In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an
essay entitled Truth and Politics in The New Yorker (it later appeared
with revisions in the book, Between The Past and The Future). Though
originally written as a response to critics she felt had lied about her
coverage of the Eichmann trials, the thinking catalyzed by these
concerns led to ideas and insights of much more general import, and well
worth evaluating today in an age where distinctions between facts,
conspiracy theories and lies seem to swirl around us in a miasma of
misinformation, shaping everything from policy and elections in gov't to
media/social media to everyday interactions in our dangerously
conflicted society. As we try to understand a world in which lies and
truths appear to be interchangeable categories ("alternative facts"),
and where the most egregious lying imaginable in the public realm has
the potential to wreck our system of government, possibly once and for
all, the topic of the essay could not be more important. It is among
Arendt's most thought-provoking essays from her late period, whether one
agrees or takes exception to the conclusions she reaches. Here I
summarize some of the main theses in the piece concisely and in the
context of our own political situation in the US.
Arendt
begins by stating that not all truths are alike in their nature and
status. We may speak of scientific truths, moral truths, religious
truths, historical truths, psychological truths, and-- most importantly
for this essay-- factual truths. She divides these various types of truth up into 2 categories: "factual truths" and "rational truths."
The definitions are useful descriptions or heuristics rather than
epistemic claims. AS Arendt puts it, "I shall use this distinction for
the sake of convenience [emph added] without discussing its
intrinsic legitimacy."(Truth and Politics: p. 2) The purpose of this
convenient distinction is to compare and contrast the outcomes when
rational truths vs. factual truths come into conflict with political authorities and power structures.
Rational
truths include the accepted truths of mathematics, science, philosophy
and religion, among others. Factual truths are derived from observation
and experience (e.g. historical records, eyewitness accounts, etc.).
The first claim she makes is that while rational truths and factual
truths can both be lost or wiped out when they bump up against political
powers, factual truths (i.e. knowledge of actual events, people, and
actions such as those journalists cover) are far more vulnerable to
erasure at the hands of political authorities than rational truths.
One
can imagine, for example, knowledge of basic arithmetic being lost, or
for some reason banned by fanatical anti-mathematical clerics or
something. All the text books would be burned, like in Bradburry's
Farenheit 451. Yet it is certainly not impossible that later generations
would devise systems like addition and subtraction for themselves based
on their own rational capacities. At more abstract levels the
likelihood or reestablishing rational truths gets slimmer but is still
possible. Imagine General Relativity, Copernican Heliocentrism, or
Euclidean geometry being banned for whatever reason (as the Church
banned Heliocentrism in the 17th C). Perhaps such knowledge would
eventually perish like so many books reduced to dust. And yet, Arendt
claims, it is at least imaginable that some of these truths would emerge
from later inquiries because they are based on reasoning and ideas
rather than fleeting and unique events in history that must be witnessed
and recorded to exist at all. Factual Truths (e.g. Stalin and
Hitler made a pact in 1939; Nixon bombed Cambodia illegally during
Vietnam; Trump lost the 2020 election and no investigation has since
uncovered "fraud" as he and others claim occurred) are MUCH easier to
stamp out, to obliterate from public discourse when they inconvenience
those in power. They are based on records rather than reasoning. The
question that arises here is "How are factual truths obliterated in
modern societies?" According to Arendt, it happens by means of what she
calls *organized lying.* The facts are "lied away," as she puts it.
We
are often prone to thinking that the biggest threat to facts is false
belief/crackpot theory/bullshit and the like. But the biggest threat
comes not from merely false belief but deliberate falsehood/lying.While
the opposite of a true mathematical result is an "error," and the
opposite of a presumed scientific truth is a "falsehood," the opposite
of factual truths on the public record is a "lie." This doesn't
mean there are no innocent mistakes in the recording of facts, by, for
example, journalists. But these failed efforts to record actualities
accurately--errata-- are not fundamentally *opposed* to factual truths.
Indeed they are accidents that occur while acting as a "truth-teller" or
chronicler of facts. So unlike other domains of truth, the opposite of
factual truth is the lie, and in particular "organized lying." What, then, is the main danger of lying in politics?
