So, ‘post-truth’ has entered the lexicon. And not just via the boffins at the Oxford English Dictionary, who have made it their word of the year for 2016, but also via our own Prime Minister, who this week dismissed Bill Shorten’s attempts to elicit some answers about the Bell Group affair and Senator George Brandis’ role in it as ‘the absolute embodiment of post-truth politics’.
Actually I think that title’s taken; but let’s leave Donald Trump to one side for a moment and reflect on Turnbull’s rhetorical manoeuvre. For in deploying the post-truth meme in this way the PM has given a good indication, not only of how it will be deployed in the future, but also of the inseparability of post-truth politics and its supposed alternative. [More at The Monthly.]
Thank you Richard. Sad, especially the para with the words Trump is not a Black Swan event. Whither wander we?
Thanks Julia. Whither indeed?
I’m bemused by this post-truth business. It carries an implication that what came before was truth! Whose truth was that? Was it the truth of the capitalist media, or the truth of the bloggers, or some other kind of truth?
I think “truth” has always passed through some kind of filter or been projected through some ideological prism or other. We’ve always been deluded one way or another and many people simply find the truth the’re looking for in the contemporary flood of data. I think we just have to work harder to find that truth by diligently applying our own rationality.
Actually, I’m a bit worried by the post truth business lest people adopt it wholesale with the assertion that what came before was more truthy!! We’ll just hear folks saying “oh that’s just so post-truth – don’t believe anything anymore – it’s not worth it”.
Couldn’t agree more Peter. And there’s an analogue here in the whole ‘fake news’ business that’s spread across mainstream media in the last week or two. So the news we had before fake news was … what, exactly?? True news? You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist — i.e. to think that ALL news is ‘fake’ or even that there’s no difference between Lateline and the Bolt Report, which there clearly is — in order to see that the distinction being made here masks a kind of self-aggrandisement. As I try to say in the piece, I don’t think ‘post-truth’ politics can be treated in isolation from the kind of politics we had before, still have, and are likely to have in the future.
The fake news aspect is frightening as no one finds out it’s ‘fake’ until later, or maybe never. Whatever happened to gospel truth? There’s a way to muddy the water
Rather like ‘justice’ struggling for a definition. The whole truthy/truthiness seems to me more like a fog to hide in