Response to the editorial ‘Education in a post-truth world’

Citation: Michael A. Peters (2017): Education in a post-truth world, Educational Philosophy and Theory, doi: 10.1080/00131857.2016.1264114

A decade before Oxford Dictionaries selected ‘post-truth’ as its word of the year, Merriam-Webster selected ‘truthiness’ as its 2006 word of the year. ‘Truthiness’ had come to public notice through its use by American comedian Stephen Colbert. He used the term in part as a response to George W. Bush’s abuse of rhetorical appeals to intuition and to gut feeling rather than to the facts. In explaining his use of the term, Colbert said:

In another interview, he commented,

So disregard for the truth, wilful ignorance of the facts, disparaging of expertise are not peculiar to this zeitgeist. Indeed, anyone with any familiarity with British tabloid newspapers will know that this phenomenon is not new, the unmatched ability of the tabloid headline to mislead and to appeal to the fears that incite suspicion and hatred of the other has a long and lurid history in the UK, often with little regard for the truth of what’s written. Once incited, the headlines serve to reinforce that suspicion and hatred on a daily basis. Of course, social media goes far beyond what’s achievable by the tabloid propagandist. It is significant that second place in Merriam-Webster’s word of the year list for 2006 was ‘google’, the proper noun that denoted a corporate identity was by then entrenched in our vocabulary as the verb denoting the activity of searching the Internet. Michael’s editorial asks whether social media undermines the ability to recognise truth rather than truthiness. If it wasn’t already clear, following the election of Mr Trump and the UK Brexit vote, we can see the role that social media—in its dissemination of fake news; its algorithmic selection of news that creates an echo effect, confirming for us claims that we would like to be true; the capacity of a single 140 character remark to poison the well—plays in socio-public discourse. Michael has written elsewhere about an age of digital reason, but at the moment, we are also confronted by an age of digital anti-reason.Footnote³ The echo chambers shelter us from sociocultural and political difference; their digital (dis)locatedness shields us from encounter with the distant other who is demonised in the absence of the challenge to our prejudices and fears that could be gained from the experience of actual, embodied encounter. Few of us are immune from these phenomena, for we choose our sources of current affairs, who to follow on twitter, who to chat with on Facebook, which Reddit subgroups to join. My own echo chamber rings daily with the clamour of tweets and Guardian and New York Times headlines about the disasters of Brexit, the problem of fake news, Google algorithms that select on grounds of popularity rather than authority, the state of the (British) National Health Service, Mr Trump’s deplorable picks for his cabinet, and the myriad other ways in which the world is rapidly going to hell in a handcart.

The internet and our behaviour within it is the site of many paradoxes. On the one hand, it enables us to broaden horizons, socially, culturally and politically by offering connection, albeit disembodied, with people from all corners of the world, with diverse ways of being in the world and with others. On the other, it offers the possibility of connecting globally yet electing to restrict that connection to those with whom we are like-minded, who experience the world in the same way as we do and who have formed and hold the same beliefs as we do. Social media offers the prospect of both a Warholian fifteen minutes of fame and an Orwellian daily 2 min (or more) of hate. So while the phenomena that currently trouble are not entirely novel, social media, has, to a certain extent, enabled the intensification and stratification of cognitive and affective processes historically familiar in propaganda and already present in socio-public discourse.

While the light shone on the post-truth, post-fact phenomena following the Brexit vote and the US presidential election has made us more acutely aware of them, the very fact that the terms have passed so quickly into ordinary parlance should be cause for concern. The addition of the ‘post’ prefix runs the risk of normalising wilful disregard for the truth, for facts and for evidence in the same way that the use of terms such as ‘post-feminism’, ‘post-race’ and ‘post-colonialism’ runs the risk that the struggles for justice and equality encompassed in those movements become occluded by an assumption that they are over, done with, in the past and surpassed by the latest sociocultural trends.Footnote⁴

The dangers of giving ground to a new, post-truth, order of discourse are recognised in President Obama’s recent call to arms:

While the possible consequences, consequences that are arguably, already coming to fruition in some parts of the world, were spelled out by Hannah Arendt thus:

What then of our role as educators and academics—what is to be done? I’ve been pre-occupied by this question since the morning after the Brexit vote. I was visiting Germany at the time. On the day of the referendum, I had reassured German friends that although opinion polls predicted a close result, on the basis of what I’d been reading (comfortably ensconced in my echo chamber), a pro-leave result seemed unlikely. The following day when the result was clear, most Germans simply could not comprehend how things could have ended up this way, that the British could elect to abandon the European project and retreat into Little Englander isolation, it seemed beyond the realms of reason. And as someone who teaches and writes about reason and argument, I had to ask myself what kind of response, what kind of effective interventions critical thinking in particular and educators more generally could and should make in response to these life and epoch changing events.

