Having first written about a 'post-truth' world a while back now, I have nevertheless been surprised in the following months that the term has become common currency so quickly, even finding its way into popular discourse. I want to argue here that the advent of 'post-truth' and the collapse of a deference toward expertise is an unintended consequence of Neoliberalism and its appeal to a particularly crude and ill-defended subjectivism, whose triumph led to the defeat of Social Democracy and a transformation of the political landscape. Evidence from Labour's performance in Britain after two general election defeats, and more worryingly Jeremy Corbyn being the first Labour leader to never achieve positive poll ratings, appears to confirm that this is not something that is about to be reversed.
Firstly, a word about subjectivism in this context. In moral philosophy, subjectivism is effectively the idea that there are no moral norms to which individuals have a duty to conform to that are external to themselves. The individual alone has the power to accept or reject norms as he or she sees fit. Any sort of objectivism implies that, regardless of the individual's immediate belief or desire, there is in fact an onus on that individual to take into account or follow a norm which they themselves would not have conformed to otherwise. This is not a new debate, in any sense unique to modern times. Plato, in the Gorgias and The Republic, grappled with subjectivism at great length, and the whole objective vs. subjective debate is something ever-present in the history of Philosophy, spanning well beyond ethical issues into all sorts of fields.
So how does this debate affected our politics and economics? It might be spotted by the acute observer that this subjectivism seems to accord well with what became known as Neoliberalism, which began to make political ground in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, before being engulfed by Thatcherism in the 1980s. This is because Neoliberalism is committed to an idea of human freedom as being free from constraint. Such ideas of 'objective' obligations upon individuals therefore fit directly into this category of constraints which should be thrown off in order to achieve a genuinely free society. This was the thrust of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, the book famously paraded by Margaret Thatcher during a cabinet meeting early on in her tenure. Moreover, even Anthony Crosland, perhaps the most influential revisionist and Social Democrat in Britain during the 20th century, read the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer's subjectivist argument in Language, Truth and Logic (1936) with a certain degree of persuasion. Given that many of the arguments employed by 'collectivists' (those who wished to use the power of the State for social change) were moral in nature and inevitably appealed to moral norms, the subjectivist critique proved to be a devastating one, and one that appears to have stayed very much with us.
The dismissing of knowledge as opinion is more symptomatic of this than anything else, and is something that is unintentionally being amplified by mainstream media (such as the BBC), who are primarily concerned with providing unbiased coverage, as Simon Wren-Lewis continually argues. Only today, in response to the resignation of Sir Ivan Rogers as the UK's chief ambassador to the EU, Iain Duncan-Smith played down his expertise a merely another 'opinion', as if it had equivalence with the opinion of someone who had no experience of negotiations, no knowledge of the EU, and with very little interest in politics at all. This again could be traced to the influence of Hayek, whose influential 1945 paper 'The Use of Knowledge in Society' effectively claimed that the vast majority of 'knowledge' in society was not something that could be accessed through study or expertise but is instead privately experienced through our own unique choices and perspectives. Therefore, the very nature of a 'post-truth' era should perhaps be of little surprise, and in fact seems to be a logical corollary of such arguments when applied to debates with a political nature.
One of the great failings of Social Democracy is not necessarily that it has ran out of ideas, as argued for recently on the BBCs Newsnight by Matthew Goodwin, but rather that it has spectacularly failed to confront subjectivism. Progressives have on the whole failed to convince people that the moral principles upon which Social Democracy is based are in fact the right ones. The greatest defeat inflicted upon Social Democracy by Neoliberalism was not an economic one - indeed the period 1979-1990 is the 11-year period in the 20th century with the lowest average growth rate - but was a moral one, and certainly constituted a broader ideological victory. As Raymond Plant points out in his chapter on Social Democracy in Seldon and Marquand's volume The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain, Social Democracy has always been propped up by economic growth due the fact that under such conditions the government can make the worst-off relatively better-off without making the richest absolutely worse-off. In order for Social Democracy to be relevant then, in an epoch still very much in the shadow of the Great Recession, progressives must challenge and win not only the moral argument as such, but a metaethical argument against subjectivism, the argument that moral obligations matter and must be accounted for in our idea of human freedom and betterment. Such an argument is beyond the scope of this particular blog post.
