truth – Double Aspect

Ideologies in the Marketplace of Ideas

The “marketplace of ideologies” is neither new nor quite disastrous

In a post over at Concurring Opinions, Ronald K.L. Collins laments what he regards as the rise, in the place of the good old marketplace of ideas, of a “marketplace of ideologies.” Prof. Collins writes that in this new marketplace, ideas, facts, “the constitutional process of governing,” and “the noble pursuit of truth” itself are only valued if and insofar as they can put to one’s favoured ideological use; otherwise they are dispensed with. Prof. Collins quotes a number of thinkers, from John Milton to U.S. Supreme Court Justices Holmes, Douglas, and Brennan, who wrote about truth prevailing over falsehood in the contest of ideas. His “fear” however is that “[t]he idea of our faith in ideas has passed,” because

[d]ogmatism is ideology’s calling card. Where ideology reigns supreme, an open mind poses a clear and present danger to its stability. There is no trade in ideas with ideologues, there is only the demand that all opposing views surrender to the preferred creed.

The dangers of dogmatism are real, and I hope that people such as professor Collins, or the bright and brave minds behind the Heterodox Academy project, do not give up the fight against orthodoxies, whether enforced by the state, by social justice warriors, or by anyone else. But I think that prof. Collins overstates both the novelty of the problem he decries and its extent.

Skepticism about the ability of truth to prevail over or even to hold its own against falsehood is an old idea, and one that was expressed not only by various censors, but also by people whose credentials as independent thinkers are quite beyond question. Fred Shapiro has pointed out, at Freakonomics, that the idea behind the well-known quip about a lie getting halfway around the world before truth can gets its shoes ― or its pants ― on, usually attributed to Mark Twain (in the shoes version) or Winston Churchill (the pants one), has been traced as far back as Jonathan Swift, in 1710. And then there is Edward Gibbon’s point, in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that while it may be tempting to think that Christianity spread and prevailed because of its truth, “truth and reason seldom find so favourable a reception in the world,” so that additional inquiry into the reasons for Christianity’s success is warranted.

More recently Bryan Caplan has pointed out in a post at EconLog that “[t]ruth doesn’t largely win out in a well-functioning market for ideas, because consumers primarily seek not truth, but comfort and entertainment” (emphasis prof. Caplan’s). The problem that prof. Collins is describing, then, is not that the marketplace of ideas has failed or been closed down in favour of the marketplace of ideologies, but that it is working about as well as it ever has. As for the lofty quotations prof. Collins invokes as evidence for the proposition that things used to be different, they show at most that some people might have thought that the consumers in the marketplace of ideas had other preferences ― not that this belief was correct.

Was it? I see no reason to think so. It might seem that ideological dogmas are pervasive now (especially in the United States), but what of the earlier dogmas of religion or simply of received wisdom and “common sense”? Were not those who dared go against these orthodoxies shunned, criticized, and sometimes murdered? Did people not compromise their search for the truth to avoid coming to uncomfortable conclusions? It may be that things are less different now than we tend to suppose, but I’m not even sure of that, and see little reason to think that they are worse. More likely, what is the case is that ideological influences are more visible than usual, not that they are stronger. As I have argued in the context of the comparison between Canadian and American courts, the fact that the influence of an orthodoxy is only really obvious when it is opposed by a countervailing orthodoxy does not mean that no orthodoxy is at work at other times.

