Post Truth is Funny until Someone Loses an Eye: A Response to Steve Fuller
I know philosophers and scientists who don’t like
history and historians who are more than a bit suspicious of philosophers. Some
of this, perhaps much of this, has to do with an attitude prominent in the last
century and not dead in ours: the notion that philosophers are the handmaids of
science rather (in fact exactly!) as they once were the handmaids of theology.
Philosophy is on the side of science and scientific discourse has a certain way
of framing things. As Lyotard says, it is (for most of its direct practitioners
at least) a denotative language game and a denotative language game is
referential and realist. A realist and referential language game is framed in terms
of necessity. If Darwin had not discovered natural selection someone else would
have because it is there to be discovered. It can be read (indeed MUST be read)
directly from nature for nature has an underlying structure that is fixed and
determinate. Do species evolve by natural selection? Yes because, if we ask
nature, nature says yes. It imposes its own answer and we must bow to its
dictates. This causes a problem because there is another discourse, history,
which is also referential but in a different way. It refers to the world not in
the framework of necessity but contingency. For the historian few things if any
HAD to happen. Nothing HAD to be discovered on the grounds that it was simply
there. This would not be a problem except for the fact that science has a
history and there are historians who look at science not using scientific
framing but historical framing. A Marxist might serve as an example. SHE might
say that if relations of production were different in Victorian England Darwin
might have formulated a very different theory. Indeed, we post (non-vulgar!)
Marxists might add that if politics, economics, religion and aesthetic styles
and movements had been different Darwin might have seen a very different nature
than the one he did. Nature imposes no necessity by itself for the decisions WE
make cause nature to speak differently to different people in different places.
The implication of this, and this so whether by strict deduction or simple
implication or suggestion, is that no science is universal and all science is
regional and tensed. Contingency trumps necessity and history swallows science
and its supposed necessities. If x or y had been different historically we
would inhabit a different nature.[1]
This, for instance, is why philosopher Alex Rosenberg says history and
historians are all wrong. We need a new history that is a simple expression of
physics (without contingency, free will or intentionality) because otherwise we
are throwing away the possibility of knowing about the past and, by implication, anything else!
No doubt there are many sage ways of splitting the
difference between these two broad frameworks. I might, for instance, tell a
comforting story about how the (subjective and contingent) logic of discovery
is one thing and the (presumably more objective and rigorous) logic of
justification another (and for all I know that might be a good enough story!). The
interesting thing for me and for Sociologist-cum-philosopher Steve Fuller is
that on this point Elvis has already left the building. We are actually past
debating this question as a mere academic concern about disciplinary boundaries
and whether the social sciences swallow the natural ones (as per the Edinburgh
school) or, as Alex Rosenberg would have it, vice versa. Contingency has
defeated necessity and we have what Fuller and others have labeled the post
truth condition. Fuller’s advice on the post-truth condition is to relax and
enjoy it but as he is a provocateur and indeed (I sometimes suspect) prankster
we might wonder whether he is tweaking us (see his latest book A Players' Guide to the Post Truth Condition). Certainly, post-truth is looking
bleak at the moment because it is the one stance that doesn’t work in a plague.
