“Truth.” “The Truth.” “Speak Truth to Power.”
Over the last few months, in informal conversation, on social media, and in the media, I’ve found it hard to avoid all this. The tone is typically indignant and self-righteous, the context invariably last year’s (re-)election of Donald Trump.
The line has been consistent: Trump is an inveterate liar, enabled by a cast of bad actors and techno-bros in a right-wing misinformation system. This lay behind his election win. If the US electorate could be misled to this choice, it constitutes a dire warning for the future of democracy globally.
One needn’t share the jaundiced interpretation of Trump’s victory to recognise and accept that a disregard for truth is a serious challenge to contemporary democracy. A common appreciation of reality is crucial to the ability to understand others, to empathise with our peers and to debate with our opponents. This is not to say that it means we will all draw the same conclusions – quite the contrary, in fact, which I’ll get to in a moment – but rather that it makes reasoned and respectful disagreement possible,
A respect for truth is a foundational condition for democratic contestation.
What truth means
It’s worth pausing for a moment to reflect on what truth means. The Online Cambridge Dictionary tells us that truth is “the quality of being true.” This circles us to the definition of “true”. Here we have “(especially of facts or statements) right and not wrong; correct”; “being what exists, rather than what was thought, intended, or stated” and “having all the characteristics necessary to be accurately described as something”.
The Truth – note the use of article – is meanwhile rendered as “the real facts about a situation, event, or person.”
It’s impossible not to see the definitional link between truth and fact. Or differently, truth is a function of what is observable and verifiable, and whose veracity can stand up to scrutiny. Truth, thus seen, is an objective measurement, independent of any aspirational or normative considerations.
As always, though, things are seldom quite so clear-cut, especially since the idea of truth has been appropriated to describe ideas that defy simple observation. We apply it to personal feelings and emotions (as Katie Melua put it, “there are nine million bicycles in Beijing, that’s a fact, it’s a thing we can’t deny, like the fact that I will love you ’til I die…”). Truth – or perhaps “the Truth” – is a staple of religious claims, and wields immense power over people’s consciousness, yet is something that must ultimately be taken without the sort of objective, irrefutable evidence that all will accept.
Truth is a powerful idea, and one that many interests want to appropriate.
Which brings me back to the concerns that I mentioned at the beginning, the disregard of truth in political debate. As it happens, though, these concerns need not be discussed in relation to the politics of a foreign country, however, since this phenomenon is well in evidence right here. Nor is this confined to fringe elements, bad actors and the podbro scene, however problematic each of these might be.
Declaratory history
In South Africa, political legitimation has always depended on what might be called a “declaratory history”, a narrative of the past and of one’s role in it. Given that much of our history can be seen through the lens of waves of nationalism – British imperial (“jingo”) nationalism, Afrikaner nationalism, and African nationalism – this is unsurprising. Nationalist claims lean heavily on narratives about the past, demanding that a particular perspective be acknowledged as “the Truth”, as in religion.
Back in the 1990s, one of the foundational experiences of post-apartheid South Africa was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a body whose very name attempted to invoke the moral power of the concept (and in view of the behind-the-scenes conduct of the preceding system of governance, it’s hard to miss the appeal). The Commission quickly took on a condensed moniker, the “Truth Commission”. (Antjie Krog noted in her book Country of my Skull that the latter nomenclature was purposefully chosen to foreground the bold, fearless search for answers, and not to let it be subsumed in another acronym.)
Yet, the “Truth Commission” turned out to have its own sense of what “Truth” or “the Truth” entailed. From the first volume of its report: “But what about truth – and whose truth? The complexity of this concept also emerged in the debates that took place before and during the life of the Commission, resulting in four notions of truth: factual or forensic truth; personal or narrative truth; social or ‘dialogue’ truth and healing and restorative truth.”
The report’s windy exposition of “truth” revealed that fealty to verifiable facts was only one feature among several, and probably not the most important. (Judge Albie Sachs, whose brainchild this was, once said that he had “invented” these “truths”, no doubt a poor choice of words, but a revealing one.) “Truth” was not an objective record of what had happened, but a utility to be adapted to circumstances and objectives. Thus, “dialogue truth”, the report quoted Sachs, “is social truth, the truth of experience that is established through interaction, discussion and debate.”
The implication seems to be that we can come to an agreement that certain things are a certain way, maybe because it makes ugly things bearable or because it makes us feel good about ourselves.
Perspective and perception
Is this “truth”? Well, maybe it’s regarded as “true” because people might generally believe it, rather in the vein of religion or nationalist lore. But it is actually a utilitarian and instrumentalist appropriation of elements or truth in order to reach a particular conclusion. This is the stuff of perspective and perception, and it is by no means necessarily “truth” if one turns to the word’s definition.
Funnily enough, this didn’t prompt the sort of outrage that has developed in recent years as we bemoan the “post-truth world”; no, this was seen as high-brow, erudite, intellectual stuff, eagerly imbibed by our deep thinkers. What was also striking was that some strongly anti-pluralist impulses existed behind this.
