We all like “post-truth,” don’t we? It is a “cool” word. In 2016, when Oxford Dictionaries declared it to be its international word of the year, we appreciated it a lot. We saw it in a magazine or research and felt good. It was everywhere, from media to academia, from politics to diplomacy. The New Yorker, Chatham House, Foreign Policy, Brookings and others all gave wide publicity. It was sometimes a headline, sometimes a topic of a whole article. But something was not right with post-truth. It both sounded familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. We could secretly feel the strangeness. Really, what was that trend?
When Oxford Dictionaries announced its decision seven years ago, Casper Grathwohl, the president of the dictionaries, linked post-truth’s popularity with the Britons’ divorce deal with the EU and Donald Trump’s grandiose race for the Oval Office. “We first saw the frequency really spike this year in June with buzz over the Brexit vote and again in July when Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination,” he had said.
Coincidentally or not, Grathwohl’s argument was backed by data. In 2015 when post-truth was the same post-truth but the Brexit and Trump rumors were not so widespread, the word’s usage was not common, but when the 2016 summer arrived, its popularity apparently skyrocketed. Could it be possible for pro-Trump anti-EU or pro-Hillary Clinton anti-Brexit campaigns or both (I know it sounds absurd) to popularize a word worldwide? Blame the data.
Grathwohl also said: “It’s not surprising that our choice reflects a year dominated by highly charged political and social discourse. Fueled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time.”
It is hard to disagree with him, as he was simply implying a grim reality aloud; the truth was dead and we were welcoming a new, transformed concept that “has been finding its linguistic footing.” We had already entered an age of post-anything, and there couldn’t be an excuse for the truth to be an exemption. “Post-truth.” It was fair enough.
Oxford Dictionaries defines the word as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” According to Cambridge Dictionary, it is “relating to a situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts.” There are similar other descriptions too.
We must have found something in ourselves that leads us to consensually embrace those definitions. Facts are not important, or objectivity for that matter, as highlighted by the dictionaries. Truth is just a historic word, isn’t it?
However, it was not like that. Humankind’s relation with “truth” is as old as its creation. The truth was everything. It was a life goal. Throughout our journey in the universe so far, we have pondered about it a lot, haven’t we? We started wars and peace – and even died for it. You must have heard the famous story of Abu Hanifa, the eponymous founder of the Hanafi school of the Sunni jurisprudence in Islam, who died in prison for what he believed as truth.
According to Rainer Maria Rilke, an influential Austro-German poet, humankind is self-alienated, lasting a lifetime far from its own natural codes. “Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows,” he said. I think it relatively gives an answer to why the gap between people and truth is huge today.
By the way, truth’s evaporation is felt in international media too. It is so extreme that platforms are urged to find solutions to daily circulating “news” against the truth. Türkiye’s Anadolu Agency (AA), for example, has had to initiate a fact-checking mechanism, “AA Fact-Check desk,” where a professional team solely operates to confirm if a news story, which generally goes viral, is true or not. I appreciate my colleagues’ efforts there, they're really doing good work. I respect them for tracing the truth and it's so valuable, but even in a partially ideal world, who would need such a platform?
In his masterpiece “Walden,” Henry David Thoreau, a 19th-century American thinker, famously said, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” It sounds quite against "Show me the money!" in "Jerry Maguire," doesn't it? I think Thoreau's romantic call has a rational footing too. Global media, as I can specifically say through my experience in an Istanbul-based newsroom, deserves such a call. We can give truth a chance for media and others, for every field indeed. It is not a big deal.
Do you remember Jack Nicholson’s memorable quote, “You can’t handle the truth!” in “A Few Good Men”? Don’t be like him. We can handle it. Doctrinally and practically we can, and we can make "truth" not post-truth a defining word of our time. That's just a matter of choice.
