what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label post-truth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post-truth. Show all posts

Sunday, February 19, 2017

"What is Truth?" asked Jesting Pilate.....and would not stay for an answer..

I first came across the term “post-truth politics” last summer – but hadn’t appreciated the scale and nature of the “denial of facts” on the blogosphere until the Trump campaign hit us full blast in the autumn.
"Political correctness” has apparently become everyone’s favourite hate but seems now to be degenerating into a mindless post-modern contempt for anything that smacks of evidence

This is not an easy topic to discuss in a civilised way - so let me put my own cards squarely on the table…….  
I have quite strong memories of the 1980s as the issues of feminism, racism and sexism first moved in from the margins…..I was heavily involved in issues of community development and the social exclusion which affected low-income people - and wasn’t too impressed with the new language of “the glass-ceiling”….
So I understand the concern about “progressives” becoming (progressively) more focused on social aspects of power and equality – to the neglect of the economic..…And I have been no fan of the rise of academic ghettoes (particularly in the (North American) universities accompanying the development of women’s, black and gender studies.
The backlash to “political correctness”, for me, was always a disaster waiting to happen.     

But even so, I watched open-mouthed last night the antics of a self-centred, loud-mouthed, hyperactive effeminate called Milo Yiannopoulis (yeah – pull the other one!) who is apparently the epitome of a new breed of libertarian publicists who out-do Oscar Wilde in their urge to shock. Although he’s apparently an editor (of one of Breitbart website series) he’s also a wag and "provocateur” on the same level as the characters in the Little Britain series of more than a decade ago

Jill Lepote gaves us recently in The Internet of us and the end of facts the best history lesson I’ve seen of the whole post-truth phenomenon (be aware, it’s the last para of the excerpt which counts).
She starts with a childhood incident when she found herself challenging someone she knew had stolen something she valued (a bat) -    
The law of evidence that reigns in the domain of childhood is essentially medieval. “Fight you for it,” the kid said. “Race you for it,” I countered. A long historical precedent stands behind these judicial methods for the establishment of truth, for knowing how to know what’s true and what’s not. In the West, for centuries, trial by combat and trial by ordeal—trial by fire, say, or trial by water—served both as means of criminal investigation and as forms of judicial proof.
 Kid jurisprudence works the same way: it’s an atavism. As a rule, I preferred trial by bicycle. If that kid and I had raced our bikes and I’d won, the bat would have been mine, because my victory would have been God-given proof that it had been mine all along: in such cases, the outcome is itself evidence. Trial by combat and trial by ordeal place judgment in the hands of God. Trial by jury places judgment in the hands of men. It requires a different sort of evidence: facts. A “fact” is, etymologically, an act or a deed. It came to mean something established as true only after the Church effectively abolished trial by ordeal in 1215, the year that King John pledged, in Magna Carta, “No free man is to be arrested, or imprisoned . . . save by the lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.”
In England, the abolition of trial by ordeal led to the adoption of trial by jury for criminal cases. This required a new doctrine of evidence and a new method of inquiry, and led to what the historian Barbara Shapiro has called “the culture of fact”: the idea that an observed or witnessed act or thing—the substance, the matter, of fact—is the basis of truth and the only kind of evidence that’s admissible not only in court but also in other realms where truth is arbitrated.
Between the thirteenth century and the nineteenth, the fact spread from law outward to science, history, and journalism. What were the facts in the case of the nail-polished bat? I didn’t want to fight, and that kid didn’t want to race. I decided to wage a battle of facts. I went to the library. Do they even have baseball in Italy? Sort of. Is my name the name of a baseball team? Undeterminable, although in Latin it means “hare,” a fact that, while not dispositive, was so fascinating to me that I began to forget why I’d looked it up.
I never did get my bat back. Forget the bat. The point of the story is that I went to the library because I was trying to pretend that I was a grownup, and I had been schooled in the ways of the Enlightenment. Empiricists believed they had deduced a method by which they could discover a universe of truth: impartial, verifiable knowledge. But the movement of judgment from God to man wreaked epistemological havoc. It made a lot of people nervous, and it turned out that not everyone thought of it as an improvement. For the length of the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth, truth seemed more knowable, but after that it got murkier.

