In 2016 the Oxford English Dictionary’s editors chose ‘post-truth’ — which edged out ‘Brexit’ and ‘alt-right’ — as their word of the year. This year ‘climate emergency’ (‘a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it.’) topped a shortlist which also included ‘climate crisis’ ‘climate action’ and ‘climate denial’.
With retrospect it is not hard to see the link between these choices. A post-truth culture has exacerbated a wide range of crises as our commonly held store of facts dwindles due to the pressure of digital and political misinformation. As political consensus has waned on complex issues like climate change, it has become much harder to coordinate the multinational response that is necessary to address them. It is also noteworthy that both ‘Brexit’ and ‘alt-right’, the movements and the concepts, share a rising trajectory with ‘post-truth’ as the disinformation and propaganda which enable all three to continue to flourish.
The New York Times recently asked the chess legend and political activist Gary Kasparov, what concerned him most about the decade ahead. His answer: “The free world is lurching toward a polarized, post-truth reality that reminds me of my life in the Soviet Union, where the truth was whatever the regime said it was that day.”
In many ways the trend that alarms Kasparov began in January 2017 when the incoming US president, to the helpless astonishment of the mainstream US media, launched a string of fact-free assertions. These included that Trump had won the popular vote (if you discounted the millions of `illegal’ votes for his rival); in which there had been no interference in the elections (despite a broad consensus on this point among US intelligence agencies); in which he had secured the largest electoral victory since Reagan; in which his inauguration had drawn an unprecedentedly large crowd; in which CIA officials had given him a standing ovation; and in which the national murder rate, which was actually close to an historic low, was at a 47-year high.
That rapid sequence of fibs was just a foretaste of Trump’s virtuosity. Since then he has misled audiences so fluently, and so often, that it is now hard to tell whether his untruths are calculated lies or sincere repetitions of the propaganda that is fed to him daily by rightwing outlets like Fox News.
Meanwhile, fact-based US foreign policy, after enduring several chaotic cycles as Trump fired secretaries, senior generals or chiefs-of-staff who proved too independent, has all but collapsed around its hollow centre. The consequences of a trade war with China remain open-ended. The Senate stands poised to dismiss, summarily, impeachment charges that are far more substantial than anything levelled against Bill Clinton, and the post-truth Trump base remains unmoved, expressing support for their leader with almost cultish uniformity.
Truth has fared little better in Europe. Despite the proven deceptions and electoral chicanery which the Leave campaign used to eke out its victory in the Brexit referendum, similar tactics have empowered a suitably post-truth leader, three years later. A man whose casual mendacity all but guarantees a Trumpian future. Misinformation, and its many purveyors, has also prospered in France, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Poland, not to mention throughout Russia, the former Soviet empire, Turkey, and the Middle East.
While a thousand false fears have enabled the upsurge of brazen ‘mis-leaders’, genuinely alarming facts about the climate crisis have needed champions like Greta Thunberg to even get noticed. Some news organizations have begun to change the language they use to describe the crisis in a belated attempt to push back against the well-coordinated propaganda campaigns that the fossil fuel industries have used to sow public doubt and de-emphasize the scientific evidence for the UN’s increasingly dire warnings. But the belated arrival of a’ climate emergency’ may well prove too little, too late for a world saturated with post-truth propaganda.
Although there is no trace of it in his writings, in a suitably post-truth manner GK Chesterton has long had the following statement attributed to him: “When men stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing. They believe in anything.” In our notionally secular age, it is not hard to see that we have done something similar with the idea of Truth, and that our current credulity will continue to exact steep political, social and environmental costs for many years to come.
