Praveen Swami: This Op-Ed Is Dead
NB: A timely and sensitive essay. The author's observations about the destruction of conversation are correct, and carry sinister portent. In its deepest sense, 'communication is living together': if we fail to communicate, we render ourselves incapable of social life, which can then be taken over by the Behemoth of the modern state. It is worth considering whether 'New Dogma' is actually new, or something which has been cooking for decades. I would say the realm of thought and philosophy has been relentlessly subsumed by ideology, which has emerged as a substitute for religion.
To take two rampant examples of ideological belief systems, Nation-worship is the atheism of the Right; Party-worship the deism of the Left. The Schmittian ramifications of Bolshevism are a clue to why the doctrines of a Nazi jurist exercise so much fascination for Leninists. Communal ideologies pretend to religious belief, actually they are about representational claims and the enforcement of this or that version of civil religion. In either case, God is absent; (not that I yearn for his return), and speech about truth, justice and the Good replaced by polemic, which is a form of silence. (The philosopher Stanley Rosen referred to nihilism as a condition wherein speech is equivalent to silence. For those interested, his book on nihilism is of great value).
Contemporary nihilism has many sources, not least of them the wave of global war, state terror, and the trauma and pessimism of the first half of the 20th century. These phenomena straddled political fault-lines - and that is a long story. The rise of ideological belief systems is also connected to the reduction of theory to interpretation, and the retreat of objectivity into pure subjectivity - something touched upon in this article. Certain contemporary schools of thought have contributed to this development - let us remember that the term 'radical' can be used to describe nihilists of all inclinations. The leap from 'post-modern' to 'post-truth' has been enabled by relativists of all stripes. Here are some articles that address this issue:
The fact-value distinction is another matter raised here - it could prompt us to think about the parallel distinction, raised by Hannah Arendt, between truth and meaning. Her essay on truth and politics is also relevant. Be all that as it may, this article deserves careful reading. Contrary to the author's statement, I hope that his column remains very much alive. DS
“Fools admire and love
those things they see hidden in verses turned all upside down”, wrote Titius
Lucretius Carus, “and take for truth what sweetly strokes the ears”. Looking
out at the political dissension, slave revolts, and riots that marked the death
of the Roman republic, the poet saw people cringing in fear, dreading divine
wrath. His answer was to explain the nature of matter. There’s little chance a
7,500-line essay explaining atomic physics and philosophy, the twin pillars of
Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, would be published today. There is even less chance
that it would be read.
Lucretius - and the
tradition of reasoned opinion he represented — have been rendered redundant by
the profound intellectual changes sweeping the world. In its place, we are
seeing the rise of New Dogma: A system of knowledge in which legitimacy derives
from I. Truth, in other words, has become a personal aesthetic preference. Evidence of the rise
of New Dogma has emerged all around us: Two eminent commentators calling each
other “donkey”, “idiot”, and, more colourfully, “b*c*” during a debate on
India’s most-watched television network; cows that exhale oxygen; an opposition
politician claiming Prime Minister Narendra Modi was
importing Taiwanese mushrooms to whiten his complexion; the prime minister
asserting his predecessor was plotting with Pakistan.
Truth is no longer
arrived at through evidence carefully marshalled, premises examined and
arguments tested. The system of knowledge that came to us through pamphlets,
books, art and newspaper op-ed pages ever since the Enlightenment has begun to
disintegrate.
The key to New Dogma
is the ideological proposition that everyone is entitled to their opinions.
This democratic core distinguishes it from earlier forms of dogma, which drew
legitimacy from god or political power. Technology has facilitated its triumph.
New Dogma ideas gain legitimacy through iteration, not by gatekeepers like
op-ed editors or institutions like peer-review. New Dogma allows everyone to
weigh in on everything - poets on gene science, accountants on nuclear physics,
journalists on urban design. For power, New Dogma is of particular use. Complex
ethical choices - the need for economic justice, the role of secularism, the
value of individual rights - are reduced to matters of taste. Both the
political right and left have embraced the New Dogma, as each withdraws into
the intellectual ghettos created by social media.
New Dogma rests on the
well-established idea that statements of fact, and statements of opinion have
separate value. There is, the argument goes, reality - that is, statements that
can be proven to be true - and then representations of that reality, or
beliefs. Examined closely, of
course, the distinction between fact and opinion is less clear than it appears
at first. I might state for a fact that there is milk the fridge, and opine
that it is enough for the children. There might, however, be no milk - but then
children might not want any. In this case, fact and opinion shift around.
Ferocious contestation, similarly, will greet the claims about murder being
only wrong if people believe it to be so; many would see it as objectively
wrong. God’s existence can be asserted to be a fact, or not, depending on who
is making the claim. Put simply, both facts and opinions can be either successful
or unsuccessful in representing reality: There’s just no way to assess their
truth without engaging in the hard work of critically evaluating the evidence.
For generations,
institutions like the book or the op-ed page have guided public culture through
the process of assessing opinions and facts. This old order, though, involved
respect for hierarchy, deference to knowledge and hard work. New Dogma has
killed these values, and the opinion essay - like this one - is dead. “There are mirrors”,
the scholar Umberto Eco wrote of his visit to an amusement park, “so on your
right you see Dracula raising the lid of a tomb, and on the left your own face
reflected next to Dracula’s, while at times there is the glimmering figure of
Jack the Ripper or of Jesus, duplicated by an astute play of corners, curves,
and perspective, until it is hard to decide which side is reality and which
illusion”. For the age of New Dogma, there is this metaphor: The disembodied
heads talking at the same time on prime time news, each distinguished from the
other only by its volume, none addressing the other. Each of us may listen to
them, or not, and choose the particular illusion that, as Lucretius wrote,
“sweetly strokes the ear”.
In 2018, when we are freed of the burden of reasoned
choice: Happy New Year.
see also
Andrew
Calcutt: The surprising origins of ‘post-truth’ – and how it was spawned by the
liberal left
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality
Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson - Revisiting Foucault and the Iranian Revolution
Farewell to reality
Articles on ideology in East Europe