I suppose he thinks this because he is a critic in what is actually a
legitimate enlightenment sense. HE questions authority like we are ALL supposed
to do ALL the time according to t-shirts. In fact, he raises the question
Edmund Burke once raised about Marie Antoinette’s gown: if we strip the
mystique from authority there is no authority, just another naked person! Just
think if people who tout ‘peer reviewed research’ as a gold standard actually
saw that weird, petty gate keeping process in action! In the contemporary west
we have social processes for certifying the truth of certain claims. These
processes confer epistemic legitimacy
on questions of fact and questions of theory. Now they do so only within certain
domains. I might, for metaphysical reasons, accept what A.N. Whitehead says
about the primordial and consequent nature of God but, if I do, THAT is not a
public reason. Nor should it be a public reason because judgments of
metaphysics and ontology are contested and highly individuated rather like
judgments of taste. Whether God exists and whether he has a di-polar primordial
and consequent nature is something on which ‘gentlemen’ disagree. Of course
there are also things on which ‘gentlemen’ should not disagree and these are
things like medical science and the legitimacy of elections that have been
certified by all the relevant authorities. If there is no clear intellectual
line to be drawn between these two categories there is a social one that we are
all in the habit of drawing daily. I am NOT punching out Whiteheadians though
process theology is not quite my cup of tea![2]
What then could go
wrong with this ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ (and yes I am referring subversively to
the Gregory Peck film of the name)?[3]
Correctly to my mind Fuller points out that the ground has completely altered
and that certifying epistemic
legitimacy is no longer quite the thing at stake. This is why ALL the ‘critical
thinking skills’ in the world taught by ALL the best professors will not alter
the post-truth condition one single bit. I quote “Simply put and without
prejudice, in the post truth condition what matters is not whether something is
true or false but how the matter is decided”. This, it would seem, is a simple outcome
of what Lyotard terms the emancipatory language game. Autonomy means we live
under our own law, such laws as we can give ourselves by our own lights and the
fact that someone knows the truth about x or y gives them no dictatorial power
over anyone else (after all that’s what the Medieval church claimed- error has
no rights!). Fuller points out that this is a clear development of principles
internal to the enlightenment: it is where the moral project of the
enlightenment clashes with the epistemic project. True and false must be the
product of a consensus forming process we can all live with. I cannot tell
Whiteheadians what they ought to believe or say about God even if I have slam
dunk arguments that they are wrong. HOW we determine truth is now more
important than WHAT we determine for the rules of the game must be fair. [4]
Here we come across the second aspect of the post truth
condition and again I quote: “The ultimate prize in the post truth condition is
to name the game you play even if you turn out the loser.” This is as much as
to say that we now struggle to define the rules of the game rather than win
within the terms of the game laid out for us. If we are losing the game we can
play a different game as homeopaths propose with respect to allopathic
medicine. Naming the game you play means, in part, changing the framing of a
fact, redeploying that fact in a new framework which we might call, especially
if we don’t like it, spin. Take the following example: in the Middle Ages a
thousand years of theological reflection had worked out the Christian mysteries
and the destiny of human kind with objectivity and marvelous precision, the
very kind of objectivity we ascribe today to things like general and special
relativity. In the early modern period did Europeans wake up and suddenly
notice that Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas were meretricious junk? That never
happened. Fuller would say that people like Hobbes, Luther and Galileo found
‘wiggle room’ in the military sense of space in which to maneuver. They found
new ways to play the knowledge game and outflank the old guard.[5]
They rewrote the rules of that game itself and,having succeeded in that
endeavor, their successors got to write winner’s history about the so called
ages of darkness and superstition. In fact, even to this day Bill Nye and Neil
DeGrasse Tyson (following in the footsteps of Carl Sagan and Cosmos) get to tell this same winner’s
history to children as ‘the objective facts’. Of course, since the internet
came along especially, cultural authorities like Mr. Nye (and his professional
looking bow tie) no longer command the respect they once did as a critical mass
of people are now playing a different game with strange, repellent new rules. What
is worse the internet has destroyed the possibility of effectively censoring
them. When media had flagship publications like the Globe and Mail or New York
Times or public broadcasters like NPR or the CBC ‘professionalism’ could be
imposed on reportage and the expression of opinion. Access to platforms of
communication was kept scarce and difficult. Now who even watches CBC news?
Plus, I can post all the bogs I want where I can tell even the elites where and
why they are full of it! The only problem here is over-saturation- my opinions
are a drop in a vast ocean unless they find an echo-chamber to resound in.
Fuller seems, on the whole, sanguine about this even
taking COVID into account. After all, it was the professors themselves who,
cultivating their hermeneutic of suspicion, contributed to creating the
post-truth condition. Alas though, they have been outflanked exactly as Luther
and Calvin were outflanked by the radical wing of the reformation. Still, it seems that if we are committed to
‘autonomy’ as modernity defines it, we cannot be uncritically committed to a
culture of priestly expertise. Fuller seems to assume that things will balance
out and we will end up with a more democratized, egalitarian culture in
whatever form this may take (and that has yet to be fully defined). I suppose
that is nice work if you can get it. I can think of other ways all of this can
end many of them not pleasant. In one sense though, I believe his intuitions are
correct if not his exact conclusions. I believe the framing that views our
current crisis of legitimation as an epistemic problem is incorrect. What we
actually have is a crisis of recognition, recognition being the scarcest thing
in our world and the most contested (even wealth is a form of it!). If
recognition were democratized radically people might actually be o.k. with
expertise again. Take anti-vaxxers as an example. Right now is their moment in
the sun. Though a small minority they are flexing power in a context where they
cannot be ignored. They are forcing US to talk about them! All it takes is a small, isolated group of
supposed whack jobs to derail public health policy in the most advanced and
educated nations on earth (though astro-turfing DOES play a role here). Where recognition is concerned they have us hostage
and they are going to relish the moment! This is a version of the 19 men with box cutters phenomenon brought to us be certain Bin Laden!
