What a year. America’s election news cycle oscillated between riveting five-star drama rife with side-splitting irony and realizations which induced stomach-churning dismay. But perhaps “oscillate” is not even an appropriate word; 2016 showed us that you could have both at once, as these two elements fused into the ultimate black comedy. 2016 beat fiction, gang.
As people everywhere collected their thoughts and reflected on last year, Oxford Dictionary took a noteworthy stab at 2016 by declaring the word of the year “post-truth,” which they define as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” This definition is a whopper to unravel, but the concept is fully present in our national media conversations through the buzzwords of “fake news” and Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts.” And in between the lines there is a part of our culture which we need to consider.
In previous articles, I examined the idea of worldview—the fundamental assumptions we each make about the nature of reality. These assumptions answer questions that are most basically about the nature of God and the nature of man, from which follow implications about morality, purpose, truth and other major concepts which contend for transcendent significance.
But in activism and politics, the conversation centers around agenda—the means which coalitions are trying to execute and the goals they seek to accomplish. These include everything from the Democratic party’s national platform to Trump’s 100-day plan to Obama’s efforts to secure his legacy to Duke’s timetable to become carbon neutral by 2024.
But neither of these categories comprise how our culture and particularly we—as millennials and Duke students—tend to process society day-by-day. If “worldview” is our philosophical pillar of knowing basic reality and “agenda” is the social imperative by which we live every day, this leaves a wide gap between the two which can be best described as “narrative.” This could seem like a superfluous abstraction, but maybe this concept can help explain the phenomena of “post-truth” in our time.
Oxford Dictionary’s definition for “post-truth” can be paraphrased as, “Too many Americans don’t care about the plain facts anymore; they just believe whatever they want to believe.” This is undoubtedly a jab at Trump’s campaign, and it correctly assesses that provable falsehoods are not as odious to the public as they have been previously. There have been numerous occasions when Trump has made false or unsubstantiated allegations that his supporters have shrugged off—from the claim that Bush lied about Iraq War intelligence to Obama literally being the founder of ISIS to his recent assertion that he not perhaps, but actually won the popular vote (if it weren’t for the three-to-five million illegal ballots cast).
Oxford Dictionary has a valid point that the individual facts seem to matter little to the American public; but what its definition misses is the alternative which Americans on both sides are embracing. For instance, many Trump supporters defend his twitter feed by saying that Trump must be taken “seriously, not literally.” It’s true that this approach becomes necessary because of his tendency to spout word salads. But on the other hand, it lets you read into Trump whatever you want to read into him. You feel what Trump is saying. The specifics aren’t of consequence; you buy the narrative. Many Americans who voted for Trump don’t care if Trump gets some of the facts wrong, because they think he has the narrative right.
Why are narratives so compelling? Because they frame the world in a way that is very appealing to our moral sense. They divide the world, through story form, into heroes and villains, victims and oppressors. The theme of this tension is everywhere in the picture Trump paints of America’s situation domestically and within the world theatre—whether the issue involves trade, NATO, the cosmopolitan elite, the political establishment, the mainstream media, the totalitarian PC (politically-correct) Left, illegal immigration and the list continues. Trump supporters are ready to go along with many of the flaws because he’s fighting the right “bad guys,” in their eyes.
Yet the power of narrative (sometimes at the expense of fact and truth) doesn’t only play among Trump’s following. Put the shoe on the other foot. For instance, what about the claim that the Obama Administration has been scandal-free, an attempt to define Obama’s legacy as that of an honest, lovable and virtuous president? This is in light of the “Fast and Furious” scandal, the Benghazi incident and the IRS targeting of conservative NGO’s, to name just a few. Or how about the slogan, “Hands up, don’t shoot”? The fact that this rallying cry of Black Lives Matter was based on an unsubstantiated allegation (arguably falsehood) didn’t matter to many on the Left because it still embodied their narrative of institutional racism and police violence.
As our culture becomes more and more Post-modernistic, I fear that the degree to which tribal narratives shape our social outlook will only increase. G. K. Chesterton articulates this shift as he writes, “A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth: this has been exactly reversed.” In today's mainstream culture, the only thing that is morally certain to us is our own un-transferrable experience—how things make us feel. It follows that instead of being able to arrive at true principles by which we can know good and evil, the only way to obtain the deepest level of moral clarity on an issue is to have been victimized in that way. If you have not personally been the object of those actions, words or behaviors to directly feel the rightness or wrongness of them, then you must accept the moral judgment of those who have. This type of moral reasoning is shaky ground on an individual level, but becomes especially dangerous to a society when it manifests at a group level. It causes our society to break down along tribal lines, each faction bound by its own sense of grievance.
But what if we could check our tribes and our lists of allies and oppressors at the door? What if we could converse about truth, untruth, right and wrong as ideas that are accessible to all of us as human beings? To quote N.T. Wright, who spoke at the Veritas Forum at Duke a few years back, “The line between good and evil does not lie between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ between the West and the rest, between Left and Right, between rich and poor. That fateful line runs down the middle of each of us, every human society, every individual. This is not to say that all humans, and all societies, are equally good or bad; far from it. Merely that we are all infected and that all easy attempts to see the problem in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’ are fatally flawed.”
Narrative is a powerful element—one that allows us to moralize history and ourselves within it, while weaving in elements of reality. But if there are principles deeper than events and our own experience, and if competing tribal outlooks on the world aren't going to characterize our future, we need to seek absolute Truth.
Addison Merryman is a Trinity senior. His column, "deep magic," runs on alternate Fridays.
Edit 10:49 AM 01/27/17: Added word for clarity
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