About: Michel Martin
[Wikipedia] interviews Lee McIntyre
[Wikipedia] on the PBS Amanpour & Company
[Wikipedia] programme about the consequences of living in a 'post-truth' world.
Transcript: (McIntyre referencing Timothy Snyder): "'post truth is pre fascism'" (Snyder, T., 2017, p.39). "'So, the point of post truth is to get people ready to be dominated, to get them ready to be ruled. Martin: 'But why are people disposed to believe things that are manifestly not true or that their own experiences might contradict'? McIntyre: 'it's because belief is about something more than facts and evidence belief is often very tight... belief is often very tied up with identity with values with trust even and I'm talking here even about empirical truths I'm talking about things for which there are facts and evidence not necessarily morality or you know other values or other things that people believe maybe that they got from their family I'm talking about factual beliefs and our belief system... it is very much based on which which team you're with which group you're with...'"
https://www.youtube.com/embed/EgE68NSffVI?start=389
Quote: "The rhinoceri
[Wikipedia] are roaming through our neurological savannahs. We now find ourselves very much concerned with something we call 'post-truth,' and we tend to think that its scorn of everyday facts and its construction of alternative realities is something new or postmodern. Yet there is little here that George Orwell
[Wikipedia] did not capture seven decades ago in his notion of 'doublethink.'
[Wikipedia] In its philosophy, post-truth restores precisely the fascist attitude to truth—and that is why nothing in our own world would startle Klemperer
[Wikipedia] or Ionesco.
[Wikipedia]
Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.
Post-truth is pre-fascism" (Snyder, T., 2017, p.39).
Criticism: "Lee McIntyre’s book Post-Truth (2018),... attempts the unenviable task of pinning down a vague, but very popular concept in our discourse. He settles on the understanding that post-truth denotes the notion of feelings being more accurate than facts, of believing something because it feels right. This also implies the potential for ideological domination by politically subverting the possibility of gathering facts about the real world. ...
McIntyre makes some very good points about the history and toxicity of science denialism, the nature of our motivated thinking, the development of the prestige press, the idea of objectivity in media, the fragmentary effects of social media information silos, and so on—though these are hardly novel, it is commendable to have them explained briefly and accessibly.
The book is ultimately unconvincing, however, not just because it appears to suffer with symptoms of what it diagnoses—post-truth errors of both fact and interpretation (more on that later)—but because for a work that seeks to tackle an epistemological issue—even if in a popular vein—it does not really engage with the relevant literature on social epistemology.
[encyclopædia] The book neglects the very essential epistemological questions any treatment of truth (post- or otherwise) needs tackling: what truth is and how do we come to believe it in the first place. Neither do we get a convincing account of why post-truth is a distinct phenomenon [for a recent skeptical take, see (Habgood-Coote 2018)], and not a moral panic, a conceptual muddle of lies, propaganda, and bullshit (in the Frankurtian sense), or merely a discursive shortcut for numerous disquieting social, political, and technological developments. Instead we get the by-now somewhat tired chapters on science denialism, cognitive biases, the decline of traditional media, the rise of social media and—with a surprising twist—the blameworthiness of post-modernism.
But most of all, his treatment of ‘post-modernism’ as one of the sources of our current post-truth predicament seems more ideological than anything else. It is far too easy to blame an ill-defined, elusive concept such as post-modernism for post-truth. McIntyre echoes long-standing conservative obsessions with post-modernism (or 'cultural Marxism' or 'critical theory' in other, similar iterations) as a scourge of truth and beauty instead of what it really is: a set of divergent, theoretical propositions about knowledge in our society. Here he joins the narrative of the likes of Dennett, Pinker, Dawkins et al. who are at the forefront of the discursive efforts to straw-men all post-modern criticism of how science is done into a belief system committed to radical skepticism at best, or a relativizing incoherence, at worst. ...
In the final analysis, McIntyre also offers advice on how to fight post-truth, but it is equally un-inspiring. He admonishes us to take responsibility over our personal epistemic practices: be skeptical, buy a quality newspaper now and then, fight the instinct for partisanship and confirmation bias—we can do it, it is our decision how we react to the world. There is no accounting of structural issues, institutions and their epistemic effects (cf. Rini 2017), or simply of how ridiculous it is to epistemically pull yourself by your bootstraps out of bullshit in the information environment he described in the previous chapters" (Hardoš, P., 2019, pp.311-315).
Bibliography: McIntyre, L. C. (2018). 'Post-truth'. The MIT Press.
[pdf]
Hardoš, P. (2019). 'Lee McIntyre: Post-Truth'. Organon F.
[academic source]
McIntyre, L. (2020, 14 January 2020 ). 'Lee McIntyre on Post-Truth in Today’s Society' [Interview].
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/amanpour-and-company/video/lee-mcintyre-on-post-truth-in-todays-society/ [Wikipedia]
Snyder, T. (2017). 'On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century'. London, Bodley Head.
[Wikipedia] [pdf]