Besides an absence of evidence to the contrary, there is another good reason to think that ideology was always a part of the marketplace of ideas ― not an alternative to it. Ideologies are a sort of appellation for ideas. Associating an idea with an ideology makes it possible to guess where the idea comes from, who its likely supporters and opponents are, what sort of consequences it might lead to, and so on, in more or less the manner in which knowing that a wine is a champagne or a rioja tells us where it comes from and what it might taste like. Of course, there is no central authority certifying an idea as liberal or conservative in the way wines are certified to earn their appellations ― though such authorities did not always exist for wines either. And, partly for that reason, the guesses we might make based on ideological labels are likely to be less accurate than those based on wine appellations. That indeed is one problem with ideologies. The bigger problem, though, is that ideas that would be recognized as rubbish if considered on their own merits can get a free pass as part of some ideological scheme whose adherents will uncritically accept them ― in the way that sparkling plonk might be able to command a premium price by virtue of being a champagne. Conversely, ideas that deserve consideration may be rejected out of hand by people who reflexively oppose their ideological appellation, just as one might refuse to drink perfectly good wine simply because it does not carry some label deemed necessary. These problems are serious, of course, but they are not, strictly speaking, caused by ideologies or appellations ― they are caused by closed minds, and closed minds would cause problems even if ideologies gave up their role to the old orthodoxies of religion and common sense.

“Things are merely just as horrible as they always were, not worse” is not a terribly inspirational thing to say. So here is something that might be a bit more hopeful. We can and should act as if the idea that truth prevails over falsehood were true regardless of whether we believe that it is, and perhaps even though we have reason to think that it is not. That’s what we do, after all, with human dignity or inalienable human rights. These ideas may not be true, but they are comforting and our life is more fun with them. That’s why we can hope that, despite everything, they will prevail.

How Power Corrupts III

I have already touched on the issue of the meaning of Lord Acton’s dictum, that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I have invoked J.R.R. Tolkien’s treatment of the pernicious influence of power on those who once wield it even once they relinquish it, and discussed Mikhail Bulgakov’s claim that “all power is violence done to people.” Boris Schumatsky’s article on the lies of Vladimir Putin, of which I posted a translation yesterday, gives me an occasion to continue on this topic, because it suggests an additional way in which “power corrupts” that was missing from my earlier posts ― that power is inextricably linked with deceit. (I should specify that in this post, I am referring only to misrepresentations of existing facts, not to broken promises, the subject of an op-ed by Andrew Coyne this morning. Mr. Coyne makes an impassioned plea for treating them as lies and finding ways for eliminating them, but while some of his arguments are quite compelling, I think the issue of promises is both different from that of misrepresentations of fact and perhaps more complicated than Mr. Coyne allows.)

Of course this is not a very original idea. Its best-known literary treatment is surely George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Still, since I’ve taken upon myself to catalogue the corrupting effects of power, it deserves to be reiterated here. Besides, Mr. Schumatsky hints at a reason to think that, as Kurt Vonnegut would have said, Nineteen Eighty-Four isn’t enough anymore. The regime’s lies in Nineteen Eighty-Four had to be backed up by an elaborate and brutal apparatus that eliminated any idea, whether in print or in anyone’s mind, that was contrary to them. As Mr. Schumatsky shows, that’s not actually necessary. Truth need not be wholly suppressed. It can simply be swamped by lies, made into one of many competing narratives, until people give up trying to figure out where the truth is. That is why, Mr. Schumatsky says,

[t]he Kremlin doesn’t really aim at people believing its lies. Putin wins when other heads of government let the lies stand uncontradicted. Putin surely knows that at least some politicians see through him. But: they don’t call a con a con, nor an invasion an invasion, nor a hybrid war a war. … When the truth is absent, the lie wins.

The result looks a great deal more benign than Ingsoc, but it is still very effective at getting the liars into power and keeping them there. And importantly, it is not only Mr. Putin who resorts to this tactic. Politicians in the West who mislead or lie to voters about crime, climate change, immigration, or globalization might not care if people don’t quite believe them (though they’re surely happy if they do). It is enough for them to create the impression of competing, equally plausible narratives, to justify acting, or not acting, as if the one they prefer is true.