Commissioner Richard Lyster, in a widely commented-on article, called for the Commission to provide the country with a “publicly sanctioned history”, which would be used to educate future generations. There were, he averred, “a number of contradictory versions of our history” which could promote conflict. There was no room here for alternative perspectives or for debate. There is a great irony here: “truth” was difficult to define as a concept, a malleable idea, but once the Commission had pronounced on “the truth”, it would be eternal and unchallenged. And official.
As an aside, part of Lyster’s argument was that the Commission was well placed to do this, since it was composed of a diverse group of South Africans. This was ridiculous, given that virtually all the commissioners had what might be termed “struggle sympathies”, something replicated in the commission’s staff.
Not a single commissioner had any links to the Inkatha Freedom Party, despite its involvement in the violent conflicts of the 1980s and 1990s, and the propaganda war that took place around it.
And when my colleague, Dr Anthea Jeffery, actually took the time to read the Commission’s report and critiqued it, well, there was very little interest from those sympathetic to it as to the substance of her work. Not that it was ignored.
There was a veritable firestorm of moralistic outrage that she should be making any sort of critique at all. Dr Jeffery (her name often misspelled) was insulting “our people”, one columnist hissed, the nationalist drive on display. Another said that he was looking forward to doing a comprehensive review when he’d read it, though this review never materialised.
Meaningful
This was deeply meaningful. South Africa had second-rated “truth” – as in a regard for facts and evidence, and even for the debate that would make verifying them possible – early on, while foregrounding an ideological and prescriptive take on it. (“Alternative Facts” before they were a thing, perhaps?) Antjie Krog’s book, meanwhile, had a subplot about her personal infidelity, which she later revealed to have been made up to “express the psychological underpinning of the Commission” – deeper and more existential “truths” apparently prevailing over the more mundane factual ones…
Perhaps one shouldn’t be too harsh on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It was, after all, a creature of the political maelstrom of the transition, and as much a part of the country’s politics as the “truths” it was purportedly laying bare. Maybe “truth” was simply an inevitable casualty of the heated political climate. Maybe a disregard for “truth”, or a recognition of the power of weaponizing what passes for “truth” is just a part of our political culture.
And perhaps it is also redundant to raise objections to the abuse of “truth” among our political caste. Politicians are in the trade of swaying opinion and in crafting views of the world that serve this goal.
But it is a matter of grave concern when “truth” is disregarded by those whose vocation it is to make sense of society. Think here of journalists and academics, for example. There is much here to raise concerns.
Globally and locally
Globally and locally, much has been written over the past few decades – certainly since the start of my career, and if I may employ a South Africanism – on the transformation of journalism. In the main, this has not been a positive development. Commercial pressures, changes in journalists’ training regimes, and the retirement of seasoned journalists or their decamping to more lucrative careers in public relations have driven the so-called “juniorisation of the newsroom”. Indeed, today, AI programmes can do much of the heavy lifting, so even writing skills need not be a journalistic necessity. Journalism just isn’t what it once was.
More than this, I sense that something even more profound has taken place. Online platforms have opened up enormous opportunities for people to have their say; but they’ve also made it possible for a great deal of unnuanced and low-quality commentary to get an airing. They have further given rise to unabashedly partisan echo-chambers, where damn-near all of us can find something to validate what we believe and denigrate what we oppose. It is emotionally satisfying, in a sugar-high manner, but intellectually impoverishing. It’s one reason I dislike podbro culture.
I would also suggest that journalists have become increasingly bold about stepping into public debate. A responsibility to report on things has blurred into an imperative to influence them.
Don’t get me wrong: news outlets have always held institutional positions – often deeply political ones – while journalists have held their own views and have used their writing to push them. “Crusading” journalists have often been an admirable species in free (and even more so in unfree) societies, bringing unpleasant facts to light. “Speaking truth to power”, as the cliché has it. The Washington Post’s tagline, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, is a lyrical expression of this idea.
Much the same could be said of academia, scholarship merging with activism. Foreshadowing this, Karl Marx said: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” It’s not surprising that the highly educated and articulate view themselves as having a vanguard responsibility for driving societal change.
Concern
My concern – and I’ve written at length about it – is that in these spheres too, we’ve seen a bold rhetorical commitment to “truth”, though what is meant by this often looks less like is a forensic presentation of facts than a deployment of what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission would have described as “social truth.” I have termed this narrative ‘a depiction of the world through a particular lens of ideology and aspiration to reach particular conclusions’. Not infrequently, those preferred conclusions inform the framing of constituent elements of the “truth”.
Since Trump is once again in focus, the attention he has attracted in the past provides an enlightening glimpse of this approach. Back in 2018, Trump tweeted: “I have asked Secretary of State @SecPompeo to closely study the South Africa land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers. “South African Government is now seizing land from white farmers.” @TuckerCarlson @FoxNews.”
