Many claim that we live in a "post-truth" era. Trust in major civic and political institutions is
rapidly declining. People on all sides of the political spectrum
dismiss the media as biased at best and little more than "fake news" at worst. The postmodern President of the United States is the most powerful man in the world, and
according to Politifact makes statements that range from "half true" to outright lies 83 per cent of the time. In
an earlier article for Canada's
The Hill Times, I invoked the philosopher Harry Frankfurt and summarized these developments as a rising "Age of Bullshit." Concurrently, our post-truth era has been marked with lamentations across the ideological spectrum by those who provide a variety of explanations for our climate of untruth. Many progressives and liberals pin the blame on manipulative conservative politicians such as Trump and Boris Johnson, interference by foreign governments and cyber-attacks, and politically biased media. Many conservatives, meanwhile, pin the blame on progressive activists, the rise of PC culture and oversensitivity, and...politically biased media. I have already offered
my own opinions on the roots of the "Age of Bullshit," characterizing it as a natural development of postmodern culture, so I will not repeat my position here.
In this short article, I want to analyze a somewhat different question: Why do we value the truth at all? This was a major theme in Bernard Williams' seminal 2004 book
Truth and Truthfullness: An Essay in Genealogy. Inspired by the work of Nietzsche, especially his essay
"On Truth and Falsity in a Nonmoral Sense" and
On the Genealogy of Morality, Williams asks a different set of questions to those normally seen in standard philosophy. Most philosophers ask questions like "What is truth?" or "How can we discover truth?" These are obviously important questions and no right-minded person would be indifferent to them. But what Williams (following Nietzsche) is interested in is the "virtue" of truth; what roles does truth play in our lives, and is it valuable?
How much truth are people really capable of handling? Are there circumstances where untruth might actually be valuable or even expected? These are peculiar questions, but asking them can help us get a better grip on why truth is virtuous, and why our post-truth era suffers from so many defects.
Comment: What can one say in the face of such idiocy, except how did this lunatic gain a college teaching position? The answer is that he is teaching at what is really an asylum comparable to Evergreen College.