Education in a Post-truth World

Abstract

This short chapter provides an account of “post-truth” by reference to the Oxford Dictionaries “Word of the Year” for 2016 and a description of politics in our time. It notes the close affiliation with the concept “Alt-right”, a synonym for the emergence of the Far-Right in American and European politics. The chapter focuses on Donald Trump, and the “big lies” he told as one of his main media techniques in his campaign to become the US President. The chapter investigates whether the new social media undermines our ability to recognize truth.

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Educational Philosophy and Theory
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ISSN: 0013-1857 (Print) 1469-5812 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20
Education in a post-truth world
Michael A. Peters
To cite this article: Michael A. Peters (2017) Education in a post-truth world, Educational
Philosophy and Theory, 49:6, 563-566, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2016.1264114
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1264114
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EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY, 2017
VOL. 49, NO. 6, 563566
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1264114
EDITORIAL
Education in a post-truth world
The Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth dened as ‘relating to or denoting circum-
stances in which objective facts are less inuential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion
and personal belief.’1 In their brief history of the concept Oxford Dictionaries notes a spike after a
decade of use in relation to Brexit and Trump’s election as US president and the rise of the compound
noun post-truth politics as a description for our times. Oxford Dictionaries also notes earlier formations
with the Post stem like post-national (1945) and post-racial (1971) and they trace its incidental use in a
variety of media before it became a general description and characteristic of our age. It ought not to be
a surprise that the 2016 shortlist also included both Alt-right—‘An ideological grouping associated with
extreme conservative or reactionary viewpoints, characterised by a rejection of mainstream politics and
by the use of online media to disseminate deliberately controversial content’ and Brexiteer—‘A person
who is in favour of the UK withdrawing from the European Union.’
The concept has certainly been picked up and anchored quickly in mainstream media. Time maga-
zine deliciously states as a headline ‘It describes a situation in which feelings trump facts.’ Time quotes
Casper Grathwohl, president of Oxford Dictionaries as saying ‘It’s not surprising that our choice reects
a year dominated by highly-charged political and social discourse. Fuelled by the rise of social media as
a news source and a growing distrust of facts oered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept
has been nding its linguistic footing for some time.’2
The Economist devoted two articles to the issue—‘Post-truth politics: Art of the lie’3 and ‘The post-truth
world: Yes, I’d lie to you’4 beginning the latter with the sentence ‘When Donald Trump, the Republican
presidential hopeful, claimed recently that President Barack Obama “is the founder” of Islamic State and
Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate, the “co-founder,” even some of his supporters were perplexed.’
Trump repeatedly told and retold ‘big lies’:
• Trump Falsely Claimed That ‘The Birther Movement Was Started By Hillary Clinton In 2008’ when
he perpetrated and championed the birther claims;
• Trump Has Repeatedly Falsely Claimed That He ‘Was Totally Against The War In Iraq.’
• Trump Has Repeatedly Falsely Claimed That The ‘Real Unemployment Rate Is 42 Percent.’
• Trump Has Falsely Claimed That ‘It Could Be 30 Million’ Undocumented Immigrants Currently
Residing In The United States.
• Trump Has Lied That, Because His Taxes Are Under Audit, He ‘Can’t’ Make Them Public.
• Trump Has Falsely Claimed That Clinton ‘Soundly Slept In Her Bed’ During The 2012 Attack In
Benghazi, Libya.
• Trump Claimed That ‘Inner-City Crime Is Reaching Record Levels,’ Which Is False.
• Trump Lied That Clinton Wants To ‘Abolish The Second Amendment.’
• Trump Claims He’s ‘Really The Friend Of’ The LGBT Community But He Supports Anti-LGBT
Legislation5
• Trump falsely claimed ‘The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order
to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.’6
• Trump made multiple false claims concerning immigration and mass deportations7
© 2017 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

