Truth No More
How to survive in a post-foundationalist America.
In a piece of epic trolling — and morbid timing — Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” the 2016 word of the year.
I have already talked about the perverse market incentives that drive the negative feedback loop that has destabilized truth — and made untruth profitable — but it is worth considering what kind of thing “truth’’ is that it can be destabilized in the first place.
I was a competitive debater in college. The novelist Ben Lerner was, too. He wrote about it in Harper’s. His essay was disappointing, as I recall, because he used the work “somatic” in the first graph when “visceral” or “sensual” would have done. He also compared the rapid speechifying of “the activity” — as it is known in its own circles — to a sort of rhapsodic trance. He interpreted it poetically.
This was not my experience. I found debate to be entirely formal, argumentation as close to its purest form as possible, disregarding even — at times — the intelligibility of the speaker. This is shocking to most people the first time they see it — the “spread,” as they call it — speakers rattling off telegraphic arguments as fast as possible, the effort rattling their bodies and stealing their breath.
It was shocking to me, too. But then my coach noted that if I went to the Texas State Fair, I might go to the rabbit-judging booth and find rabbit aficionados using all kinds of terminology for ear shapes and tail positions. It would be completely unintelligible to me — he argued, like an avuncular Judith Butler — but this did not mean it was nonsense. I was persuaded, but then he was persuasive: a debate coach with a degree in rhetoric and an encyclopedic knowledge of America’s train and bus routes.
Once oratory is sloughed off like the nose cone of a Futurist rocket, nothing remains but thought and meaning. “Thought” is the way the arguments are arrayed and wired to each other, like a circuit board, with as much attention to aesthetics.
Meanwhile the “meaning,” in policy debate, comes from “evidence,” which in my day were tiny quotations snipped from books and magazines and pasted onto note cards or letter-sized sheets of paper, then photocopied and passed through the ages until they became illegible. This was before computers.
Even then, however, it was clear to us — high-adrenaline eggheads, engaged in a relativist-to-nihilist activity — that you could find “evidence” that said anything. Like pornography on the Internet, if you could think it, it was someone’s specialty. No matter what you wanted to argue — that climate change was false, that technology would solve everything, even (yes) that nuclear war was … rejuvenating— you could find someone with a decent sounding credential who said it, frequently in governmental proceedings — grubby, white-bound pamphlets from the Government Publishing Office, stored in the basement of the library. And, again, this was before computers, so I’m sure now you can find multiple sources to support any claim.
It is time that philosophers broke it to the public: “Evidence” is insufficient to determine truth. The fit is not tight. There is a lot of give. As Quine argued, theory is underdetermined by the facts. In science, this has led to projects like the Strong Programme, which investigates what extraneous factors — like social relations among scientists — determine which of several adequate theories become accepted. (See, for example, The Golem by Collins and Pinch.) And that’s science!
We do not need to imagine how loose the fit is between facts and theory in politics, because we are seeing it now. The center has not held. The common presumptions that constrained the range of outcomes have been dissolved. Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, the “ethical order” that held things together, has collapsed. What is to blame? Everyone will be able to name a culprit.
Capitalism, racism, decadence.
I do, however, look back on my involvement in post-modernism in the 1990s with a shudder. American bourgeois intellectuals had — and perhaps still have— an extremely naive reading of Foucault, made even more naive as it has trickled down to campuses without the reading list.
“Power” constrains and must be overthrown, this reading says, forgetting — and this is explicit in Foucault and influential successors like Judith Butler — that there will always be “power.” Power orders. Without power, there is no consciousness, no civilization. That there could be a world without constitutive power is an American delusion common to the academic left and the libertarian right — both anchored in the uncritical axiom of radical individualism. That both have lobbied for the collapse of institutions we are now seeing, and that the right has landed on top, is disconcerting.
I once saw an exceptionally bad paper about Foucault and Lacan delivered at a conference. It ended by hoping that somehow we could overcome Lacan’s “symbolic” order and come “face to face with the real.”
A European scholar, who impressed me and whose influence likely finalized my departure from academia, countered: “You want to confront the ‘real’? Go to Bosnia. They are cutting off each other’s noses.”
The famous slogan notwithstanding, there might be no beach under the cobblestones. There might be void.
When I was in graduate school, Richard Rorty was deeply uncool. It was the grunge era and he was Blind Melon. As young idealists hungry for freedom, we hustled right past him to Derrida and — on weekends — Deleuze or Baudrillard.
Rorty, who died in 2007, was in the news this week for his seemingly prescient vision of a Trump-like presidency. Personally, this struck me as synchronicity — casual mysticism coming to the fore in irrational times — having devoured his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity less than a year ago. Freed of my youthful biases, I found it to be an astounding and practical work that provides valuable resources for confronting our current dilemma.
Many things can be shoved into Quine’s loose fit between fact and theory, most of them awful. Superstition. Force. Racism. Behavioralism. Biological political determinism, which seems to be what Breitbart is after with the idea of “natural conservatives,” a description turned prescription, cribbed from social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.
Rorty, however, has an answer to this. In short, we choose what principles we use to decide between competing, equally good theories. We choose, furthermore, knowing full well that there is no objective basis for this choice. Not only does this steal the objectivity of anything like “natural conservatism,” but it throws the moral responsibility back onto the subject. (Synchronistic moment #2 being the recent appearance of Sarah Bakewell’s Sartre redux At the Existentialist Café.)
How does this work in practice? For Rorty the liberal, ironic subject — as he calls the subject who advocates principles she knows cannot be foundationally justified — picks a “final vocabulary.” Rorty’s example of a final vocabulary is “cruelty is the worst thing that we do.” Therefore, in the current framework, the liberal ironist would solve a Quinean choice between two equally fact-fitted theories by choosing the least cruel.
In this period of national soul searching, I would suggest that what we are searching for — on the left — is a final vocabulary. First, we must each choose our own. What will we each be willing to stand up for before the next HUAC or Comité de salut public? And then, our shared vocabulary — Rorty preserves a profoundly uncool but sensible public/private distinction— can lead us forward.
I’ll be working on mine as I prepare to become a reluctant citizen of Trump’s America. What’s yours?
