#Debate: The Opposite of Truth May Not Be Lies — It's Nihilism and Agnosticism

Have people really grown sick of the truth? The answer may be that they are only sick of the noise.

#Debate is a new QDaily column for interesting, contested questions. We know we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us.

"Truth is not truth."

Every year Fred Shapiro, a lecturer at Yale Law School, picks the quotation that best captures the era. The line above — "truth is not truth" — beat out a shortlist of about ten.

In a television interview this past August, Rudolph Giuliani — President Trump's lawyer and the former mayor of New York — was asked whether he would let Trump testify, and answered that everyone tells a different story about what happened. "Trump says I didn't talk to CIA Director Comey about Flynn (note: the former U.S. national security adviser). Comey says I did. Now you tell me what the truth is."

On air, Giuliani argued fiercely with the anchor, Chuck Todd. Tempers run high, and even the most seasoned politician can misspeak. Giuliani said afterward on Twitter that he only meant this: when two sides give flatly contradictory testimony, it is not right to declare either one the truth.

The point Giuliani wanted to make may not have been wrong. But in today's climate, the literal denial in "truth is not truth" hit a deep fear. People worry that truth has become slippery, impossible to confirm, its very existence in doubt — and that if truth is wiped out, a whole society could end up calling right wrong and black white. That is where chaos, and then collapse, begins.

This near-panic grows out of worry about the current political climate, and it is only two or three years old. What first drew notice was a pattern: when people make decisions, political ones above all, they judge more and more by feeling or allegiance rather than by the facts.

In 2016, Britain voted in a referendum to leave the European Union. Afterward, people accused the British tabloids of inflating the number of immigrants and refugees coming in, playing up the sense that Britain had lost all control of its own country — which led plenty of voters who did not know the facts to make a hasty, wrong choice. In the U.S. presidential election that same year, Trump won. He was good at accusing news organizations of publishing fake news, and the press hit back: "Trump is the real manufacturer of lies." Again people got lost in the exchange of fire, and what the truth actually was seemed to become the least important question of all.

Since then, truth has been a touchy word. Use of "post-truth" — for situations in which emotion sways public opinion more than objective fact does — rose 2,000 percent in 2016, and the word was named Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year for 2016.

In 2017, "alternative facts" became the catchphrase. A White House press officer said the crowd at Trump's inauguration was the largest in the history of presidential inaugurations, a claim that contradicted the counts from Washington-area transit authorities. Asked about the gap, presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway said the White House had offered alternative facts — "additional facts and information from other counts."

Also in 2017, the American think tank RAND Corporation coined "truth decay" for the shrinking share of facts and fact-based analysis in American public life. Interpretation, opinion, allegiance, guesswork, rumor and bias, RAND argued, have become the information people mostly take in, pushing facts to the margins of public argument. That is truth decay.

Has truth really stopped existing? So many new words have been coined for anxiety about truth that the question does feel sharper every year, and it leaves people confused and uneasy about what comes next.

They have reason to be uneasy. Politicians shout. Fights between media outlets make the room noisier. Conspiracy theories on social networks crank the volume higher still.

Many people are not tired of truth. They are tired of the mess — tired of the posturing and the reversals, tired of trust that gets betrayed.

Just as the internet democratized information, anyone of any class or background can now, barring exceptions, be heard. Part of the noise comes from the simple fact that far more people can speak than in the days before the internet, when elites controlled public discourse. The other part comes from the use made of that noise — to stall, to cover up, and to wear down the patience of anyone chasing the truth.

"There is no such thing as truth." Plenty of people hold that view, and the world has not given them much of an answer.

President Trump has shown how a position that ought to carry ample credibility can have that credibility destroyed by lies. The Washington Post counted, at the 100-day mark of his presidency, 492 false or misleading statements from him, on everything from the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, to the danger refugees pose to American society, to his personal relationship with Putin.

As authority crumbled, people slowly discovered how many deliberate manufacturers of lies this world holds. In November 2016, Wikipedia added a page listing sites that dress themselves up as serious news organizations and publish nothing but carefully built falsehoods, many of them copying the page designs of traditional outlets such as ABC, Bloomberg and CNN. The sources of information were getting messier by the day.

Distribution was no better. Facebook became the target of public fury this past March. The Guardian, The New York Times and others reported that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm working for the Trump campaign, had obtained the profiles of roughly 50 million Facebook users, letting it push pro-Trump messages at them with precision. Even before that, Facebook had admitted that Russian operatives had quietly bought political ads on the platform and meddled in the 2016 presidential election.

The so-called echo chamber on social networks makes everything worse. People like to befriend people who think as they do, and on a social network that hardens into an echo chamber: you see only information that supports the views you already hold. The result is the illusion that the whole world agrees with you, and information that cuts against your views struggles to travel — even when it happens to be true. Many people believe social networks are exactly what has fed hatred and discrimination, and even produced serious conflict offline.

Finally, the flaws built into the way humans take in information are drawing more attention. A Pew survey found that American liberals and conservatives alike are bad at tolerating people who disagree with them. Conservatives are more likely to look up information on Facebook that matches their political beliefs; liberals are more likely to block or mute people who hold different views.

Psychologists worked out long ago that human cognition is not built purely for truth. The readiness to accept opinions you already hold is called confirmation bias. The anchoring effect describes how readily people accept the first thing they hear, even after later evidence shows it to be false. Against the backdrop of Brexit and Trump's election, people began citing these biases to argue that many voters' choices were not entirely rational.

In the language of communication studies, getting information happens in roughly three stages: making it, spreading it, receiving it. Deliberate liars, chaotic channels of distribution and biased ways of taking things in can each send people astray in their pursuit of the truth. Chaos has become the keyword of the era.

