Post-Truth?: Facts and Faithfulness

By Jeffrey Dudiak, Ronald A. Kuipers and Robert Sweetman

In Post-Truth? Facts and Faithfulness, Jeffrey Dudiak explores the fissures and fractures that vex our so-called "post-truth" era, searching for a deeper, dare we say truer, understanding of the cultural forces that have led North American society to become so polarized. Eschewing the kind of easy responses that trade pluralistic solidarity for tribalistic certainty, Dudiak diagnoses a deeper breakdown in social trust as the underlying issue that has everyone today scurrying for comforting, ideological cover. In this context, Dudiak reminds the reader that truth is more, and runs deeper, than simple correspondence to the facts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666706482

Jeffrey Dudiak

Jeffrey Dudiak is Professor of Philosophy at The King's University in Edmonton, Alberta. He is the author of The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas (2001).

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Post-truth: Facts and Faithfulness

1

. The post-truth era

Back in 2005, when people still used to watch TV, before everybody under thirty simply ignored cable and started watching YouTube instead, Stephen Colbert, the comedian who is currently the host of The Late Show on CBS, had a television program on Comedy Central called The Colbert Report in which he played the role of a conservative talk-show host, confusingly named Stephen Colbert, in which he nightly mocked advocates of right-wing politics by pretending to be one of them, their foibles and blind-spots coming vividly to life across Colbert’s hilarious parody. One of Colbert’s recurring bits was to accuse—by pretending to advocate for—the presidential administration of the time, that of George W. Bush, and conservatives in general, of relying not upon the truth, but rather upon something Colbert called truthiness. According to Colbert, with regard to truthiness: We’re not talking about the truth; we’re talking about something that seems like truth—the truth we want to exist.¹ And Wikipedia defines truthiness (its word of the year in 2005) as a truth ‘known’ intuitively by the user without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination or facts. The character Stephen Colbert—as opposed to the actor Stephen Colbert, who played the character Stephen Colbert—would often mockingly advocate for some inane political position on the show—say, for instance, the Bush administration’s denial of climate change—by appealing to what his gut told him, over against what all of the reasoned evidence