The Rise and Fall of Truth
Thoughts on ritual, correspondence and totalitarianism
POLITICS
Thoughts on ritual, correspondence and totalitarianism
For the last eight years, much of the world has been living in what political scientists and philosophers call a “post-truth” era. Post-truth refers to “a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts.”
Post-truth became popularized in the context of two watershed moments of 2016: the United Kingdom vote to leave the EU in what became known as the Brexit referendum, and the election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States. For many commentators, one of the most noteworthy elements of these events was the degree to which both campaigns displayed an utter disregard for facts, instead relying on emotive and often demonstrably false statements designed to sway voters.
It has long been accepted that politicians lie. What distinguishes post-truth politics from the established decorum of neoliberal consensus politics is the lack of concern about getting caught in the act of lying.
As a student of history, what troubles me most are the parallels I see between our own culture’s disregard for truth, and the totalitarian propaganda of the early twentieth century. Hannah Arendt could have been describing our own times when she wrote that
the masses are obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects…. The masses’ escape from reality is a verdict against the world in which they are forced to live and in which they cannot exist.
Then as now, demagogues and strongmen rush to offer simplistic ideologies as a substitute for alienating complexity. And then as now, they didn’t care one whit whether their factual claims were false, or whether they were called out for lying. For the totalitarian, truth is not the outcome of an inquiry into nature, but the product of imposing one’s will upon it.
Your lies are only lies if you lose.
Still, it would be too easy to write off such people as aberrant or deviant. I’ve studied philosophy, language and debates on the nature of truth for many years, and I’ve come to see our susceptibility to post-truth thinking not as a step beyond or outside of a liberal consensus, but as a return to an ancient way of thinking.
In this essay, I’ll explain what I think we really mean by “truth.” Armed with this explanation, we’ll have a much easier time grasping why what we now call “post-truth” thinking has in fact always been with us, an essential but insufficient aspect of how we make sense of the world.
A symphony of grunts
If you asked most philosophers what we mean by “truth,” they’d probably say that it’s a quality of statements that accurately describe the world, or some material or social process that unfolds in the world. If you asked which statements possess this quality, you might be told that statements are true when they “correspond” or “map” to the world.
That sounds perfectly reasonable at first glance. But if you sit with this notion for a minute or two, you may realize just how vacuous it is. What does it even mean for a statement to “correspond” to the world?
Stephen West, host of the podcast Philosophize This!, has called language a “symphony of grunts.” I love that metaphor. How does this symphony, this carefully orchestrated modulation of air waves, possibly “map” to anything?
The problem with saying that true statements are true because they correspond to the world is that it piggy backs on our intuitions about the meanings of words and sentences, but without unpacking how words and sentences achieve meaning in the first place.
If you really want to understand how words mean, and how meaning “corresponds” to reality, you need to first understand this key fact: for our ancestors, meaning (we might even say truth) has meant correspondence since before there were words at all.
That might sound crazy at first, but trust me. Once we understand what words are doing, how they manage to create meaning in our minds, it’ll make perfect sense.
Actions speak louder than words
Most people today who study language and human evolution would agree that the capacity to speak language is innate, even if they disagree on the degree to which that innate capacity structures the final product of language itself.
Given that fact, it makes sense to infer that much of the cognitive architecture necessary to support language existed for at least some significant span of time before our ancestors actually began to use language as we know it.
This would not be a unique occurrence in the animal kingdom. Often, an adaptation that serves one end can eventually be conscripted to serve another. For example, before feathers enabled flight they provided insulation. Similarly, the capacity for symbolic thought might have long pre-dated the development of language, and simply have manifested in different ways, such as physical gestures or rituals.
Consider this example, from Terrence Deacon’s excellent book The Symbolic Species. Deacon describes a ritual called “the Feast” that’s performed by two Yanomamo villages and results in the establishment of a kind of peace treaty between them.
First, the hosts who wish to make peace prepare a meal. When their guests are due to arrive, dressed for war and carrying weapons, the hosts put their weapons away and the men recline on their hammocks waiting for the guests to enter their village.
