Intellectuals in a Free Society: Bernard Williams’s nightmare come true.
Inaugural long read essay: Making sense of a post-truth world. Or another one.
Has Bernard Williams’s worst nightmare come true?
Making sense of a post-truth world. Or another one.
By Pieter Marx
22 April 2023.
“Rather then just a scholar, an intellectual is a truth-sayer.” R. Devos[1]
Is, or is to be one.
ABSTRACT—PREFACE
I aim to answer the question: is this current moment we find ourselves in, as characterised by its relation to truth, and by the position (social) scientists as truth-workers (academics, journalists, experts,..) find themselves in, the realisation of Bernard Williams’s relativistic nightmare as foreshadowed in his 2002 book Truth and Truthfulness?
A second aim, and one needed for the first, is to at least make this moment, its relation to truth and the position of the social sciences and their truth-workers more readable. To do this, I will put the truth-workers in their (conflictual) relation to their audiences.
I will cover these aims in PART 1: LIES AND DESPAIR.
A third aim, is undertake an appreciation of my own position in the current moment, as assessed in Part 1, and in relation to the reading of Williams’s Truth and Truthfulness.
A fourth aim, and drawing on philosophy of science where it has been concerned with its place in a free society, is to suggest the possibility of a pivot by the social sciences and their truth workers to find a new route away from an indeed deflated position they find themselves in. A humbler, yet more fruitful route.
I will cover these aims in PART 2: HOPE AND TRUTH.
An overarching fifth aim, and possibly the real aim of this essay, is to make the world more readable, legible, more likely to make sense, to readers (and I include myself) that agree with (part of) the story I am telling, and equally to readers that do not. At least that.
PART 1 –LIES AND DESPAIR–
He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.
"Too long," in this context, should perhaps be taken as meaning "after the dragon is beaten."
G. Orwell quoting F. Nietzsche, As I Please, The Tribune, 8 September 1944
1.1 The nightmare of sense-making without truth
A—Sense making, truth-workers, truth relativism
We hate it when the world does not make sense. When it lacks legibility, stability, clarity, and with that predictability. This is innately threatening, and we feel fear. It is even worse when the world does not make sense in ways that threaten what we previously thought useful to make sense of the world: our general understanding of things, our world view, our cosmology.
We need to look for an explanation, a story, a narrative, that makes sense, and re-makes sense of the world. A story we can rely on: it needs to be truthful: concerned with what is true.
When we look for this story, we turn to people who we trust have something to say about the world. And we rely on their willingness and skill to look at the world, interpret it, and tell us about it. And not only their willingness and skill, also their character: we rely on them to be truthful about it. We rely on their “ virtues of truth, qualities of people that are displayed in wanting to know the truth, in finding it out, and in telling it to other people.”[2]
That is a quote by Bernard Williams (1929-2003). Williams was a highly respected moral philosopher who worked at emblematic places like Oxford and Princeton. He was committed, in his own words, to a kind of philosophy that would have to be “thoroughly truthful and honestly helpful”[3]
Helpful, that is, to concrete humans, subjects, in moral problems without alienating them from what they felt, wanted, cared about, and how they lived their lives—so not too reliant on a big moral theory, that is also what he meant. And truthful, that is not relying on some distant, platonic Idea-of-Truth, but also not reducing any idea of truth to some social construct by priests or other powerful people that want to guide our actions, and that use the truth—their truth—to oppress people who believed them: Williams opposed both truth idealismand truth reductionism.
These twin commitments were not a coincidence. On the last one, the ‘thoroughly truthful’ one and the main focus of this essay, he crucially was witness to the ascent of philosophers like Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Rorty. They put language and its relation to meaning and truth center stage in Western philosophy. Rorty would refer to this as ‘The Linguistic Turn’. He went as far as to dismiss the truth as a usable concept altogether as the goal of thought, and wanted to replace it with concrete social progress. So the goal of thinking is not reaching the truth, but things like solidarity, or unity, justice, or less cruelty in the world. Truth and truthfulness are of no value in the matter.
Williams saw these ideas as deeply problematic.
In 2002, one year before his death and already gravely ill with cancer, he published one last book, passionately arguing for the value of truth as an intrinsic human value, maybe the most pivotally intrinsic value of all. And that pushing it aside, losing a sense of the value of objective truth, or any truth, or of honesty (and do we not all naturally understand with Williams that honesty is just truthfulness, or at least that there cannot be honesty without truthfulness?) would result in a nightmarish “problem”, a situation where “we shall certainly lose something and may well lose everything.” Nightmarish indeed. [4]
B—Relativism and Williams’s Nightmare—losing everything
Williams paints a picture in which science, particularly the social sciences or what is called ‘humanities’, the societies or civilisation of which they are a part of, or important institutions to these societies that have a an intrinsic link to (finding and telling) the truth—universities, journalism, Expert Agencies etc—have lost something: a guiding principle, people operating that principle and at the same time within it, and are trusted by others to do so.
They would have lost the principle of truth and the practice of truthfulness. They would also have lost the value of truth, as it can be encountered in virtues of truth, virtues displayed (or not) in real people; these two truth virtues were proposed by Williams as Sincerity (I say what I believe) and Accuracy (I do my best to make sure that my beliefs are actually true).
They would have lost these things, because of a denial of something. At first, he chooses to call the people doing this denying ‘sceptics’, but then changes his mind. Scepticism is the asking wether what we take as true actually is true, without denying that there is indeed truth to be found, if only we were more sincere or more accurate. They believe in truth, and its value. Instead, he calls them deniers: they believe, or claim to believe, that the principle of truth, truthfulness, truth virtues, are really relics of a metaphysical past, or of an enlightenment age that is suspicious after all the blood of the twentieth century on the hands of people that were really committed to the truth—their truth—or that truth is always a matter of context and power. In any case, the Deniers claim that this concept of truth is, for various reasons and in varying degrees, to be treated with a Relativistic attitude.
Bernard Williams foresaw that the effects of this attitude towards truth, this relativism, would be detrimental, and in fact saw them happen already in his last years. What exactly did this nightmare look like?
First, at the fundamental level, critique, as a fundamental force of Enlightenment and science, any science, has no bearing point without an idea of truth. Indeed, where does the critique end? Every and anything can be critiqued, and no truth claims to defend even valuable ‘true’ theories, or assertions. Williams saw a process of critique without end, ad nihilem, ad nihilism, without the bearing point of truth. The humanities would be tearing themselves apart. Second, and related to the first point, there would be only destructive critique, based on distrust and finding reasons not to trust out of the—negative—desire not to be fooled or deceived. Third, and this already bears on the relation with the outside world: if there is no truth, then what exactly is a truth-worker’s authority (towards students, colleagues, the public at large, or any audience really) supposed to be based on? The only alternative is power, no doubt always a factor in social settings, but surely not the only one. Related to this, if a truth-worker’s profession is devoid of the beautiful thrill of seeking and at times reaching the truth, or close enough (for now)—then what is left? A disenchanted careerism. Concerned with power and advancement. Publish, but not because it is thrilling. Read, but only because you need to publish. Four: an audience, looking for truth and sense-making, will find, after a while, that the disenchanted humanities have now become boring, tiresome and useless. They will need to look for sense-making somewhere else, and they will also, first gradually, then suddenly, lose the willingness to keep the humanities—these humanities—fully funded and afloat. Five: Alienation. Williams crucially warns against a collective (as truth-workers, or social scientists, etc) and politicised state of denial from the world of other people, e.g. the outside ‘normie’ public that just deal in everyday truths everyday to get things done. Six. Nobody “really” believes that truth is irrelevant, but this trope of relativism is a ploy, a hypocritical rhetorical devise, to gain the upper hand, e.g. by accusing, critiquing, an adversary of wanting to impose his oppressive truths. A debate winner (in the right circles). And boring, tiresome.. And finally and not unrelated to the last point, Williams foresaw, in this dystopian truth landscape, the emergence of claims for authority based on “minority” or “political urgency”, frivolous arguments really that need some moral imperative or other compelling sentiment (guilt, panic etc) for the authority to be actually granted.[5]
C—Elites and the rest – Introducing the exoteric and esoteric distinction
Up to now, I have spoken of two groups in relation to each other: the relation between knowing speakers and interested listeners. Inside and out, esoteric and exoteric. Truth-workers and truth-taker audiences. Intellectual elites and the public. This will be an leading theme in this essay.
