In the Truthyard !!

 

"I promise to tell the truth… the whole truth and nothing but the truth"—

The witness, standing at the witness box, does not need to ask the judge which theory of truth.

The ancient Greek understanding of truth as aletheia, a problematic word variously translated as "disclosure" or "un-concealedness" is very complicated, and has never been grasped straightforwardly as 'truth as such'. Since we are bombarded with myriad opposing facts and contradictory ideas in our circus-like world, the truth is, as if, lost somewhere in the dazzle and sparkle of fire-play.

I told my child that there is a jar on the table, he went and found it there. That is the normal understanding of the truth. The Polish-American mathematician Alfred Tarski famously put that the proposition "snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white in reality. The orthodox versions of truth insist that evidence is evidence, the reality is reality, and "brute facts" exist independently of anyone's attitude toward them. Reality is out there, within arm's reach— graspable and catchable through re-description.

But alas my friends! The truth is not just so simple. Standing in front of a mansion behind the boundary wall one might think, "Ah! Here I am, I can now easily cross it." But in fact, trespassing might cause damage to the body. So, truth suffers and can cause damage through lack of shared conceptual understanding. For instance, one claims a series of statements to be true which cohere among themselves. But when someone stands up in front of a group of strikers and says "2+2=4", one would no doubt be jeered, because though the proposition is true, it is not appropriate under the given circumstances.

Therefore, one is forced to abandon the notion of "what is truth?" or "is X true?" Instead, one asks "why don't we agree that this or that is true?"— and without being noticed one enters into the domain of post-truth. The prefix "post" is meant to indicate not so much the idea that we are "past" truth in a temporal sense (as in "post-war"), but in the sense, that truth has been eclipsed or it is something different from our conventional notion. Interestingly enough, our personal beliefs, opinions, and emotional appeal have taken the center stage in the courtyard of truth. A New geography of truth would take note that the so-called objective facts or unalloyed reality are less influential in shaping public opinion than their emotion and personal belief.

I am reminded of the story of six blind persons in where the nature of the elephant is judged based on the personal touch of the different organs of the said animal, where none of the opinions reflect the truth as such; rather they become relative truth. People are convinced now that the truth is relative to our perspective and constructed as a result of our social and cultural milieu. The given brute ingredients can be arranged or modified in several ways and can take the seat of "facts". One remembers the famous statement of Wittgenstein --"The world is the totality of facts only" and facts include all kinds of arrangements of the given data.  For example, I have ten pieces of furniture in my room, which I change every after few weeks to give a new look to my room. A mere change in their place changes the setting of the room and can change the facts too. Truth is, thus, a kind of social construction, where talk of truth is not disappearing, or dead, it merely changes. What counts as truth is a matter of interpretation of our belief system. This attitude can be referred to our Democratic system which supposes that no man or woman is good enough to claim they know the truth of the earthly habitats in which they dwell.

There are many interesting relationships one can have with the truth.  When one is bull-shitting, one is not necessarily lying but instead may just be demonstrating a careless indifference toward what is regarded as the so-called truth. For example, to enjoy Cricket, one has to suspend other beliefs for the time being and accept that the rules of Cricket are human inventions. Similarly, one learns to respect the holy books in the same way one learns to value the paper currency with the imprint of the queen or Gandhi. It is our anthropomorphic vision through and through and contains not a single point that would be "true and universally valid", apart from man.

In many cases, people are ambiguous or forgetful about this division in practice between knowing that something is just a human convention and believing that something is inherently valuable. Therefore, while engaged in deep discussion, almost everybody would agree that the word "Company" is a fictional story created by human beings. Microsoft isn't the building it owns, the people it employs, or the shareholders it serves — rather, it is an intricate legal fiction woven by lawmakers and lawyers. Yet most generously, we treat them as if they are real entities, just like monkeys or humans. Humans have a remarkable ability to know something when they think about it, but most of the time they don't think about it, so they don't know it. If one focuses, one realizes that money is fiction. If one is asked about Cricket, one knows that Cricket is a human invention. But in the heat of a match, nobody asks. One knows that nations are elaborate yarns, but during a war, one doesn't have the time and energy to think so. Scholars throughout history have faced this dilemma.