The guests enter, dancing and chanting, and circle around the camp stopping in front of each host. There they ritually threaten them, raising an ax or drawing a bow and arrow. The hosts must remain unmoved, trying to show no fear and no offense at provocative remarks.
After this has been repeated for awhile, the roles are reversed. The guests recline in hammocks, their weapons hidden away, while the hosts circle around the camp dancing and ritually threatening their guests. Finally, when it is clear that nothing untoward is likely to happen, they break off and the guests are offered food.
In this simple example we see not only how physical rituals can carry symbolic meaning even in the absence of words, but also a solution to the riddle of correspondence. We needn’t wring our hands about how arbitrary sounds can map to the world, because in this case the symbols being used directly represent the social facts to which they refer.
We’ve all heard the expression that actions speak louder than words. Most of us are also probably familiar with social science studies demonstrating that when a speaker’s body language is at odds with her words, listeners give more credence to the body. That makes perfect sense if our capacity for symbolic thought is rooted in the physical, and is only co-opted later by language.
In Deacon’s example, the Yanomamo dance and chant. But if we think about how this ritual evolved, it’s unlikely the first attempts involved such a stylized performance. More likely, the first such rituals involved marching rather than dancing, and shouting instead of chanting.
Over time, the marching might have become stamping. Its rhythms were codified. Any innovations, if they were not to disrupt the capacity of the symbol to convey its meaning, would have had to arise within the context of synchronous, rhythmic movement.
Same thing with the shouting. As feet and legs harmonized, so did voices. Over time, a preference for harmony and melody might have aided symbolic communication by eliminating “noise” and allowing the other side to better hear the threats and emotions being expressed.
In other words, what we have here is nothing less than a brief history of art. Today, we moderns think of culture as a big Venn diagram comprised of art, religion, science, politics, sport, fashion and a bunch of other things. But to our ancestors, all those separate circles would have coincided. Artifacts would have carried important religious and political significance beyond any utilitarian function.
The elaboration of skilled crafts and performances would have been undertaken for social reasons, and these traditions would have been understood as serving to maintain nothing less than social reality itself. Here again, we see not just the origins of truth as correspondence, but also the beginning of the idea that the role of truth is not to describe the world, but to make it.
You didn’t say the magic word
This brings us finally to words and their proper role in communication. Just like the chanting in the Feast, it’s a good bet that most ancient human rituals incorporated some kind of vocalizations.
Perhaps language originated as a way to use vocalizations as shorthand for larger rituals when performing the entire ritual was impracticable. The first words would therefore have been a kind of synecdoche, like saying “threads” to mean “clothes,” or “wheels” to mean “car.” Part of the ritual — particular stylized vocalizations — are understood to convey the full symbolic significance of the entire thing.
In How to Do Things With Words, the philosopher J.L. Austin argues that it’s a mistake to assume “that the business of a ‘statement’ can only be to ‘describe’ some state of affairs, which it must do truly or falsely.” On the contrary, Austin argues that we often use words in the form of what he calls “performative utterances.”
Unlike statements, performative utterances do not describe the world; they change it. They bring a fact into being. When the justice of the peace says “I now pronounce you man and wife,” he is not just stating a fact but actually creating it.
Examples abound in the law and religion alike. The formation of a contract involves words that create legal obligations. The priest’s blessing of the host and wine causes their transubstantiation into the body and blood of Christ. And of course, every culture has some concept of magic. Spells, incantations and “magic words” are essentially performative utterances.
In other words, truth as correspondence begins with performative rituals that directly resemble the social facts they serve to create. Then, vocalizations are abstracted from these rituals and allowed to perform their function. This results in words “mapping” to the social facts they bring into being.
With words, it becomes possible to consider social facts hypothetically. That is, we can entertain the thoughts associated with the words without intending (or being understood to intend) to bring about any social facts at all. Indeed, it’s possible that the need to consider whether to bring about certain social facts played a big role in the tendency to use vocalizations as shorthand for rituals in the first place.
