fake news and the
RETURN TO ORDER THROUGH REALISM
by
SANTIAGO ZABALA
___________________________________
Santiago
Zabala is
ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona.
His books include The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy
(2008), The Remains of Being (2009) and Hermeneutic
Communism (2011, coauthored with G. Vattimo), all published
by Columbia University Press. His most recent book is
Why Only Art Can Save Us. (2017) This essay
first appeared in aeon.com
A call to order is
taking place in political and intellectual life in Europe and
abroad. This rappel à l’ordre has sounded
before, in France after World War I, when it was directed at avant-garde
artists, demanding that they put aside their experiments and create
reassuring representations for those whose worlds had been torn
apart by the war. But now it is directed toward those intellectuals,
politicians, and citizens who still cling to the supposedly politically
correct culture of postmodernism.
This
culture, according to the forces who claim to represent order,
has corrupted facts, truth, and information, giving rise to ‘alternative
facts,’ ‘post-truth,’ and ‘fake news’
even though, as Stanley Fish points out, “postmodernism
sets itself against the notion of facts just lying there discrete
and independent, and waiting to be described. Instead it argues
that fact is the achievement of argument and debate, not a pre-existing
entity by whose measure argument can be assessed.” The point
is that postmodernity has become a pretext for the return to order
we are witnessing now in the rhetoric of right-wing populist politicians.
This order reveals itself everyday as more authoritarian because
it holds itself to be in possession of the essence of reality,
defining truth for all human beings.
This
return of realism is evinced by the public careers of some contemporary
intellectuals, also referred to as ‘realists’ or members
of the ‘intellectual dark web,’ such as the psychologist
Jordan Peterson, the neuroscientist Sam Harris, and philosophers
like Christina Hoff Sommers, among others. Although some of these
thinkers would object to being categorized as new realist or politically
conservative, they all seem to oppose postmodernism’s neo-Marxist
linguistic turn and its conflict of interpretations, which holds
that everything that exists is only the correlate of a subject
that conceives it. The problem with this postmodern stance, they
claim, is that it has denied thought any rational access to things
in themselves, allowing apparently unfounded discourses on scientific
objectivity, traditional values, and gendered essences.
But these
thinkers, as Bari Weiss points out, are determined to emphasize
the “biological differences between men and women”
and to demonstrate that identity politics is a threat to our social
fabric. This is why Sommers, for example, opposes those feminists
who still “believe that our society is best described
as a patriarchy, a ‘male hegemony,’ a ‘sex/gender
system,’” with her “factual feminism,”
which is based on a data-driven approach. These data, interpreted
by the American scholar, indicate that most feminists exaggerate
the plight of women while ignoring that of men.
But critics
of this return to realism—from Simon Critchley to Slavoj
Žižek and Gianni Vattimo—are consistent in reminding
us that this realist philosophical approach has long been surpassed
and superceded and that the need for realism appears to be a “closure
that reassures and stifles at the same time.” Vattimo believes
its roots can be found “in a psychological discomfort rather
than in a strictly conscious demand.” The “need for
reality is neurotic,” ultimately an “effect of ressentiment,”
of the “tedious qualities of old dogs and men who have long
been kept on the leash.” The problem with this stance is
that whoever does not submit to the asserted reality is automatically
incorrect, on the wrong side of reality, and perhaps even on the
wrong side of the border.
In order
to resist this political and cultural movement it is important
to remember that when Kellyanne Conway, counselor to U.S. president
Donald Trump, used the phrase ‘alternative facts’
to defend a false statement we were not entering a new age of
alternative facts but rather another age of alternative facts.
These successive ages of alternative facts arise from our naïve
enthusiasm for objectivity, transparency, and free speech. This
naïveté today belongs to those rational people, as
Bruno Latour says, who still continue to believe “that facts
stand up all by themselves, without a shared world, without institutions,
without a public life, and that it would suffice to put the ignorant
folk back in an old-style classroom with a blackboard and in-class
exercises, for reason to triumph at last.”
But as
scientists and linguists explain there is no “neutral observation
language” that can erase human differences. These differences
are not the source of our problems but rather the only possible
route to their provisional solution. Facts, information, and data
by themselves do nothing. “Facts remain robust,” Latour
continuous, “only when they are supported by a common culture,
by institutions that can be trusted, by a more or less decent
public life, by more or less reliable media.” In the age
of alternative facts, facts have been framed, that is, stripped
of all the interpretative, institutional, and social support they
once could count on.
As we
can see, alternative facts or fake news are a consequence not
of postmodern philosophers’ claiming the indispensable role
of interpretation in comprehending the world but rather of the
return to order that thinkers of the intellectual dark web are
helping impose. The problem of identifying thought as a mirror
of reality is that freedom is also framed. This is why Donald
Trump’s wall on the Mexican border, ban on Muslims, and
hostility toward the facts of climate change are not meant to
create a ‘state of emergency’ but a condition without
emergencies—where nothing can emerge from the overwhelming
order.
Difference,
change, and cultural others must be avoided as disruptions of
the safety that order is supposed to represent.
In order to preserve freedom from external impositions it is necessary
to denounce the alliance between these thinkers and right-wing
populist politicians. This alliance is at the origin of a patriarchal
obsession with the so-called natural order and the politics of
hate that now also drives a growing anti-feminist and anti-queer
campaign. While gender theory, as Judith Butler recently reminded
us, “simply seeks a form of political freedom to live in
a more equitable and liveable world,” its opponents instead
demand that we all be “kept on the leash” so that
freedom does not disrupt the ongoing return to order. The “biological
differences between men and women” that Jair Bolsonaro,
Matteo Salvini, and Viktor Orbán praise is founded on this
order, and appeals to it in order to exploit rather than confront
ongoing social resentment.