In this first part (Lies and Despair), I will focus a lot on the esoteric part of the equation: the truth-workers or intellectual elites as I have called them. I will give an account in the period roughly since Williams’s death of these truth-workers place in society, their view of themselves and of the others (exoteric, the non-truth-workers, the public), and their relation to truth. I will make use of two events of 2016, the Brexit vote and the Trump election, because the elites’ reactions and attitudes including emotions and sentiments to these unexpected votes—unexpected at least to them—so tellingly clarify the elements under study.
In part two (Hope and Truth), I will clarify my personal views on the matter, and my reading of Williams. I will also propose a way forward for the elites and us all, already posing the question if I myself am, can be, or even want to be, part of an intellectual elite, and if so under what terms, and how my reading of Williams is informing me on this personal matter.
My proposed way forward will draw on another branch of philosophy, namely philosophy of science, on work by Paul Feyerabend that has been done during Williams’s lifetime but then discredited, at the very least neglected This is work pertaining to science and its place in a free society. I will use it to propose this way forward for science, the humanities, and intellectual elites in our free society. A humbler way, but a more fruitful one, a more connected one, and one more committed to shared truth-finding.
In the course of this essay, we will encounter more than a couple of thinkers that each have their own conceptualisations of the two groups we are discussing. It is clear there are plenty of differences in scope, concepts, nuances, treatment of social and power dynamics etc between them, and there would be much to learn from analysing them. Particularly interesting is the work of Michel Foucault in this respect, theorising about the pouvoir-savoir (power-knowledge) dynamic for a large part of his career, and indeed until his end in 1984 with ‘Le courage de la verité’, and R. Devos’s epigraph refers to this work. We will briefly discuss his ‘pastorat’ account later on. But even if I will indeed go into some of them later on, I will not analyse these differences in depth here. Instead, I will focus on the task of using the insights of these thinkers to try and illuminate the current relations between truth-workers and the world outside. Thus, I will return to the aim of this essay: did Bernard Williams’s truth-free relativistic nightmare of this section become a reality?
1.2. Describing the current moment
Now that we know what Bernard Williams feared two decades ago, and what the philosophical backgrounds of those fears were, we now want to get to the question wether this has indeed become reality. And the first thing to do, is to get a picture of how things stand today. Stand today, that is, where it concerns the recognition of the value of truth and truthfulness by truth-workers (intellectuals) and their truth-taker audience (the public) and the general relation between these two groups today.
Allow me to introduce Alessandro Baricco (1958-), an Italian author, critic and philosopher. He first gained international renown in 2006 with I Barbari. In this bundle of essays, he is early to try and decipher what was happening in what we now commonly call the digital revolution—something Williams hardly discusses in his book TT: it had only barely become visible. Rather then commenting negatively and defensively against digital barbarians (the people working in the new global Google style companies, or embracing the commensurate life style), Baricco argued already then that the barbarians brought “a mutation that affected all of us and that would soon generate a new civilisation that was in some ways better than the one we had grown up in.” He crassly critiqued defensive reactions by his peer intellectuals, that instinctively wanted to stop whatever it was that was changing as “a widely held bias that i barbari destroyed things.” In addition, he denounced critical intellectuals’ motives, writing that “defending something, making sure it was not swept away by the winds of change, gave them a feeling of superiority.”[6]
Baricco will be our entry point into understanding the state things are today. In 2017, a decade after I Barbari, he published the article “La verità sulla post-verità”[7] (the truth about post-truth). Not because he will be concluding that yes, we are now indeed in a dreadful era of post-truth, and it is because of Trump and Brexit, but because he is on the contrary highly critical of the use of the term ‘post truth’, and of the truth-elites that use it, because—once more—he denounces the reasons why they introduce the term. He asks: why now, why over Trump, why over Brexit? And it is exactly his answering these questions that will shed light on what is going on, because something certainly is, if not this “era of post-truth”. It will shed light onto a slight change in “il nostro rapporto con la parola verità”[8] (our relation to the word truth). It will also shed light on the situation of the truth-workers, a situation that has become slippery at best, and more realistically a situation where they have been dethroned from their positions and are isolated from their public.
A—Spectacular blindness
Baricco is a passionate intellectual, a refined scholar and musician, a lovely man. And Baricco does not mince his words.
“This story of post-truth is una bufala [9] (a hoax, fake news). (..) Post-truth is the name that we elites give to lies when it is not us telling them, but the others. In other times, we used to call them heresies.”[10]
In this “brutal” sentence, Baricco immediately puts a distinction between elites and the rest center stage, a distinction made by elites. By employing the term heresy, he opens op an image of an attitude that Michel Foucault has called that of a ‘pastorat’, a priestly class that is there to ‘conduire les conduites’ (guiding of behaviours). And finally, an image of the pastorat not being followed, or not any more, in their guiding and guidance. The distinction has become division.
Indeed, he compares lies told by Colin Powell[11] to the UN Security Counsel on February 5th, 2003 (a respected elite four-star US general and Secretary of State) to lies told during the 2016 Brexit and Trump votes. He draws the following conclusions on “post-truth”:
1. There has never been an ‘era of truth’ preceding a supposed ‘era of post-truth’.
2. There are more data then ever, available to more people than ever by more various media channels than ever. Except if one believes that restricting all access to these data through one single channel where specialised people (intellectuals?) review these data and decide which can be published or not is somehow better, it is now more difficult to disperse lies and not be found out.
3. The main difference between the treatment of the Powell lies and the Trump/Brexit lies is this: Powell’s lies were more or less normal lies, same as what politicians had always done. But in the case of Brexit/Trump, we intellectual elites had tried so hard and at the same time had encountered so much difficulty, resistance even, “to focus people on facts, or rather what we (elites) considered facts.”[12]They were so convinced to be right, to know what was best, what were the facts, what was the truth, they had tried to explain this truth—their truth to voters, and still they went for Trump and Brexit anyway.
4. This is why the term post-truth is used in 2016, and not in 2003: Because it was all too shocking, or at least to the elites, so shocking that they leaped to the only conclusion: they were now in the era where facts did not matter, only gut feelings and legends did. An era of post-truth.
5. Nobody even considered that from the point of view of voters, from what mattered to them, the daily facts they perceived, the knowledge derived from these facts, even if mundane, the truth as they saw it, it was actually the best or more rational or more reasonable choice to vote as they did. To elites, it was was “more effective to preach about the arrival of a terrible upheaval that would spell the end of civilisation.”[13]
So, in Baricco’s account, what intellectual elites seemed to really be saying, was this: they found themselves playing an entirely new game, and moreover they were losing it. Truth-workers, credentialed and competent to be doing so, were no longer able to convey facts and truth to people—the audience have their own now. And the elite’s loss of control over truth was the death of truth.
Après nous (et certainement sans nous), le déluge.Baricco: “Che prezunzione, che mala fede, che menzogna, che bufala”
Such spectacular blindness.
B—Shifting Truth
So Baricco, speaking as an intellectual, is by his own admission “brutally” critical of the intellectual elite’s main reaction to the 2016 events as he analyses it. But at the same time he offers another insight: since the start of the digital revolution, 20-30 years ago, there is an underlying change of our relation to the word truth that is at play here, causing both the election results, and the intellectual reactions and responses that we have just discussed.
In this sense, the intellectuals are right to point out that something did change, that an era did end, and that another started, even if it is not ‘post-verità’.