When I teach and write about critical thinking, I often present critical thinking as transformative and as a source of empowerment, a means of acquiring knowledge and habits of mind that enable one to speak truth to power. Indeed, it’s not for nothing that throughout history philosophers have been seen as a threat to established political power—as Socrates’ trial and death sentence for corrupting the youth amply demonstrates. Recently, at my son’s final primary school assembly, the head of the senior years talked about the now familiar contemporary approach to curriculum: Teachers no longer transmit facts to students, filling them with information, instead their objective is to enable them to find it and use it. Of course, if students, if any of us, are to do this well and effectively, we need to do so with the ability to find, assess and use information critically, analytically and responsibly. And when the internet has become the primary source of information, when news comes through social media as well as through traditional, professional, news media, when a 140 character throwaway remark can be afforded as much authority on the issue at hand as a carefully researched in-depth article or broadcast news item, the need for training in good and responsible enquiry becomes ever more acute.

Yet the echo chamber of social media sourced news and current affairs coverage makes it harder to employ the skills and habits of mind of which responsible and critical enquiry are comprised. In critical thinking instruction, we emphasise that reaching the true or most likely belief involves examining candidate claims against a background of evidence, testing whether you would be justified in holding them. But if the evidence is sourced solely from within our own echo chamber, it is likely simply to reinforce our beliefs; we fall prey to confirmation bias. And thus the oft-cited goal of what Richard Paul calls ‘deep sense’ critical thinking,Footnote⁷ that of taking and performing a critical stance towards our own deeply held beliefs, is frustrated by the echo, within the chamber, we encounter only those claims that resonate with us. We are also seeing inconsistencies that seem strange when viewed within a framework of the expectations of reason: On the one hand, we appear more gullible. For instance, in the UK, when polled, people consistently overestimate the number of migrants in their community, a perception both formed and confirmed by the ever present anti-immigration and anti-asylum seeker headlines in the tabloid press.Footnote⁸ On the other, we are more sceptical, but often inappropriately so, with contempt shown for genuine, credentialed expertise such as that of scientists in the case of knowledge about climate change, or the well-known and internationally revered Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, in the case of knowledge about the causes of the demise of the Roman Empire.Footnote⁹

We need a critical thinking pedagogy that teaches not only the skills of good reasoning and critical analysis of others’ reasoning, but that enculturates the values of which responsible enquiry is comprised, values such as open-mindedness—being prepared to open up one’s own beliefs to scrutiny, to relinquish or put them to one side if it is shown that one lacks good reason to hold them, to take on entirely different beliefs if one has good reason to do so—and epistemic humility—treating others as equally entitled to having their views heard and taken seriously whatever their status. We need a critical thinking pedagogy that teaches that the ad hominem attack is not a legitimate form of political discourse, but a rhetorical strategy designed to undermine our right to think critically and make up our minds on the basis of evidence. We need a critical thinking pedagogy that teaches how to recognise proper authority and how to avoid deference to false authority, a critical thinking pedagogy that leads away from and enables the awareness of Intellectual vices—gullibility, close mindedness, intellectual arrogance and wishful thinking, a critical thinking pedagogy that teaches us how to recognise rhetorical ploys and the affective responses they are intended to elicit from us.

Another, crucial, aspect of my response as someone who teaches and writes about reasoning and argument is a recognition of the need to respect the role of emotion as part of our response to the world and of our lived experiences of it. Many of the responses that we have when thinking about and discussing socio-political issues are both cognitive and affective.Footnote¹⁰ The need to acknowledge and accommodate this contrasts with the traditional approach to argument and critical thinking and standard instruction, according to which emotion has no place in critical thinking, but is instead the preserve of rhetoric. This does not mean that we should also become teachers of rhetoric. Rather, we need to harness the potential of emotion and the facts of lived experiences as a route to reason—as a means of opening up the mind to considering alternative ways of thinking and of being, rather than simply pointing out falsehoods. Historically, fiction and story-telling in general have provided us with the means both to make sense of our experiences and to countenance possibilities other than the realities of our actual lives. Moreover, socially shared fictions can play a constitutive role in binding a group of individuals together, enabling us both to maintain existing and to create new ways of being. As film director Ken Loach said when speaking about his film, I Daniel Blake, which was awarded the Palme D’Or at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival,

In sum: The more that social media becomes a principal source of information about socio-political issues and current affairs, the more our ability to recognise truth rather than truthiness is potentially undermined. And yet the more that social media becomes a principal source of information about socio-political issues and current affairs, the more we need to be able to recognise truth rather than truthiness. Of all the interventions we can make as educators, one of the most important is to ensure that the familiar institutional policy rhetoric about the importance of educating learners, graduates and citizens who can think critically is transformed into action. That action needs to involve a pedagogy that emphasises habits of intellectual responsibility that moderate and guide the use of the skills of good reasoning and argumentation, that acknowledges and accommodates the role of emotion in our responses to and decisions about the world and our ways of being within it and allows space for the play of narratives that make manifest alternatives to our actual ways of being. Perhaps, most importantly, though, as educators and intellectuals, now is the time to re(mind) ourselves that teaching and intellectual enquiry are always political, and moral, acts.