The desire to gain or to keep power, so eloquently described by Tolkien, creates the temptation to lie. So does the fear of losing power, described by Bulgakov. But Orwell illustrates, and Mr. Schumatsky explains, a further point: power gives one the means to lie effectively. In Mr. Schumatsky’s words, when “[e]ach player has his own truth, or even truths, which he freely adjusts according to need … only one thing matters: who is strong enough, to impose his truth on his opponent?” This too is something that politicians in the West are well aware of, as they show whenever they exploit the power of the incumbency and the resources of the state to support and impose their own “narratives,” regardless of their relationship to truth.

The other link between power and lies, to which Mr. Schumatsky points with his concluding quotation of Solzhenitsyn, has to do with violence. If, as Bulgakov suggested, power is violence and if, as Solzhenitsyn claimed, violence and lies are inseparable, then power too is necessarily concealed and upheld by lies. And indeed, we know these lies very well, from the attempts to deify the rulers or the claims that their authority has a divine blessing, to the mythologies of nationalism, to the claims of a supposedly universally acceptable social contract. Lord Acton again, in his Lectures on the French Revolution, made this point with his usual eloquence:

The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weaker man with the sponge. First, the criminal who slays; then the sophist who defends the slayer.

Political power might be ineradicable; or, at any rate, it is at least possible that we are much better off with it than without it. But that doesn’t change the sad fact that those who seek it, those who wield it, and those who justify it will all be tempted to lie, and that at least most of them will succumb to the temptation. This too is how power corrupts.

I want to end on a (somewhat) more optimistic note, however. As I have observed in my previous posts, democracy and the Rule of Law provide mechanisms that check, although they cannot eliminate, the corrupting effects of power. When politicians lie, their parliamentary opponents, as well as journalists, can call them out on it. In many cases, they have an incentive to do so. In some cases, courts too can serve as mechanisms and fora for “setting the record straight.” Even by simply ensuring that laws are applied according to their terms, without favour or abuse, courts limit the scope for official lies. All these mechanisms are liable to misuse and abuse. Courts can be dragged into political disputes, undermining their independence; freedom of speech serves those who want to spread lies as well as those who want to counter them. But they are the best we’ve got, and it is for us to put them to the best use we can.

Damned Lies

One of the most pressing, if not the most pressing, problems in contemporary politics is the problem of lies. Perhaps it is not so much a contemporary as a permanent problem, though that does not make any less urgent. But perhaps it is even more pressing now, due to the intellectual trends permeating our society, a pervasive skepticism of the very idea of truth, which refashions facts, and especially inconvenient ones, into opinions, the better to dismiss them. Or so argues ― compelling in my view ― the German writer and journalist Boris Schumatsky.

He makes his case in the context of Russia, but I’m afraid that while that country, and its leaders, are the most extreme example of this trend, they are not the only one. I don’t mean to equate others with Vladimir Putin. I don’t mean to deny the role of democratic institutions and media in checking the politicians’ tendency to lie. I will return to these points in a separate post. Still, I think that Mr. Schumatsky’s argument should at least serve as a warning to all of us.

If you can read German, you should read the original version on his website. If not, please have a look at my translation, which I am publishing below, with Mr. Schumatsky’s kind permission.

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Russia Is a Lie: Putin and Postmodernism

Boris Schumatsky

The biggest difficulty in dealing with Russia is this: Russia lies. This blanket statement sounds like a Cold War slogan, and yet it is the only way to do justice to reality. When I wrote my first newspaper articles after the fall of the Soviet Union, I always avoided journalistic jargon such as “Moscow wants,” or “the Kremlin claims…” When I read that “the Russians invade Chechnya,” I had to think of my friends in Moscow, and that seemed to make about as much sense as Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech. Today, I do not only write that my native country is has become an Empire of Lies. Russia is itself a lie.

Lies begin with simple facts. First, there were no Russian soldiers in Crimea, and then there were. First there were none in eastern Ukraine, and then there were, but they had just run off there―no, they were on vacation there, and anyway they just want peace. It all sounds confusing, but it’s a strategy.