However he immediately warns this underlying change is not: that there is a now a group of deplorables that have embraced myth, ignorance, illiberalism, and gut feelings, and there is a remnant of rational, liberal, truth seeking intellectuals trying to save humanity and civilisation. Trying to understand the complex situation we find ourselves in as a result of the digital revolution in those simplistic terms, is like making “sushi with an ax”[14], and it does look like the simplicity of the elite’s “post-truth era” account has been made with this ax. This and related explanations just do not make sense, because they are not truthful, nor respecting truth values (at the very least, the Accuracy one: we need to try harder)
The Game[15], both the title Baricco’s sequel to I Barbari, and the name he gives to the situation that is the result of the digital revolution, is very much more complex than that.
Understanding well that it is too soon to tell for sure, too soon to assess the flooding of a river while the flooding is still taking place, Baricco does make an illuminating ad hoc attempt to try to get more clarity of this changed relationship to truth.
In the same 2017 VPV article, he offers four insights on how we deal with ‘truth’ on a daily basis today, post-digital revolution. First: truth looks more like a film, a sequence of images, changing through time, than a fixed picture or painting. Second: we look for truth in things that travel efficiently through the world and its networked media, as opposed to a “segreto esoterico ” guarded and sanctioned by a “competent sect”. This does in no way mean that truth has been truncated from what is to be regarded as fact, it does mean that, thirdly, truth is the confluence of facts and storytelling or narrative, and successful truth-telling combines both, putting truth into the hands of storytellers, and not people who merely know the facts (which facts, and which not? Their facts? Their truth?). Storytellers that know how to look at the world and its facts and data—in Williams words: we do not lack facts, “there are only too many”[16]—and know what and how to select and narrate, are the ones we now look to in order to make sense of the world. And finally: the digital revolution, this Game, has given everybody anywhere anytime the tools to participate in truth-telling and sense-making, or at least information dissemination.
It is crucial to understand that Baricco is not making a normative claim, but a descriptive story: to the best of his ability, this is how the river is flooding. He also stresses that truth itself, its function, its meaning, how it informs us about the world and ourselves, did not change. What did change, is its ‘everyday design’. To understand what he is getting at, we should compare it to the 2007 introduction of the iPhone[17], redesigning something long known: the telephone. It is still a phone, nothing changed, yet everything changed, because of its superior design. One could still use it exactly as we used to use a fixed telephone, but nobody does. We like the new design way better. The same is true of truth and truthfulness in The Game. Of course, we need to learn, get accustomed. Of course, we see the dangers. But we still use the new design, because it simply is superior.
The four point analysis, combined with an awareness of how they interplay, is a sharp contrast with a previous situation, in which a special class of people held some ‘pastoral’ monopoly to truth and truth-telling, by truth-workers, that were supposed to make sense of the world. This gated situation of monopoly, with its qualities of stability, clarity, and legibility, has gone. And so has the status of the truth-working elites. The situation has become more unstable and slippery, and this is especially so for the truth-elites: in this Game, they are not dealing the cards any more, everybody has got their own decks now.
A special case are journalists. They are the truth-workers that most people are most often in contact with, and certainly at some point were. They are or were the first ones we turn to for everyday sense making. They are the truth-workers relentlessly putting out the daily “first rough draft of history”[18].
Official, credentialed journalists are now faced with a myriad of new outlets, some individual, some fringe, some organised, some obscure, some successful, websites, blogs, YouTubers, Twitter accounts, Spotify podcasts, etc. Some credentialed journalists have even switched sides. Some are reaching vast audiences[19]. Millions of people are now turning to this online world for their news, for their sense-making. For the public, if the digital revolution and the tools it has yielded were meant to liberate them from elitist systems ( and Baricco thinks they were, but I will not discuss this further here), the liberation succeeded. The key question, then, is a question we all have: are official journalists doing a better job then the new ones? Baricco’s answer is that it is hard to tell, but that that in itself is the death bell for official journalism as we have known it.
The point here is not that journalists cannot be trusted more or less before or after the digital revolution.[20]The point is that vast amounts of people think they are not, and now get their sense-making somewhere else, and that there is no compelling—truthful—case to tell them they are wrong, even if our sentiment were that we wanted there to be one, or think there should be one.
C—Elite sentiments
This brings us back to what we described before as the shock that truth-workers, Baricco’s elites, experienced at the 2016 Trump and Brexit votes. To deepen our understanding of where exactly truth-workers were and are since then, I will here turn to a number of thinkers offering compatible and wider insights. I will focus on elite sentiment, because, as we will see, this offers a mirror in which we can see why they (we?) do what they do.
1. Fear, urgency, unfair-mindedness
Martha Nussbaum (1947-) is one of the greatest humanist thinkers alive. A staunch defender of the humanities, she devoted a really large chunk of her philosophical life to understanding emotions in a social and political context. During the Trump election night, she was lucky enough to be in the glaring Tokyo daylight, preparing to receive the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, an honour often compared to the Noble Prizes. She was far away from everything, but the “election news kept coming in, producing first, increasing alarm and then, finally, both grief and a deeper fear, for the country and its people and institutions. I was aware that my fear was not balanced and fair-minded, so I was part of the problem I worried about.” Later that night, she decided that her work on (political) emotions had not gone deep enough, and her own fear told her that fear was the main issue here. She started writing right away, on the spot, about how fear is connected to anger, disgust, hostility, and how it makes them toxic.[21] Trust is undermined by fear, in personal matters, but also in politics, making what we should strive for, civic values such as reciprocity, balance, respect, fair-mindedness, impossible. She describes how she sees this refusal of trust all over the country now in her circles: anybody that voted for Trump, is to be viewed as an untrustworthy, hostile force, “..deplorables at best, fascists at worst.” Of course, the distrust is returned by Trump supporters, concluding that Nussbaum’s elite circles are “subversive enemies of real people.”[22]
Now who would not fear fascists? Who would want to be fair-minded to them? Did the same bloody 20thcentury not teach us that it is the worst— and if not the worst, than in any case a close second—in the contest of collectively righteous ideologies when it comes to destroying tens of millions of humans in the most horrendous of circumstances? Under this kind of threat, who would not grasp after control?
Frank Furedi (1947-) is a sociologist, a professor at Kent in Canterbury, and a maverick. He publishes and speaks on a wide range of topics, including immigration, borders, and the animosities between Hungary and the EU, but his main theme is and has been risk and uncertainty, and the difficulties Western societies increasingly have engaging with it, resulting in what he calls a ‘culture of fear’. In How Fear Works,[23] he links fear and morality to the backdrop of “a tendency to inflate the nature and range of threats faced by society.” and a “propensity to imagine that humanity is confronted with an existential crisis.”[24] He argues, facts and figures in hand, that the world has never been safer,[25] but that the prevailing “cultural script”[26] that the world has never been more dangerous, is underpinned by stories, narratives that “echo the tone of fundamentalist eschatological warnings about the end of time. ‘Time is running out’” Furedi suggests that these urgent “prophesies” have less to do with a practical and reasonable—shall we call them sincere and accurate?—assessment of risk, than they have to do with a sentiment of fear, overwhelm, and moral righteousness. To put it bluntly: we do not have to ask if we should panic, displaying the truth values in answering this question, because it is right to panic. It is just to panic. Right and just meaning: sanctioned by the prevailing, hegemonic social and moral code. “All moral tales act through sowing fear”.
Who needs fair-mindedness when the end is near and fear is a moral duty?
2. Anger and shared thrill
Anger is the natural first born of fear. We fear, and we lash out to the threat. Nussbaum speaks of ‘fear-anger’ and fear-blame. We want to hurt, we want to punish.[27]
Anger and fear are negative emotions. Shared fear is still negative. But shared anger is not, it is actually is thrilling, we want to stay in it. And that is what is driving us off a cliff. This is what Jonathan Haidt is telling us, a social psychologist at Stern in his 2012 book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.
