Post-Truth: Language

blackliberal (55)in #truth • 6 years ago (edited)

The language of post-truth is the language that was defined at the XIII International Seminar on Language and Journalism held recently in San Millán de la Cogolla. The relationship that this convention has with the truth could be summarized with the word epistemology. Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals precisely with how we know, what we can know and how we do it. The question of truth is central to this inquiry into what we can know. Therefore, if we live in the post-truth era, it is essential to make an epistemological, philosophical approach to what the post-truth means and how it influences our worldview and the public debate.

The first thing that was raised in this seminar was the privatization of language, so it should be made clear that there is no such thing as a private language, human language is a social fact and is possibly the strongest characterization of human beings as social beings. Ludwig Wittgenstein, an Austrian philosopher, mathematician, linguist, and logician, refuted this argument of the private language. Wittgenstein uses the word "pain" as an example to explain his theory of social language. Therefore, he affirms that when I say that I feel pain, I am referring to my personal pain, but it cannot be related only to my feeling of pain, because to do so would place us in a scenario of total isolation of some people from others. There is a collective consensus on what pain' means so I can say that I feel pain and others understand me, even if they are not feeling it. In that sense, he says that there is no private language.

Consensus on the meaning of words is one of the most basic consensuses that exist in any society, so much so that we are not even aware of it. One of the most revealing books ever written by a philologist is the language of the Third Reich, by Victor Klemperer. In this book, the author carries out a philological analysis to demonstrate how the Nazis were modifying the meanings of different morphemes shared by society until they were able to re-invent a language that in fact recreates reality in the way that was convenient for Nazism. Once they redefined the meanings of the concepts for the society, it was not difficult for them to convince the Germans of their political ideas, because meanings are the key to our ideas. The truth goes even further.

According to the Oxford dictionary

It is primarily the deliberate distortion of reality, in other words, it is any information or assertion that is not based on objective facts, but appeals to the emotions, beliefs or desires of the plebs. It means that there is no shared reality that we can all recognize as such, but that everything consists of who has the strength to impose their vision because there is no absolute truth, and everyone has a truth to present.

Postruth is tantamount to denying the enlightened paradigm and ideal of modernity, according to which the tools of reason and logic are the best instrument for knowing reality. Modernity is above all a method, which does not deny that we have personal opinions, but asks us to base them on facts and defend them with coherent arguments. In the end, post-truth leads us to a pre-modern age in which superstitions are stronger than reason; beliefs matter more than reality.

Postruth is often assimilated to the predominance of emotions in public discourse, but is it really a matter of emotionality? Public discourse always has an emotional component and a rational component. There are two problems: one, emotions are not bad in themselves, there are good emotions for politics (hope, for example, one of Tatcher's or Churchill's strong ideas) and there are very negative ones (fear, anger, hatred that), which are the ones that stir populism and fascism to create social distortion and a great degree of polarization. The second problem is that it is not about fighting emotions as a whole, but about not confusing them with superstition. Superstitions are individual or collective personal beliefs, not based on facts or data, but on beliefs that are impossible to contrast. This brings us back to a worse scenario than that of private language, it takes us to a private reality, to a reality that I or a group of people believe in and that we don't care if it has a correlation with reality. At this point, it is important to underline the importance of journalism and its role as the backbone of public reality, political reality. Journalism tells us the set of shared facts on which we all agree (then, naturally, there are the natural and healthy political discrepancies regarding how to deal with those facts, how to change reality).

A well-established idea in politics - and in the design of political communication - is that facts are not relevant, what really matters is that language can be used to convince the masses of any particular issue as long as one has sufficient strength in the media to impose one's story. This leaves us totally helpless, and ultimately means that whoever has sufficient power (media, political, economic) not only exercises power, but has the ability to define reality and alter it in its favour. This is totalitarianism. As the classic saying in journalism goes: opinions are free, facts are sacred. Only this unconditional attachment to the facts of real journalism can save us from post-truth, and unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of journalism now interested in contributing to creating this or that story, rather than committing to reality, truth and objective facts.

Now I would like to make it clear that it is not only the evil of journalism that is distorting so many concepts and playing into the hands of post-truth, but also that there are three other particularities, in my opinion, that aggravate the situation we live in with regard to the truth.

The postmodern, fully established belief that there is no such thing as truth, that there are only points of view. What really defines our era, although Orwell denounced it in the 1930s, is not so much the lie as the abandonment of the idea that truth can exist. It must be borne in mind that he says this in times of war, when it is assumed that propaganda is multiplying. It's like we're living in perpetual propaganda.
The financial crisis has left the elites with an appalling distrust. It's hard to believe someone who has the slightest institutional halo (be it an expert, a public official, a media outlet). In the face of this, we choose to believe those who ratify our previous ideas (which is aggravated by the confirmation bias).
Social networks, the web, big data, multiply the strength of lies. Hoaxes have always existed and we know their strength. But scientific research has shown that networks spread lies faster than the truth. And they also reach more people. I mean, faster and further away. This calls for our own responsibility as network users, as builders of a much-needed'civilisation' in this field in whose transition we find ourselves. It will only be possible if we do not lose sight of the Enlightenment and values such as being able to discuss with those who do not have the same opinions around minimum consensus and shared concepts.

Much could now be said about real solutions to the problems of post-truth and political manipulation through language as a factor of change. However, if these solutions are not implemented with immediate effect, civilization may be so affected to the point of involution. The beings belonging to the post-truth society do not understand the importance of the concepts of truth and all the moral duty it implies.