Post-truth

Post-truth
Lee McIntyre

As with any multi-author series, the MIT Press Essential Knowledge volumes are all over the map in terms of quality. This timely primer on Post-truth, which was Oxford Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year, is one of the best. Lee McIntyre provides a genealogy of post-truth, explaining its rise to prominence through an examination of the different forces that gave rise to its full flowering in the year of Trump and Brexit: cognitive biases, propaganda (the work of our “merchants of doubt”), political polarization, the decline of the news, social media, and postmodern theory.

It’s an excellent survey, but doesn’t address the deeper questions I still have. Is it true, as McIntyre concludes, that “truth still matters” and that “it is dangerous to ignore reality”? Yes, but only in some circumstances. Reality, for various reasons, may become intolerable to some people. Humankind cannot bear too much of it, even at the best of times. Meanwhile, truth has a pragmatic value, it lies downstream from money, and while it’s easy to mock the “magical thinking” of Trump the fact is that wealth and power does have the ability to shape reality, at least to some extent. Thinking about post-truth helps us better understand this.