When I said earlier that Martha Nussbaum was lucky enough to be in Japan the night Trump won, I meant that, in her own estimation, had she been in the company of her ‘tribe’, she would have probably fled into more soothing, more thrilling, more shared emotions that would have kept her from the insight that indeed she and her tribe were not the solution, not like that, but part of the problem[28]. Only the best of thinkers, such as Nussbaum is one, would give up a certain shared thrill for an uncertain bout of atomised but illuminating fear.
3. Disgust and the breaching of taboos
So when I said before, when discussing Baricco’s brutal yet illuminating—and I think truthful—onslaught, that nobody considered an alternative to the all too simple post-truth story, I exaggerated..At least the thinkers in this essay did: Baricco, Nussbaum, Furedi, Haidt. Another thinker did too: Hong Kong born political scientist Eric Kaufmann (1970-) of the School of Politics and Sociology at Birbeck College, London. Himself of an exceptionally mixed ethnic and religious background, his fields are national identity, and political/religious demography. In a monumental data-laden 2018 work Whiteshift. Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, Kaufmann links the demographic realities caused by migration into Western democracies, the attitudes to migration, and what this has meant and means in terms of options and potential responses for original European majorities in the past 20-30 years, today, and in the coming decades. One of these options is populism.
Kaufmann starts: “We need to talk about white identity. (..) an ethnic identity as any other. (..) The progressive storyline for white majorities is a morality tale celebrating their demise, and, as I hope to show, much of today’s populist reaction stems directly or indirectly from this trope.”[29] Much of the book is indeed concerned with a clash between a rising majority ethno-traditional nationalism, and an anti-traditionalist left-modernism,[30] that, quoting George Orwell, is the ideology of choice “in left-wing circles (where) it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being Englishman.”[31] That was 1930. After the murderous experience with fascism and communism, by the sixties left-modernism had gradually taken over as the “dominant sensibilities of the high culture.” However, and just as other triumphant ideologies before it, “as it gained ground, it turned moralistic and imperialistic, seeking not merely to persuade, but to institutionalise itself in law and policy, altering the basis of liberalism from tolerating to mandating diversity.”[32]
For Britain, this is the backdrop of a long and detailed explanation of the rise of majority populism after Thatcher, and its clash with the culturally dominant left-modernism exactly around the theme of diversity, multiculturalism and immigration, culminating in the 2016 Brexit vote. Kaufmann recounts how in various waves the majority traditionalist has had to push against a cultural and social taboo not to challenge the moral and imperialistic mandate of diversity. The way to guard a cultural taboo is punishment by indignation and disgust[33], and the guardians, like previous pastorats before them, are the left-modernist elites, with their charges of moral deviancy. To maintain the taboos in place, tactics of occlusion of definitions (racism, ant-racism, multicultural, etc) are not eschewed “in order to paint critics of multiculturalism as monocultural racists.”[34]
This works, and can work for decades, even with the occasional ups and downs. Until it doesn’t. Citing preference theory economist Timur Kuran’s notion of preference falsification[35], Kaufmann explains how people comply with a social norm that they do not agree with because they believe others do, while others do the same. Then the social norm gets challenged, as Trump did, as the Leave campaign did, as other populists do, and sceptics find each other. Révolte contre le pastorat, and Brexit gets done.
The elite side, however, left-modernism in Kaufmann’s account, is not giving up on its taboos, which they now see massively breached, causing equally massive social disgust. This is part of our current moment, everyday.
Revisiting Nussbaum, it is easy to see how disgust is keeping us away from danger, or at least, recalling Furedi, from what we fear (or are socially instructed to fear). It is more difficult to see how this disgust could be “socially constructive, since what the disgusted want to do is flee, rather than to to solve the problem.”[36] This seems especially true if the fear and disgust are socially sanctioned and based on rather loose or outright occluded definitions.
4. Disdain, credentials, and the last prejudice
Michael Sandel (1953-) is a True Liberal Harvard Philosopher not too far from the Rawlsian school of Justice Theory. In his 2020 book The Tyranny of Merit. What’s become of the Social Good[37], Sandel includes a chapter “4. Credentialism: the Last Acceptable Prejudice”. Citing Belgian, Dutch and British surveys, he writes that to college-educated respondents, poorly educated people are most disliked, more than any of the other disfavoured groups in the surveys. Moreover, for this prejudice towards the less-credentialed, no shame is felt, no embarrassment is reported. “They may denounce racism and sexism but are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated.” So when “by 2016, many working people chafed under the sense that well-schooled elites looked down on them with condescension”, this sense was not unwarranted, and it is easy to understand how this fuelled—and continues to fuel—backlash against the elites and their narratives.[38]
One could not say that no one had ever raised a warning hand at elite journalists, politicians, thinkers. An older example, of 2007, is our own Joost Zwagerman, and his pamphlet De Schaamte voor Links[39], in which at various turns he vents his outrage at the “lacherigheid en het dédain” (derision and disdain) with which questions around traditional values and the disconnect between leftist élites and historical working class electorates were dismissed. Unbearably lightly.
5. Offended censoring
Who censors? How does the censor do it? What are the effects on the censored? What is auto-censure? Does one lie to authorities? Why does the censor do it, purportedly? Why does he do it, really?
Purportedly? In the interest of the community[40]. Really? Because he is weak. Because he feels threatened. Because he is offended, and this means he must be losing power, and fears to be powerless already, or soon if he does not act now[41].
These are answers given by Nobel Laureate for Literature J.M. Coetzee ( in his 1996 Giving Offense. Essays on Censorship.[42] As a South-African novelist, he is in a good position to tell us about censorship, as he saw the coming and going of the Apartheid system’s censorship apparatus. He also studied communist censorship practices, and Erasmus of Rotterdam’s views on church censoring.
We have seen Eric Kaufmann’s account of the role of taboo in enforcing moral elite codes, and how they crumbled under the traditionalist pressure and critique of immigration policies. It is not far fetched to imagine how a desire to censor would have arisen, a desire to silence, to exclude from the discussion, to acknowledge the distance from the deplorables, supported with the remnants of the punishing taboo edict, in places (elite newspapers, for instance) and to the extent they still worked.
In any case, what we now call cancel culture, the practices of following, unfollowing, blocking and ghosting on social media, point in the direction of these desires. Moreover, it is now a matter of public record that at least the US government have undertaken large scale pressuring of social media companies (facebook, twitter) to suppress dissenting narratives when it comes to Covid-19 responses. We also know that this was—must have been—in the interest of the community.
6. Shame and international prestige
Going back to Kaufmann’s study, he makes an interesting point. In the successive waves of traditionalist informed nationalist challenges of the left-liberal cultural norms, elites developed in response their own brand of national pride, one devoid of traditional or ethnic ties—still living by the Orwell quote. Kaufmann calls it ‘civic’ nationalism. The pride that one’s nation has reached prominence in civic progress: LGBT rights, cultural progress, positive discrimination, and so on. This pride is felt not towards the imagined audience of the traditionalist countrymen, but towards other likeminded elites in other countries.
The affront, then, of being a citizen of Brexit country, or under a Trump president, or no doubt a 45% Le Pen vote, or another number, or another populist etc, causes shame, the shame of loss of international standing. Prestige anxiety.
7. Elite sentiments and business models
Shock at the loss of power. Urgent fear and socially sanctioned moral panic. Anger thrillingly shared within the tribe. Disgust for the taboo breachers. Disdain for the uncredentialed. Offence and desire for censoring. And shame and status loss at the sight of international peers. Not a happy picture. Not a sowing ground for rapprochement. Naturally, these sentiments are broadly, if not all, mirrored in sentiments of the other side, the public. And they might have to be supplemented (e.g. envious states) if we were to have a full picture of them. However, this is not the point, nor is it to bash elites summarily. On the contrary, we will need this indeed not very positive picture because we have asked a question about Williams’s nightmare. And in this elites, truth workers, the humanities, played a crucial role.
