Writing Slowly

Alan Jacobs rightly observes that Trump supporters don’t care about the ‘truth’ of their claims.

Richard Rorty’s bastard children.

He’s spot on to point out that the purpose of the constant barrage of egregious lying is to mock the idea that truth matters, and to gather a constituency of people who are in on the joke.

And certainly, there’s no point trying to correct these outlandish claims, as though their pushers ever cared a fig about the facts of the matter. They don’t.

Indeed, the Trumpist approach to truth is a direct refutation of Bertrand Russell’s claim that there’s a clear difference between truth and utility:

when we say that a belief is true, the thought we wish to convey is not the same thought as when we say that the belief furthers our purposes; thus “true” does not mean “furthering our purposes”. (Russell 1910 [1994: 98])

For Trump and his fellow-travellers, though, ‘furthering our purposes’ is precisely where it begins and ends.

Lest there be any doubt, the misogynistic vice-presidential hopeful, James Vance, spelled this out in a CNN interview:

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” Source: The Verge.

But since this has nothing to do with Richard Rorty and his ‘bastard children’, two further observations are in order:

First the F-word. Fascist ‘truth’ is all about power. Whoever demonstrates the capacity to act with force is the truth. For fascists the so-called truth of the powerless is a risible fantasy. Their obvious weakness to enact their supposed truth-telling is to be mocked and exploited by the strong. Clearly the Trump movement is at the very least proto-fascist. The fetish for ‘winning bigly’. The anti-immigrant theatre of cruelty. Oh, and yes, the attempted putsch. These are very clear steps on the way to a fascist takeover.

Contra Alan Jacobs all this has little to do with the pragmatist philosophy of Richard Rorty, which Trump supporters have not read¹.

Rorty’s mistake as a philosophical pragmatist was to imagine that the worst possible adversary was the authoritarian claim ‘to ascertain the truth once and for all’. In the authoritarian state, truth and power are tightly aligned. For example in medieval Europe the church supported the ruler, who in turn supported the church. Orthodoxy, right belief, was the same as loyalty, right allegiance. Together they constituted a sealed environment of truth’s possibility. Outside this was only exile or death. The European wars of religion which followed the Reformation came to an end by maintaining a new version of this nexus: cuius regio, eius religio. Whoever rules determines the state religion.

Sadly, the fascist nightmare is far worse. Whoever rules determines everything. In the fascist state truth is less than irrelevant, it’s what the weak cling to as they go to their deaths, deaths which will be denied. Power is all. The world has not gone to hell in a hand basket just because Rorty got philosphy wrong. It’s true that Rorty’s philosophy critiqued traditional theist certainties, but he was no more on the side of the fascists than the theists were.

Second, Trump isn’t in fact a cradle fascist. His gut understanding of the nature of truth comes not from Mussolini and Goebbels but from his religious upbringing in Manhattan’s Collegiate Marble Church and his long association with its pastor, Norman Vincent Peale. Peale was the author of the well-known self-help book, The Power of Positive Thinking, and Peale’s philosophy greatly influenced Trump. Or as Trump himself put it, with his characteristically ridiculous-but-effective brio, “He thought I was his greatest student of all time.”

“Believe in yourself!” Peale’s book begins. “Have faith in your abilities!” He then outlines 10 rules to overcome “inadequacy attitudes” and “build up confidence in your powers.” Rule one: “formulate and staple indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” “hold this picture tenaciously,” and always refer to it “no matter how badly things seem to be going at the moment.” - Gwenda Blair, ‘How Norman Vincent Peale Taught Donald Trump to Worship Himself’. Politico

Again, this self-help concept of truth, with its strong overtones of faking it till you make it, has little or nothing to do with Richard Rorty’s pragmatism. A philosophical scepticism about the correspondence theory of truth does not require conceding that Trump is the biggest winner of all time, or that Trump University was a real university, or that they’re eating peoples' pets.

But the confluence of these two impulses - the fascist will to pure power and the narcissistic conjuring up of pure positivity - is a very dangerous thing. Its course has not yet run out. Yet if Trump mocks truth, history will have the last laugh. “History is what hurts, " as Frederic Jameson observed in one of his grittiest aphorisms, “it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis”.

Well, we’ll see who it hurts most.

References

Jameson, Frederic. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. p. 102.

Russell, Bertrand. 1910 [1994], “William James’ Conception of Truth”, in Philosophical Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910: 127–149. Cited pages from the 1994 Routledge, New York, edition, pp. 112–130. Source: The pragmatic theory of truth, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.