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With the lying and disregard for truth shown in the presidential campaign and presidency of Donald Trump, many books have been examining what they fear is a "post-truth" culture and offer ways of reversing it. Among these books is "Post Truth" by Lee Mcintyre, Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an Instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. The book is part of the "Essential Knowledge Series" published by MIT which aims to offer "accessible, concise, beautifully produced pocket-sized books on topics of current interest."
Mcintyre has written a short, well-written book on the nature of post-truth and its causes. The book explores issues in history, philosophy, and current events to understand post-truth, which Mcintyre describes in his opening chapter as "a form of ideological supremacy, whereby its practitioners are trying to compel someone to believe in something whether there is good evidence for it nor not." It involves the ignoring of facts in favor of feelings and preconceptions. In its broadest sense, for Mcintyre, post-truth denies the existence of objective reality.
In the Acknowledgement section of his book, Mcintyre speaks simply and truly of his "love for philosophy", and this love shows. There is much to be learned from this book, and the search and love for truth never goes out of date. Mcintryre has a background and understanding in the sciences and approaches truth and reality from a scientific perspective. This is invaluable. The other focus of his book is Donald Trump whom he criticizes sharply. His discussion about Trump is valuable and troubling, but the broader, stronger message of his book is about the nature of objectivity.
In seeking to understand post-truth, Mcintyre intermixes a variety of subjects. He begins with a discussion of the efforts in the 1950s of the tobacco industry to present an alternative story to the already overwhelming scientific evidence about the health danger of smoking. He carries the analogy forward to climate change deniers. Mcintyre finds the efforts of some politicians and putative researchers to deny climate change and its cause by the activities of humans is equivalent to the attempt by the tobacco industry to cause unfounded doubt in the public about the dangers of smoking.
In the middle chapters of his book, Mcintyre discusses the decline of objective news reporting in a morass of media and fake news. The material is well and succinctly presented, but this phenomenon has been endlessly discussed elsewhere.
The heart of this book lies in its scientific and philosophical chapters. In a chapter titled "the roots of cognitive bias" Mcintyre discusses the results of several psychological investigations which tend to show in Mcintyre's words that "we are not quite as rational as we think." This chapter includes much fascinating information and suggests the circumstances under which individuals will disregard evidence in favor of psychic well-being, group-think, or other non-rational considerations.
In the most philosophical chapter of the book, "Did postmodernism lead to post-truth"? (which he answers in the affirmative) Mcintyre explores the difficult modern philosophy, with long historical roots, of postmodernism, which broadly denies the existence of any objective truth free from the perspective of the group. Claims for objectivity involve one group imposing its values on others. Postmodernism in this sense has been applied to science and it properly draws Mcintyre's criticism Although to support the weak and voiceless parts of the political spectrum, postmodernism has been used as a way to critique science and revitalize certain religious claims. And its claims about the denial of objective truth have moved from the left to the right in politics and have coalesced in the post-truth world of Trump and his supporters.
There is much of value in both the critique of postmodernism and in the psychology of this book. There is also much of value in the attack on Trump although I find it overdone. Here is something I learned from the psychology section of this book that seems to me valuable.
A group of college students were given the following number series, 2, 4,6 and asked to come up with series of their own following the rule of this series and to articulate the rule. To simplify, most of the students came up with a series such as 8,10,12 and said the appropriate rule was the sequence of even numbers. A little reflection shows that this response was jumping to a conclusion. For those students probing a bit deeper, the sequence 1,2,3 was within the rule the investigator sought as was the sequence 25, 356, 1084. The rule simply was that each of the three numbers in the sequence had to be of increasing value.
The lesson I drew from this example is that one needs to be careful in assessing the cause of an event or the form of a series that one has considered all the possibilities. And as applied to post-truth and Trump, I find them worth discussing and Mcintyres' discussion insightful. I also find the discussion overly partisan, perhaps, and bloated as an explanation. Other explanations that a philosophical denial of the existence of truth and of the objective character of reality may be possible. The fact that Trump lies and that he was elected and enjoys a degree of support does not, in my opinion, necessarily lead to the conclusion that we live in a "post-truth" culture.
