Abstract
This article is a critique of the notion of post-truth. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I argue that the epistemological crisis suggested by the notion of post-truth is epiphenomenal to a more general crisis of authority, a crisis that is poorly understood in the literature. I also argue that revisiting Arendt’s account of authority can help us elucidate the vexed dynamics of authority in modern society, as well as the dynamics behind its current crisis. The post-truth situation is a loss of authority that is political before it presents as epistemological. Effectively addressing this situation, I conclude, is a much more challenging and complex proposition than what is suggested in the literature on post-truth.
Highlights
Whenever the prefix “post” insinuates itself into our thinking, there is good reason to think again
In the deluge of academic, journalistic, and hybrid writing that has brought this notion to the fore, it has been suggested that we are in the midst of a “new war on truth” (d’Ancona, 2017), a metaphor that conveys a pervasive attitude in this literature, and its default trope, which is not metaphor but hyperbole
Among the notable casualties in the new war we find, in addition to “truth,” “facts,” and “reason,” “the Enlightenment,” which is we are told, “really dead,” since the Enlightenment “displaced the primacy of myths with hard facts” and hard facts have in turn been displaced by “arguments based on their
Summary
The literature on post-truth can be roughly divided into two categories. Have political debate and public opinion always been shaped by what the Oxford English Dictionary refers to as “emotion and personal belief,” as much as by “objective facts” (cf Achen & Bartels, 2016; Alexander, 2006; Enroth, 2020b), even leaving aside, for the immensely complex process through which objective facts are established and become compelling as such (cf Daston & Galison, 2010; Latour, 2005) This ancient tension between reason and emotion in the discourse of democracy is, in our current situation, a diversion, an inherited construct obscuring rather than elucidating what is presently going on. Framing our predicament in epistemological terms — in terms of a loss of truth, facts, and reason — misses, but perilously misrepresents, what the predicament is and what we may and may not do about it
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