The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump by Michiko Kakutani
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Being Reasonable

Epistemology - learning what it means to be reasonable - has become fashionable once again. With any luck this might prove to be Donald Trump’s most important achievement: a backlash against the reality (largely his) of fake news. Unfortunately The Death of Truth is yet more fake news not a way to beat it.

More formally, epistemology is the study of how we know what we know, of what constitutes a fact, and logically therefore about what constitutes an anti-fact, that is a lie (see here for some explanation of epistemology and its current problems: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). It doesn’t take much epistemological analysis to determine that Trump lies, more or less continuously, about everything he encounters - events, people, issues, decisions, statements, whether these are politically relevant or not. These lies are endorsed and disseminated by tame media like Fox News and Breitbart which have their own commercial agenda. This much is obvious.

But what is much more difficult to establish is the epistemological structure, as it were, of the human beings who hear these lies, cheer them and act on them - in the way they vote; their behaviour toward opponents, and minorities; and in their expressed opinions about the rest of the world. The presumption of a book like Kakutani’s is that these people have been duped, and that by demonstrating that the motivation for their actions is a pack of lies, the era of Trumpian mendacity can be checked. Essentially, lack of discriminatory power brought about by inadequate education is Kakutani’s key issue. Therefore better analytical education, she believes, is the solution.

This presumption, and its purported solution is, however, in Kakutani’s own terms, wrong. The people who adhere to the Trumpian ideology know well that the President lies. They know that Fox and Breitbart have their own interests in these lies. They simply don’t care. The fact that Trump lies has about as much political import to them as the barometric pressure or the population of an ant colony. If photographic evidence shows that Trump’s inauguration had much smaller crowds than claimed, if numerous women have prima facie valid claims for sexual harassment despite his denial, if his closest advisors were obviously involved in relationships on his behalf with the Russians and nefarious others: it does not matter at all to the folk who support him. He has said this over and over again during his campaign and his presidency. And his supporters cheer him and themselves when he says it.

To observe, therefore, that Kakutani’s book is preaching to the choir is not a very profound insight. But it does reveal the essential flaw in her epistemological analysis. People, all people, have interests. Interests are what defines the things which are not only important but the things which can be and will be seen, heard, recognised, and generally allowed into one’s cognition. Interests are also the motivating force for reason; it is they, not some arbitrary logic like that proposed by Kakutani, which defines the reasonable. Kakutani, like many before her, tries desperately to separate what is factual from what is of interest; she aspires to be ‘objective’ in the way that facts and truth are established. For her, recognising interests is equivalent to the terrible heresy of “postmodernist relativism.” She doesn’t quite know what she means when she uses this term but she’s sure it’s the reason Trump is in the White House and Putin is in the Kremlin.

Paradoxically, one might think, this abhorrence of relativism is shared with Kakutani by Trump’s evangelical and conservative ideological supporters. They too want a firm epistemological foundation; and they believe they can get it by the articulation of one or more basic doctrines - the inerrancy of scripture, the necessity for complete personal freedom, the benefits of unlimited competition, the non-existence of something called society or any of a number of other ideological or religious premises. This establishment of fundamental premises is the only path available toward absolute, irrefutable, non-relative truth according to their way of thinking. And they’re right, that is the only way to be absolutely, positively, one hundred percent sure of what the truth is: define it beforehand. Otherwise one must simply muddle through with continuous nagging doubt, an uncomfortable and, one might say in our current culture, an unmanly state of mind.

But certainty and psychic ease come at a cost. Obviously diverse premises lead to diverse versions of what constitutes the truth, of facts, of signal versus noise. Evangelicals do not start with the same fundamental truths as economic neo-liberals, or radical nationalists. For the moment at least the competing versions of truth are not as important in American politics as the principle on which they all agree: Truth is fixed, certain, immutable, eternal and necessary for personal and social well-being. This is the basis of the populist alliance which Trump has created so skilfully. And Kakutani has decided that she will join it unwittingly using her own version of the truth.

It may not be obvious but this principle of absolute truth is in fact a religious concept. It is correlated with the explicitly Christian doctrinal idea of faith, that is to say the firm, ‘reasonable’ belief in eternal salvation. Faith is an epistemological principle invented by Paul of Tarsus as the foundational principle of his new religion of Christianity. This principle is arguably the most important contribution of Christianity to world culture. It provides a rationale for calming the apparent chaos of the world around us by simply removing large chunks of reality from our perception. If things don’t matter, they will not be perceived. If one is ‘tempted’ by distractions outside the realm of the doctrines of faith, one is urged to intensify one’s faith.

Intense faith is what the various components of the Trump alliance (and terrorists of all sorts) share. Trump’s lies are either irrelevant or they are contributing toward a greater good, of which even he may be unaware, according to Trumpists. Arguing against such a state of mind has never had much success for obvious reasons: the argument cannot be heard. Kakutani’s use of the principle of faith to undermine faith is consequently absurd.

So faith in absolute, invariable truth is the poison which creates and not the antidote which cures fake news. The only workable solution to the proliferation of fake news involves in the first instance the recognition of the interests represented by apparently unreasonable behaviour. Lack of apparent reason in someone else is indistinguishable from an inability in oneself to appreciate alien purpose when it is confronted. The idea of error is entirely dependent upon what one’s aims are. Ultimately, the effect of establishing the criteria of ‘objective’ truth is the exclusion of whole sets of human interests which then cannot be discussed politically. In other words, Kakutani’s solution is to intensify the problem we are experiencing at present.

I don’t know what the purpose of Trump supporters is. I suspect there are many, one of which, perhaps, is merely to be heard. This in itself could explain a great deal. I nonetheless do find them annoying because they don’t appear to consider it their responsibility to go beyond their pervasive nihilism and articulate what they’re really after. So there well could be an educational aspect to the situation because ostensibly unreasonable people may not have the ability to effectively articulate their reasons. If so, however, education in being able to listen articulately, especially among politicians, may be the most important parallel pedagogical task. Hearing the intentions of others, particularly others we abhor, is probably the most taxing political as well as social skill one can hope to develop. It is nevertheless the foundation of all epistemology. Kakutani has been listening to the wrong folk.

Postscript: Several people have written privately to me expressing an important issue with my review. What if, they remark, the purposes of some Trump supporters are morally unacceptable? Indeed, I have no doubt that this is the case, as it would be among any political group. One of the most important aspects of any political system, and the explicit purpose of the US party system, is the marginalisation of extreme and generally unacceptable purposes. The Trumpist alliance, I have no doubt, includes some, perhaps many, whom the vast majority of Americans would consider of questionable integrity. However, unless one is willing to conclude that half the American eiectorate has become politically insane (although a credible possibility), the bulk of Trump voters are expressing political views which while not extreme or evil have not been incorporated into political discussion. In fact it seems likely that the extremists have been attracted to the alliance of faith among disaffected voters and not the source of it. This doesn’t reduce the culpability of faith as an epistemological principle but rather makes it more urgent to make the consequences of this principle clear.

Postscript 17Sept2018: an interesting piece putting some context on the epistemological problem of Trump: http://www.abc.net.au/religion/americ...

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