Now, of course, we have to figure out what forms of
recognition would satisfy this and other alienated groups of people. We would
then have to figure out which can be granted without alienating a different
group. These are challenging problems to which I don’t have pat answers. In
Fuller’s terms people are trying to name the game they are playing and not all
games are mutually compatible. They can’t all be played at once. Some people,
in fact, will lose and our current problem is that when people lose the post
truth game they simply reject the process by which the game was played. Indeed,
they try to manipulate the game so that they never have to face the psychic wound
of defeat again. This may be because the stakes are too high for losers to buy
into the process. This is in terms both of ‘face’ (i.e. recognition) and
potential material factors. Worse, I suspect that when material hopes take a
significant hit, ‘face’ becomes that much more important: hence the cultic
status of fetish objects like assault rifles. How, then, to get the losers to buy
into the new normal? I have one suggestion: face can be cashed in for material
benefits and lost face can mean lost benefits. This is why there is no ultimate
distinction between economic justice and epistemic justice. Precarity as a
general factor in society may well be incompatible with expertise if people
think they are losing face to ‘experts’ and ‘elites’ who don’t actually have
their interests at heart and take no account of their sensibilities or
insecurities. If we WANT expertise to exist (Fuller seems not to at times), then
the cost of it may be a significant investment of social resources into long term
economic security for marginal persons (whether that marginality be economic or
‘other’) and persons who, while not currently ‘marginal’ by OUR definition,
fear becoming so (and note that self-perceived marginality is the exact same
poison in the body politic that ‘real’ marginality is- in fact it may be worse).
Pascal said that if you want to become a Christian take a little holy water.
The same applies here: if we don’t like the post-truth condition we can alter
it by doing something. That something
may be as simple as a basic annual income that lowers the stakes of the game.
[1] Of
course a scientist has to work with the theories we have just like a theologian
has to work the religions we have. It matters little to her whether we could
have had different ones in an alternate time line. We can’t will a world
without Christianity or the bomb because that door has closed. This is a post
hoc historical necessity though it is not the kind of timeless, apodictic
necessity we have been conditioned to seek for scientific and philosophic
claims. It is similar to the way past evolution closes down pathways for the
future. I leave open, then, the question of whether, like Nietzsche said of
Christianity, science has produced its own grave digger by turning the science
of nature into ‘natural history’ and introducing the snake of historicity into
the paradise of pure reason.
[2]
Oddly enough Whitehead editor David Griffin is now a 9/11 truther. The CIA,
apparently, has more power over contingency than Whitehead’s God! Of course people
in other ages did punch each other out over God because metaphysics and
revelation established the truth about him among the relevant experts. WE, of
course, have not changed our mind about the social necessity of recognizing
certain epistemic claims over others we have just shifted them from theology to
nature and switched from deductive and hermeneutic methods to inductive and
experimental ones. On THIS basis we club anti-vaxxers on the head (so far
symbolically) along with flat-earthers and other heretics who refuse to
recognize how our society produces knowledge as authoritative. That we no
longer BURN such people is a moral advance but not really, as far as I can see,
an epistemic difference.
[5]
Perhaps following Paul Feyerabend, Fuller seems to view the history of science in
vitalistic, even voluntaristic terms. Galileo and Kepler are exercising a will
to power vis a vis their predecessors
irreducible to reason or natural necessity. They are productive of new
discourses not because of nature (which under-determines what we say about it)
but out of a contest or agon where
the autonomy or authority of the modern self is at stake: to adapt a phrase
from Blake, they create a system so as not to be enslaved to another man’s.
Thus, they use all the tricks in their arsenal to establish their theoretical
revolutions as the new normal. In other words, they are changing the rules of
the game to create a new game in their own image. One can, certainly, tell
other stories about the birth of modernity as Hegel, say, or Marx did. For such
stories the scientific revolution would be a moment in the self-positing of
freedom or of the evolution of class consciousness rather than an (ultimately
nihilistic) eruption of the pure will to novelty. To the post truth stance,
though, the past would indeed take on this form.
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