 OK - here's the punchline -
Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, fundamentalism and postmodernism, the religious right and the academic left, met up: either the only truth is the truth of the divine or there is no truth; for both, empiricism is an error. That epistemological havoc has never ended: much of contemporary discourse and pretty much all of American politics is a dispute over evidence. An American Presidential debate has a lot more in common with trial by combat than with trial by jury, which is what people are talking about when they say these debates seem “childish”: the outcome is the evidence. The ordeal endures.

The title of this post is the opening sentence of one of Francis Bacon's most famous essays

Saturday, July 23, 2016

The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters

Global events have struck me dumb…Brexit did not so much surprise as shock me – into a deep depression. But it’s not so much the result per se as the new tone of global politics of which this is simply one expression – any pretence at reason has been surrendered to the exercise of brute power and stirring of visceral hatreds as evident in Trump’s victory and events in Turkey, Nice and Munich…..let alone Baghdad and Kabul

They’ve apparently been talking in the US for some 5-6 years about “post-truth politics” but it was an important recent article argues that technology is at the root of the new drift 
It was hardly the first time that politicians had failed to deliver what they promised, but it might have been the first time they admitted on the morning after victory that the promises had been false all along.
This was the first major vote in the era of post-truth politics: the listless remain campaign attempted to fight fantasy with facts, but quickly found that the currency of fact had been badly debased.The remain side’s worrying facts and worried experts were dismissed as “Project Fear” – and quickly neutralised by opposing “facts”: if 99 experts said the economy would crash and one disagreed, the BBC told us that each side had a different view of the situation. (This is a disastrous mistake that ends up obscuring truth, and echoes how some report climate change.)
Michael Gove declared that “people in this country have had enough of experts” on Sky News. He also compared 10 Nobel prize-winning economists who signed an anti-Brexit letter to Nazi scientists loyal to Hitler. It can become very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and 'facts' that are not…
For months, the Eurosceptic press trumpeted every dubious claim and rubbished every expert warning, filling the front pages with too many confected anti-migrant headlines to count – many of them later quietly corrected in very small print. On the same day Nigel Farage unveiled his inflammatory “Breaking Point” poster, and Labour MP Jo Cox, who had campaigned tirelessly for refugees, was shot dead, the cover of the Daily Mail featured a picture of migrants in the back of a lorry entering the UK, with the headline “We are from Europe – let us in!” The next day, the Mail and the Sun, which also carried the story, were forced to admit that the stowaways were actually from Iraq and Kuwait.

 A few days after the vote, Arron Banks, Ukip’s largest donor and the main funder of the Leave.EU campaign, told the Guardian that his side knew all along that facts would not win the day. “It was taking an American-style media approach,” said Banks. “What they said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”
 Twenty-five years after the first website went online, it is clear that we are living through a period of dizzying transition. For 500 years after Gutenberg, the dominant form of information was the printed page: knowledge was primarily delivered in a fixed format, one that encouraged readers to believe in stable and settled truths.Now, we are caught in a series of confusing battles between opposing forces: between truth and falsehood, fact and rumour; between the few and the many, the connected and the alienated; between the open platform of the web as its architects envisioned it and the gated enclosures of Facebook and other social networks; between an informed public and a misguided mob.

What is common to these struggles – and what makes their resolution an urgent matter – is that they all involve the diminishing status of truth. This does not mean that there are no truths. It simply means, as this year has made very clear, that we cannot agree on what those truths are, and when there is no consensus about the truth and no way to achieve it, chaos soon follows.
Increasingly, what counts as a fact is merely a view that someone feels to be true – and technology has made it very easy for these “facts” to circulate with a speed and reach that was unimaginable in the Gutenberg era (or even a decade ago). ……
There are usually several conflicting truths on any given subject, but in the era of the printing press, words on a page nailed things down, whether they turned out to be true or not. The information felt like the truth, at least until the next day brought another update or a correction, and we all shared a common set of facts. 
This settled “truth” was usually handed down from above: an established truth, often fixed in place by an establishment. This arrangement was not without flaws: too much of the press often exhibited a bias towards the status quo and a deference to authority, and it was prohibitively difficult for ordinary people to challenge the power of the press.
Now, people distrust much of what is presented as fact – particularly if the facts in question are uncomfortable, or out of sync with their own views – and while some of that distrust is misplaced, some of it is not.

update; I now see that there was talk in Britain even in June of "post-truth politics" - and that I must have borrowed my title for this post from a post on 23 June by Chris Grey