The New “Post-Truth” Normal

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic exposed the severity of the epistemological crisis we face in the digital age. As the new virus spread globally, public health experts and government leaders naturally struggled to understand the nature of the contagion and how best to contain it. But the speed with which information—good, bad, and ugly—spreads in today’s world meant that imperfect data, errant projections, hastily written analysis, and contradictory recommendations were spread confidently and quickly, resulting in a disaster of information every bit as dangerous as the disease itself. Whatever you wanted to believe about the pandemic and the “stay at home” restrictions issued by governments, there were articles, studies, and experts you could find online to defend your view. The result was a deepening cynicism and uncertainty about pretty much everything.
 
COVID-19 didn’t create these frightening information dynamics, but it was a crisis made worse because of them. It was really 2016 when the extent of our epistemological crisis became apparent. That was the year Donald Trump’s election to president in the US and “Brexit” in the UK stunned experts and accelerated feelings that the world was entering a new, unpredictable phase driven more by rage than reality, more by fear than facts.
 
As a result, Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” the international word of the year in 2016, defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”1 The new “post-truth” normal was underscored in early 2017 when Time posed the question, “Is Truth Dead?” on its cover, designed in such a way to mirror a Time cover from 50 years earlier which posed a more foundational question: “Is God Dead?”2 These two covers, a half century apart, tell an important story. Without God as an ultimate standard of truth, all we have are “truths” as interpreted by individuals. To each their own. You do you. It’s no wonder we are now as confused as we are. Do away with God, and you do away with truth.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

 

The Depressing Dead End of “Your Truth”

In her lifetime achievement award acceptance speech at the 2018 Golden Globes, Oprah Winfrey said, “What I know for sure is that speaking your truth is the most powerful tool we all have.”
 
“Your truth” Those two words are so entrenched in our lexicon today that we hardly recognize them for the incoherent nightmare that they are. Among other things, the philosophy of “your truth” destroys families when a dad suddenly decides “his truth” is calling him to a new lover, a new family, or maybe even a new gender. It’s a philosophy that can destroy entire societies, because invariably one person’s truth will go to battle with another person’s truth, and devoid of reason, only power decides the victor.
 
“Your truth” also puts an incredible, self-justifying burden on the individual. If we are all self-made projects whose destinies are wholly ours to discover and implement, life becomes a rat race of performative individuality. “Live your truth” autonomy is thus as exhausting as it is incoherent. As French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg points out in The Weariness of the Self, the self-creating person turns out to be fragile and “weary of her sovereignty.” Depression is the inevitable result and “the inexorable counterpart of the human being who is her/his own sovereign.”
 
“Your truth” autonomy invariably leads to loneliness. It erroneously suggests we can live unencumbered and uninfluenced by the various structures that surround us (families, churches, cultures, biology, etc.) But it becomes impossible to form community when everyone is their own island, with no necessary reliance upon larger truths or embeddedness within a bigger story.
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Perceptual Presentism

Compounding the problem is what I call “perceptual presentism,” where reality is filtered to us in fleeting fragments of what’s happening now, rather than through the filter of time and generational wisdom.
 
But this approach to time is not only narcissistic; it’s dangerous. It disconnects us from the wisdom of history and places undue mental emphasis on (and blind trust in) that which is least likely to produce wisdom: the untested now.
 
In a sobering 2019 Atlantic article, Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell note the problematic way that ideas and conflicts of the present moment “dominate and displace older ideas and the lessons of the past.” One paradox of the information age, they observe, is that even as younger generations grow up with unprecedented access to everything that has ever been written and digitized, the new generations nevertheless “find themselves less familiar with the accumulated wisdom of humanity than any recent generation, and therefore [are] more prone to embrace ideas that bring social prestige within their immediate network [and] yet are ultimately misguided.”
 
Today’s technological landscape hasn’t invented this sort of problematic presentism, but it has amplified it. Our existing human inclinations toward the latest and the trendiest are accelerated by the breakneck speed with which things come and go. This presentist orientation is particularly toxic (and all too common) in evangelical faith communities, where obsessions with “relevance,” an uncritical embrace of technology, and a disconnection from history leave many churches vulnerable to being molded more by the ephemeral spirit of the age than by the solid, time-tested wisdom of ages past.
 
Presentism is toxic not only because it rejects the resources of the past, but also because it has little discipline to stay on course for the future. Orientation around the new is by definition unstable, because the “new” quickly becomes “old” and passé. The presentist world burns through fads and ideas at an alarming pace. Among other things, this undermines the sorts of qualities—grit, perseverance, long-haul commitment—that are essential to actually solving complex problems. Presentism leads us to be “all in” for some cause for a few months, only to lose interest when another cause grabs our attention. It turns us into fickle consumer “slacktivists” whose short bursts of passion—for a new weight loss scheme, a buzzy Netflix show, a hashtag campaign against some injustice—move the needle on nothing except the profit margin for the platforms that benefit from our now-ness.