Often we fear that the danger of lies is that they can come to replace factual truth, or provide a substitute for
the public record, which serves as an orienting consensus in an
otherwise diverse society. The fear, these days, is expressed in terms
of some "alternative facts" coming to replace actualities. This is not
the ultimate threat, thinks Arendt. There is a point beyond which lying
becomes incompatible with social stability and common understandings
necessary for survival and shared life. You can only get so far in
establishing "alternate accounts" of the facts without utterly
destabilizing the fabric of reality itself. Taken far enough, the
content of lies (be it conspiracy theories or arbitrary misstatements
that attack facts) result not in a substitute for the shared public realm of acknowledged facts, but in confusion, disorientation and conflict over what is real-- and over what is really happening. Thus the ultimate threat isn't the content of the lying itself (though this obviously has proximate importance) but rather it is the coordinated and
concerted effort to undermine or obliterate facts that threaten those
in power for one reason or another. Publicly
acknowledged and shared factual truth constitutes a minimal basis for
any overlapping consensus within which we can communicate at all. It is
one of the main ingredients in the very fabric of social existence, and
it can't be replaced by lies. The fantasies of organized lying and
factual truths can't function in equivalent ways. One reflects a
reasonably accurate grasp of realities we cannot escape--i.e. the
social, historical realities within which we must exist and act-- while
the fantastic lies have no ground at all. Once the ground of truth is
lost, just about anything goes. As Arendt puts it famously elsewhere,
the result is that "Nothing is true and everything is possible." In
Truth and Politics, she writes that, "[truth] is limited to those things
that men cannot change at will...[adding] Conceptually, we may call
truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground we walk on
and the sky that stretches above us."(T&P:p. 19)
Factual
truths, then, function to check arbitrary power from destroying our
access to shared reality. This leads to a discussion of the importance
of those public institutions "established and supported by the powers
that be, in which contrary to all political rules, truth and
truthfulness have always constituted the highest criterion of speech and
endeavor."(T&P:17) In this connection, she mentions the importance
in modern open societies of the independent judiciary, research centers
and universities, government archives, et al. What all such domains
share is a commitment to impartiality. "Whether these places of
higher learning are in private or public hands" she writes, "is of no
great importance; not only their integrity but their very existence
depends on the good will of the government anyway...Very unwelcome
truths have emerged from the universities, and very unwelcome judgments
have been handed down from the bench time and time again." (T&P: p.
17). But we must not take these "refuges of truth" for granted, as they
are, along with the free press, vulnerable to the whims of political
power-- even in "open societies" ruled by constitutions. Without real
journalism, as opposed to what we call "fake news," she remarks, "we should never find our bearings in an ever-changing world and, in the most literal sense, we would never know where we are." This is the desired outcome of organized lying.
So political lying typically targets not just recorded truths in the
public realm, but the institutions in which disinterested studies and
impartial determinations are made. Universities, the free press and
independent judiciaries are often the first casualties of organized
political lying campaigns. Over the past decade, we've seen a disturbing
trend along just such lines in Hungary, Poland and a few other
countries in Europe. Trump's effort to "drain the swamp" is largely
tantamount to erasing the institutional memory-system of our "bloated
government departments." Attempts to neutralize agencies like the EPA by
staffing it with opponents of environmentalism also belie the desire to
"lie away" even important scientific truths we face in the age of
global warming. The list goes on and on. Organized lying depends on the
dismantling of as many centers of relatively impartial inquiry as
possible, and again this reveals the true goal not as one of "replacing"
a world anchored by generally accurate public understandings, but
destroying that world in service to the caprice of the will to
domination, and not the will to truth. The manipulation of social
reality allows those in power to get away with almost anything, and then
make up rationalizations as they go along.
Take
the example of "memory laws" in which history is turned into official
doctrine. In Turkey, one can't say there was an Armenian Genocide. In
Poland, one can't say there were collaborators in WW2. In China,
Tiananmen Square never happened, and surviving witnesses are carefully
monitored to this day. (Louissa Lim's book, The People's Republic of
Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, describes that sad affair). Thus, lying
in politics relies heavily on creating "public enemies." Recall Trump
said the NY Times is "an enemy of the people"-- and though many laughed
at the time, he soon stopped taking any questions he didn't like in
press conferences, saying only three words instead, "That's fake news."
