A Player's Guide to the Post-Truth Condition: The Name of the Game

A Player’s

Guide to the

Post-Truth

Condition

KEY ISSUES IN MODERN SOCIOLOGY

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Key Issues in Modern Sociology publishes scholarly texts by leading social theorists that give an accessible exposition of the major structural changes in modern societies. These volumes address an academic audience through their relevance and scholarly quality, and connect sociological thought to public issues. The series covers both substantive and theoretical topics, as well as addressing the works of major modern sociologists. The series emphasis is on modern developments in sociology with relevance to contemporary issues such as globalization, warfare, citizenship, human rights, environmental crises, demographic change, religion, postsecularism and civil conflict.

Series Editor

Peter Kivisto – Augustana College, USA

Editorial Board

Harry F. Dahms – University of Tennessee at Knoxville, USA

Thomas Faist – Bielefeld University, Germany

Anne Rawls – Bentley University, USA

Giuseppe Sciortino – University of Trento, Italy

Sirpa Wrende – University of Helsinki, Finland

Richard York – University of Oregon, USA

A Player’s

GUIDE TO THE

POST-TRUTH

CONDITION

The Name of the Game

STEVE FULLER

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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and

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Copyright © Steve Fuller 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-603-3 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-603-4 (Hbk)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-604-0 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-604-2 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

A Word to the Reader

Acknowledgements

Introduction: How to Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Post-Truth Condition

1. Post-Truth Breaks Free of Reason’s Own Self-Imposed Chains

2. Post-Truth Is about Finding a Game One Can Win

3. The Fate of Truth, Reason and Reality in the Post-Truth Condition

4. Capitalism, Scientism and the Construction of Value in the Post-Truth Condition

5. Public Relations as Post-Truth Politics, or the Marketisation of Everything

6. The New York Times Gets the Post-Truth Treatment

7. Science as the Offer That Can’t Be Refused in the Post-Truth Condition

8. Will Expertise Survive the Post-Truth Condition?

9. Will Universities Survive the Post-Truth Condition?

10. ‘Research Ethics’ as Post-Truth Playground

11. Why Ignorance – not Knowledge – Is the Key to Justice in the Post-Truth Condition

12. A Pandemic Seen through a Post-Truth Lens

13. Thinking in the Fourth Order: The Role of Metalepsis in the Post-Truth Condition

14. The Path from Francis Bacon: A Genealogy of the Post-Truth Condition

Conclusion: How to Put Yourself in the Post-Truth Frame of Mind

References

Index

A WORD TO THE READER

This book is designed to do what its title says, namely, to provide a guide to the post-truth condition for those who wish to feel at home and thrive in it – rather than simply avoid or attack it. It consists of a series of short chapters that are best read in the order presented but may also be read in a different order or simply in parts – as most books are normally read. The book ranges widely across philosophy, theology, science, politics, economics, psychology, and the arts – but hopefully in a way that allows readers to find their bearings, given the opportunities presented by the internet to follow up whatever might interest them in the text. Underlying this breadth of scope is a fundamental scepticism with ‘business as usual’ in the production and evaluation of knowledge claims. To be sure, the reader will see that post-truth extends many of the themes already found in what passes for ‘postmodernism’. However, at a deeper level, and in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the post-truth condition invites us to discover in a new key what it has always meant to be ‘modern’.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In writing this book, I kept in mind three quite different people who had already embodied the post-truth condition in their beliefs and action early in my academic career nearly forty years ago: Deirdre McCloskey, Charles Arthur Willard and Steve Woolgar.