There was a veritable apoplexy about this. Not unexpected for the most part. However, News24’s response bore noting. Under the hashtag #truthmatters, it said: “Carlson: Ramaphosa has begun seizing land from his own citizens because they are the wrong skin colour. Fact: No farms have been seized without compensation and race is not a part of the proposed constitutional amendment.”
To its credit, News24 published a reply from me. I noted that while they were correct that no farms had been seized without compensation (as yet, though that was the loudly trumpeted intention, expressed from the President down), there was nothing to support the contention that “race is not a part of the proposed constitutional amendment.” At that point, there was no text of the proposed amendment to interpret, so no way to know if “race” was a part of it or not. However, given the tenor of the debate, and the demands of the measure’s proponents, it was hardly unreasonable to draw this conclusion. Commending News24 on #truthmatters, I commented: “The media could do a great service in helping to inject a greater quantum of truth into these issues. Not just from Trump.”
A little while later, President Ramaphosa found himself in the US and told a reporter that “there are no killings of farmers or white farmers in South Africa.” This was a transparent lie, far more brazen in its expression that anything Trump had said on the subject. It was – for domestic consumption – sort of walked back. But a lie it remained, and we at the Institute of Race Relations called him out on it.
Accommodating
Interestingly, on this issue, News24 took a far more accommodating view of what constituted “truth”. There was context here. This was specifically about what Trump had said (one might take this to mean that lies are acceptable when there is a Trump factor involved, though I doubt it). In fact, demanding factual honesty was itself unreasonable. As a piece by Pieter Du Toit commented, the criticism from the IRR was “absolutist, which does not leave room for nuance or context.” What the President was doing, it seems, was not lying, but deploying intriguing rhetorical techniques, an exercise for the intellect. Why demanding absolute respect for facts (#truthmatters) was undesirable was not explained.
I don’t think I’d be courting too much controversy if I said that this all came down to politics and ideology. Trump was someone whom the commentariat as a whole disliked, Ramaphosa someone it liked. The expropriation drive was loaded with racial overtones, and so tended to be treated cautiously, often defaulting to “trust Cyril” (he’s our man, after all). Maybe that’s understandable in the prevailing cultural milieu, but it raises disturbing questions about how “truth” is understood, and how fealty to it is a variable and situational commitment.
Something similar is typically at play where a case of suspected racism arises. All it takes is an allegation, and assumptions and moralistic outrage will do the rest. There will invariably be a working presumption of guilt on the part of the putative racist, and any number of commentators willing to appear on television with care-furrowed brows to expound on how this exposes a “broader problem”.
Allegations
Think of the recent allegations about Pretoria High School for Girls, or rather the manner in which it was covered: the revealing (and slanted) choice of words about a “whites-only” WhatsApp group, the quoting of anonymous sources or jaundiced second-hand reports and the general assumption that there was a roiling sea of bigotry on the school’s campus. That this might all be a storm in a teacup (rather what the disciplinary committee found) was hardly entertained. Nor did the grossly unprofessional behaviour of education department officials receive the attention it deserved.
Much the same could be said of various other controversies. Think about Hanks Irish Pub, the obscene character assassination of Schweizer-Reneke teacher Elana Barkhuizen (gleefully and shamefully joined in by some who might read this), and the Jan Braai kerriewors skandaal.
Equally, there have been a stream of cases of “farmers” supposedly abusing their workers, although these typically involve people with no connection to agriculture at all. “Farmer” here is just shorthand for “white person in a rural setting” (need not even be outside a town, not in terms of some of the cases that I’ve come across). But of course, this is meant to touch on pain points in the country’s past; there is no factual justification for this, but that’s not the point. For its proponents, it’s about those “broader problems”, and whether or not it is empirically true is irrelevant.
Sara Gon and I wrote at the time of the PHSG incident that all this was essentially a matter of narrative construction. We put things together in a manner that makes sense, or may serve a particular purpose. Dialogue or social “truth”, it seems to me. And I would suggest that this isn’t really truth at all. It’s a dialogue happening among a small group of the like-minded, and at best it is a perspective on a set of signifiers, which often disregards the possibility of any alternative explanation.
This is not only not “truth”, as a reflection of reality and a record of an actual procession of events, but makes establishing it a fraught if not impossible task. Before “truth” is recognised, there must be a willingness to see it, however unpleasant, or mundane, or inconvenient it may be.
Sadly, much of the country’s public discourse is seemingly not interested in doing this. Too often, South Africa’s public conversation is dominated by narrative, by emotion and the heady lure of perceived virtue. It is something with deep roots in the way we as a society behave in the public square. And in appropriating the concept to truth, as has been done in South Africa – “too clever by half”, as my late mother might have put it – it delivered the country to something of a post-truth world long before Donald Trump’s name appeared on a ballot half a world away.
This is the first in a two-part series. Next week’s article will look at what can be done to counter this.
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