564 EDITORIAL
This is just the ‘big lies.’ The New York Times (2016) commented on Trump’s technique:
… Donald Trump has come up with something new, which we can call the ‘big liar’ technique. Taken one at a time,
his lies are medium-size—not trivial, but mostly not rising to the level of blood libel. But the lies are constant,
coming in a steady torrent, and are never acknowledged, simply repeated. He evidently believes that this strategy
will keep the news media ummoxed, unable to believe, or at least say openly, that the candidate of a major part y
lies that much.8
Taken together, Trump’s triumph in the US elections and Brexit indicates a decided turn against the
global liberal internationalist order. It is fueled by the rise of both extreme right and left fractions—a
coincidence of older neo-conservative values, anti-immigration sentiments, and white working-class
people, especially men, who populate the deindustrialized areas in the US and got left behind when
American manufacturing went East in search of cheap labour. Arguably, this group is less educated, more
open to conspiracy theories, and less likely to change their deeply seated beliefs in the face of evidence.
The style of Trump campaigning and the turn to anti-globalisation protectionist policies as a rejection
of the liberal global order has led to what has been called ‘post-truth politics’ based mainly on appeals
to emotion without any detailed policy specics, delivered through video and social media, especially
Twitter, that are not ideal media for argumentation, disputation, reection and fact-checking. Post-truth
politics is a development of an increasingly privatised and fragmented public news that began with the
‘sound bite’ and ‘photo opportunity’ to bypass public discussion in the regime of the 24-h news cycle,
where news channels take on the mantle of party ideologies often deliberately distorting the truth.
Old Testament accounts of lying have viewed it as a sin that admits no reservation as to lie is to delib-
erately hide the truth. In De Mendacio Augustine takes a hard line on lying and modern philosophical
accounts that lying is detrimental to society because it erodes trust as the very foundation of relations
among human beings that sustains our institutions (Bok 1999: 31). Truth, truthfulness and truth-telling
are seen as a necessary precondition for society. Lying is bad because it harms people through false
information and because it is a violation of trust (Rachels, 2011: 42-43). It interferes with the process of
self-understanding and perverts our relationship with the world. Foucault in his lectures at Berkeley in
the early 1980s investigates “the use of parrhesia [truth-telling] in specic types of human relationships”
and “the procedures and techniques employed in such relationships” (Foucault, 1999: 66). In the Ancient
Greek, parrhesia is a speech activity where there is an exact coincidence between belief and truth and
truth-telling is “a practice which shaped the specic relations that individuals have to themselves”
(p. 66) (Peters, 2003).
The classic account of “Lying in Politics” is Arendt’s (1971) account of political imagination as a reec-
tion on the Pentagon papers that draws interconnections between “lie, the deliberate denial of factual
truth, and the capacity to change facts, the ability to act.” She argues “the lie did not creep into politics
by some accident of human sinfulness; moral outrage, for this reason alone, is not likely to make it
disappear.” As she argues “factual truths are never compellingly true” as contingent facts they carry no
guarantee of truth and “no factual statement can ever be beyond doubt.” Arendt goes on to argue “Facts
need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to nd a secure
dwelling place in the domain of human aairs” (Peters, 2015). Arendt maintains lying and deception
in public life is so easy “up to a point” and does not necessarily come into conict with truth because
facts can always be otherwise (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1971/nov/18/lying-in-%20
politics-reections-on-the-pentagon-pape/).
One major consideration about the shift to post-truth is the “truth carrying capacity” of new social
media and its propensity to disseminate fake news through Facebook, Google and Twitter, and thereby
to create a “bubble world” where algorithmically selected news sources simply reinforce existing prej-
udices thus compromising the capacity for moral thinking. Does the new social media undermine our
ability to recognise truth?
Harsin (2015), in his article ‘Regimes of Posttruth, Postpolitics, and Attention Economies,’ following
a Foucauldian line of argument, argues that we have moved from ‘regimes of truth’ to ‘regimes of
posttruth.’ In the new regime that characterises postpolitics and postdemocracy ‘power exploits new
“freedoms” to participate/produce/express (as well as consume/diuse/evaluate)’ where ‘resource rich

EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 565
political actors attempt to use data analytic knowledge to manage the eld of appearance and partic-
ipation, via attention and aect.’
As an experienced star of the reality game show TV series The Apprentice that ran for 14 seasons
and made him a household name, Donald Trump understands contemporary media better than his
opponents. He utilises the same media strategies in his politics: he gets attention; he isn’t polished; He
promotes unltered feelings; He follows a tried-and-true storyline; He encourages a subjective inter-
pretation of the truth.9 Trump has mastered Twitter as the ideal medium ‘unleashing and redening its
power as a tool of political promotion, distraction, score-settling and attack.’10
In this new media political landscape, the liberal media and pollsters have fared very badly indeed.
How could they be so wrong? How could they consistently overrate Clinton’s chances over Trump’s? The
robust New York Times gave Clinton an 85% chance of winning!11 They bought into Trump’s politics of
mediatization responding emotionally to his taunts and bullying, desperately wanting to point out his
failings and losing their objectivity. They contributed to his success by overestimating Hillary’s prospect
of success, dismissing Trump’s chances and misunderstanding the electorate and their hatred of the
professional political elite.
In this post-truth political environment Gay Alcorn notes ‘facts are futile.’
12
Post-truth is often taken to
mean ‘post-fact.’ It’s not so much that facts are futile, it’s just that they take a while to collect and marshal
into a knock-down argument. By the time the facts are gathered the media moment has passed, the
headline has been grabbed, and the lie can be modied, apologised for or replaced by another. A leader
in the New Scientist (2016) comments on the revolutionary result when free speech meets social media:
the right to free speech has morphed into the ability to say and spread anything, no matter how daft or dangerous.
Hence the buzz around the idea of ‘post-truth politics’—although a cynic might wonder if politicians are actually
any more dishonest than they used to be. Perhaps it’s just that bs once whispered into select ears are now over-
heard by everyone.13
There have been some important historical precursors in the lead up to the post-truth zeitgeist most
recently in the ‘science deniers,’ especially the climate change deniers, in the neoconservative attacks by
Lynn Cheney on US history teachers over the rewriting of the American past, the Holocaust and genocide
deniers, the Sokal hoax involving Social Text, the older ‘science wars,’ and furore that greeted Funtowicz
and Ravetz’s (1990) ‘post-normal science’ where quality assurance systems replaces the search for truth.
Ravetz explains the line of argument thus: ‘We argue that the quality-assurance of scientic inputs into
policy processes requires an “extended peer community,” including all the stakeholders in an issue. This
new peer community can also deploy “extended facts,” including local and personal experience, as well
as investigative journalism and leaked sources.’14
It takes little imagination to draw some conclusions from this melange of past examples to under-
stand that the notion of ‘facts’ and ‘evidence’ in a post-truth era aects not only politics and science but
becomes a burning issue for education at all levels. Education has now undergone the digital turn and
to a large extent been captured by big data systems in administration as well as teaching and research.
Criticality has been avoided or limited within education and substituted by narrow conceptions of
standards, and state-mandated instrumental and utilitarian pedagogies. There have been attacks on
the professional autonomy of teachers as arbiters of truth. If education is equated almost solely with job
training rather than a broader critical citizenship agenda for participatory democracy, we can expect
the further decline of social democracy and the rise of populist demagogue politicians and alt-right
racist parties. In the era of post-truth it is not enough to revisit notions or theories of truth, accounts
of ‘evidence,’ and forms of epistemic justication as a guide to truth, but we need to understand the
broader epistemological and Orwellian implications of post-truth politics, science and education. More
importantly, we need an operational strategy to combat ‘government by lying’ and a global society
prepared to accept cognitive dissonance and the subordination of truth to Twittered emotional appeals
and irrational personal beliefs. Rather than speaking truth to power, Trump demonstrates the enduring
power of the lie.

566 EDITORIAL
Notes
1. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year.
2. http://time.com/4572592/oxford-word-of-the-year-2016-post-truth/.
3. http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21706525-politicians-have-always-lied-does-it-matter-if-they-leave-
truth-behind-entirely-art.
4. http://www.economist.com/news/brieng/21706498-dishonesty-politics-nothing-new-manner-which-some-
politicians-now-lie-and.
5. http://mediamatters.org/research/2016/09/21/trump-s-11-biggest-lies-debate-moderators-should-be-prepared-
address/213234#Birtherism; see also http://www.dailywire.com/news/4834/trumps-101-lies-hank-berrien#.
6. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trumps-big-debate-lie-on-global-warming-w442167.
7. https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/08/29/one-of-trumps-biggest-lies-is-falling-apart-
so-naturally-hes-blaming-the-media-for-it/?utm_term=.e84aec9c1ccd; https://thinkprogress.org/two-big-lies-
in-trumps-immigration-speech-769ac7e060a9#.bfps3glw5.
8. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/opinion/donald-trumps-big-liar-technique.html?_r=0.
9. http://qz.com/828700/2016-presidential-election-donald-trump-has-used-reality-tv-strategies-throughout-his-
campaign/.
10. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/politics/donald-trump-twitter-use-campaign-2016.html.
11. http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/upshot/presidential-polls-forecast.html.
12. http://www.theage.com.au/comment/facts-are-futile-in-an-era-of-posttruth-politics-20140227-33m70.html.
13. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23030763-000-free-speech-has-become-sound-bites-with-
revolutionary-results/.
14. http://www.jerryravetz.co.uk/work.html.
References
Arendt, H. (1971). Lying in politics, New York review of books. Retrieved November 18 from http://www.nybooks.com/
articles/1971/11/18/lying-in-politics-reections-on-the-pentagon-pape/
Foucault, M. (1999). Discourse and truth: The problematization of parrhesia. In J. Pearson (Ed.), Digital Archive: Foucault.
info. Retrieved 1999 from http://foucault.info/documents
Funtowicz, S., & Ravetz, J. (1990). Uncertainty and quality in science for policy. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Harsin, J. (2015). Regimes of posttruth, postpolitics, and attention economies. Communication, Culture and Critique, 8,
327–333.
Peters, M. (2003). Truth-telling as an educational practice of the self: Foucault, parrhesia and the ethics of subjectivity.
Oxford Review of Education, 29, 207–223.
Peters, M. (2015). The history and practice of lying in public life. Review of contemporary philosophy, 14, 47–61. ISSN 1841-
5261.
Rachels, J. & Rachels, S. (2011). The Elements of Moral Philosophy. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Michael A. Peters
University of Waikato
mpeters@waikato.ac.nz