Before we do move on in this further enquiry, I want to add one more element, also in defence of truth elites as being stuck in an economic situation they have no control over. It is an element of the changed economic circumstances of journalists, and with them other truth-worker categories[43]. It will give us another element that will steer in the direction of narrowing of the debate, putting ‘narrative’ before ‘truth and truthfulness’, and a state of isolation between official journalism and large parts of the public.
In Williams’s time, media outlets (newspapers, tv channels) made their money from advertisements, and the thing to be avoided was for the press was to “not simply to promote their own activities and (in a phrase of R. H. Tawney’s) to sell pieces of paper with nonsense printed on one side and advertisements on the other.”[44]Indeed, the business model was to reach as broad an audience as one possibly could, and then sell all these eyeballs to ad companies. Moreover, to sell a lot (to have a so called supportive selling environment), media channels needed to be associated with positive values, such as poise, consensus, shared information. Stability, clarity, legibility: manufacturing consent. And consumption.
That business model is over, and the digital revolution is to blame. In Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarisation[45], Andrey Mir details the history of journalism and its economic models. As the bulk of the ad revenues are now in the books of The Game corporations (Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter,..), legacy media outlets have had to switch to maximising reader revenues. This means subscriptions, returning loyal customers. And the subscribers don’t come for the news, they get that from social media feeds. They come for validation of the news. Journalism wanted to bring a true and truthful picture of the world. This picture was called ‘the news’. Postjournalism, a validation service, is an effort to make the world fit a preconceived picture, a narrative, a narrative that works for a particular audience—a paying audience. Or rather, a narrative that keeps the audience coming, clicking, subscribing, crowdfunding. Postjournalism is crowdfunded narrative driven journalism.
To illustrate how this works without a more thorough analysis, it is a truism that “readers must worry. A fact that is (..) rather positive, is nevertheless framed as bad news, “soliciting negative emotion, starting with fear. And then anger, outrage, disgust, all around the working narrative that needs to be supported.. because that is a “supportive selling environment”, returning if indeed polarising subscribers.” Polarisation as a postjourno media effect.
D—The current moment
We have in this chapter taken a look at prevailing attitudes to truth and truthfulness, and how these attitudes are held by truth-elites, in relation to their audiences. We have seen that this relation has been heavily perturbed, that elites have lost and at least alienated their audiences, due to mutual distrust. We have seen that various dynamics, sentiments, and incentives (social, moral, economic) are steering away from a situation in which parties are (again) exchanging truthful stories that try, amongst other things, to convince other parties. As Williams noted, the decision to try (or not) to reason and convince rather then sneer and snub, or whatever other toxic lack of constructive truth-based and not postjournalistic narrative based exchange, is in itself political[46]. One could not be blamed for despairing at the prospects of such constructive steps from what we have seen.
We have also seen an account of how al this is influenced and made more complex by the digital revolution and the still developing situation it has yielded: The Game and its adapted truth design.
1.3 A truth-free nightmare
Richard Rorty, that was the name of William’s main target, the thinker that most embodied the truth relativism that Williams predicted, at least feared, maybe expected, would turn nightmarish, his “we may well lose everything” In Rorty’s 1989 work Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity[47], discussing ‘the contingency of community’, Rorty writes “A liberal society is one which is content to call "true" (or "right" or "just") whatever the outcome of undistorted communication happens to be, whatever view wins in a free and open encounter.”[48]
After Baricco’s account of our new relation to truth and its dissemination in The Game, I cannot help but imagine Rorty saying ‘well not thát free, not thát open, not thát undistorted.’ And even ‘not without us, not without our guidance’, which would echo Williams’s observation that Rorty and his like-minded relativists “think that we can do without these illusions [truth and truthfulness], and get on as well or better without them, but they believe this only because they really assume that the truth—their truth—will set us free.”[49]
Furthermore, in Rorty’s “liberal utopia”, there would be a “general turn against theory and toward narrative,” meaning novels, movies, TV programs replacing “sermon and treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress.” [50]
Something must have gone wrong during decades of liberal cultural hegemony. It is always possible, as with all utopian projects, that its realisation is just around the corner, or the next one, but from what we have seen, it is clear that there is no lack at all of sermoning and preaching, and no lack of treatises either, even if they are written by pastors for the own parish, and not for the straying flock, that, by now, is perfectly happy with its new range of Game-proof and thus shepherdless prophets and priests.
In seriousness, I believe we have gathered enough material to conclude that a lot of what Williams feared would happen, did indeed become a reality.
1
We have seen that there in now a postjournalist practice immersed with negative sentiments and unconstructive incentives where truth is not the goal, certainly not widely shared truth, but rather a motivated defense of a narrative that leads, or is endlessly thought to lead, or is in any case asserted to lead to social or political goals, much like Rorty prescribed. These goals are for instance (a specific idea of ) liberal democracy, specific views around immigration, around climate response, or sex and gender, around what should be part of public discourse, or public health discourse, and what should not and how to keep it out by use of taboo or censorship.
Truth, where mentioned, is a concept to be instrumentalised in function of these in principle laudable goals. The curious practice of fact-checking is no exception, but a revealing feature: even if at times mundanely useful in specific cases, the salience gatekeeping (what is checked? What is not? Why not?) and the immersion with the incentives and sentiments we have seen, make it a part of the narrative driven postjournalist dynamic.
2
The intellectuals loss of authority that Williams warned against, is now a mere fact. The theatre is empty, or if it is not, it is colleagues of the theatre company taking a seat, other ‘professionals’, not the public. Behind closed doors, this loss of authority based on truth and truthfullness is not disputed, where it is instead asserted that authority comes from claimed social and moral objectives, solidarity, unity. It could not come from actually attaining these goals, because that would involve accurately and sincerely (and really) measuring real life progress against the stated goals. In any case, when all else fails, there is always the authority to be gained from ‘just looking down’ on the uncredentialed.
3
Williams warned against a collective intellectual alienation, based on, amongst other things, the persistent belief to be right without applying the truth values, and then again, the being convinced of what people in the know of the “segreto esoterico” collectively know. The truth—their truth—is now a moral imperative that will set us all free, if only the deplorables would listen. What we see is indeed a righteous priestliness, a demand for deference, for trust in the experts. But it is not just their specific knowledge that we should trust, it is a whole cultural idea, a cosmology of how the world works (and it maybe did, once), what Kaufmann labelled left-modernism. To think that the taboos and accusations of blasphemy against a cosmology that is simply not shared still hold power, is and will in my view increase to be exposing the extent of the alienation of elites and their institutions from large parts of society and the realities of the public (“real people”) in them.
4
People do not turn to truth-elites for sense-making, and they will not be returning any time soon. I do not know wether this is because the public has indeed decided that they are “boring, tiresome and useless”, but if they had, they would do what they are doing now.
5
Another aspect of what Williams warned about, was the move to replace truth-grounded authority and capacity for sense-making with an urgency, a plea, no time to waste, if we do not act now,.. and we have indeed seen how these eschatology narratives are playing out, exacerbated by the mere fact that apocalypse sells.
Here we agree. It is indeed time for something else. This is a nightmare.
PART 2: —HOPE AND TRUTH—
“The hope that a truthful story on a large enough scale will not cause despair is already hope.” Bernard Williams
2.1 Reading Williams. Being an intellectual
Two things have always been clear to me in my conscious lifetime.
1
Truth, as a concept, as a daily reality and category, and also objective truth, have always been a given to me. It would be easy to attribute this to an engineering background, but I do not believe this is accurate. More accurate would be to link it to the practical reasoning required in situations of organisational and entrepreneurial decision making, in which I have been involved for decades, and still am.. These are not possible without a (strong) notion of, and proclivity towards, distinguishing between what is the case, what might be, and what is not. In turn impossible without a strong sense of ‘truth’. Moreover, not lying, not even to oneself, is the first responsibility in such a setting, innately introducing both truth virtues we have discussed. Only in a philosophy seminar (luckily far from all of them), could one imagine assertions and a fist fight amount to be the same thing. Or that business decisions can be taken without a sense of truth, and firmly employing truth virtues.