As a political instrument, a lie is especially effective when it doesn’t involve self-deception. A political lie is only a lie if the liar doesn’t himself believe in it. As for Putin’s lies, only his sympathizers and supporters, inside and outside Russia, believe them. If one tries to find even a kernel of truth in the Russian web of lies, one becomes a “useful idiot” of the Kremlin. A bit like a well-known Russia-connoisseur on German television. First she repeated Putin’s lie that he hadn’t sent any Russian soldiers in the Ukrainian Crimea. And then she still held on to this position, even after Putin admitted that there were his soldiers there after all. Moscow happily refutes its own lies, as soon as they are no longer useful. How its stooges deal with that, the Kremlin doesn’t care. It knows that they’ll make up some justification for themselves.

The regime mostly employs those lies which have long floated around in the darkest corners of the Russian society. Old lies work best, as for example the NATO-lie. It holds that the aggressive block is encircling the Motherland ever more narrowly. Other lies are newly-invented and told by Putin’s friends in the East and West: the Ukrainians are fascists, and Russians must, as in World War II, protect their homeland against the fascists.

The friends of the Russian autocracy misunderstand the politics of lying. The Kremlin doesn’t really aim at people believing its lies. Putin wins when other heads of government let the lies stand uncontradicted. Putin surely knows that at least some politicians see through him. But: they don’t call a con a con, nor an invasion an invasion, nor a hybrid war a war. Its opponents’ motives are secondary for the Kremlin, whether it’s their fear of Russian nuclear weapons, or the pacifism of their voters. When the truth is absent, the lie wins.

“Try to live in truth” was the appeal of the dissidents from Socialist realism, Aleksand Solzhenitsyn in 1974, and Václav Havel four years later. From their demand for truth there developed, after the breakup of the Soviet bloc, a claim to leadership, and that did not go down well with the then-young generation, which grew up bearing the marks of postmodernism, and which I belonged as well. What did Solzhenitsyn, with his folksy Russianness, or a Wałęsa with his Catholicism, have to tell us? This grandfatherly wisdom wasn’t even worth deconstructing. History was at an end, and we would ride the wave of postmodernism to eternal peace.

It was a brave new world of diversity and difference, freed from binding values in thought and politics, emancipated from the dictates of universal human rights. We paid no heed to Jürgen Habermas when he recognized, in the postmodern critique of reason, a new wave of the counter-enlightenment. Yet it did not take long before our liberating postmodernism found its distorted image in the media populism of a Berlusconi, as the philosopher Maurizio Ferraris writes in his Manifesto of New Realism, and then in Putin’s propaganda state. Vladimir Putin is an even better postmodernist than his Italian buddy. Putin’s Russia lies because it honestly and wholeheartedly believes that there is no truth anyway. In the late Soviet period, neither people like Putin nor people like I believed the communist slogans. As the Soviet ideology faded away, there began at the same time a search for a new “national idea” for the masses. The latest of these ideas is the Orthodox-religious Russian world. The chimera of Russia’s special way grew up on the dung heap of the blood-and-soil ideologies of the past century, and of course it is constructed through and through, as one would have said in the past. Today I will simply say “made up.” Putin’s Russia is a lie. His subjects actually believe neither in God nor in soil or blood, but only in the two letters PR, public relations [in English in the original]. This belief entails that anyone can be bought, from journalists to politicians, from Russians to Americans. Nobody tells the truth, and the only thing that counts is what in the contemporary Russian language is called “Pi-Ar.” That is Russia’s true truth, and this truth is a lie.

The Kremlin drags the world into its geopolitical game, and this game is ruled by political postmodernism. Each player has his own truth, or even truths, which he freely adjusts according to need. For only one thing matters: who is strong enough, to impose his truth on his opponent? Vladimir Putin and his faithful know the rules of this game not from philosophical texts; they have learned them in the street.

