The idea of truth has fallen out of favour in recent years. For one thing, itās less politically important than it used to be. In the era of the Cold War, what beliefs you held to be true counted for a lot, as one sovereign ideology clashed with another. Then, sometime in the Nineties, once the Cold War had faded, the word āideologyā fell out of use. This was partly because people don’t tend to regard their own beliefs as ideological, any more than people go around calling themselves Spotty or Fatso. Ideology is what the Other has, and one particular Other had now vanished.
Other peopleās beliefs are ideological in the sense of being rigid, doctrinaire, immune to argument and detached from the practical world, whereas oneās own convictions are flexible, pragmatic and eminently reasonable. Capping child allowance so that more families are plunged into poverty is pretty much common sense in an economic crisis, while heavily taxing the oil companies springs from socialist dogma. Thereās nothing ideological about revering the monarchy ā like scratching your nose or gambling for eight hours a day, itās a natural human inclination ā but claiming that it provides circuses for the people to distract them from a shortage of bread is simply the talk of disaffected intellectuals.
To be post-truth, then, is to be post-ideological. Long ago, when the middle class were revolutionaries storming the strongholds of the aristocracy, ideas like God, liberty, progress, patriotism and equality mattered to them a lot. They were vital weapons in the struggle for hearts and minds. Once they settled down to the humdrum task of accumulating capital, however, these grandiose notions werenāt so essential. Besides, by secularising and rationalising the world, capitalism created a climate in which such high-minded stuff sounded increasingly implausible. In doing so, it undercut some of its own rationales.
Itās mostly American politicians these days who talk about God, freedom, “this great country of ours” and “our brave men and women in uniform”, the United States being on account of its Puritan heritage one of the most metaphysical nations in the world, as well as one of the most materialistic. One canāt imagine Jeremy Hunt waxing eloquent about the countryās eternal debt to the Almighty, as opposed to its debt to its international creditors. As capitalist society evolves, its everyday practice comes loose from its rhetorical self-justification, which is to say that the gap between what it does, and what it says it does, looms incongruously large. This is what philosophers know as a performative contradiction. Better, then, to ditch as much of its metaphysical baggage as you decently can ā in which case truth, at least with a large T, becomes increasingly redundant.
Truth is what compels our belief, but belief isnāt what binds late capitalist societies together. According to the ruling ideology of liberalism, you can believe whatever you like as long as it doesnāt stymie other peopleās freedom to do the same, or pose a serious threat to their wellbeing. The state doesnāt give a toss about what you believe, a situation which would have been unintelligible to John Calvin or Oliver Cromwell, and is still unintelligible to a host of contemporary autocrats. Besides, in a relativist world, the word “conviction” comes to have a dogmatic ring to it.
This is odd, given that having convictions of some sort is constitutive of being human. To be a person is to have a point of view on the world. The convictions in question donāt need to be obsessive. You can believe that childbirth should be abolished without standing with a megaphone outside maternity hospitals. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once told a committee interviewing him for an Oxford fellowship that he had extreme political opinions but held them moderately.
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