Skeptic March 2020

that I can dominate your reality, and there is nothing
you can do about it.”
The eminent historian of fascism Hannah
Arendt provides the parallel for our present situa-
tion when she observes that “the ideal subject of
totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the
convinced communist, but people for whom the
distinction between fact and fiction...true and
false...no longer exist.” In his 2017 book On
Tyranny, Tim Snyder makes the point even more
succinctly: “post-truth is pre-fascism.”
Perhaps it’s a matter of degree and timing. I
agree with Pinker when he observes that the ma-
nipulation of information is hardly new, and that
politicians have always lied, dissembled, and dis-
torted the facts. But post-truth is not mere lying or
distortion. While it may involve the spread of
falsehood, its purpose is political, not epistemologi-
cal. With post-truth, no one is asking for your
agreement.
When President Trump notoriously took a
sharpie to a NOAA weather map^4 so that he was
“not wrong” about the path of Hurricane Dorian
(drawing its moving path to include territory Trump
said it would), most of the country just laughed at
him. But isn’t this tactic identical to his chilling in-
sistence, just after the massacre at the Tree of Life
synagogue in Pittsburgh, that he was justified in
holding a rally^5 that night because the NYSE was
open the day after 9/11? When it was pointed out to
Trump that this was in fact false (the NYSE was
closed for six days after 9/11), it did not seem to
matter. Trump went on to hold his rally not because
his lie had convinced anyone, but because there was
no political price for it.
Pinker is well known these days for his opti-
mistic contention (he calls it realistic), in his
2018 book Enlightenment Now, that we are living
in what by many measures is the best era of
human history. So why all the catastrophizing? As
Pinker points out in his post-truth essay, fake
news constituted less than 1% of online commu-
nication^6 in the run up to the 2016 election, and
even that seemed targeted toward people who
had already made up their minds. How to square
this, though, with the conclusion from the same
study that Pinker citesthat the penetration of false
stories^7 reached over one quarter of the American
electorate, with unknowable consequences for its
outcome?^8 Such unknown costs may be negligi-
ble; then again, they may be non-negligible, in
which case concerns about the hacking of the
2020 election may be justified. Here it would

seem the precautionary principle may apply. While Pinker’s cheery graphs and statistics may be accurate, they do little to assuage our sense that the risk to facts and truth during the Trump era is a potential crisis for democracy. Of course, Pinker might point out that such alarm could (ironically) itself be due to the degree to which we are suc- cumbing to worry and emotion that is coloring our beliefs about post-truth itself! Yet perhaps it is pos- sible that, even while Pinker’s measures of well being are all valid, the risks are nonetheless higher as well. Think of the analogy here with war. Couldn’t it be true that while we are living in one of the most peaceful eras of human history, we also live in a time of greatest threat in that a single (nuclear) war could wipe out humanity? Even Pinker admits this to be the case in both Enlightenment Nowand in The Better Angels of Our Nature, in which he made clear his support for a nuclear-free world. To say that we now live in a post-truth era does not mean that no one believes in truth or that all of the progress of science and reason has been wiped out; it means that despite the fact that millions of us still care about truth, we feel helpless in watching the standards of evidence and accountability erode before our eyes. To make the claim that we could not be living in a post-truth era because too many people care about truth is like saying that we could not be living in a era of institutional racism, because there are so many people these days who are at- tuned to the problems of race. I am also in robust agreement with Pinker on the importance of science and reason: we should not deny facts, truth, and reality. Where we seem to disagree is on the question of whether science and reason are under genuine threat. The threat to truth is posed both by those (like Trump) who would sub- vert the truth for political gain, and also by those who would deny that such a threat actually exists. Even if Pinker is right that we are now living in an era of extraordinary progress and accomplish- ment, it may all come crashing down if we don’t take the threat from post-truth seriously.

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