“A lie told by bullies,” that’s what Ernest Hemingway called fascism. The key difference between Putinism and Hitler’s fascism is that fascists and National-socialists largely believed their own lies. The Putinist, by contrast, believes in one thing only: lying as a life principle. If, like Vladimir Putin or I, one grew up in a Soviet city, one learned that in elementary school already. One is surrounded by a group of bullies: “you’ve ratted on me to the teacher,” says one of them, though that’s the first time one even sees him. If one says, “that’s not true,” one is beaten up right away. If one apologizes, is first mocked, and then pummelled.

A victim’s whine coupled with a clenched fist is not an unknown pose. Putin’s Russia jumps into the ring like a superpower, even as it complains about Western machinations. The Kremlin is fully aware of the weaknesses of the Russian state, economy, and military. But in a street fight, one hides one’s weaknesses. The enemy must think that you are strong. The enemy must wet his pants. He must believe that, if challenges your lie, he’ll get punched in the face double quick. He can de-escalate, which is what politicians everywhere in the world try to do with Putin. He can appeal for peace, but as a result, the bully also cries “Peace!” before throwing his punch.

If the person who is being attacked does not defend himself from the lie in the first place, he won’t defend himself against the violence either. He’ll be beaten up, and indeed the attacker has already won the moment his victim did not call him a liar.

Needless to say, Russia is not just a nation of violent brutes who unscrupulously shoot down passenger aircraft. Needless to say, there is also another Russia, and not just one either. Yet all the diversity of Russia has been sent off to internal or external exile. Until the mirage dissolves, the millions of potato farmers or math teachers, bank clerks or copy-editors have no more political impact than someone who, like me, has left Russia. There is only one voice to be heard now in Russia, the voice of the collective Putin, and it reduces everyone else to silence.

Today’s political language is no longer suitable to the collapse of the conventional order in Europe and the world. The old slogans about the aggressive American imperialism only obscure the circumstances of the war for the “Russian world.” Similarly, the analytical framework of post-colonialism is inadequate to the murders of the “Islamic State.” We have no concepts for that yet. But as a start, one could, all the postmodern doubts notwithstanding, again call a war a war, and lies, lies.

It’s the same with Russia’s lies as with the heating at my place in Berlin once upon a time. I used to live in a building with coal stoves, and the residents, one after the other, would install their own gas heating, at their own expense. One neighbour saw in that a “threat to his basic principles.” In an as-yet un-gentrified Kreuzberg, one spoke that way about rent increases. He kept on dragging two buckets of coal every day up to his tile stove. He stopped saying hello to us. The more neighbours joined the club of the modernizers, the fiercer he became. Just like Putin, who initially had himself wanted to join NATO. But our cold-resistant neighbour did not break the wall into my apartment; did not occupy my kitchen with the gas heater, and did not cry, like Putin about Ukraine, “You are endangering my existential interests!”

“There are no facts, only interpretations.” This saying of Nietzsche’s, so beloved by postmodernists, has now showed its true meaning, which Ferraris explains as follows: “The reason of the strongest is always the best.” This is, paradoxically, the exact opposite of what people like Michel Foucault actually wanted to achieve. For when power is always dictating terms, the power alone is real. The present conflict with post-modern thought about the idea of reality is no coincidence. Speculative realism wants to think reality as independent from our perception, while the nuovo realismo distances itself from the political implications of postmodernism: “That of which the postmodernists dreamt, the populists made real,” says Ferraris.

Of course it wasn’t philosophy that produced Berlusconis or Putins all over the world. But the rejection of their politics of lies also requires us to revise our postmodern habits. Postmodernism’s plural concept of truth has been shot down in Ukraine. Putin forces us to turn back to reality. Realpolitik is being displaced by the real, by the old-fashioned adventure of naming things. We no longer have the luxury of relative truths and devalued values. In Russia the lie has won yet again, and yet again only a simple, black-and-white language can do justice to this tragedy. Here is how Solzhenitsyn put it: “Violence can only be concealed by lies, and lies can only be upheld through violence.”