This series of posts will examine myths or tropes that I hear progressives repeat in order to make sense of the "New Dark Age" that is our fragmented social reality. Conservatives likely have their equivalents but I don’t feel as qualified to offer critiques. If you have an idea for a trope to address, contact me at anthony.skews@gmail.com or on Twitter @Askews2000.
“Truthiness”, satirist Stephen Colbert once declared, is the assertion of fact on the basis of intuition without recourse to evidence, logic or reason. It is a concept that seems to define the political times we live in better than any other single concept. In response to Brexit and Trump, if not before, left-leaning intellectuals have lamented the growth of this type of evidence-free discourse, in which facts don’t matter and the truth is subjective. To whit: all the protestations of Hillary Clinton’s competence were irrelevant because only the intuitive sense that she was corrupt mattered to voters. And in an ironic turn, see how easily the Trump administration has turned around the Clintons’ claim they were the victim of ‘fake news’ to justify its own failures.
To discuss why this is such a pointless thing to worry about (on both left and right), we should first be able to distinguish between scientific facts (things falsifiable according to the scientific method) and social facts or ‘common sense’. The latter are widely shared rules, norms or taboos that are effectively unchallenged in a given social or group equilibrium. Of course, the idea that the scientific method grants some beliefs evidentiary weight it itself a social fact, but let's not dive too deeply down the epistemological rabbit-hole. Using this classification, we can distinguish between the existence of human-induced global warming (a scientific fact) and the political responsibility to do something to prevent it (a social fact).
When arguing with right-wingers, we often mistake a small, obvious lie (about the validity scientific facts) for the more subtle ‘big lie’ (about the validity of social facts). As the US sociologist Everett Hughes, a critic of 1930s Germany, wrote in the middle of last century:
“Each of these [right-wing] rationalizations brought up in defense of racial and ethnic injustices is part of a syllogism. The minor premise, stating an alleged fact, is expressed; the major premise, a principle, is left out. Instead of driving our opponent and ourselves back to the major premise, we [liberals] are content to question and disprove the minor premise, the allegation of fact.”
So too today the left ends up answering climate change denialists’ and racists’ ridiculous claims with [accurate] scientific data, but miss the right’s real agenda of signalling, to both their followers and the public at large, the weakness or irrelevance of social norms we would otherwise take for granted. For the same reason, the right can easily dismiss progressives' mustering of evidence because they see, better than we do, that such a rhetorical exercise has as its purpose challenging social power, not just winning the argument.
Cheaters and Liars
What makes the Trumps of the world so dangerous is that they are natural cheaters: individuals or institutions willing and able to defect from established social consensus. By doing so they obtain a selfish advantage, while damaging the shared social norms that normally make mutually beneficial cooperation amongst everyone else possible. A purveyor of ‘fake news’ may be a mere commercial or political opportunist: seeking ad revenue or votes. But they may also be a propagandist seeking to deliberately alter cultural reference points to advantage their agenda. A danger arises because for the average member of the public, the false social reality the propagandist or cheater signals is difficult to distinguish from the real thing.
Needless to say, social taboos can often serve evolutionarily useful functions. For example: over the course of the twentieth century, we learned at great cost that institutional (public) racism caused immense, destructive harms. Casual (private) racism has proved more difficult to control, because it plays on elemental in-group/out-group prejudices in individual human nature, but most people are at least socialised to feel shame at the public expression of prejudice, and that shame enforces a norm that allows more diverse and creative societies to flourish in public spaces. What marks an entrepreneur of chaos is their inability or unwillingness to feel this shame about their actions, a mindset that encapsulates Trump and Farage, as well as Putin. In facing such individuals, social elites are simply flummoxed by their failure to abide by norms that would have limited a more neurotypical individual.
Looking in the mirror
It’s both correct and useful to point out Trump’s blatant disregard for both scientific and social facts, his casual racism, misogyny and outright falsehoods. But problems can also occur when intellectuals and leaders themselves mistake the two categories of fact, and fail to recognise that social or political taboos they in turn regard as mere common sense are just widely shared expectations and not scientific truths. The right knows this, but the left is typically more reluctant to admit it. When we discover that our opponents don’t share our reality, it’s convenient to believe they are simply liars, charlatans or idiots. But the liberal social contract norms that advanced democracies enjoy are fragile and need a vigorous and purposeful defense against the illiberal ideologues that would purposively seek to undermine them.
A social fact is true only insofar as it is useful. We can, for example, distinguish between important social taboos of universal application (i.e. “Don’t be racist”), and political or intellectual taboos shared by members of the political and intellectual class. Such ‘common sense’ political norms are easy to enumerate off hand: don’t be a socialist, free trade is always a positive, markets promote freedom, regulation is always inefficient, ‘something’ must be done about climate change, don’t show sympathy to those on welfare, or criminals, or refugees. Such decision rules look like political wisdom: elites have been taught – perhaps through observation of a highly salient political case studies – to believe that violation of these norms routinely carries negative consequences.
Elites genuinely believe that these are objective facts which it is personally shameful to reject. Much of so-called high politics consists of partisan attempts to induce ‘gotcha’ traps in which a politician can be shown to violate such taboos, and thus demonstrate their unfitness for leadership. There is an expectation that individuals will feel shame for violating norms, and a strong backlash bias exists to punish those that fail to quickly comply. The political and intellectual establishment is and remains outraged by Bernie Sanders’ (and Jeremy Corbyn’s) refusals to play by their rules of political discourse: to question free trade, to criticise cozy relationships between big business and government, to advocate for socialised healthcare and a living wage for all.
But such elite norms are often wrong. The usefulness of a social fact bears only a cursory relationship to its scientific objectivity. In evolutionary terms, social facts may be maladaptive: useful and correct in one context (socialism during the Cold War = bad), while being less relevant or harmful in the next (socialism during the Great Recession = maybe good?). They may also be like a male peacock’s feathers: costly, and only relevant in an arms race where everyone else is also a peacock.
Moreover, social facts need not be established rationally. ‘Prestige imitation’ is one of our species’ primary mechanisms for transmitting and learning cultural information; unfortunately, that means we are more likely to imitate the social norms signalled by high-status or successful individuals. We may rationally believe that discrimination is bad, but when discriminatory policies win elections, the political and intellectual elite can’t help but adjust their behaviour to incorporate a new reality in which maybe it isn’t. Our societies therefore often seem to change dramatically in response to electoral victories (and defeats); the Overton window of political acceptability is adjusted with each new data point.
So when people lament post-truth political debate, always consider: what sort of truth do they mean? And whose? Ultimately, winning and holding political power is critical not just because of the legal powers it grants, but because of the social influence it grants the wielder to shape social and cultural norms and taboos by exploiting the majority of our species' natural predilection towards compliance with the prevailing social reality.