After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth — an adjective 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’.”
Oxford Dictionaries made this announcement on their website in November 2016, noting what they described as a spike in the frequency of the usage of the word post-truth last year, most prominently in the context of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States.
The British newspaper The Economist, in an editorial dated 10 Sept. 2016, describes post-truth politics as “a reliance on assertions that ‘feel true’ but have no basis in fact”.
This is observable most famously when then US presidential candidate Donald Trump claimed that Barack Obama’s birth certificate was fake (on top of being the founder of the Islamic State), that the Clintons are killers, and that the father of a political rival, Ted Cruz, was with Lee Harvey Oswald before the latter shot John F. Kennedy.
This prompted another British media organization, The Independent, to run an article on the eve of the 2016 US presidential election entitled, “Whoever wins the US presidential election, we’ve entered a post-truth world — there’s no going back now”.
As far as mainstream media and popular culture are concerned, the consensus seems to be that 2016 was the pivotal year of our collective entry into this newfound reality.
I submit, however, that a long, hard look at history will reveal that politics has always been this way. No matter the time or place, each aspiring leader’s objective has always been to strengthen and legitimize their hold to power by capturing the hearts and belief of the people they seek to govern.
Seen this way, Donald Trump has never really subverted anything; where before, perhaps, politicians have felt the need to invoke truth and facts, Trump has merely found a way to circumvent or bypass the mind and lunge straight at the heart of his voters. What we saw in 2016 was not a change into a different kind of politics; rather, a change only in the intensity and strategy thereof.
We should have seen this coming by the time we embraced the arrival of postmodernism in the 1900s, particularly through its champion-philosophers Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault.
Post-modernism repudiated the grand and the absolute, distrusted any authoritative claim of truth and fact, and preferred a more self-imposed system of meaning.
This has had a drastic impact on contemporary life, particularly in art, entertainment, education, and religion. It was the first shoe to fall, leading up to what we now know as the post-truth world.
The recent adverse reaction we see in the mainstream media towards post-truth politics, then, serves to reveal one of our greatest hypocrisies: that there is no such thing as absolute truth.
This, of course, refers to postmodernism’s philosophical twin child, relativism. Yet this position is demonstrably absurd, because if you ask the relativist the question “Is relativism true?”, there is no way for him or her to give a rationally defensible answer.
If the relativist says yes, the answer itself is contradictory to the idea of relativism itself. On the other hand, if the relativist says no, he or she has just admitted that relativism is wrong.
Truth matters, precisely because of its Truth-ness. It is inescapable. We cannot say or do anything without the facility of truth, such that entire societal systems and institutions such as science, education, government, medicine, banking, and law have been built on its reality.
Otherwise, it would be unimaginable, uninhabitable chaos.
Unfortunately, we have flirted for too long in recent decades with an extreme and unhealthy dose of postmodernist, post-truth skepticism. We have done it so much and so often, that we hardly even notice it anymore.
But now we live in a world that we have darkened with our own hands, and unless we experience some collective recovery of a respect and love for truth, there might be, indeed, no going back.
Democracy will continue its free-fall from critical thinking, degenerating into the exclusive realm of feelings and, given enough time, of force.
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Author’s email: micahdagaerag@outlook.com