Firstly, a word about subjectivism in this context. In moral philosophy, subjectivism is effectively the idea that there are no moral norms to which individuals have a duty to conform to that are external to themselves. The individual alone has the power to accept or reject norms as he or she sees fit. Any sort of objectivism implies that, regardless of the individual's immediate belief or desire, there is in fact an onus on that individual to take into account or follow a norm which they themselves would not have conformed to otherwise. This is not a new debate, in any sense unique to modern times. Plato, in the Gorgias and The Republic, grappled with subjectivism at great length, and the whole objective vs. subjective debate is something ever-present in the history of Philosophy, spanning well beyond ethical issues into all sorts of fields.
So how does this debate affected our politics and economics? It might be spotted by the acute observer that this subjectivism seems to accord well with what became known as Neoliberalism, which began to make political ground in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, before being engulfed by Thatcherism in the 1980s. This is because Neoliberalism is committed to an idea of human freedom as being free from constraint. Such ideas of 'objective' obligations upon individuals therefore fit directly into this category of constraints which should be thrown off in order to achieve a genuinely free society. This was the thrust of Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty, the book famously paraded by Margaret Thatcher during a cabinet meeting early on in her tenure. Moreover, even Anthony Crosland, perhaps the most influential revisionist and Social Democrat in Britain during the 20th century, read the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer's subjectivist argument in Language, Truth and Logic (1936) with a certain degree of persuasion. Given that many of the arguments employed by 'collectivists' (those who wished to use the power of the State for social change) were moral in nature and inevitably appealed to moral norms, the subjectivist critique proved to be a devastating one, and one that appears to have stayed very much with us.
The dismissing of knowledge as opinion is more symptomatic of this than anything else, and is something that is unintentionally being amplified by mainstream media (such as the BBC), who are primarily concerned with providing unbiased coverage, as Simon Wren-Lewis continually argues. Only today, in response to the resignation of Sir Ivan Rogers as the UK's chief ambassador to the EU, Iain Duncan-Smith played down his expertise a merely another 'opinion', as if it had equivalence with the opinion of someone who had no experience of negotiations, no knowledge of the EU, and with very little interest in politics at all. This again could be traced to the influence of Hayek, whose influential 1945 paper 'The Use of Knowledge in Society' effectively claimed that the vast majority of 'knowledge' in society was not something that could be accessed through study or expertise but is instead privately experienced through our own unique choices and perspectives. Therefore, the very nature of a 'post-truth' era should perhaps be of little surprise, and in fact seems to be a logical corollary of such arguments when applied to debates with a political nature.
One of the great failings of Social Democracy is not necessarily that it has ran out of ideas, as argued for recently on the BBCs Newsnight by Matthew Goodwin, but rather that it has spectacularly failed to confront subjectivism. Progressives have on the whole failed to convince people that the moral principles upon which Social Democracy is based are in fact the right ones. The greatest defeat inflicted upon Social Democracy by Neoliberalism was not an economic one - indeed the period 1979-1990 is the 11-year period in the 20th century with the lowest average growth rate - but was a moral one, and certainly constituted a broader ideological victory. As Raymond Plant points out in his chapter on Social Democracy in Seldon and Marquand's volume The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain, Social Democracy has always been propped up by economic growth due the fact that under such conditions the government can make the worst-off relatively better-off without making the richest absolutely worse-off. In order for Social Democracy to be relevant then, in an epoch still very much in the shadow of the Great Recession, progressives must challenge and win not only the moral argument as such, but a metaethical argument against subjectivism, the argument that moral obligations matter and must be accounted for in our idea of human freedom and betterment. Such an argument is beyond the scope of this particular blog post.
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