Trump & Truth: do we want facts back now?

A year or so ago I shared an article on Facebook about a man who had been travelling the world for years and years, increasingly miserable, but insistent that he couldn’t get a job because he still hadn’t ‘found himself’ – I captioned it as being a sad reflection of the huge sense of meaninglessness in today’s culture. Later that day my brother messaged me, gently pointing out that the article was from the Onion, a satirical magazine which writes spoof news stories. I felt very silly indeed.

But just now, I read an interview with a guy who makes his living writing fake news articles and posting them on the internet. He intends it as satire but during the US election stuff he’d written to mock Trump supporters – what he thought were ridiculous conspiracy-theory stories or outrageous caricatures – ended up getting shared crazily widely, sometimes even retweeted by Trump’s own account, with the vast majority of people never reaching the desired point of “Oh, this isn’t actually true, he’s taking the mick.” He remarks in the interview that he’s concerned that he accidentally helped the campaign by providing a stream of propaganda which was lapped up by supporters.

This is just one aspect of a frightening shift in how the world works which has led to the Oxford Dictionaries of both the US and the UK declaring this year’s ‘word of the year’ to be “post-truth”: which is an adjective that means ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. (The Guardian)

Now for someone who just graduated from doing English Literature at university, this rings some very loud bells. [My apologies if you have also done a fair bit of study in the humanities and you are super-familiar with the next couple of paragraphs, humour me!] For about thirty years now the dominant philosophy in the universities of the Western world has been ‘post-modernism’, which is a pretty slippery term, but could be described as the idea that objective Truth does not and should not exist, rather each person has their own perspective on reality which is ‘true for them’, and we ought to respect all such perspectives as equally valid.

I’ve got a lot of time for post-modernism (especially having read James K A Smith’s brilliant book which essentially argues that the humility it insists on – admitting that as humans we don’t just have perfect access to reality through our reason – is actually a humility that Christianity has been calling for for 2000 years). But especially I want to say that the political motivations behind the rise of post-modern thought were really brilliant: the desire to value and protect the voices of those who had been belittled, ignored or oppressed by mainstream societal opinion – especially women, and ethnic and sexual minorities. To simplify horrendously, the idea was that Truth with a capital ‘T’ was oppressive – it was the way the big rich white men trampled on everyone else and told them that that was just the way things were, it was the Truth, whether they liked it or not. So in order to find liberation, to protect the weak and the easily silenced, various thinkers started to reject the idea of Truth altogether, saying in very complicated theoretical terms, “why should we listen to you and your oppressive rational Truth claims?”, and declared boldly instead, “Everyone’s perspective is equally valid!” So ta-da! Post-modernism is born.

But here’s the thing: I think right now we’re watching post-modernism eat itself alive. The ideas of post-modernism have gone out into the world and while in some limited ways they have done what they were sent to do, we are now seeing them leading to exactly the opposite of what they were intended for. Because I don’t think ‘post-truth’ is an unrelated cultural phenomenon: it is what has happened once the big post-modern idea got into the cultural air and got breathed in by all kinds of people – not just the intellectual elite in the universities. Let’s think about it: if ‘post-truth’ is about a situation ‘in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’, then it is just post-modernism being lived out in political debate: Donald Trump knows full well that he doesn’t need to tell the truth. He doesn’t need facts. Nobody cares about them anymore, or at least not enough people for it to bother his campaign. He just needs to say things that resonate with people’s own perspectives. This is a politician who has essentially said (whether he knows the theory behind it or not),

“Ah, OK, so you’ve been telling everyone for three decades that objective Truth isn’t real or important, that whatever they believe is true for them. Great. I reckon there are a lot of people who believe things that you would find intellectually ridiculous and morally disgusting, but if I tell them that I agree – that it really is ‘true for them’ – then there’s no way anyone is going to be able to convince them otherwise.”

And in a world where our source of news and opinion is increasingly fragmented into articles, blogs, papers and TV channels with their own strongly held perspectives – a real life reflection of the multiple small ‘t’ truths of post-modernism – this approach to politics works terrifyingly well. At least one layer of the shock that hit many of us last Wednesday morning was the realisation that you no longer need to have any regard for what is true or factual at all to be the President of the United States.

And I don’t need to explain the ways in which the non-truth that Trump has thrived on is the exact opposite of the liberating intent of post-modern thinking: he is very clearly bad news for the easily silenced, the weak, the unusual, the oppressed. So is Marine le Pen, so are UKIP.

