Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age Without Facts
11-02-2011
The introductory lecture at the Arendt Center 2011 Fall Conference, "Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age Without Facts" from Arendt Center director, Roger Berkowitz.
Truthtelling: Democracy in an Age Without Facts
It is well known that Iraqi's participated in the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States; that global warming is a myth; that childhood vaccines cause Autism; that President Obama is not an American; that a cabal of American Jews collaborated with the U.S. government to carry out the attacks on 9/11; and that the United States does not torture. These are acknowledged facts for millions of educated, indeed often highly educated, people.
Of course, I hope you will agree, these acknowledged facts are open to debate.
We face today a crisis of fact. Facts, as Hannah Arendt saw, are all around us being reduced to opinions; and opinions masquerade as facts. As fact and opinion blur together, the very idea of factual truth falls away. And increasingly the belief in and aspiration for factual truth is being expunged from political argument.
Even before technologists have made good on their promises to provide virtual realities, we have created multiple realities using nothing more than the internet, cable news, and human nature.
So what? Does all this lying, this blurring of fact and opinion, this creating of and defending of alternative and opposing realities --does it really matter? Isn't that what politics has always been about?
The answer, as Hannah Arendt argues, is that the loss of factual truth in the political realm is an existential threat to politics and also to human life in general. Arendt rejects the classical maxim fiat justitia, et pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish); instead she endorses the reformulation: Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus. Let Truth be done, though the world may perish.
Her point is simple: We cannot give up on truth—even if it means the end of the world! This is because the loss of truth leads to the loss of the world. Without truth, without the ability to say what is, there is no permanence, no common world. The danger is that when truth disappears, the world wobbles. We lose our bearings. We lose what holds us together—the common sense and common assumptions—that are the furniture and stability of our human world.
Arendt's worry is that when truth is impossible, when truth disappears, when the world wobbles, the result is cynicism. As she writes:
It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism—an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established.
In other words, the danger from a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will win out—that is highly unlikely. Rather, the danger posed by the demise of factual truth is the victory of cynicism, the belief that it is simply not possible to "say what is." What cynicism means is that the sense of factual truth from which we take our bearings in the real world is wasting away.
2. Isn't this an old problem? Hasn't it always been the case that people disagree about facts and that facts are turned into opinions?
If one looks back in history, it is quickly apparent that dissensus is the norm, and consensus the exception. Many who bemoan the rise of Fox News and CNBC along with the decline of the New York Times and the Network News as arbiters of a common sense forget that for most of American history workers and elites, blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, read different newspapers and inhabited very different worlds and held often contradictory ideas of what America was. It is actually the consensual politics of Post-World War II America that is the exception, not its gradual breakdown in recent decades.
So what is different in recent times?
Arendt's answer is that only beginning in the 2nd half of the 20th century do we now routinely encounter the mass manipulation of fact. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the Soviet/Stalinist effort to deny that Leon Trotsky ever played a role in the Russian Revolution, to airbrush his images out of old pictures, and to re-write communist party history books. The lie that Trotsky was never a part of the communist party was what Arendt calls a "totalitarian lie," a lie that seeks to re-create an entire reality. Already in 1950, she understood that such lies were now possible. This is only more true today, as technology affords liars extraordinary means to alter the documentary past.
The mass manipulation of fact does not always aim at such totalizing lies. For example, there has been a concerted effort by some to refute the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the earth. Others seek to disseminate an image of America as a nation that doesn't torture. To be effective, such claims do not actually need to prevail. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to overcome the brute fact that we did, in fact, employ torture as a governmentally sanctioned policy. Rather, the purpose of the mass manipulation of fact that characterizes the modern lie is to sow doubt. Based in cynicism and yielding apathy, doubt immobilizes; thus does doubt neutralize the oppositional power of truth and doubt frees those who pursue naked power stripped from limits imposed by truth.
****
We must recognize is how profound and prevalent the confusion of fact and opinion is today. The truth is that the utter refusal to believe established facts is not out of the ordinary today. Indeed, it is the new normal.
We need to now confront and accept the new normal: that our democracy must operate now without even the basic expectation of factual agreement. We must confront this fact that facts, today, are politicized and thus reduced to opinions. That is Arendt's point. She writes not simply to decry the decadence of politics, but to call us to face the facts about the loss of facts.
Click here to read the full essay by Roger Berkowitz.