During this book’s composition, the following people offered insight, provocation and support of various sorts: Aleksandra Łukaszewicz Alcaraz, Thomas Basbøll, Anya Bernstein, Kean Birch, Yael Brahms, Sindi Breshani, Mattia Gallotti, Jane Gilbert, Zhengdong Hu, Petar Jandric, Ian Jarvie, David Johnson, Paul Jump, Ilya Kasavin, Josephine Lethbridge, David Levy, Veronika Lipinska, Luke Robert Mason, Linsey McGoey, Alfred Nordmann, Nathan Oseroff, Lea Peersman Pujol, Ljiljana Radenović, Sheldon Richmond, Sharon Rider, Raphael Sassower, Nico Stehr, Adam Tait, Gareth Thompson, Steven Umbrello and Cong Wang.

Finally, this book is dedicated to my mother, who died in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic – but not of it. But that’s a story for another day ...

INTRODUCTION: HOW TO LEARN TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE POST-TRUTH CONDITION

The post-truth condition means many things to many people. Simply put and without prejudice, in the post-truth condition, what matters is not whether something is true or false but how the matter is decided. As we shall see in the following pages, there is a lot more to it than that. But that is the core meaning – and it is already enough to strike fear in the hearts of many. Opponents of the post-truth condition identify it with a credibility crisis in knowledge-based institutions that stems from some evil force intent on leading a gullible public to undo all the careful work that over the past five centuries has made ours an increasingly rational world in which people can operate freely to mutual benefit. These malign manipulators range from alternative newsfeeds such as Breitbart to big data firms such as Cambridge Analytica to the vague but looming presence of ‘Russian hackers’. I take a very different approach to the post-truth condition.

I welcome the post-truth condition as nothing more – and nothing less – than the logical next stage of the very same project of rationalisation that post-truth’s opponents claim to uphold. It should not be feared but embraced as a sign of this project’s genuine democratisation. Authority is finally being devolved from a vanguard class of ‘experts’ with a monopoly of moral and political force to some yet-to-be-defined organisation of independent self-legislating individuals. In the coming years we should expect that such modern ‘establishment’ institutions as the ‘state’ and the ‘university’ will be subject to the same shakedown that the ‘church’ has periodically undergone since the early modern period in parts of the world touched by Christianity. To be sure, the exact sort of ‘organisation’ that governs the post-truth condition is very much up for grabs, and may always be, which explains the subtitle of this book: The Name of the Game. The ultimate prize in the post-truth condition is to name the game you play, even if you turn out to be the loser. Put as a point of strategy, history can be written by the losers, if they manage to make the winners feel guilty about having won, thereby handicapping them in any subsequent game. Readers of Nietzsche will understand exactly what I mean.

What is most evident about the post-truth condition is that the difference between those who know and those who don’t has been reduced – but not quite as you might think. To be sure, we live in a time of unprecedented levels of literacy, schooling and access of information, notwithstanding what opponents of the post-truth condition sometimes seem to assume. Thus, lay people can increasingly catch up with what the experts know to the point of confidently challenging their judgement, even if they are rebuffed in the end. And no doubt this dynamic goes to the democratic heart of the post-truth condition. But the sort of ‘reduction’ I really have in mind is about the playing field of uncertainty becoming levelled.

In the past, experts have exercised a form of ‘cognitive authoritarianism’ (Fuller 1988: ch. 12). They have enjoyed a monopoly licence to turn uncertainty to their advantage by dictating the name of the game that everyone else should be playing. This ‘monopoly licence’ has normally taken the form of state-certified academic credentials that grant experts the right to heroically simplify reality in the name of policy. Its signature contemporary practice is ‘modelling’, a mathematically inspired and technologically enhanced descendant of the esoteric art of the ‘microcosm’. Both involve a sophisticated way of extending from what one knows to what one doesn’t know in order to create a template for reality as a whole. In the European Renaissance this art was typically depicted in Platonic terms as a rigorous way of recalling a collective past but nowadays it is discussed more ‘naturalistically’ as the search for underlying causes. And so the magicians yielded to the scientists (Yates 1966). In any case, in the post-truth condition, that monopoly over modelling is broken, resulting in a free market with multiple competitors which effectively democratises control over uncertainty.