If this account is correct, then using language to describe reality not only isn’t its primary purpose, it’s an afterthought. The primary purpose of language has always been to create and regulate social reality. It’s only because social reality can be quite complex that language has had to acquire the specificity and sophistication that would make possible descriptive accounts of natural (or supernatural) phenomena.
Reason to the rescue?
Based on the account I’ve given so far, we can say that “truth,” in its most ancient sense, refers to the correspondence of social expectations with social reality. Where myth and ritual fortify this alignment, the community must see their “truth” as self-evident, and dissent as not merely wrong but anti-social.
You can see where I’m going with this. If language is sophisticated enough to orchestrate complex social relations, it’s also capable of calling into question the veracity of myth and the relationship between ritual and physical reality. Language allows us to cast spells, but it also lets us break them.
That, in a nutshell, was the mission of the Enlightenment. In a famous essay, the philosopher Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment as
man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!
Naturally, if you believe that our social reality is a fragile thing, the idea that we should turn our backs on myth and ritual, and use reason to investigate nature and society directly, must present a terrifying prospect.
But even if you sympathize with the project of the Enlightenment, you can still appreciate how reason, stripped of all social context, can free us from superstition while at the same time untethering us from important social values. Exposed to the predations of impersonal ideologies like capitalism, we are left feeling alienated from ourselves and each other.
“It seems to me a historical fact,” writes Isaiah Berlin, “that whenever rationalism goes far enough there often tends to be a backlash, which springs from what is irrational in man.”
Like most liberals, Berlin appreciated the Enlightenment’s use of reason to win a victory over dogma and superstition, not to mention the political forces that used these things to hold people in a state of servitude. But he hastened to point out that Reason had some dogmas of its own.
For one thing, there was the belief that for all genuine questions there was one correct answer. For another, there exists a correct method for finding that answer. Finally, all such correct answers must be ultimately reconcilable to one another.
Berlin and other critics of the Enlightenment argued that these dogmas of rationalism have actually served to justify a lot of harmful ideologies, not least racism, colonialism, Nazism, and Marxism.
More contemporary thinkers argue that the point of Reason was never to get at “truth” in some impersonal or extra-social sense. Rather, reason evolved as a linguistic style primarily to persuade others. Given the thesis I’ve been developing here — that language’s original and most powerful source of meaning lies in the creation of social facts — I’d tend to agree.
It is only by a kind of cognitive arms race that some of us have become adept at spotting logical fallacies and other rhetorically manipulative strategies. That arms race could in principle serve to protect us against simplistic ideologies, but only if its benefits were widespread, and only if people were motivated to use them.
I’m afraid neither is the case.
This little light of mine
Which brings me at last to my conclusion. We live in what philosopher Charles Taylor called a “disenchanted world.” We long for meaning and purpose, but too few of us are finding it in the places society tells us to look.
Present day hostility towards science and expertise in general cannot be explained merely by jealousy, suspicion, or the idea that in a democratic society we’re all entitled to our own opinions. No, that hostility is a function of the divergence between the promise of scientific understanding, on the one hand, and the lived experience of masses of people, on the other.
The recent rise of authoritarianism in the West, and the complete disregard for truth and facts that most authoritarians evince, must be understood in light of the whole discussion we’ve been having so far. These demagogues are speaking to a part of us that longs to lose ourselves in the dream of myth and the conformity of ritual.
That was Truth’s first home. It was a mixed bag, as nurturing as it was abusive, and Truth could not remain there. Spiritual and intellectual maturity required emancipation. From our humble huts Truth rose to touch the heavens and split the atom.
But now a powerful movement calls Truth back, and many of us are heeding it even as others resist. My goal here has been to clarify just what it is that some of us are heeding or resisting, so that we can fully appreciate the stakes.
On the one hand, there is the enveloping warmth but ultimate hollowness of the ancestral cave. On the other, the promisingly vast but also choppy and uncertain sea of modernity. Each of us must choose where to carry that little light of Truth that lives inside us.