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Alternative Facts

“Alternative facts” famously entered the cultural lexicon in early 2017 when Kellyanne Conway told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press (in reference to the disputed crowd size at Trump’s inauguration), “You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and [we are] giving alternative facts to that.” To which Todd went on to reply: “Alternative facts are not facts—they’re falsehoods.”
 
In today’s post-truth world, “facts” are seen as fluid, bias-laden things to dispute or ignore when they threaten us. Political debates are largely unproductive in part because both sides marshal their own sets of “facts” and simply dismiss the other side’s arguments as invalid. Feelings now overrule facts. We assert as facts what we feel to be true, and when someone challenges us, we turn it back on them, because how dare they question the validity of our feelings? 

To have one’s felt truth invalidated is to have one’s very identity dismissed. It is to be offended, triggered, and “disrespected”—which is seen as more egregious than simply being proven wrong. However logical an argument might be, however indisputable the facts, it can all be dismissed as the “blindness” of privilege, the manipulation of the hegemony, or the weapon of the oppressor. Facts and rationality simply become inflictors of “trauma” (an increasingly weaponized word); not objective evidence in any agreed upon sense. “In a post-truth age,” writes Abdu Murray, “if the evidence fits our preferences and opinions, then all is well and good. If it doesn’t, then the evidence is deemed inadmissible or offensive, with offense being a kind of solvent against otherwise sound arguments.”
 
The same cavalier attitude toward facts also goes for our personal belief systems. In part because of the chaotic, incoherent flow of information that constantly fills our minds and also because our capacity for self-awareness and critical thinking is decreasing, we increasingly curate hodgepodge worldviews full of inherent contradictions. A person might adopt some aspects of Christianity but also some of Buddhism or Wicca, ignoring the fact that Christ claimed religious exclusivity (see John 14:6). Some might passionately support the protection of iguana eggs while advocating the legal killing of unborn human babies. Others might enthusiastically argue for the importance of organic crops and against the dangers of genetically modified tomatoes, even as they cheer the sex change operations and hormone modification of transgender persons. We increasingly fail to consider our own logical inconsistencies.
 
But because it’s easy to just turn the channel or unfollow someone when our incoherent positions are challenged, we find it easy to keep holding contradictory views without feeling cognitive dissonance. “When confronted with a deficiency in our ethical code, it takes no real effort to ignore it,” Alan Noble observes. In a world of constant mental stimulation, “our default response to cognitive dissonance is to simply do something else.”
 
All of this might sound crazy, and indeed it is. But it’s how we live now. “Reality” isn’t a force to reckon with as it once was. Established knowledge, provable facts, even the reality of one’s own body—all of it can now be dismissed if it subverts the authority that matters most: the “self.”
 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

The Death of Expertise

One of the by-products of information’s glut and speed is that we are increasingly skeptical about its trustworthiness. There is so much bad information out there, so much that is false and fake and corrupted by bias. It’s no wonder we increasingly cope by seeing ourselves as the most trustworthy source. It’s no wonder “look within,” “follow your heart,” and “you do you” are resonant phrases. External authorities like family, teachers, pastors, politicians, religious traditions, and others have disappointed us or been proven hypocritical. At best we see them as secondary to the self as sources of truth. At worst we dismiss them as oppressive obstacles on the path to self-discovery.
 
But the self is not the reliable authority it is cracked up to be. Our fickle hearts are unreliable guides, deceitful above all things (Jer. 17:9). Our embrace of “being true to ourselves” often leads to a closed loop of self-deception and chronic brokenness, where we erroneously believe we have all the resources for healing within ourselves. We buy into the notion that we exist as isolated, self-contained creatures who needn’t be accountable to anything beyond ourselves. But this is a dangerous and lonely lie.
  
The “look within” tendency to shun authority is as old as Eden. It was refined by Enlightenment thinkers like René Descartes and John Locke, who located truth in the individual’s mental world, not in the world outside our heads. But the last century has seen an acceleration in the erosion of external authority.
 
The Internet’s democratization of information has had a leveling effect that tends to downplay credentials and embolden unqualified participation in every area of discourse. We are now all “experts” on everything and have platforms to publish our thoughts. Actresses can launch lifestyle blogs that proffer all manner of dubious health advice.
 
Experts are usually not out to get us. They want to help us. Guardrails and gatekeepers are not about stifling us. They’re about protecting us. Authority can be abused, yes, but at its best it is for our good.. When we shun the advice of experts, we not only risk being exposed to bad things; we also miss out on good things.
 
