage increased by 2,000% in 2016 compared to 2015.
As Oxford Dictionaries’ Casper Grathwohl explained:
We first saw the
frequency really spike this year in June with buzz over the Brexit vote and
again in July when Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination. Given that usage of
the term hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down, I wouldn’t be surprised if
post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time.
Punditry on the
“post-truth era” is often accompanied by a picture either of Donald Trump (for
example, BBC News Online or The
Guardian) or of his supporters (The
Spectator). Although The Spectator article was a rare exception, the
connotations embedded in “post-truth” commentary are normally as follows: “post-truth”
is the product of populism; it is the bastard child of common-touch charlatans
and a rabble ripe for arousal; it is often in blatant disregard of the actualité.
The truth about
post-truth
But this
interpretation blatantly disregards the actual origins of “post-truth”. These
lie neither with those deemed under-educated nor with their new-found
champions. Instead, the groundbreaking work on “post-truth” was performed by
academics, with further contributions from an extensive roster of middle-class
professionals. Left-leaning, self-confessed liberals, they sought freedom from
state-sponsored truth; instead they built a new form of cognitive confinement –
“post-truth”.
More than 30 years
ago, academics started to discredit “truth” as one of the “grand narratives”
which clever people could no longer bring themselves to believe in. Instead of
“the truth”, which was to be rejected as naïve and/or repressive, a new
intellectual orthodoxy permitted only “truths” – always plural, frequently
personalised, inevitably relativised.
Under the terms of
this outlook, all claims on truth are relative to the particular person making
them; there is no position outside our own particulars from which to establish
universal truth. This was one of the key tenets of postmodernism,
a concept which first caught on in the 1980s after publication of Jean-Francois
Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report On Knowledge in 1979. In this
respect, for as long as we have been postmodern, we have been setting the scene
for a “post-truth” era... read more:
see also
