I prefer to think that 21st century society is post-trust, rather than post-truth.
As
any philosopher will tell you, truth is a fraught concept. But for the
average non-philosopher, trust is a pretty good tool to determine truth.
For example, I can’t personally test every single claim put forward by
physicists, so I trust that the community of physicists does their due
diligence during the peer review process.
In other words, our perception of the truth of a statement that we cannot directly verify boils down to our perception of the trustworthiness of the person or institution making the statement.
The post-trust era is basically the era in which the erosion of faith in institutions has reached critical mass. But the process may have begun in the postwar 20th century.
The
1960s saw a major erosion of trust in politicians, all over the world.
The Watergate scandal in the 1970s confirmed the worst suspicions of the
counterculture. Meanwhile in much of the third world, the hope and
enthusiasm that followed the end of colonialism started to give way to
cynicism in the face of corruption and mismanagement.
The
greedy 1980s seemed to accelerate the trend: politicians seemed to
glorify selfishness while dismantling various social institutions. The
left-wing dream really seemed to collapse in that decade. By the 1990s
cynicism had become a mainstream position, exemplified in pop culture by
the (hilarious!) nihilism of Seinfeld.
And all
over the world, the past 50 years has seen a marked decline in
religious faith, particularly among educated and affluent elites.
Many
of the institutions that started to crumble were of course unworthy of
trust. But we haven’t replaced them with anything, really. Pure capitalistic self-interest does not lead to institution-building.
Look at what the profit motive has done to journalism! A major reason
for the rise of Donald Trump was the free advertising many liberal media
organizations gave to him in the early months. They cynically assumed
that his circus of a campaign would attract maximum ‘clicks’ and
‘eyeballs’, not thinking of the larger risks.
Meanwhile, trust in science has probably declined, though it’s hard to tell whether there was that much trust to begin with.
It strikes me that many people simply think that all elites are untrustworthy:
the people with the PhDs, after all, did not predict the financial
crisis, and still seem unable to articulate any vision of a future in
which everyone is better off. We are promised better algorithms, but not better lives.
If you can’t trust the former arbiters of truth: journalists, academics, politicians, and priests, who can you trust?
It’s a race to the bottom, where you trust things based on whims and fancies, or on aesthetic and cultural principles.
The post-trust era is when postmodernism becoming the actual state of the world, rather than an obscure topic for humanities professors to debate about.
Postmodernism is the idea that society has become suspicious of meta-narratives:
the overarching cultural stories that tie groups of people together.
These narratives include religious ones, political ones (such as
Marxism, anarchism, libertarianism and so on) and even aesthetic ones
(such as classicism, romaniticism, modernism or ‘rockism’).
So
educated elites dumping more ‘facts’ on ‘stupid’ people from on high is
unlikely to do anything. Why should the masses trust that these ‘facts’
are true? The elites haven’t done anything to help them lately (or so
it can often seem), so their ‘truths’ might be self-serving. This was
the case in the mid 20th century when doctors were paid to claim
cigarettes were harmless… how are we to know if this isn’t happening all
the time?
In our age of globalization and instantaneous remote communication, I think the only solution is to rebuild our human-scaled networks of trust.
Your climate-change-denying friend might not trust your scientific
arguments initially, but if you are a trustworthy and reliable friend,
perhaps one day your point of view will carry weight. It’s a two-way street of course: you must eventually become open to considering what your friend says too.
So
if we want to get back to a society in which people agree more often on
what is true, we might have to roll up our sleeves and give our
neighbours and friends reason to trust us first.
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