Fists fly as truth fades in U.S. politics
What replaces objective facts? Fisticuffs or worse, says Andrew Potter.
So what’s with all of the punching, all of a sudden?
The inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. president saw a strange spike in low-level fisticuffs. Vice Magazine cofounder turned conservative gadfly Gavin McInnes got into a fist fight with a protester outside the Deploraball, an inauguration-eve party for the alt-right celebrating Trump’s victory, while the next day someone punched white supremacist Richard Spencer in the head as he was doing a live television interview.
Later that evening, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway was reported to have given someone a knuckle sandwich at the inaugural ball; and finally, a man at last weekend’s women’s march in Edmonton appeared to punch a Rebel Media reporter’s camera while she was trying to interview him (the man has since been identified and charged with assault).
While the Internet continues to debate the relative merits and dubious morality of punching Nazis, reporters and protesters, it is worth noting that this all comes just as the very idea of truth, or objective facts, has been called into question.
Indeed, it’s not a coincidence. To be honest, truth has never had an easy run of it, least of all from philosophers.
In his infamous parable of the cave, Plato compared us to people chained to a rock watching shadows cast on the wall by objects behind us, and mistaking the shadows for the real thing. And that pretty much set the tone for the next 2,500 years: A good chunk of the philosophy undergraduate curriculum amounts to either teaching books that are skeptical about the existence of truth, or explaining why books that purport to show the existence of objective truth are wrong.
Even when truth is acknowledged, it is usually to denounce it.
For the better part of the past 30 years, the received view in most humanities departments has been that truth is at best the handmaiden of capitalism, at worst the whore of patriarchy.
Either way, all a commitment to truth ever gave us was inequality, environmental destruction and the atomic bomb.
To argue otherwise is to reveal yourself as a fascist or — perhaps worse — a liberal. Outside the academy, it’s the conservatives who find truth inconvenient.
Scientists have developed an annoying habit of pointing out the connection between the activities of a modern economy and the heating up of the planet, while social planners like to make use of stuff such as demographic data to suggest social policy.
That’s why Donald Trump, like Stephen Harper before him, is muzzling the scientists and statisticians. Without facts or data, the social engineers have trouble getting the government doing useful things.
What’s the take-away? Largely, that truth is a problem for just about everyone across the partisan spectrum. When it is invoked, it is usually to treat it like a political football and kick it around. That is why the current crisis over truth isn’t the cause of our problems, it is a symptom of them.
And what it is a symptom of is that people on opposite sides of the partisan divide have completely lost the ability to speak to one another.
In its idealized form, we tend to think of truth as a relationship between language and the world. The sentence “the sky is blue” is true
Truth is a problem for just about everyone across the partisan spectrum. … People on opposite sides of the partisan divide have completely lost the ability to speak to one another.
because there exists, objectively, a sky, and it is, objectively, blue. “The women’s march had more participants than Trump’s inauguration” is true if and only if there were more people at the march than the inauguration. And so on. But it doesn’t really work that way.
The sort of truth we are fighting over is more like a collective agreement, a shared set of assumptions and commitments about what words mean and how we will respond when certain sentences are uttered.
Karl Rove famously dismissed what he called “the reality-based community,” and in doing so he was declaring a manifesto for 21st-century politics.
He was also acknowledging the fundamental point, which is that for all intents and purposes, truth is simply what we all agree it is.
So if I, say, declare that “the sky is blue,” and you respond “the sky is a ham sandwich,” the real problem is not that I am speaking truth and you are uttering alt-facts (or, more simply, lying).
The real issue is that we are no longer two humans speaking a common language. We have been reduced to two bipedal mammals making guttural utterances at one another. We might as well be hooting at the trees and beating our chests.
Which is pretty much what American politics has been reduced to: two troops of apes shrieking at one another across a great partisan divide.
What’s the next step after the shrieking?
Fighting, of course. The recent spate of fist fights is not a random grouping of incidents, but most probably a sign of worse to come.