Post-Truth: Knowledge As A Power Game

Post-truth should be seen as largely a continuation of the last forty years of postmodernism, especially in its deconstructive guise. Both postmodernism and post-truth publicly display a strong anti-authoritarian, democratic streak. Yet it is also a legacy rooted in Plato, who acknowledged an eternal power struggle – done in the name of ‘truth’ – between those who uphold adherence to the past and those who uphold openness to the future. Later, Machiavelli, and still later Vilfredo Pareto, described these two positions as ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’, respectively. Moreover, there has always been concern that if the struggle between the lions and foxes is made public, the social fabric will disintegrate altogether, as happened to Athens in Plato’s day. The ancient and medieval support for a ‘double truth’ doctrine (i.e. one for the elites and one for the masses), as carried over in modern conceptions of censorship, articulate these misgivings. In early twentieth century, Pareto based a general theory of society on this struggle. Pareto’s legacy left the most lasting impression in the US through the Harvard biochemist Lawrence Henderson. Henderson convened a ‘Pareto Circle’ in the late 1930s, which influenced the young Thomas Kuhn, author of the most influential account of science in the second half of the twentieth century, ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’. What distinguishes science from politics is that in science the lions normally rule because they suppress contested features of their history until their own internal disagreements about how to interpret puzzling findings force a ‘crisis’ and finally ‘revolution’, during which the scientific foxes are briefly in control.

The book is concerned with the implications of a systematically post-truth perspective on academic knowledge production, which is largely seen as a vulnerable target. It turns out that military and industrial attitudes towards knowledge production have always embodied a post-truth perspective. The book also suggests an academic course of study for a post-truth world. The course would put less emphasis on content and more on skills, especially those involving the propagation and deconstruction of content, much of which is normally associated with marketing, public relations as well as aesthetic and literary criticism. In addition, the course would focus on arguments relating to the avoidance (lions) or acceptance (foxes) of risk. It would also examine the contrasting Orwellian practices involved in constructing canonical (lions) and revisionist (foxes) histories. The twentieth century interwar debate between Walter Lippmann (lion) and Edward Bernays (fox) over the meaning of a public philosophy in an era of mass media would be a centrepiece.