Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
For more than a decade, we have observed the eruption of the notion of “post-truth” in various media often devoid of journalistic standards: reality TV, social networks and a panoply of new à la carte media, such as Rebel News in Canada or InfoWars in the USA. There are also cases of misinformation for the purpose of political interference: last March, for example, Radio-Canada International reported on the actions of the Chinese social network WeChat, which sought to exert influence on Canadian-born voters China ahead of the 2021 federal election.
Fake news and hoaxes are not a new phenomenon; they have existed since antiquity with disastrous episodes, including Nazi propaganda and the Stalinist party line. The new fact consists in the proliferation of “infox” and “post-truths” by the digital platforms on which, in Quebec, 79% of citizens obtain information.
To understand why and how the power of parallel truths tends to increase, it is important to get out of circumstantial analysis and to question the conflicting relationships between politics and truth, and the very nature of democracy.
In his work The weakness of truth. What Post-Truth Does to Our Common World (Seuil, 2018), Myriam Revault d’Allonnes reflects on this thorny problem. According to the political philosopher, it is necessary to explain why the concept of “post-truth”, which has become the pillar of political commentary, “intends to mark a qualitative break” bringing about a new era, a new regime of historicity.
Proclaimed Word of the Year 2016 by the respected Oxford Dictionary, “post-truth” (post truth) is defined there as referring to “circumstances in which objective facts have less influence on public opinion than those which appeal to emotion or personal beliefs”. The distinction between true and false is therefore eclipsed by the effectiveness of “making believe”. Because of the difficulty caused by the proliferation of post-truths, we risk not stopping what Revault d’Allonnes calls the “withering away of politics” (The decline of politics. Genealogy of a common placeFlammarion, 2002).
What is this withering away that takes us further and further away from our civic duties? Its progression comes from the rise of populism, this specter which haunts the United States, the United Kingdom, Poland, Hungary and again Italy. From there to say that these phenomena are linked to the emergence of post-truth, there is only one step. Because this type of parallel truth, also focused on the misuse of emotions, prevents people from making rational decisions. It risks fostering the recurring temptation to prefer the competence of experts to the opinion of the people.
Political judgment and plurality
Like populist parties and movements, post-truth promoters attempt to bury the notion of deliberation; their mode of governance creates an impoverished collective and social imagination where they claim to escape uncertainty. This raises the question which, for Myriam Revault d’Allonnes, is fundamental: what does post-truth undermine?
The central issue of politics is not conformity to the truth, but “the ability to judge, to ‘opinate’ (form opinions)”. On this capacity depends the constitution of the “foundation of the common world”. Collective deliberation and judgment take place under specific conditions. These conditions are certainly not those of the natural sciences, where singular researchers exercise their expertise through the intervention of experimental protocols, which allows them to arrive at a better established truth.
Political judgment takes place in the common world and through the implementation of plurality — which includes rulers and citizens and brings together the capacities that none of them alone have. Far from designating the relativism of opinions, “the plurality […] is inseparable from the horizon of human affairs,” the philosopher tells us. It is the exercise of plurality which, through potential access to the point of view of any other, allows everyone to go beyond the limits of their subjectivity.
If, in our democratic systems, it is necessary to build and protect the “sense of living together” to which this principle of the “extended mentality” leads, it is because the sensus communis, the sense of community, engenders a first-rate political philosophy. To deliberate and judge, one should not essentially refer to “knowledge” neither in the sense of an abstract theoretical knowledge nor in the sense of a specialized technical knowledge.
As mentioned by the philosopher Danièle Letocha, in a lecture delivered during the 85e Acfas Congress, “political discourse obviously does not consist of an exact and verifiable description of the world as it is. We have various social sciences to complete this task. Political discourse first posits an ideal society (among other possible ones) which is that of the common good accomplished, then it judges the world in which we live as lacking, faulty, deficient, corrupt or, at least, far from the goal. Facts and values come together to call not for knowledge, but for action”.
Parallel truths and indifference
In the afterword of the new edition (2021) of The weakness of truth, Revault d’Allonnes offers a substantial review of the pandemic crisis. We already knew this before the health crisis: the anti-truth is conveyed by conspiratorial, climatosceptic or Holocaust denier assertions of all kinds, which call into question the basis of shared values.
If it is essential for science to safeguard “the idea of shared truth”, then it is necessary to democratize its critical body in order to counter the deleterious effects of anti-truth. Otherwise, ignorance of the scientific approach increases the risk of sparking, in a renewed way, the “infodemic” denounced, in 2020, by the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr.r Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: “Our greatest enemy to date is not the virus itself. It’s the rumours, the fear and the stigma. »
Myriam Revault d’Allonnes points to a factor that aggravates the current situation: to the increased number of parallel truths is now added our indifference towards them. On this level, she writes, the evocation of the fictional world of 1984 is most relevant: “If, with the advent of post-truth, the world imagined by Orwell in 1984 has such strong resonance today, it is not so much because it draws the features of a complete totalitarian system. It is above all because it depicts a world where the idea of truth has totally disappeared. […]. Orwell appeals, more than to instituted knowledge, to the “truth” of the common that is common decency (“common” or “ordinary” decency)”
What about the relationship between post-truth and lies, especially in history and politics? In our democratic societies where the number of readers of 1984 grows, do anti-truth and the fabrication of “alternative facts” come under the same mechanisms as totalitarian ideology? The answer is no.
To the analysis of this ideology, it would be necessary to add a nuance: the propagandist concern to “make believe” does exist in the dictatorships and totalitarianisms of the last century, but, unlike the dystopian society described in 1984, these political systems manufacture ideologies in which they believe. These are not fictional accounts to justify their power.
At the end of his work, Orwell adds an appendix on the principles of the official language called “Newspeak” which, in the imagined society, will be the unique idiom of oral and written communication; he suggests that minimizing the repertoire of language (syntax and lexicon) reduces the realm of thought. Moreover, the simplification of the language undermines this “sense of living together” that we, the Moderns, evoke in reference to the faculty of judging in the field of politics. The judgment of the democrats that we are depends on the quality of fact-based information, based on credible sources and curated by competent people.
Historically, the Pentagon Papers analyzed by Hannah Arendt show that the counter-power of the press, which Daniel Ellsberg uses, manages to transform reality, recalls Revault d’Allonnes. Subsequently, it will also be so whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden or Irène Frachon, who will reveal the Mediator drug scandal in France. This mode of resistance to the growth of disorder in politics, which emanates from “ordinary” citizens, is not only “moral”. It is potentially political since it gives rise to various civic initiatives aimed at transforming our common world. We cannot therefore dissociate “the conditions for a capacity to tell the truth” from our capacity to live together in a common civic space where we do not give up changing the world, changing life.
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