Perhaps the most concise statement he made along these Arendtian lines
is when he told an audience, "What you're seeing and reading is not what's
happening." https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2018/07/24/donald-trump-what-youre-seeing-not-whats-happening-tapper-sot-vpx.cnn
So we see in modern authoritarian politics, as with the totalitarian
states of the 20th century, an attempt not to replace truth with some
other stable "alternate reality" as some fear, but to make it seem that factual truths are really just so many "opinions." You
think Trump lost, but I have a "different opinion"-- an "alternative
account." That's the sort of attitude toward facts operative in the
domain of organized lying.. Of course, there are areas in which citizens
disagree because they hold different opinions-- a hallmark of free
society. But these are opinions ABOUT agreed facts, not just opinions
about other opinions of opinions, ad infinitum with no bottom
line or basis for mediation. If the distinction between these is lost or
blurred, the results are disastrous. We already see a world in which
people who live in the same cities seem to be denizens of utterly
different universes as far as their basic beliefs about the world and
reality are concerned. Some of us are able to remember that not so long
ago this was simply not the case.
Once
factual truths are leveled out and treated like mere opinions, there is
no longer a possibility for shared understandings of reality to serve
as a legitimate basis for debating and discussing policies as responses
to situations and problems that are agreed upon on the basis of public
records, journalism, social science etc. Suppose we are debating
responses to urban crime or unemployment. We can only disagree
meaningfully and offer our opinions on the topic if we at least agree on
statements of crime rates or unemployment. In some political speeches
these are almost completely fudged in order to achieve some political
goal which treats such facts as mere obstacles to power. Then
the description of society and its problems and needed policies no
longer rests on shared knowledge but becomes malleable in the hands of
those who fabricate and deceive in order to impose
their will on society with impunity. This , for Arendt, is the heart of the fascist project. She writes:
"The
result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth
is not that lies will now be accepted as truths, and truths defamed as
lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real
world-- and the categories of truth vs. falsehoods is among the mental
means to this end-- is being destroyed." (TP: p. 16)
So
the goal is to render populations susceptible to the arbitrary
refashioning of the public stock of knowledge on which political acts
and decisions are based. Power determines alleged facticity, and the
possibility of critique, dissent or simply holding authorities to
accounts based on accurate knowledge is short-circuited. Facts then
become radically free . That is, the usual constraints of
accuracy are entirely loosened so that authorities can say things one
day and contradict them, or say they never said them at all the next
day. They can rewrite history to subserve their own ends. They can
categorize whole groups as "criminals," "traitors," or "public enemies"
with no burden of objective evidence at all.
An
example of this from the 1/6 hearings is found in an interview with
former AG Barr. He recalls conversations with Trump in which the latter
would say things like, "I have evidence from Pennsylvania, you have to
do something about that." Barr would say, "We investigated that claim,
Sir, it doesn't check, it's simply not true." Barr recalls that
Trump seemed "totally unconcerned with the facts" as he would
effortlessly switch to some other allegation as if he had not registered
the FACT that the first claim was being dismissed as false. He would
say something like "Well what about the evidence I gave you from
Georgia?" Barr went on to say, "I thought, 'boy, he's really detached
from reality if he believes this stuff.'" I'm not sure Barr understood
that what he was so surprised to see was no different from the way Trump
had dismissed photographic evidence regarding the size of the crowd at
his inauguration in 2017, when he insisted it was "the biggest crowd
ever...bigger than Obama's inaugural" etc. The press treated that like
it was merely some character flaw, a narcissistic personality disorder,
etc. Even if that part is true, it is less important for Arendt than the
real goal of such unremitting lying on all matters great and small. The
real aim is to eradicate the distinction between facts and lies. After a
while, GOP stalwarts asked about Trump's endless stream of obvious lies
just submitted to their validity. They accepted the lies by adopting a
blase attitude towards them, thus according the fact/lie distinction
little importance. In such a blase mode it was no longer difficult let
the lies stand simply by NOT refuting or denying them. I remember Pence
being asked about some obvious lies and accusatory statements made by
Trump in a speech in an interview. Asked if he agreed with the content
of the lies, Pence simply said, "I think it's just Trump being Trump."
