Post-Truth

Steve Fuller

Description

This book is the first to show that today’s post-truth world-view is deeply rooted in the history and philosophy of religion, politics and science.

‘Post-Truth’ was Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year. While the term was coined by its disparagers, especially in light of the Brexit and US Presidential campaigns, the roots of post-truth lie deep in the history of Western social and political theory. This book reaches back to Plato, ranges across theology and philosophy, and focuses on the Machiavellian tradition in classical sociology. The key figure here is Vilfredo Pareto, who offered the original modern account of post-truth in terms of the ‘circulation of elites’, whereby ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’ vie for power by accusing each other of illegitimacy, based on allegations of speaking falsely either about what they have done (lions) or what they will do (foxes). The defining feature of ‘post-truth’ is a strong distinction between appearance and reality which is never quite resolved, which means that the strongest appearance ends up passing for reality. The only question is whether more is gained by rapid changes in appearance (foxes) or by stabilizing one such appearance (lions). This book plays out what all this means for both politics and science.

Post-truth should be seen as largely a continuation of the last forty years of postmodernism, especially in its deconstructive guise. Both postmodernism and post-truth publicly display a strong anti-authoritarian, democratic streak. Yet it is also a legacy rooted in Plato, who acknowledged an eternal power struggle – done in the name of ‘truth’ – between those who uphold adherence to the past and those who uphold openness to the future. Later, Machiavelli, and still later Vilfredo Pareto, described these two positions as ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’, respectively. Moreover, there has always been concern that if the struggle between the lions and foxes is made public, the social fabric will disintegrate altogether, as happened to Athens in Plato’s day. The ancient and medieval support for a ‘double truth’ doctrine (i.e. one for the elites and one for the masses), as carried over in modern conceptions of censorship, articulate these misgivings. In early twentieth century, Pareto based a general theory of society on this struggle. Pareto’s legacy left the most lasting impression in the US through the Harvard biochemist Lawrence Henderson. Henderson convened a ‘Pareto Circle’ in the late 1930s, which influenced the young Thomas Kuhn, author of the most influential account of science in the second half of the twentieth century, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’. What distinguishes science from politics is that in science the lions normally rule because they suppress contested features of their history until their own internal disagreements about how to interpret puzzling findings force a ‘crisis’ and finally ‘revolution’, during which the scientific foxes are briefly in control.

The book is concerned with the implications of a systematically post-truth perspective on academic knowledge production, which is largely seen as a vulnerable target. It turns out that military and industrial attitudes towards knowledge production have always embodied a post-truth perspective. The book also suggests an academic course of study for a post-truth world. The course would put less emphasis on content and more on skills, especially those involving the propagation and deconstruction of content, much of which is normally associated with marketing, public relations as well as aesthetic and literary criticism. In addition, the course would focus on arguments relating to the avoidance (lions) or acceptance (foxes) of risk. It would also examine the contrasting Orwellian practices involved in constructing canonical (lions) and revisionist (foxes) histories. The twentieth century interwar debate between Walter Lippmann (lion) and Edward Bernays (fox) over the meaning of a public philosophy in an era of mass media would be a centrepiece.

Acknowledgements; Introduction: Science and Politics in a Post-Truth Era: Pareto's Hidden Hand; Chapter One: Brexit: Political Expertise Confronts the Will of the People; Chapter Two: What Philosophy Does and Does Not Teach Us about the Post-Truth Condition; Chapter Three: Sociology and Science and Technology Studies as Post-Truth Sciences; Chapter Four: The Post-Truth about Academia: Undiscovered Public Knowledge; Appendix: Prolegomena To A Deep History of 'Information Overload'; Chapter Five: Science Customisation: A Project for the Post-Truth Condition; Chapter Six: The Performance of Politics and Science on the Playing Field of Time; Chapter Seven: Forecasting: The Future as the Post-Truth Playground; The Argument in A Nutshell; Glossary; References; Index.

Sujets

• Epistemology
• Social sciences
• Social theory
• Sociology
• PHILOSOPHY

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 25 mai 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783086962
• Langue: English

Extrait

Post-Truth
KEY ISSUES IN MODERN SOCIOLOGY
Anthem’s Key Issues in Modern Sociology series 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 addresses 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
Post-Truth
Knowledge as a Power Game
Steve Fuller
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
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Copyright © Steve Fuller 2018

