The Death of Truth
From a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic comes an impassioned critique of the West’s retreat from reason.‘The Death of Truth is destined to become the defining treatise of our age’ David Grann‘The first great book of the Trump administration … essential reading’ Rolling StoneWe live in a time when the very idea of objective truth is mocked and discounted by the US President. Discredited conspiracy theories and ideologies have resurfaced, proven science is once more up for debate, and Russian propaganda floods our screens. The wisdom of the crowd has usurped research and expertise, and we are each left clinging to the beliefs that best confirm our biases.How did truth become an endangered species? This decline began decades ago, and in The Death of Truth, former New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani takes a penetrating look at the cultural forces that contributed to this gathering storm. In social media and literature, television, academia, and political campaigns, Kakutani identifies the trends – originating on both the right and the left – that have combined to elevate subjectivity over factuality, science, and common values. And she returns us to the words of the great critics of authoritarianism, writers like George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, whose work is newly and eerily relevant.With remarkable erudition and insight, Kakutani offers a provocative diagnosis of our current condition and presents a path forward for our truth-challenged times.
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018
First published in the United States by Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York in 2018
Copyright © Michiko Kakutani 2018
Snake image on cover © Getty Images
Michiko Kakutani asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Frontispiece: Truth has died, plate 79 of ‘The Disasters of War’, 1810–14, pub. 1863 (etching), Goya y Lucientes, Francisco Jose de (1746–1828)/Private Collection/Index/Bridgeman Images
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Source ISBN: 9780008312787
Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008312794
Version: 2018-06-07
For journalists everywhere working to report the news
Contents
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION
1. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF REASON
3. “MOI” AND THE RISE OF SUBJECTIVITY
8. “THE FIREHOSE OF FALSEHOOD”: PROPAGANDA AND FAKE NEWS
9. THE SCHADENFREUDE OF THE TROLLS
EPILOGUE
NOTES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TWO OF THE MOST MONSTROUS REGIMES in human history came to power in the twentieth century, and both were predicated upon the violation and despoiling of truth, upon the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, “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 (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
What’s alarming to the contemporary reader is that Arendt’s words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling mirror of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today—a world in which fake news and lies are pumped out in industrial volume by Russian troll factories, emitted in an endless stream from the mouth and Twitter feed of the president of the United States, and sent flying across the world through social media accounts at lightning speed. Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fears of social change, and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.
This is not to draw a direct analogy between today’s circumstances and the overwhelming horrors of the World War II era but to look at some of the conditions and attitudes—what Margaret Atwood has called the “danger flags” in Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm—that make a people susceptible to demagoguery and political manipulation, and nations easy prey for would-be autocrats. To examine how a disregard for facts, the displacement of reason by emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing the very value of truth, and what that means for America and the world.
“The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life,” Arendt wrote in a 1971 essay, “Lying in Politics”; “it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.”
The term “truth decay” (used by the Rand Corporation to describe the “diminishing role of facts and analysis” in American public life) has joined the post-truth lexicon that includes such now familiar phrases as “fake news” and “alternative facts.” And it’s not just fake news either: it’s also fake science (manufactured by climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers), fake history (promoted by Holocaust revisionists and white supremacists), fake Americans on Facebook (created by Russian trolls), and fake followers and “likes” on social media (generated by bots).
Trump, the forty-fifth president of the United States, lies so prolifically and with such velocity that