Look at history, though, and chaos turns out not to belong to this era alone.

The American journalism historian Michael Schudson, summing up the U.S. newspaper business at the end of the 19th century, pointed out that the press was never naturally objective. Papers of the day — the press baron William Randolph Hearst and his New York Journal chief among them — chased sensational news to build circulation, and reporters treated entertainment as the main purpose of the job.

Then there is the famous 1938 radio drama The War of the Worlds. It told the story of a Martian invasion of Earth, and the effect was so convincing that it set off mass panic. Many people called the station to check whether it was real, police turned up at the studio to find out what was going on, and some listeners packed their bags and started to flee.

Lies, rumor, bias, jumping at every rustle in the grass — all of it has always been part of human society. Set against the present, it is hard to say which era was worse. Many people criticize Trump's presidency as a step backward for democracy, but compared with 1933, when Hitler took power, the press, the courts and Congress are still there today, checking what Trump decides.

The internet is a new thing, grown huge in 20 years. People have not yet worked out how to live with it, which makes it easier to overstate the harm of false information and to feel a level of worry about it they have never felt before. But rather than mourn the loss of truth, and use post-truth, truth decay and alternative facts over and over to color in how severe the crisis is, it would be more useful to think about how to strengthen truth's standing in public argument — at the making, the spreading and the receiving alike.

Measures already in use include: building fuller fact-checking systems that test the assumptions behind every widely circulated claim; running public courses at universities that teach students to tell opinion from fact; YouTube labeling news videos to show whether a government or another organization funds them, so viewers can weigh the slant; and appending to every news story more coverage of the same event from other outlets, so that extra angles cut the chance a reader is misled. Or, more basically, teaching people to tell an opinion ("you're tall") from a fact ("you're 1.95 meters tall").

Beyond the technical fixes, the most basic approach is simple to state: believe truth exists.

In Schudson's account of American newspaper history, the late 19th century is read as a clash of philosophies between two papers — Joseph Pulitzer and his New York World, chasing entertainment, and Adolph Ochs and his New York Times, chasing news. Ochs believed: "If the price is right, readers will always choose a clean newspaper, one that fights for a noble purpose, prints all the news that's fit to print, and speaks its mind honestly from an independent position."

That reading of human nature looks too optimistic. Perhaps, like many people today, the Times' own staff at the time were not much persuaded by Ochs either. But the fact remains: The New York Times' circulation grew from 2.4 million in 1898 to 23.4 million in 1920. The New York World, by the time it folded, was down to 313,000.

Two Englishmen, both named John, laid the theoretical ground for that turn of history. John Milton struck back at press censorship in his 1644 pamphlet Areopagitica. John Stuart Mill restated the importance of free speech in On Liberty in 1859. Their argument was that if different views can collide freely in the same public arena, the side holding the truth will win out over a long enough span of time — and that collision is the road truth has to travel.

Even Chinese netizens rubbernecking celebrity gossip on Weibo handle phrases like "ask for a hammer, get a hammer" with ease. The hammer they want is nothing more than facts and evidence — call recordings, chat screenshots, transfer records — and resourceful netizens will go further and check a posted image for signs of Photoshop. In an open, free arena of public argument, people can tell the true from the faked, and they do it fluently, without difficulty.

And right now, the work of chasing the truth has never stopped. In 2018, The New York Times employed 1,500 journalists, more than 36 percent above its 2014 count. The Washington Post's reporting staff has grown by more than 70 percent in five years.

Have some faith in people, and facts always find a way — often an unexpected one — to dominate the public conversation. As Chow Po-chung, an associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, put it: "It isn't that the public doesn't care about the truth. Everyone cares about the truth, everyone wants to know the truth. The problem is that a lot of the truth can't get out. That's the reality we're in."

Getting people to give up that faith in truth and that urge to look for it, and to accept agnosticism in the everyday sense, is close to impossible. Anyone who declares that facts and truth do not exist in this world, or cannot be known, contradicts himself: he knows at least one thing for certain, which is that "facts and truth cannot be known."

Ask the White House press officer who coined "alternative facts" how many people actually attended President Trump's inauguration, and you will get a number — not the claim that two contradictory numbers are both right. Which means that even though the phrase appears to erase the existence of truth, the person using it does not believe that.

It is also why Giuliani, having said "truth is not truth," needed to clarify his position on Twitter. He knows the existence of truth is beyond question; to protect President Trump, all he could do was set out two flatly contradictory accounts, and make the search for the truth harder and more tangled.

Beyond the fact that reason pushes people away from skepticism, they care about truth because facts and truth are the ground on which they go on living. As individuals, humans have to work out what is food and what is poisonous, and how, in order to stay alive. As a society, only by weighing what free trade and tariff barriers do to the economy and to the country can people decide which trade policy suits them.

In that sense, human society is built on truth. Those who announce that "there is no truth, only interests" — apart from the parties with an actual interest — are mostly looking for shelter in cynicism, buying themselves a sanctimonious kind of ease.

It is worth saying that truth, so called, does not stay fixed. Research on what counts as healthy food has flipped back and forth for decades. Wrongful convictions may not be formally overturned until ten or more years later. Physics went through Aristotle and Newton before reaching today's relativity and quantum mechanics, and physicists today do not announce that this is the face of the world; they say only, carefully, that it is the theory that best fits what has been observed.

Truth's defining trait is that it never claims to be absolutely right. It submits to every test.

None of that is something agnosticism or nihilism can do.

Cover image / stills from Truth, The Post and Spotlight