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: 978-1-78308-693-1 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-693-9 (Hbk)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-694-8 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-694-7 (Pbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
This book is dedicated to the memory of the founder of ‘scientific history’, the ancient Greek historian Thucydides , who by today’s standards would be regarded as a purveyor of ‘fake news ’.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Introduction. Science and Politics in a Post-Truth Era: Pareto’s Hidden Hand
1. Brexit: Political Expertise Confronts the Will of the People
2. What Philosophy Does and Does Not Teach Us about the Post-Truth Condition
3. Sociology and Science and Technology Studies as Post-Truth Sciences
4. The Post-Truth about Academia: Undiscovered Public Knowledge
5. Science Customization: A Project for the Post-Truth Condition
6. The Performance of Politics and Science on the Playing Field of Time
7. Forecasting: The Future as the Post-Truth Playground
The Argument in a Nutshell
Glossary
References
Index
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Among the people (aside from the publisher!) who had to suffer graciously while I stretched their patience as I wrote various texts that provide components of the argument in these pages, let me single out for special thanks: James Chase, Jim Collier, Alistair Duff, Joannah Duncan, Bob Frodeman, Inanna Hamati-Ataya, Jerry Hauser, Ilya Kasavin, Sharon Rider, Mikael Stenmark and Jack Stilgoe. I would also like to thank the British Sociological Association, the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology, the Guardian newspaper and London’s Institute of Art and Ideas for hosting earlier versions of what I say here on their websites. Finally, I would like to acknowledge support of the Russian Science Foundation, project number 14-18-02227, ‘Social Philosophy of Science’, with which I am associated as a research fellow in the Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy.
Introduction
SCIENCE AND POLITICS IN A POST-TRUTH ERA: PARETO’S HIDDEN HAND
‘Post-truth’ may have been declared word of the year for 2016 by the Oxford English Dictionary , but the concept has been always with us in both politics and science – and in much deeper ways than those who decry its existence realize. A long memory is not required to see its roots in politics. Recall 2004’s coinage of ‘reality-based community’ as an ironic counterpoint to George W. Bush ’s approach to foreign policy, especially after the start of the Iraq war . Nevertheless, it is interesting to see the exact dictionary definition of ‘post-truth’, including examples of usage:

Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief:
‘in this era of post-truth politics, it’s easy to cherry-pick data and come to whatever conclusion you desire’
‘some commentators have observed that we are living in a post-truth age’
This definition is clearly pejorative. Indeed, it is a post-truth definition of ‘post-truth’. It is how those dominant in the relevant knowledge-and-power game want their opponents to be seen. In this context, the word ‘emotion’ is a bit of post-truth jargon that only serves to obscure the word’s true function, which is to gain competitive advantage in some more or less well-defined field of play.
Those who are most resonant to our living in a ‘post-truth’ world believe that reality is fundamentally different from what most people think. This applies to both sides of today’s ‘post-truth’ divide: the elite experts and the populist demagogues. Informing it all is Plato ’s view of the world, which Niccolò Machiavelli helpfully democratized in the Renaissance. It was then updated for the capitalist world by the political economist Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), one of sociology’s forgotten founders, an inspiration to Benito Mussolini and the man who was still cast in my youth as the ‘Marx of the Master Class’, given his respectful treatment by such Cold War liberals as Talcott Parsons and Raymond Aron (Parsons 1937: chaps. 5–7; Aron 1967: chap. 2). If anyone deserves to be the patron saint of post-truth, it is Pareto .
For Pareto , what passes for social order is the result of the interplay of two sorts of elites, which he called, following Machiavelli , lions and foxes . Both species are post-truth merchants. The lions treat the status quo’s understanding of the past as a reliable basis for moving into the future, whereas the foxes regard the status quo as possessing a corrupt understanding of the past that inhibits movement into a still better future. History consists in the endless circulation of these two temporal orientations: the ‘inductive’ and the ‘counter-inductive’, as epistemologists would say.
The Oxford English Dictionary ’s definition of ‘post-truth’ speaks the lion’s truth, which tries to create as much moral and epistemic distance as possible from whatever facsimile of the truth the fox might be peddling. Thus, the fox – but not the lion – is portrayed as distorting the facts and appealing to emotion. Yet, the lion’s truth appears to the fox as simplistically straightforward and heavy-handed, little more than claims to entitlement often delivered in a fit of righteous indignation. Thus, the fox’s strategy is to minimize the moral and epistemic distance between his own position and that of his leonine opponent, typically by revealing her unredeemed promises and rank hypocrisy.
Post-truth politics was laid bare in the 2016 US presidential campaign when the leonine Hillary Clinton , perhaps the most qualified person ever to run for the presidency, called half of Donald Trump ’s supporters ‘a basket of deplorables’ for trying to undermine the dominant ‘progressive’ agenda of the post-Cold War neo-liberal welfare state. In response, the foxy Trump , speaking on behalf of the Americans increasingly left behind by this same agenda, called the people fronting it ‘corrupt’ and ‘crooked’.
But Trump meant something deeper, which goes to the heart of the post-truth condition . It came across in his campaign catchphrase: ‘draining the swamp’. The entire Washington establishment – not only Clinton ’s Democrats but also the opposing Republican Party who nominated Trump as their candidate – was blamed for having staged a rigged game in which whoever was elected, the ensuing legislation would always benefit the political class, regardless of its consequences for the populace. In more leonine days, this was called ‘bipartisanship’ and it got the business of government done. Indeed, its sociological defenders had been trailing it as the ‘end of ideology’ for at least two generations (Bell 1960). It was supposed to be the game that beats all games. But Trump successfully showed that it was still just one more game. That’s the post-truth condition in a nutshell.
In philosophical slang, the post-truth condition is all about going meta . You try to win not simply by playing by the rules but also by controlling what the rules are. The lion tries to win by keeping the rules as they are, and the fox tries by changing them. In a truth game, the lion’s point of view is taken for granted without much thought: opponents contest each other according to agreed rules, and this initial agreement defines the nature of their opposition and the state of play at a given moment. Here the foxes are potentially disgruntled losers. In a post-truth game, the aim is to defeat your opponent in the full knowledge that the rules of the game might change. In that case the nature of your op