It is no longer simply that the world itself is uncertain but who is best positioned to manage that uncertainty is also uncertain. It is, as the logicians would say, this ‘second order’ shrinkage in the epistemic distance between experts and lay people that ultimately defines the post-truth condition. This helps to explain the increasingly heavy-handed ways in which experts have tried to exert their authority in the public sphere, very much like an autocrat who needs to regularly remind subjects of his power, lest it slip away. As Machiavelli and others have realised, this is a sign of weakness not strength, since the sheer survival of nonconformists forces the autocrat to redouble his efforts to reassert his authority. And once the autocrat takes the bait and redoubles his efforts, he will effectively recognise his opponents as equals, as well as expend his own energies in a self-defeating cause. Typically the autocrat will be forced to settle for a world in which he perhaps retains dominance but not hegemony. In this spirit, I believe that the post-truth condition will leave the university – and the scientific establishment as a whole – in the position of the Roman Catholic Church after the Protestant Reformation vis-à-vis Christendom.

This prospect is at once exciting and scary. For the full measure of what I mean, consider the following potted history of human institutions which sociologists have been telling since the late nineteenth century. In the beginning, institutions were reproduced on a hereditary basis, as social lineage closely tracked biological lineage. The path to modernity started to be paved once the lines of social and biological descent were disaggregated. It began with the clergy and the military, and gradually spread across the productive sectors of society. By the end of the eighteenth century, the presumed basis for institutional reproduction had shifted away from hereditary entitlement to examination and election. Periodic performance checks increasingly replaced the need to wait for an incumbent to die or resign. At that point, institutions had effectively become disaggregated as ‘corporate’ entities from the individuals who happen to carry out their functions at a given time. This change corresponded to a shift in the source of institutional legitimacy from some original moment in history to a ‘charter’ or ‘constitution’ that functions as a sustaining generative programme. It is not so different from how we think about a computer algorithm today, in which theoretically the same programme can run on many different machines indefinitely, without being dependent on any particular set of individuals.

The post-truth condition marks a third disaggregation in this potted history. After all, a state whose leaders are constitutionally subject to regular elections is just as monopolistic as one whose leaders are subject to hereditary succession. Similarly, if the most influential theorist of science in the second half of the twentieth century is to be believed, the cognitive authority enjoyed by the dominant research paradigm in a field of empirical inquiry is no less monolithic than that enjoyed by an established church (Kuhn 1970). Against this backdrop, the post-truth condition amounts to ‘epistemic trust-busting’, resulting in a free market whereby multiple constitutions, lineages, paradigms and churches compete to name the game in their respective field of play (Fuller 2018: 48). One person’s sense of the established order thus becomes another’s conspiracy against the public interest. But more important than the sheer plurality and conflict of perspectives unleashed by this situation is the mental agility required to thrive in it. A successful player needs to see things from the standpoint of one’s opponent, and if possible turn that to one’s own advantage. If one is a chess player who encounters someone who plays checkers, then one’s strategy must be to achieve an outcome in checkers comparable to the outcome one would wish to achieve in chess.

This characterisation of the post-truth condition will undoubtedly strike many philosophically literate people as no more than a sophisticated version of relativism. However, this would be to seriously underestimate the intellectual stakes. Relativism may be acceptable or abhorrent but it is philosophically straightforward. As its name suggests, ‘relativism’ presupposes a jurisdictional approach to claims about knowledge, morals and so forth. ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do’, as Bishop Ambrose advised the young St Augustine. That’s relativism in a nutshell, and hence its appeal to anthropologists who approach a native tribe as absolute outsiders. Indeed, relativism makes most sense if you are an outsider to all possible jurisdictions. Suppose you’re looking at a map trying to figure out how to blend in with the inhabitants in various locations. It is the world view of tourists and chameleons. In contrast, the post-truth condition assumes that the jurisdictional boundaries are themselves