Reading Williams did not change that. How could it? What it did do, is turning something that had long been a given into a passion.
When after a quarter century break from studying philosophy I re-entered the field again in late Spring of 2022, my first idea was to focus on the subjects I really liked when I was younger: epistemology, philosophy of science and related topics. Instead, and to my surprise, I developed a taste for political philosophy, and for the history of ideas.I especially enjoy the area where the two worlds touch, e.g. social epistemology. Reading Williams made me realise/conclude a couple of things.
1. Not surprisingly, I am largely on board with his argument. I share his passion for truth and its value, and I share his weariness for the world of boring, uninspiring, useless, if not destructive strand of philosophy that he critiqued, as did I in Part 1 in this essay
2. Truth, as I wrote earlier, as a subject has now evolved from a strong interest to a passion. TT provides a wealth of arguments, considerations, moves, turns, not for the sake of the moving and turning, but for the sake of clarifying, illuminating the subject. This is has been a very interesting experience. I have studied his essay in depth. Multiple times. And, as a good inhabitant of the 2022-23 Game, on multiple media.(audio, e-book, paper). And to be honest, I am not through with him.
3. In many ways, Williams offers not only an argument, but also a role model for how to construct an account, and how to interact with a reader. In my view, to use his words, this work is what philosophy should be, both in its objectives (useful and truthful) and in its qualities (reasonable, illuminating, convincing)[51] This is a high bar, and a sufficient bar.
4. In addition, it is dense. It is personal and the opposite of aloof detachment, and in his case, personal means the reader is conversing with a mature and still passionate, maybe as passionate than ever in the face of death—the result of half a century of western philosophy, and what a century that was. We should revisit it more often.
5. I will come back to it often, to its bloody-minded rigor, to its density, recalling the words by Barthes that rereading is required not to read the same thing everywhere.
6. An analogy: in my experience, reading Nozick and Rawls within reasonably small time gaps of each other, makes them both more interesting. The same goes for Rorty and Williams. It would surprise me if Rorty would prove to grow into a personal favourite, but he is an interesting read indeed. I owe that experience to reading Williams.
7. Maybe a strange point from a fifty-year old: reading Williams taught me how to read, read better, and reread, and think and write, and then reread again. Reiterating the point I will come back to him. One should prefer reading good books five times over five average works.
2
I have always been interested in the world, an innate curiousness, even as a child, reading anything from children’s Bibles, world history, stories, even Atlases and Encyclopaedias.
Now, does that make an intellectual, a truth worker, or, can I even be one, do I want to be one? Some preliminary thoughts.
I certainly want to say something. The picture of ‘Lies and Despair’ is a painful one, and it is happening in a space that, in a broad sense and at least in principle, I would include in a “we”. As in “we need to do something, we need to fix this” And I find myself passionately looking for what it is, precisely, that I want to say, and to whom exactly. And at the same time, I personally perceive the desire—I hope that this is clear from this essay—to make sense of the world, and hopefully assist others in making sense of it too.
On Williams’s account and mine, living the virtues of truth is essential for any constructive effort to fix our sense-making world and institutions. I see these as virtues I can (further) fully embrace.
I will return to these questions later on. Let me first bring some hope where there was despair: the nightmare account.
2.2 Nightmare: yes, but maybe not all is lost
In part 1, we have concluded that Williams’s nightmare had to a large extent realised itself, how and why.
But some qualification is in order. Not all is lost: Thinkers, the Public, the Game.
1. Not all is lost: Thinkers
I have substantiated my account with quite a number of thinkers in various fields, providing illuminating, reasoned, and truthful accounts that have provided us with knowledge, insight, building blocks. Even if I stand by the conclusion that our cultural moment is a perilous one, and that in particular there is a pervasive and toxic elite culture that seems to be stuck on and into itself, many great and brilliant thinkers continue to do what they do best: helping people to make sense of the world. These thinkers cover any ideological range: from Sandel to Furedi, from Kaufmann to Nussbaum, Mir to Coetzee, and all combinations of and between them.
This is good news.
2. Not all is lost: The Public
The public is not lost. The public is doing great with its new tools and possibilities bringing newfound freedoms. Not everything is perfect, but it has never been perfect. I would say, all in all: progress.
To illustrate this, I believe we should be more appreciative of the millions and millions of weekly downloads that long form podcasts enjoy in politics, sociology, history, science, technology, philosophy, and general interest. These are serious subjects, discussed and handled seriously, for hours on end every week, produced by people who understand the Game, and the public loves it. This is just progress, and huge progress too. And bottom line, this means that the public, or large chunks of it, have not given up on finding truthful sources that can help them make sense of the world. Trust in elites is broken, commitment to truth and to truthfulness is not—in fact, this was one of the main reasons why the trust was broken in the first place: they wanted facts and truth, and they got postjournalist narrative.
This is good news again.
3. Not all is lost:The Game.
Whatever one thinks of the digital revolution, it is there, it isn’t out of the bottle, it will take new forms, forms that we cannot imagine yet. It will not go away, primarily because we love it, like we love our smart phones, well aware of the risks and trade-offs.
This does not mean we should not pay attention. On the contrary, we should pay much more attention. But not defensively, conservatively, but always looking for opportunities to solve the problems that have been raised in this essay. This river is flowing, and surfing beats drowning. We have no choice. All in all, in my view, more reasons to be optimistic than pessimistic.
2.3 Two more things about Intellectual elites today
A—Not like this
Intellectual elites, as we have seen, are doing something wrong. They are doing a lot wrong. And they should stop it. Let me illustrate with an example: a radio interview with an editor of a leading Western European broadsheet paper, in occurrence Pieter Klok of De Volkskrant[52]. He explains why no dissenting views will nor should be included for the public to read, even if it is plainly and fully admitted that the truth of the matter concerning the Covid outbreak is far from clear at this stage.
I choose to keep the original Dutch interview for detail and nuance on behalf of Dutch speakers. English translation in notes. Note: RIVM is the Dutch Public Health Institute.
- Klok: Als de angst zo groot is, moeten we echt wel proberen zoveel mogelijk uit één mond te praten
- Interviewer: Ja vind jij dat?
- Ja vind ik zeker
- Want er ligt toch ook een journalistieke taak om te kijken naar: wat zijn consequenties van beleid? Je moet ook niet alles voor zoete koek aannemen-slikken (eat it all up on faith)
- Normaal niet, maar als de angst in de samenleving groot is, vind ik het van belang dat je het probeert eens te worden, en niet de tegenstelling uit te vergroten, en dat gebeurde gisteren volgens mij wel. Ik denk niet dat je van iedereen kunt verwachten dat zelf hierover een oordeel kunnen vellen, en dat doe je eigenlijk wel door allemaal virologen op hen af te sturen.
- Maar op het moment dat niet alle virologen het eens zijn met elkaar, wat doe je dan als media?
- Nou ja, ik denk dat het verstandig is om als land één lijn te trekken om die lijn te steunen en en we weten allemaal dat elke lijn.. dat we heel veel niet weten, dus elke lijn die je kiest, daar valt heel veel op af te dingen, dus dat is gewoon een feit, dat weten we. Maar moet je dan op dat afdingen gaan uitvergroten (salience, what we are thinking about!) of gewoon zorgen dat we bij elkaar blijven (“solidarity”) en gewoon die ene lijn steunen, en die ene lijn is vrij goed onderbouwd hè, een heel instituut zit daar achter (trust the institution, not the deplorables). Het is, tegelijkertijd, we kennen het virus nog niet helemaal, we weten niet precies hoeveel mensen besmet zijn, dus er zijn veel onzekerheden, dat zal, dus je moet in onzekerheid een keuze maken. Dan weet je nooit of dat de goede keuze is, maar ik denk toch dat het belangrijk is dat we allemaal samen even achter één keuze gaan staan
- En is het dan als er iemand zich meldt bij jullie op de redactie van De Volkskrant met allerlei gegevens en zegt van ik denk dat het wel belangrijk is dat we dat geluid horen, maar het is wel een ander geluid dan het beleid van het kabinet en de strategie die gekozen wordt door een RIVM, dan…doe je dat niet?
