Review: Post-Truth

Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Soon after the 2016 election, I read Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, and – slim masterpiece that it is – it helped me make some sense of the rise of Donald Trump. It’s still a brilliant argument (it was even before then) suggesting that, beyond lying, the bullshitter consciously undermines the possibility of truth. He or she degrades our mechanisms for communicating and, as a result, makes it difficult to answer clearly false claims with truth.

This book is the closest I’ve seen to Frankfurt’s. Like that one, this is short (though it may be close to twice as long) and it goes for the philosophical jugular. We live in a moment when the term “post-truth” is “trending,” when we recognize widely that the truth is no longer an absolute defense or even an effective counter. We live in a world, as McIntyre puts it, of post-truth, of a condition in which may think that “the crowd’s reaction actually does change the facts about a lie.” We know intuitively much of what Frankfurt laid out, but the question is how this came to pass.

McIntyre begins his study with a fantastic first chapter on the nature of post-truth. He extends what Frankfurt is doing to argue that, where bullshit is generally an annoying phenomenon that occasionally leads to someone taking undue advantage, the situation of post-truth is a calculated political one. As he puts it in one chilling observation, “To say that facts are less important than feelings in shaping our beliefs about empirical matters seems new, at least in American politics…never before have such challenges been so openly embraced as a strategy for the political subordination of reality.”

McIntyre works throughout this book to avoid something like blunt partisanship, but he notes the difficulty of that early on. As he puts it, one side of the political debate sees the status of “post-truth” as a crisis while the other ignores it. Taking a stand that the problem exists is therefore a political statement, one that takes on partisan implications, but it is also a project that grows out of the philosophical tradition. Socrates pondered the problem, so McIntyre feels he has disciplinary standing to take on the question.

This is not quite an historical examination of how we have arrived where we are, but it is rooted in a five distinct historical strands that McIntyre sees coming together. A few are the usual suspects. He has a good chapter on the history of science denial – initially around the link between smoking and cancer and then moving into the vaccine controversy and finally into climate-change denial – as a charade in which lobbying interests create fake “controversy” around legitimate scientific consensus. He has another that reviews various areas of cognitive bias that nudge us toward scientific skepticism. Then he has one on the decline of traditional media and another on the corresponding rise of fake news through clickbait and social media.

The most controversial part of this book – controversial because it’s the only part that’s potentially offensive to anyone who’s likely to read it – is a chapter that traces the rise of post-truth to the postmodern, politically progressive, academics of the 1980s and 1990s. Though he acknowledges Lyotard and Foucault are obscure figures to most of the right-wing that’s employing post-truth as a political instrument, he makes a solid case for a link. He finds a handful of right-wing operatives who openly cite their familiarity with postmodern thought, and then he points as well to mea culpas from some important theorists who worry their approach may have helped undermine ‘truth’ in a way that’s made this subsequent threat possible.

McIntyre’s tone changes in that penultimate chapter; he’s clearly a little more apologetic, and he seems to be anticipating push-back. He won’t get it from me, though. I’m not necessarily convinced that the work of such theorists is necessary to the rise of post-truth as we’re seeing it in Trump’s moment, but I am convinced there’s at least something to the critique. If we embraced epistemological doubt in the theory-crazed 1980s, we may well want to reconsider that today. (I was never that sort of theory head myself, but you couldn’t escape in graduate school of the 1990s.)

McIntyre wraps up with a final chapter on fighting post-truth. I wish he had a more concrete prescription, but, drawing on his fine historical breakdown, he puts some weight behind the obvious: in the face of untruth, we have to assert – and re-assert – truth. In a strangely optimistic moment, he cites the Republican mayor of Coral Gables, Florida who has come to acknowledge that barely-above-sea-level cities simply can’t ignore climate change. It may clash with some Republican party ideology, but accepting the truth of climate change means staying alive. That is, we may deny truth, but that’s not going to keep truth from doing what it wants to us in the end.

Read Frankfurt On Bullshit if you haven’t. If you have, though, and if you’re hungering for someone who takes those ideas a step further, read McIntyre.


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