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If truth is beauty, does truth lie in the eyes of the beholder?
Around 30 years ago, post-modernism was the darling of the intellectual set. I tried to read the main authors — Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault, Habermas — but found them impossibly pompous and dense. The best I could make out was that their message was roughly, “There are no grand narratives”, or more over-simplified, “There is no truth.” Arguments over post-modernism usually ended with something like, “If the statement ‘There is no truth’ is itself not true, then the post-modern argument contradicts itself. It seemed that the whole movement had died a natural death.
Or so it seemed. Surprisingly, in the past week, I have heard three new references to Post-modernism. Is this school of philosophy making a comeback?
Along came Donald Trump, with his acolyte Kellyanne Conway introducing the notion of ‘alternative facts.’ The whole idea of truth is once again under attack. In the past month, VP candidate JP Vance put the whole issue in a nutshell when he declared that he didn’t care whether the story of Haitians eating pets were true or not; what mattered was the impression it made on voters. Its ‘truth’ was its ability to make a point.
Let’s go back a couple of thousand years to Aristotle’s 0-1 concept of the truth value of a statement — the ‘law of the excluded middle’ . A proposition is either true (=1) or false (=0); there is no middle ground. Then, only a century ago, ‘fuzzy logic’ came along, claiming that a statement could have a truth value between 0 and 1, that is, it could be partly true and partly false. That more or less set the stage for post-modernism.
Now J.D, Vance’s new concept of truth value is that the truth value of a statement is a measure of the effect it produces, of the message it sends. The Haitians-eating-pets had a huge effect and sent the message: “We hate black immigrants.” To many white supremacists, this statement had a truth value of 1.
The problem with this approach to truth is that different groups will assign radically different truth values to the same statement. In this case, there can be no rational argument, since both groups will claim ‘truth’.
In addition, we now have the ‘Gish gallop’, defined by Wikipedia as
The Gish gallop is a rhetorical technique in which a person in a debate attempts to overwhelm an opponent by presenting an excessive number of arguments, with no regard for their accuracy or strength, with a rapidity that makes it impossible for the opponent to address them in the time available. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality.
When Trump spouts a new falsehood every sentence, it becomes impossible to fact-check it all immediately, and so he gets away with some amazing lies without ever being called out. He repeats the lie so often that it becomes ‘truth’ in the minds of most listeners.
An article by Mehdi Hasan (February, 2023) in The Atlantic discussed the phenomenon, and noted what he calls
“Brandolini’s law”: “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” The Gish Galloper’s entire strategy rests on exploiting this advantage.
I’m reminded of Keat’s Grecian Urn poem, it which he offers the memorable line, “Truth is beauty; beauty truth.” If we couple this line with the commonly accepted truism going back to Plato: “Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder,” it becomes “Truth lies in the eyes of the beholder.” So Keats was a post-modernist.
I fear that the rise of AI will make such post-modern ‘truth’ ubiquitous. We can no longer trust the ‘truth’ of any statement, video, recording, etc. And on the flip side, any real statement can be claimed to be an AI fake, just as the North Carolinian Mark Robinson claims that dozens of his recorded statements and emails are all AI fakes.
Recently, an AI-generated photo of a small girl and her puppy purported to show how Biden had neglected the survivors of hurricane Helene.
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Even after people knew that it was an AI fake, many left it on their websites, with explanations such as, “I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter… I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.” More in keeping with the theme of my blog, was this: “Even though that image was AI, it spoke a truth about the disregard Harris and Biden have for ordinary Americans, as evidenced by their criminal non-response to Helene.”
“It spoke a truth.” It was totally fake but its ‘truth’ remained. Let that sink in.
The day may not be far off before we will be Gish-galloped with millions of fake AI images and recordings, so that no one will know what is true or false. We will hear Trump saying he hates Haitians on one channel, and an almost identical clip on another channel saying he loves Haitians. And everyone will believe whichever clip they prefer.
All this notwithstanding, scholar Hans Bertens offers the following:
If there is a common denominator to all these postmodernisms, it is that of a crisis in representation: a deeply felt loss of faith in our ability to represent the real, in the widest sense. No matter whether they are aesthestic [sic], epistemological, moral, or political in nature, the representations that we used to rely on can no longer be taken for granted.
The famous historian Hannah Arendt (most famous quote: “The Banality of Evil”) painted the following frightening picture:
“This constant lying is not aimed at making the people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes anything anymore.
A people that can no longer distinguish between truth and lies cannot distinguish between right and wrong. And such a people, deprived of the power to think and judge, is, without knowing and willing it, completely subjected to the rule of lies. With such a people, you can do whatever you want.”