- Nou ja, ik zou zeggen, de RIVM is een instituut hè. We hebben in het verleden discussie gehad toen de boeren de uitkomsten van het RIVM betwijfelden. We vonden dat allemaal gemiddeld genoeg vrij schandalig en nu is dat ineens heel normaal geworden. Ja ik vind dat euh, ik zie de noodzaak niet. Er zitten gewoon hele goede mensen, mensen die daar de hele dag aan werken, dag en nacht onderzoek doen, en dan zouden wij als bevolking daar ook nog een mening over moeten hebben. Ik zou zeggen laten we ons op andere dingen richten, onze energie stoppen in elkaar helpen hier doorheen te komen en niet alle energie in de discussie over de vraag: wat is nu de goede aandacht, of de goede aanpak, dat kan het RIVM heel goed bepalen.
One could use the section on ‘Elite sentiments’ as a check list and see how far we get ( the superior distrust in the public, the disdain, the deference to experts, even if it is fully clear that they too do not have a full picture, the censorship ‘in the interest of the community, etc etc), but that is not my point. My point is, that if trust is to be restored, then elites should stop doing this. This era is over. It is too late, the Game is too far developed, the truth cannot be managed and sanctioned centrally and top down by Baricco’s “competent sect”. Institutions that do not learn this lesson, and the truth-workers in it, will continue to be distrusted and suffer, or perish. I believe some will.
Another point is that me, personally, would not, could not involve myself in this past era institutional truth-averse (non-)sense-making.
B—In defence of truth elites
Notwithstanding the continued critique of truth-elites throughout this essay, I want to briefly, maybe all too briefly, include another perspective. Of course, many people in these truth-elite institutions did cause much of their own situation, or their predecessors did, but it is also true that they too are stuck in a situation that is unsatisfactory in many ways. It is appropriate to approach this with a level of empathy, especially where it concerns the economic aspects, and also where it concerns younger people. These are people that deserve all attention they need. Time well spent.
2.5 In defence of conspiracy theories.
To drive a point home of another approach and another attitude, I will now argue in defence of conspiracy theories, and at the very least another treatment of members of the public raising them. Kindly bear with me.
1. Conspiracies are ubiquitous in the history of mankind. And when a suspicion that one might be in preparation or operation, a theory, this theory might later prove to be right. And if you do not believe me, I will tell you about that time the CIA tricked a four-star general and Secretary of State to tell the world that some dictator of some oil-rich Arab country.. you get my point. Or that time the NYT tried to tell us Poland had just invaded Nazi-Germany. Or when people tabled the possibility that the high profile Wuhan Institute of Virology might have had some role in the viral outbreak in the same city in 2019. The rational, truthful, truth-virtuous response is to assess the claims, and compare them to other potential explanations, and eventually postpone judgement to do some fact-finding. This is not what happened. Instead, people were accused of racism (the taboo), and dismissed as tabling an impossible claim. This (that the claim was impossible) was plainly not true, as is now clear to everyone.
2. More importantly, what would happen if we could see the merit of a conspiracy theory to at least try to make sense of a situation that does not make sense to the theorist. A desire for a truthful story, a nefarious one, for sure, where there is no better one available, or not to him. A common course of events leading up to the formulation of a conspiracy might be:
a. Things do not stack up. Something seems off.
b. The institutional narrative does not make sense, or there is none, and/or is not congruent with what people already know, or experience.
c. But Institutions (state departments, newsrooms, virology institutes, RIVM, ..) are not transparent, and the truth to the public, one that would make sense, cannot be found without getting to the facts within: the public does not dispose of the ‘esoteric data’
d. So no narrative is available, no facts to create a truthful one. Still the experience (something is off) is there.
e. So a new explanation, typically with a pernicious role for the institution, is created.
3. The standard treatment by elites today comes down to: dismissing it with disdain, silencing it, ignoring it. But which conspiracy theorist has ever concluded he was wrong because he was scorned, silenced, or ignored?
4. A better attitude, in my opinion, is to approach the theory with respect and civility, and contrary to what is happening today in the elite vs public dynamic, lauding the commitment to try to get to the truth, and to make sense of a situation.
5. I believe this is a better platform, whatever the circumstances, to start a conversation that would identify or generate other competing explanations, maybe less nefarious, maybe more truthful.
The point here is not that I claim to have presented a golden formula to debunk conspiracy theories, if indeed they are wrong, or that any conspiracy should be believed and receive immense attention at any rate. The point is though, if we do want to restore hope and truth in our culture and its dealings with data and knowledge, respect and civility are sure to work better and foster mutual trust and fair-mindedness than scorn and contempt. We could have understood this by now.
Another handle might be to approach any similar situation bearing two questions in mind: is there something I know that they don’t, and what is the best way to convey this knowledge taking the situation of the other party into consideration? And is there something they might know that I don’t, and what is the best way to find that out? Civility, respect, fair-mindedness and normal humility. Virtues that go well with truth virtues.
2.6 Intellectuals in a free society
In conclusion, I will now offer some ideas, in very broad terms, enabling a renewed relation between truth elites and their estranged audiences. I will draw on work by Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) in the seventies, that has afterwards largely been ignored. One could say he got cancelled for labouring against the prevailing ideas of the primacy of (the natural) sciences—but I will not expand further on this. Instead, I will draw on his less theoretical work of 1978 Science in a Free Society.[53] Feyerabend asks the question wether, in a free society, Science should deserve the highest of places in a free society, comparable to what the church deserved in earlier times. Feyerabend complains that, whereas church and state are now “carefully separated, state and science however work closely together.”[54] This causes Science, once a “liberating force”[55] to have taken over the place of the church, “now turning man into a slave of its [science’s] interest.”[56]
The important point he is making is that science was a liberating force because of circumstance (i.e. the hegemony of the church), and not for any reasons intrinsic to science. “There is nothing in science or any other ideology that makes them inherently liberating.”
This leads him to propose a relativism of what he calls “ideologies” or “traditions” But it is a very different form of relativism than the one we have encountered in Part 1, and that is the general point I am trying to make here. Where we have seen that ‘Rorty’s’ relativism, to simplify the matter, seemed to have the effect of concentrating power and prestige at the intellectual elites (until, remembering Timur Kuran’s preference falsification dynamic, the spell breaks), Feyerabend claims that his relativism of traditions works the other way around: “Relativism is often attacked not because one has found a fault, but because one is afraid of it. Intellectuals are afraid of it because relativism threatens their role in society just as the enlightenment once threatened the existence of priests and theologians (..) It is the realisation that one’s own most cherished point of view may turn out to be just one of many ways of arranging life.”[57]
He goes on to develop how this should work: open exchange between traditions, and layman oversight of all traditions, opening querying of elites about the true extent of their specific special knowledge, and its limitations, for instance because of an intellectual consensus that is more the reflection of a political decision, than actual and honest full epistemic alignment.
There’s much more to the reading of SFS almost half a century after its publishing date, and I believe we should be reading it. But I hope to have given a sense of the promise that ‘Feyerabend’s relativism’ holds: a level playing field between elites and competing ideologies or traditions. I am confident that Eric Kaufmann would agree that, had such a level playing field been available to the competing traditions that clashed in the past 20-30 years, Britain would now be in the EU, and the EU would indeed have stronger support amongst its citizens.
Laudable goals indeed. And measurable too.
I conclude for now by proposing that a relativistic outlook, not the corrupting one of Part 1, but the humbler one presented here, would be predisposed to foster humility, civility, respect, mutual fair-mindedness and trust.
