MOSCOW-based British journalist Alfred Cholerton once said of a Stalin show trial, “Everything is true except the facts”. Or did he? Elsewhere his remark is recorded as “I believe everything but the facts” which is not quite the same thing. A couple of millennia before him, Pontius Pilate asked “What is truth?” and wisely left the room before the discussion could take hold.
From Socrates through Aquinas to Russell, the truth about truth has taxed many a great mind and it seems unlikely that “post-truth” should be any easier to explain. The Oxford English Dictionary, at least provides a succinct definition for its 2016 word of the year: “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
Broadcaster Evan Davis is one of at least three authors who have recently stepped forward to help us understand post-truth. But his book is so wide ranging – encompassing behavioural science, economics, psychology and media – that it needs more than the basic OED definition to hold it together.
To that end, Davis opts for the word “bullshit” which once referred to cattle excrement but, since its adoption into American slang, can now be applied to almost anything. Davis defines bullshit as “any form of communication – verbal or non-verbal – that is not the clearest or most succinct statement of the sincere and reasonably held beliefs of the communicator.”
Having given himself licence to roam, Davis uses it to full effect. The book is divided into three parts which investigate what bullshit is, why it so pervasive and how “we can improve our relationship with bullshit and navigate our way through a post-truth era.” Bullshit, he contends, can be fake news, near lies, variations on Edmund Burke’s economy of truth, self-delusion a la Tony Blair and so on.
Davis is fond of sliding from theory to practice. For instance, an examination of Michael Spence’s signalling theory, normally used to show the way that potential employees sell themselves to employers, is extended here to explain persuasive advertising. This is an early hint that, though the book is dressed up in new terms like post-truth, it is actually covering a lot of old ground.
Advertising has long been suspected of bullshitting and there is not much to be gained from Davis’s re-examination of the power of 99p pricing and so forth. Adverts are only really interesting when they change people’s behaviour. In the summer, for instance, the man of the house generally takes it upon himself to flip the steaks; a phenomenon directly attributable to the 1950s North American advertising campaign which connected barbecuing and virility. Whether this was bullshit or not is an open question, but it worked.
Davis is an opponent of short-term dishonesty and taking the low road, not just because they are wrong in themselves but because, in his view, they are eventually ineffective. He has a particular interest in the economy and his musings, almost inevitably, lead to Warren Buffet who “is not just the world’s most successful investor ever but one of the nicest.” Like Buffet, Davis is an optimist. In a section entitled “Better Bullshit” he makes a case for honesty and against hard selling. He feels politicians should be more sincere without quite managing to explain the success of those who are clearly the opposite.
This is an interesting romp around fields of bullshit, but the unintended effect is to persuade one that there is nothing much new under the sun. A wee bit of Jesuit casuistry would explain many of the issues here just as effectively and a lot less crudely. Eventually Davis’s ubiquitous bullshit is everything and nothing and even “better bullshit” is still, somehow, bullshit.
The book is full of bullshit but it is also full of Donald Trump and, though Davis doesn’t say so, it seems likely that he is the reason it was written in the first place. Davis is good on the meaning of Trump, from his connection to WrestleMania through “drain the swamp” to the Oval Office. It all ends rather tamely, however, with the observation that Trump too will pass and maybe sooner than we think – cue the example of Senator Joseph McCarthy flying too close to the sun.
If post-truth ends post-Trump, then books like this may turn out to be passing phenomena too. Davis spends surprisingly little time on the possibility that bullshit only seems at an all-time high because the method of communicating it has changed. When one of Trump’s grammatically challenged POTUS tweets about Russia or FAKE NEWS can, simultaneously, have the FBI worrying about national security and the guy next to you in the pub speculating about presidential sanity, then something’s up. It may or may not be bullshit, but it’s definitely snake-oil selling on a grand scale and all true except for the facts.
Post-Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It by Evan Davis is published by Little Brown, priced £20
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