If the medium is the message, then the message of the web is “bullshit”. Long before today’s crisis, the American philosopher Harry Frankfurt broke from the conventions of a discipline not known for its plain speaking and explained Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Andrew Wakefield, the Canary, Breitbart, Putin propagandists, Holocaust deniers, climate change fantasists, truthers, birthers, Salafists, sexbots and Mr Michael Gove of the London Times.
Liars respect truth in their way, wrote Frankfurt in his 2005 essay On Bullshit. They care about it enough to know what the truth is and find ways to suppress it. Bullshitters are more dangerous. They neither know nor care whether what they say is true or false, only whether they can advance their interests by fooling the gullible.
Trump’s victory is the bullshitters’ apotheosis. Whether the west can survive the corruption of its leading nation is unknowable. But we already know that the events of 2016 have led to our assumptions about how “mature” democracies work unravelling. What is mature, after all, about American or British democracy, when both prefer bawling charlatans to uncomfortable truth-tellers?
The crisis is apparent in the publication of three books in one week all called Post-Truth, all analysing bullshit and all infused with the spirit of WH Auden’s grim lines from September 1, 1939: “Defenceless under the night/ Our world in stupor lies.”
The authors try to come to terms with the consequences of the web, where no gatekeepers insist you pay the price of accuracy before publishing and lies are given the same status as truth. After that, they diverge, as they must. For asking why we believe lies raises vast questions about human psychology and history, which did not appear from nowhere in 2016 or emerge with the invention of the web. Meanwhile, asking why we must worry about cognitive biases now raises equally pertinent questions about how recent history has seen a collapse in faith in the rational ordering of society.
To anyone who is invigorated by urgent writing, Matthew d’Ancona’s work is as startling as a cold shower. His book, which surely announces his arrival as a first-rate essayist, is just 176 pages but manages to convey a super-abundance of learning without breaking into a sweat.
Trump stalks his pages like an orange panther. But as d’Ancona acknowledges, the least interesting thing about Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Rather, the triumph of “the visceral over the rational, the deceptively simple over the honestly complex” that Trump’s victory represented demands our attention. He does not believe the populists’ rise to become our new elite will ensure their downfall when they fail to deliver on their promises. I do not share his pessimism. If America and, more particularly, defenceless Britain can find a competent opposition to nail them, US journalist Salena Zito’s observation that Trump’s voters took him “seriously but not literally” may not be the last word on his presidency, particularly if he takes away their healthcare. But to date there is little evidence of a reckoning. As d’Ancona says, the Brexit campaign’s direct lie that a vote to leave the EU would provide £350m a week for the NHS has not hurt Leave politicians, who are flourishing today like weeds in a well-manured bed.
His explanations for the current crisis do not stay in the world of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. However brilliant their work on cognitive biases, it cannot explain why demagoguery triumphs now when it did not triumph in the past. The immediate causes of the collapse in faith in institutions are well understood: the decision to force the public to bail out the banks without prosecuting the bankers destroyed the assumption that the upholders of the status quo possessed even the vaguest notion of natural justice.
Davis's care and his determination to make complicated ideas accessible show why he is such a good broadcaster
Given their opportunity, demagogues can now fight in a rigged match. As Trump, Putin and Gove know, the experts they target are unlikely to fight back or even know how to fight back because they abide by the code of intellectual honour. The American climate change denier Marc Morano explained with relish: “You go up against a scientist, most of them are going to be in their own policy wonk world or area of expertise: very arcane, hard to understand, hard to explain and very boorring.”
The appeal of false narratives fills James Ball’s book. He may be the least well known of the three authors, buthe does not deserve to be the least read. Better than anyone I know, Ball explains how the economics of the web is destroying the possibility of financing serious news and raising the question of whether readers want a cautious fact-checked article when it is cheaper and much more profitable to follow Breitbart, the Express or the Canary and whack out clickbait, which is anything but “boorring”.
Political books by broadcasters usually fail, not because users of the spoken word can’t write, but because the impartiality rules stand in their way when they should be following ideas to their conclusion. But although the orange panther stalks his pages too, Evan Davis tackles bullshit by largely eschewing politics and producing a measured account of irrationality in economics. His care and his determination to make complicated ideas accessible show, above all, why he is such a good broadcaster.
Davis ends with the BBC-ish conclusion that in the end truth will out, good government will reassert itself and all will be well. D’Ancona ends with a rallying call to defend democracy from those who would turn it into a Putinesque paradise for liars and grafters. As a natural optimist, he finds hope even in the universities, where Trump’s intellectual ancestors in the postmodern movement have been replaced by philosophers who understand that the relativist doctrine “There are no facts, only interpretations” inevitably leads to the conclusion: “The reason of the strongest is always the best.”
A backlash against the backlash is in order, of course. Every generation must refight the battles of the Enlightenment. Our age has had more than its fair share of battles. First, it had to fight armed Islamism and must now fight its reactionary twin, white nationalism. But before we become too bellicose we must understand many do not want to fight. Scientists and medics, for example, are getting out of British universities rather than waste their lives there.
Most of us in Britain and America cannot and do not want leave. We have no choice but to stay and fight. No one should be in any doubt that the struggle will be long. When and if we get through to the other side, we will not be the same people we were yesterday.
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