It turns out that abandoning Truth with a capital ‘T’ is not ultimately liberating, because by declaring all truth claims to be nothing more than power-plays it leaves us in a situation where the only thing left is power, and inevitably it is the interests of the powerful that end up getting served, while the weak bear the brunt. Again. I just found some random person on the internet putting it very powerfully:


"To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights."

Post-Trumpism

So may I suggest the outline of the new approach I think we might need – trying to keep the best of post-modernism while learning from Trump and avoiding post-truthism. We could even call it “post-Trumpism”… maybe.

• Be suspicious of truth claims coming from the big, powerful and self-interested.
• Really listen to the Other – try to understand the perspective of those who think very differently from you.
• Look for objective realities that provide a solid basis for liberating the oppressed and discriminated against – and if you find them, put them into practice and tell people about them! Not in a blurred outburst of personal anger or manipulative rhetoric, but with passion and conviction, focussed on the fact that these things are actually true – and would still be true if no one in the world believed them.

These thoughts have been gradually formulating in my mind, and when I was chatting with a couple of my best friends who are really serious about liberation politics and especially feminism, I found myself putting the last point like this: there’s a big difference between seeing something wrong and oppressive and saying, “It shouldn’t be like that – it’s just obvious, isn’t it?”, and saying, “It shouldn’t be like that because the reality is this.”

As a kind of analogy, and also another area in which this applies, I have a good friend who is a Christian, and did CBT a while ago.* You have this table where you write down the negative thoughts you have, and then you try to correct them, and in the other column you write your replacement thought. It was a bit weird for her to write these things and hand them in, because when she had a negative thought like, “I’m rubbish because I’ve achieved nothing today”, she felt like she was expected to just replace it with a kind of rival idea plucked out of the air like, “I’m actually great and I have achieved some things”. But what if actually it’s been a really rough day? What if she hasn’t managed to do anything that she is honestly proud of? Should she just lie to herself to try to make herself feel better? Well no – what she wanted to write instead was, “I am valuable and precious because God loves me deeply, and that does not change in the slightest when I have achieved literally nothing today.” I’ve actually got a tear in my eye as I write this because I just think it’s so, so beautiful that that is the truth. It is the reality. It can be relied upon however we feel and whatever is happening and so it can truly, really, set us free.

“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

And this is the same for structural oppression: why should women be treated with respect and dignity equal to that we give men? Why should they earn the same for the work they do? Why should they be protected from exploitation, commodification and relentless sexualisation in the workplace and the media? Not just because I feel like they should. Obviously I do, but if there are people in the world who don’t feel the same – and there most certainly are – then I need a reality to appeal to, I need a way to try to persuade them that their current perspective isn’t grasping reality as it actually is! But the good thing is I think there is such a reality. I think we should do all of these things because

“God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.”

There is an inherent dignity and value in every woman that is equal to the inherent dignity and value in every man because they are each created with the immense dignity of being in the image of God. The imago Dei. A privilege and a calling far too deep for me to capture here, or even fully understand, but easily, easily enough to provide an unchanging basis for equality.**

So let me end by posing a couple of questions which I would genuinely implore you to think about for yourself.

•  We’re right to be suspicious of Truth claims when they come from the powerful and are in the interests of the powerful. But that quote about the truth setting us free is from Jesus – he said he was the Truth, himself. As we wind up to Christmas, and little, slightly twee stables and cribs start popping up everywhere, ask yourself – did Jesus’s claims about truth come from a position of power, or of vulnerability? And did they serve his own interests, or the interests of others? Of course, his claims have been co-opted and used by powerful and self-interested people through the centuries, but what about the man himself?
• We’re right to insist on listening to the voice of the Other – especially minorities and the easily silenced. But why? If the secularists are right and there’s nothing at the heart of reality other than “blind, pitiless indifference”, if the underlying principle of all life is simply that the strongest survive, why is it actually wrong for the strong to exploit the weak? Isn’t that just the way things are?
• Do you think it’s possible that there is an objective reality that gives us a basis for liberating the oppressed? How could you look for it?

That’s it for now, I would love to hear some real life answers to these questions at some point.

Peace and hope,

Mike

*It’s worth saying, in the context of an article about post-truth and so on, that my recollections of my friend’s experience are not precise or word for word, but I think I’m faithfully reflecting the gist of the situation.

** I am painfully aware that some transgender people might be very uncomfortable with this idea, and I think this is another instance of the recurring complexities and difficulties in the relationship between feminism and support for transgender people. But while I’m not wise enough to get into that here, what is without doubt is that the Bible’s insistence on the value of every single person as created by God and loved by God, and its insistence that no one has a right to sit in judgement on anyone else because everyone is broken, should give us a profound basis for compassion, respect and sacrificial love towards everyone, including all minorities ethnic and sexual.