So what is wrong if one describes truth as de-factualization, which identifies hyper-rationality as the mechanism that blurs the line between "fact and fantasy"?  In the post-truth era, the highly-regarded expertise of the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam failed to convince the public that Van Gogh's work Arles Sketchbook is a fake. The hype of finding the lost Van Gogh's work seems enough to persuade public interest and its support. "221B Baker Street", the fictional address of the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes shares the same platform in one's mind.

Our historian knows how vulnerable the whole texture of facts is in which the accepted facts are challenged and interpreted through one's glasses. I do not say that it is a lie or torn to shreds and distorted by the organized group of liars, nations, or classes, rather it is a perspective that counts. One can point to the advertising agency playing a pivotal role in creating knowledge conditions of "ready to buy" certain products. Drinking lots of carbonated drinks will not make one young, healthy, and good athletic— rather, it will increase the chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades its makers have invested billions of dollars in linking it to the billions of humans who subconsciously believe in this linkage.

Thus the "post-truth" is not simply the opposite of truth but an omnibus umbrella term that comprises an assemblage of different yet interconnected phenomena.  

From the denial and scepticism of objective truths, one graduates to mere "interpretation" of facts and gradually turns to falsification in course of time, and the beauty of the "post-truth" is lost somewhere. It has been made barren and rowdy by the poison of falsities like "breaking news", "fake news", "alternative facts" and missing "evidence." These are designed to attract public attention, which finally turns out to be mere foam and waves on the surface of the deep waters. Think of photo-shopped materials and mash-ups, web applications, bluff-bluster, and bricolage of lies and pages that recycle content from more than one source to create a single new service displayed in a single graphical interface. ….It knows no borders. What is commonly called the private sphere ceases to be private. The merchants of post-truth have created a space for the so-called dissemination of lies and rumors in a fragmented society. Therefore, the word "truthiness" is coined instead of truth, which relies on one's "gut feeling" for taking big decisions, even if it is not necessarily backed up by the facts.

It is only yesterday I learned from my friend that it is a terrifying new era of post-truth, in which not just particular facts but entire histories might be faked. I asked if this is the era of post-truth when exactly was the untroubled age of truth? And what triggered our transition to the post-truth era-- Social media? Lying in politics is an ancient art. Think of Plato's noble lie or Machiavelli's recommendation that a successful prince must be "a great pretender and dissembler".   Plato way back warned of the dangers of false claims to knowledge. Who does not know, the Nazi propaganda maestro, Joseph Goebbels, allegedly explained his method thus: "A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth." If the chief says the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, most of his followers will clap.

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. It is the human ability that shapes and reshapes and again reshapes in the process of transmission and reception built on the shifting sands of space-time. 

Carl Sagan argued when one's critical faculties are tired and unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, one slides, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. Look at our judicial system which being over-critical takes years to come to a judgment, as a result, Post-truth has become the public burial of "objective facts" by an avalanche of social media that "appeals to emotion and personal belief" with gas-lighting exercise for sowing seeds of doubt and confusion among subjects.

Is it not true that humans spend more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it — and even when one tries to understand it, one usually does so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it?  Truth and power cannot travel together; sooner or later they go their separate paths. If one wants power, at some point, one will have to abandon knowledge, and if one wants to know the truth about the world, at some point, one will have to renounce power.

My friends! Look at the work of art and an unending search for personal truths that are not necessarily true when put in a broader perspective. Who wants to see the replica of natural beauty on canvas again and again? Who wants to listen to the copy-singer of legendary Lata Mangeshkar?  Art in such an equation is another outlet that can promote the post-truth world and show through its narratives and imaginary practice the work of art everywhere in life. We only need to suspend our critical eye and question everything for the time being.

Just as despite Copernicus' theory that the sun never sets, people still speak of the sun's setting, because the language of belief prevails. Wittgenstein's hiccup that "I believe I know…." makes better sense under certain conditions.