The Erosion of the Common World

Roger Berkowitz

It has become common sense that President Trump lies. Once again there are countless articles and Twitter feeds and video compilations showing that the President has lied, stated falsehoods, and denied having said what he said. And yet through it all, the President’s popularity rating is soaring. As has happened so many times, the fact that the President lies seems to have no impact on his popularity. Indeed, it may be the case that the effort to show that the President lies and the obsessive need to fact-check his statements might actually counteract the effort to assure a fact-based world. This is not an argument to accept the lies; for the lies, too, are an attack on our common world. But it does require us to ask, what does it mean when fact-checking actually contributes to the very problem we are trying to address?

As Linda Zerilli writes, “obsessive fact-checking” could actually work “against the public acceptance of the facts that are checked.” In other words, fact-checking will not lead to an embrace of facts, but works to destroy the idea of a factual world. Building upon Hannah Arendt’s work, Zerillii argues that fact-checking “undermines the truth of opinion that Arendt argues to be crucial to caring about factual truths at all.” All that fact-checking accomplishes is to undermine “our allegiance to a fact-based reality.” This is because, as Arendt shows in her work, there are no objective facts in politics. When we argue about facts, we are “not debating anything in fact. We are simply registering opinions that are ‘merely subjective,’ no different from opinion.” This transformation of fact into opinion can “destroy the common world,” but only when opinions are so fractured that no common basis for a factual world can emerge. When alternate facts emerge as a counter to the shared world, they make manifest the failure of the common world. The problem that alternate facts reveal is not the prevalence of lying, but the failure of the shared world in which facts might emerge. The common world is built upon opinions that come to be accepted, and opinion-facts are founded upon a common trust and a common sense that needs to be cultivated and fabricated. Thus, the danger in a world where lies and fact-checking both have ceased to resurrect a shared sense of reality. For Zerilli, 

Arendt's insight into the erosion of our ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, true and false, is crucial for understanding not only why fact-checking may fail but also how it may erode the common world that checking the facts is supposed to sustain. To unpack the limits of fact-checking as a democratic practice for sustaining and building the common world, we could start with Arendt's own refusal to seek solace in the manner of Orwell and many intellectuals of her generation in the restoration of the philosophical idea of objective truth. This is the idea of truth as indifferent to what human beings think or say. In her essay, "Truth and Politics," Arendt distinguishes between rational truth and factual truth. She argues that the Western philosophical tradition's attempt to hold the political realm to the standards of rational truth is not only apolitical but antipolitical. In its search for a Reality that is indifferent to what human beings think or say, the tradition's idea of rational truth is hostile to the very condition of democratic politics, namely, plurality. This idea of truth, which also governs our understanding of scientific, mathematical, and logical truths in Arendt's view, finds its opposite not in the lie, but in illusion and opinion or error and ignorance.

Arendt has been received as denying the relevance of truth to politics tout court. I have found this to be a mischaracterization of her position. She is concerned with the question of when and how truth can matter for politics and accordingly critical of the assumption, inherited from the Western philosophical tradition, that truth simply does matter for politics and that all political thinking is by definition a search for truth. This way of conceptualizing the problem of truth and politics brings her remarkably close to the work of the late Foucault, as we shall see. Further, Arendt is deeply concerned with the fate of factual truths, which "constitute the very texture of the political realm." Factual truths are inherently contingent; they could have been otherwise. Related to human action, they "have no conclusive reason whatever for being what they are; they could have always been otherwise, and this annoying contingency is literally unlimited." That Germany invaded Belgium in August 1914 is a factual and hence contingent truth and in some important sense one among those "brutally elementary data […] whose indestructibility has been taken for granted even by the most extreme and most sophisticated believers in historicism." But Arendt herself gives innumerable examples that belie this intrinsic resilience of factual truths: the complete erasure of a man named Trotsky from official Soviet history, the Nazis' successful use of anti-Semitic tales, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that had already been fact-checked as false by journalistic authorities of the time, and the whole web of conspiracy theories that sustained totalitarian rule by terror. Whatever resilience factual truths have ultimately depends on the continual testimony of human beings. In our ordinary speech and action, it is we who affirm a world held in common, reality as shared. Infinitely fragile because of this dependency, cautions Arendt, "once they [factual truths] are lost, no rational effort will ever bring them back."

Alternative facts are not just more lies (or falsehoods) or better lies (or falsehoods); they speak to some significant shift in the shared factual reality that we take for granted when engaging in politics. Their corrosive force consists in the turning of fact into mere opinion, that is, opinion in the merely subjective sense: an "it seems to me" that remains indifferent to how it seems to others. Accordingly, the alternative fact that more people attended Trump's inauguration than Obama's is merely another opinion in the merely subjective sense of what is true for me. It can be a mere opinion, just as the number that attended Obama's inauguration is held to be a mere opinion, because there is no shared object on which to have an opinion. What we are debating, in other words, is not why more (or less) people attended one or the other inauguration; what we are debating is not what was said or done in the public space. We are not debating anything in fact. We are simply registering opinions that are "merely subjective," no different from the opinion that I like coffee and you like tea. What could there be to dispute?