We can’t all be experts in everything. God gifts people differently for a reason. The biblical vision of a healthy church, for example, is not one where everyone contributes in the same way, but where variously gifted parts contribute to a healthier whole (see 1 Cor. 12:12–28; Eph. 4:1–16 among others). We need each other because we can’t do everything on our own. We need to be educated and apprenticed by others if we are to become truly knowledgeable or skillful in any area. Rather than resenting the expertise of others, we should respect it and learn from it.

 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:

Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Return to the Concept of Truth

Basically, what Wells is calling for is a return to biblical truth-not only to its content, but to the very concept of truth. The Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles had a certainty that contrasts sharply with modernity's outlook. They were convinced that the revelation that they had received from God and proclaimed was true in an absolute sense. It was not just true for them or true in their time alone. It was true "universally, absolutely, and enduringly. "
 
Wells is aware that this conception of truth is regarded by moderns as untenable. He advances three reasons moderns cite in defense of the position that we can no longer hold to absolute truth as those ancients did.
 
(1) The first is often more implicitly assumed than argued per se. It is the idea that we have progressed to the point where we can no longer turn back to that older way of thinking. What is culturally older is considered to be of less value. While this was earlier based on Darwinism and the philosophy that stemmed from it, it has more recently been related to technology.
 
(2) Second, there is the contention that it simply is not possible to slip back into the ancient or biblical worldview, the way one would take off a garment and replace it with another. Worldviews are tied to the psychology and experiences of a given age, and ours is modern. While the argument of New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann along these lines is now considered obsolete, this belief seems to linger.
 
(3) Third, we now face religious pluralism and a bewildering array of claims to truth. It is therefore no longer possible to believe simplistically, as did the biblical writers, in an unqualified view of truth.
 
Wells responds to each of these contentions, arguing that they need not deter us from holding a biblical understanding of truth.
 
(1) First, to hold the view of the progress of the human spirit in view of the atrocities of this century requires a greater credulity than to believe the biblical writers.
 
(2) Second, from the fact of contemporary experience, it does not follow that we must simply acquiesce in this view. Experience is to be interpreted, and it certainly has not been shown that we have lost our freedom to accept or reject beliefs. If beliefs were strictly determined, what would be the point of writing books to persuade someone on any subject, including this one?
 
(3) Third, while religious pluralism in our time has reached a magnitude previously unequaled, it is quite remarkable to hear the claim that this requires giving up the uniqueness of Christianity. Wells says, "Had this been the necessary consequence of encountering a multitude of other religions, Moses, Isaiah, Jesus, and Paul would have given up biblical faith long before it became fashionable in Our Time to do so. "

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.

The Disappearance of Evangelical Theology

Actually, the world in which the apostles lived and preached was more pluralistic than any other age until the present. While their world was small and ours is not, there is another very important difference between them and us, together with an important consequence:
 
Theirs, however, was a cauldron of conflicting religious claims within which the Christian faith would have remained tiny but for one fact: the first Christians knew that their faith was absolutely true, that it could brook no rivals, and so they sought no compromises. That was the kind of integrity that God, the Holy Spirit, blessed and used in the ancient world in spreading the knowledge of Christ. We today are not so commonly persuaded or, I dare say, not so commonly blessed. Even among those who seek to guide the Church in its belief, many are of the mind that Christian faith is only relatively true, or they think, against every precept and example that we have in the New Testament, that Christ can be "encountered" in other religions-religions that they view not as rivals but as "interpretations" with which accommodation should be sought. What would have happened over the ages, one wonders, if more of the Church's leaders had been similarly persuaded?
 
Wells contends that theology is disappearing from evangelicalism. This may seem strange, since surveys indicate a strong continued belief in and commitment to the doctrines of historic Christianity. Yet, Wells contends, theology is disappearing because those beliefs have been pushed to the periphery, where their power to define what evangelical life should be has been lost. This disappearance means two things. On the one hand, the several aspects of theology have been broken apart. They are now engaged in, respectively, by biblical scholars; philosophers, historians, and sociologists; and the theoreticians of practice. Second, the articles of belief are no longer at the center of the life of evangelicals and evangelicalism. Instead, there is a vacuum, into which modernity is pouring. The result is that for the first time there is a faith that is not defining itself theologically.
 
Not only the understanding of the nature of evangelicalism but the understanding of ministry has been corrupted by modernization. Two roles that are highly admired in our society have become the models that ministers now tend to adopt: the psychologist and the manager. Thus, preaching, even in evangelical pulpits, tends to be therapeutic, and the pastor is seen as the CEO of a corporation, responsible for its efficiency and growth. This is in keeping with Wells' contrast between two types of ministry-one theologically based, the other professional in orientation. In the latter, one's occupation has become a career, in which advancing to larger, more financially rewarding, and more prestigious positions is the goal.

- Millard J. Erickson, Postmodernizing the Faith: 

Evangelical Responses to the Challenge of Postmodernism, 1998.