This elides the entire fact/lie distinction by stating a banal truism, a
tautology to be precise. Soon enough, "It's just Trump being Trump" or
similar stock phrases became the common currency of his enablers. Barr
was surely among them. Did none of these people realize that they too
had become "detached from reality" (as Barr put it recently) simply by
accepting this discourse of lies as legitimate?
Arendt
thinks that to some extent, those implicated in organized lying like
this are self-deceived. This is not to say they deeply and sincerely
believe any of these things. No, these aren't held as deep convictions.
Rather, the perpetrators don't really care about the truth/lie
distinction except in cases where they must cover their asses. (And if
they take all of this a bridge to far, they may well fail even to do
that and be caught off guard). As long as they can get away with it,
they focus not on the true/false distinction but the distinction between
gaining and losing power and the ability to dominate others. To a large
extent, they stop questioning themselves about what is true and false,
except in cases where their own power hangs in the balance. Otherwise,
while delivering a speech or message, they likely do not notice that
they are lying. It has become a default mode of operating in most
situations. Arendt likens this mentality to "Madison Avenue Advertising"
culture. Here we can think of politicians who "believe their own
propaganda" or "get high on their own supply." Apparently, for example,
Rumsfeld and others in the Bush Administration really believed US
invaders and occupiers would be "greeted as liberators." The poor
planning that resulted landed them in a quagmire. They bought their own
lies. It seems Putin similarly somehow believed his own propaganda about
Ukranians embracing Russian invaders as liberators-- and planned a
victory statement for Feb. 28, a mere 4 days after "special military
operations" began. This self-deception-- which can be ones' undoing-- is
an occupational hazard faced by the authoritarian or fascist leader
accustomed to the flattery of yes-men rather than quality information.
Here
I have only summarized a few of the arguments advanced by Arendt
because they are especially relevant to our situation today. But for the
sake of clarity, Arendt does recognize that the truth is much more than
just a collection of recorded facts. The latter are the indispensable
basis for other forms such as scientific and philosophical truths. When
organized lying becomes pervasive, telling the truth or reporting facts
becomes a form of political action, says Arendt. The journalist who
digs for truth in Russia or China may well end up on a hit-list and
become a dissident or honored hero, where in a society that takes free
press for granted, it seems that simply reporting facts is apolitical.
But Arendt is also aware that the truths we live by also include
principles, values, norms and stories that lend meaning to these facts.
Storytellers, historians, philosophers, religious figures and others
have always played an important role in establishing moral, social and
political understandings such as those encoded in laws and principles
undergirding society, culture, law and the political domain. The values,
for example, of liberty and equality, are not recorded facts. But they
have been part of the commonly understood "World" inhabited by those of
us who live in liberal or social democracies. I did not think it was as
important to discuss her thoughts on how such "rational truths"
function, since the prerequisite for them is still, as she said, the
kind of knowledge we need simply to "literally know where we are." And
it appears such knowledge is now endangered here.
(This OP also appears on the Books&Ideas blog here: https://disqus.com/home/forum/books-ideas-blog/ )
References/related reading:
-Hannah Arendt: Truth and Politics (Between The Past and The Future:
Penguin press 1977 Ch.7 Truth and Politcs pp. 223-260 or available as free stand-alone essay online)
-Frederica Merenda: Reading Arendt to Rethink Truth ( Democracy and Fake News Routledge, 2021 article by Frederica Merenda page 19-30)
Possible Questions:
-Do you agree with Arendt's claim that the ultimate goal
of political lying is NOT to replace one stable truth with some
alternative to it, but rather to destroy the distinction between factual
truths and mere opinions so that those in power can stipulate what
counts as true with no regard to consistency or stability at all?
-If
Arendt's account is correct, it would seem to follow that the
relatively accountable and honest institutions she mentions (free press,
universities, various governmental departments that collect and
disseminate information etc.) are of vital importance. But she doesn't make
any suggestions in this essay regarding how to safeguard the integrity
of such institutions. Do you have any ideas about how to do that in the
face of a politically motivated all-out assault on factual truth?