And shared truth-seeking. And, I may hope: hope.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
VPV BARICCO, Alessandro (2017) La verità sulla post-verità
https://www.democraziapura.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2017-Baricco.pdf
TG BARICCO, Alessandro (2018) The Game (McSweeneys, San Francisco)
CHAPPELL, Sophie-Grace and SMYTH, Nicholas, "Bernard Williams", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/williams-bernard/>.
GO COETZEE, J.M. (1997) Giving Offense. Essays on Censorship (The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London)
DEVOS, Rob (2013) Waarheid spreken in politiek, onderwijs en vriendschap. Michel Foucault over de parrèsia (Garant, Antwerpen-Apeldoorn)
SFS FEYERABEND, Paul (1978) Science in a Free Society (NLB, London)
HFW FUREDI, Frank (2018) How Fear Works (Bloomsbury Continuum, London)
HAIDT, Jonathan (2012) The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, NY NY)
WS KAUFMANN, Eric (2018) Whiteshift. Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities(Penguin Books, London)
PJ MIR, Andrej (2020) Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarisation (Andrey Miroshnichenko, Toronto)
MOF NUSSBAUM, Martha C. (2018) Monarchy of Fear (Oxford University Press, Oxford UK)
RINDSBERG, Ashley (2021) The Grey Lady Winked, How The New York Times’s Misreporting, Distortions, and Fabrications Radically Alter History (Midnight Oil Publishers LLC, San Fransisco)
CIS RORTY, Richard (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK)
TM SANDEL, Michael J. (2020) The Tyranny of Merit. What’s become of the Social Good (Allen Lane, London)
TT WILLIAMS, Bernard (2002) Truth and Truthfulness (Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ)
SL ZWAGERMAN, Joost (2007) De Schaamte voor Links (Querido-Fosfor, Amsterdam)
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[1] “Liever dan alleen maar een geleerde, is de intellectueel een parrèsiastès.” in DEVOS, Rob (2013) Waarheid spreken in politiek, onderwijs en vriendschap. Michel Foucault over de parrèsia. (Speaking the truth in politics, education and friendship. Michel Foucault on parrèsia)
[2] TT §1.1, p.7
[3] Chappell, Sophie-Grace and Nicholas Smyth, "Bernard Williams", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2018 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/williams-bernard/>.
[4] TT p.7
[5] TT §§1.1-1.2, 3.4
[6] TG p. 12 This is Baricco looking back in the sequel to I Barbari (The Barbarians), i.e. The Game (2018). Already here he is pointing at the motives and emotions of the intellectual elites to shed lights on the events he is describing.
[7] VPV: https://www.democraziapura.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2017-Baricco.pdf
[8] VPV p.2
[9] VPV p.1
[10] VPV p.2
[11] Excerpt of Colin Powell’s Address to the United Nations Security Council:: “..every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” This was later proven to be without any substantiation. Powell later called the episode a painful blot on his record. The casualty numbers are all disputed, but excess death estimates range in the millions of victims since the Iraq invasion in 2003.
[12] VPV p.2 and TG p.273. Some of VPV is reproduced and expanded in TG pp.270-274, also 280-291. I will largely base myself on VPV in this essay.
[13] TG p. 273
[14] TG p.271
[15] TG: BARICCO, Alessandro (2018) The Game
[16] TT §10.2 structures and explanations.
[17] TG p. 274
[18] Attributed to past Washington Post Publisher Philip L. Graham, even if there is some dispute about this.
[19] A few names worth mentioning: Bari Weiss, formerly Wall Street Journal and NYT. Joe Rogan, a comedian and sports commenter who is reaching more people with his series of long form (!) podcast then ‘official’ cable tv. Jordan Peterson, reaching tens of millions of people across different platforms. It would in my view very much illuminate the topic under discussion to analyse what it is that they are doing, and why they are successful. My intuition is that they have found a way and continue to find ways to play ‘The Game’ as it now is. Also worth including is the strange case of Elon Musk at twitter, rescinding former censorship rules after acquiring control of the company in October 2022. I will for lack of space not pursue this further here.
[20] A sobering if not damning account on the reporting of official journalism’s icon and ‘paper of record’ The New York Times when it mattered most (Hitler, Stalin, Vietnam, Castro, Colin Powell, Trump, Woke etc) is offered by Ashley Rindsberg in The Grey Lady Winked, e.g. documenting the paper’s reports on the Polish invasion of Germany on 1 September 1939.
[21]MOF Martha C. Nussbaum Monarchy of Fear (2018) pp.i-ii
[22] MOF pp.7-8
[23] HFW FUREDI, Frank (2018) How Fear Works
[24] HFW pp.28-29
[25] This echoes similar and sustained accounts by contemporary rationalists such as H. Rosling or S. Pinker.
[26] HFW p.15
[27] MOF p.70
[28] MOF p.xviii
[29] WS KAUFMANN, Eric (2018) Whiteshift. Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, p.1
[30] WS p 21
[31] WS p.3
[32] WS pp.21-22
[33] WS p.144
[34] WS p.351
[35] WS p. 343
[36] MOF p.115
[37] TM SANDEL, Michael J. (2020) The Tyranny of Merit. What’s become of the Social Good
[38] TM pp.95-96
[39] SL ZWAGERMAN, Joost, (2007) De Schaamte voor Links
[40] GO p.9
[41] GO p.6
[42] GO COETZEE, J.M. (1997) Giving Offense. Essays on Censorship
[43] I will not analyse or argue this further here, but it is not difficult to imagine how e.g. academics are equally subject to a narrative driven business model today, especially before reaching tenure. See below regarding Mir’s narrative driven/ postjournalism account.
[44] TT § 9.2
[45] PJ MIR, Andrej (2020) Postjournalism and the death of newspapers. The media after Trump: manufacturing anger and polarisation
[46] TT p.261
[47] CIS RORTY, Richard (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
[48] CIS p.67
[49] TT p.60
[50] CIS pp.xv-xvi
[51] TT p.19
[52]
English translation:
(RIVM is the Dutch Public Health Institute)
Klok: If the fear is so great, we really should try to speak with one voice.
Interviewer: Do you think so?
Yes, I definitely do.
Because there is also a journalistic duty to look at the consequences of policies. You shouldn't just take everything at face value.
Normally not, but if the fear in society is great, I think it is important to try to come to an agreement, and not to exaggerate the differences, and that happened yesterday, in my opinion. I don't think you can expect everyone to be able to make a judgment about this themselves, and that is actually what you do by sending all these virologists their way.
But what do you do as media when not all virologists agree with each other?
Well, I think it is wise for a country to draw one line to support that line, and we all know that every line...that we don't know a lot, so every line you choose, there is a lot to be criticized about, that is just a fact, we know that. But do you then exaggerate the criticism or just make sure we stay together ("solidarity") and support that one line, and that one line is pretty well substantiated, there is a whole institution behind it (trust the institution, not the deplorables). At the same time, we don't yet fully understand the virus, we don't know exactly how many people are infected, so there are a lot of uncertainties, that will always be the case, so you have to make a choice in uncertainty. Then you never know if that is the right choice, but I think it is important that we all stand behind one choice for now.
And if someone comes to your editorial office at De Volkskrant with all kinds of data and says, "I think it is important that we hear this voice, but it is a different voice than the government's policy and the strategy chosen by the RIVM, what do you do?"
Well, I would say that the RIVM is an institution. We have had discussions in the past when farmers doubted the outcomes of the RIVM. We all found that quite scandalous on average and now it has suddenly become quite normal. Yes, I don't see the need for that. There are just very good people, people who work on that all day, doing research day and night, and then we as a population should also have an opinion about that. I would say let's focus on other things, put our energy into helping each other get through this, and not all our energy into the discussion about what is the right attention or approach, which the RIVM can determine very well.
[53] SFS FEYERABEND, Paul (1978) Science in a Free Society
[54] SFS p.74
[55] SFS p. 75
[56] SFS p. 75
[57] SFS pp. 79-80