After much discussion, debate and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the year 2016 is post truth. Post truth is an adjective defined as 'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.'
Q. Why was this chosen?
A. The concept of 'post truth' has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase 'post truth politics'.
Post truth has gone from being a peripheral term to being a mainstay in political commentary, now often being used by major publications without the need for clarification or definition in their headlines.
Post truth seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian - American playwright Steve Tesich in 'The Nation' magazine. Reflecting on the Iron - Contra scandal and the Persian gulf war, Tesich lamented that 'we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post truth world.' There is evidence of the phrase 'post truth' being used before Tesich's article, but apparently with the transparent meaning 'after the truth was known', and not with the new implication that truth itself has become irrelevant.
A book 'The Post truth Era', by Ralph Keyes appeared in 2004, and in 2005 American comedian Stephen Colbert popularised an informal word relating to the same concept: truthiness, defined by Oxford Dictionaries as 'the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true'. Post truth extends that notion from an isolated quality of particular assertions to a general characteristic of our age.
In 2004 Ralph Keyes used the term "post truth era" in his book by that title. In it he argue that deception is becoming more prevalent in the current media driven world. According to Keyes, lies stopped being treated as something inexcusable and started being viewed as something acceptable in certain situations, which supposedly led to the beginning of the post truth era.
• Michael Deacon, parliamentary sketch writer for 'The Daily Telegraph', summarized the core message of post truth politics as "Facts are negative. Facts are pessimistic. Facts are unpatriotic".
• In contrast to simply telling untruths, writers such as Jack Holmes of 'Esquire' describe the process as something different, with Holmes putting it as: "So, if you don't know what's true, you can whatever you want and it's not a lie".
"It is difficult to speak the truth, for although there is only one truth, it is alive and therefore has a live and changing face". - Franz Kafka
Many people quote George Orwell, who already during the first half of the 20th century, said that politicians along the entire political spectrum lie and make their lies sound truthful.
Science recognises the various interpretations of quantum physics, such as the "hidden variable" theory and the "many worlds interpretation" of quantum mechanics, which offer valid explanations and precise predictions of the same empirical facts, even though the ontologies that they offer, i.e., the narratives they tell about the structure of the world, are entirely different. The same empirical data can be explained using different theories, even theories that contradict each other.
Post modernism should not be considered a necessary condition for the emergence of the post truth phenomenon, one can say that post modernist ideas had an impact on it. Even if the post modern approach does not reject facts and reality and does not completely abandon objective factual truth, it does lay the foundation for casting doubt on the objectivity and absoluteness of truth, and legitimizes the populistic, pseudo-postmodernist discourse of the "anything goes" and "this is my truth" variety. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that this substandard discourse does not derive from an in depth understanding of postmodernist ideas, but rather, derives from a distortion and reduction of them. Conservative right wingers use these distorted ideas as tools to attack the liberal left wing and to provide greater weight to subjective interpretation and to different types of truths, such as coherent truth or pragmatic truth, in fields like science and national security, where the primary weight should be given to factual truth.
Post truth politics (also called post-factual politics and post-reality politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored. Post truth differs from traditional contesting and falsifying of facts by relegating facts and expert opinions to be secondary importance relative to appeal to emotion. While this has been described as a contemporary problem, some observers have described it as a long standing part of political life that was less notable before the advent of the internet and related social changes.
'New Scientist' characterised the pamphlet wars that arose with the growth of printing and literacy, beginning in the 1600s, as an early form of post truth politics. Slanderous and vitriolic pamphlets were cheaply printed and widely disseminated, and the dissent that they formented contributed to starting wars and revolutions such as the English Civil War (1642-1651) and much later the American Revolution (1765-1783).
☆ Solutions
Both technology companies and governments have started to make efforts to tackle the challenge of "post-truth politics". In an article for the journal 'Global Policy', Professor Nayef Al- Rodhan suggested four particular responses:
1. Improve the technological tools for fact checking.
For e.g., Germany has already asked Facebook to introduce a fake news filtering tool.
2. Greater involvement and visibility for scientists and scientific community.
The UK, for instance, has a series of Parliamentary committees at which scientists are called to testify, and present their research to inform policy making. Similarly in Canada, the role of Chief Science Advisor was re-established and each department with even a small scientific capability was required to develop a policy for scientific integrity.
3. Stronger government action.
In countries such as the Czech Republic, new units have been set up to tackle fake news. The most important challenge here is to ensure that such state-led efforts are not used as a tool for censorship.
4. Securitizing fake news.
It is important to treat post truth politics as a matter of security and devise global efforts to counter this phenomenon. In March 2017, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Opinion and Expression, the OSCE, and the Organisation for American States issued a Joint Declaration on "Freedom of Expression and Fake News, Disinformation and Propaganda" to warn against the effects of fake news but, at the same time, condemn any attempts at state mandated censorship.
☆ 5 Post truth films to disentangle your reality
1. Network
2. F for Fake
3. Broadcast News
4. Death in Venice
5. American Dharma.
2. "Philosophy of Post-Truth." INSS, 3 Sept. 2019, www.inss.org.il/publication/philosophy-of-post-truth/.
3. "Post-truth Politics." - Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc, 11 July 2016, en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics. Accessed 5 Dec. 2020.