I was thinking earlier tonight, "You know Bob, you have put up that long extract of Orwell reflecting on facts in politics (Orwell On Fact and Reality), but you have not done any exegesis with it." But here early in the AM (6/5/21) I was hit by something that epitomizes perfectly how the dilemma as to facts has reached a very high pitch.
See, for instance, Andrew Stiles' "Libs: Emily Wilder and Nikole Hannah-Jones Were Victims of Conservative ‘Disinformation Campaign’ in the Washington Free Beacon this morning. Here's a snippet from it:
University of North Carolina journalism professors Alice Marwick and Daniel Kreiss are just as convinced that Nikole Hannah-Jones was the target of multiple "conservative disinformation campaigns." Writing in Slate, the professors argue that criticizing Hannah-Jones and her controversial 1619 Project, a revisionist history of the American founding that has been widely criticized by historians, is tantamount to waging disinformation.
It's "possible," they concede, that some critics might be "doing so in good faith," but that doesn't mean their criticism is any less disinformative. "Debate and disagreement are at the heart of academia—but conservative disinformation campaigns are deliberately spread to advance particular political and ideological goals," Marwick and Kreiss write. Of course, by this standard, most of what the mainstream media do on a daily basis might be described as a disinformation campaign.
Our UNC journalism professors are mired in confusion of stunning depth. They seem totally ("perhaps in good faith," as they might put it) oblivious to the blurring of those intellectual boundaries whose precise location is at the heart of the controversy, if that is what it is, regarding facts. My guess is neither professor ever used the word "epistemology" once in, say, an undergraduate term paper. They clearly have not explored the subject at a graduate level.
Where to begin? How about with the profs' obsession with motivation instead of message? They deem it likely that conservative observers can, yes, be acting in "good faith" yet still be dissemnating this thing called -- rather loosely, it must be admitted -- "disinformation." So these observers somehow mean well, are striving to discern truth from error, but must be so deluded that they are unaware of their "political and ideological goals."
That is, of course, nonsense, as Stiles points out in summary fashion:
...by this standard, most of what the mainstream media do on a daily basis might be described as a disinformation campaign.
This simply won't do. The complete absence in the public square of any focus on, say, to what criteria ought appeal be made to sift out truth from error is daunting, and bodes ill for our future. This is not a problem only recently thrust on us. It's not as if we have not had a steady dialogue in Western Civilization for oh say a coupla thousand years on the question. But thanks to the combined efforts of French and German philosophy faculties in the last century, and their sycophantic followers in the English departments of practically every college and university in the Anglophone world, no discussion of claims to truth versus error is deemed to have any more weight than, say, conversations as to whether anchovies should ever be served as a pizza topping. (The answer to that is of course YES.)
Orwell saw this coming in the Forties. It is precisely this development that he said scared him "more than bombs." I refer of course to this from him in the extract cited above: "...the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world." Rationality and objectivity are relics of the Bad Old Past and thanks to recent elucidations are now known to be devious attempts by evil white heterosexual men to (EEK!) maintain their CONTROL OF THE NARRATIVE.
That "public square" I mentioned? It no longer rings with considered efforts to persuade. The sweaty, red-faced orators standing (literally!) on soap boxes at various points across the Boston Common may be gone, but much more has been lost than their picturesque presence. They had no problem with others of their number, at other locations, plying their assembled crowds with their efforts to persuade. They wouldn't understand the current, apparent, need to eliminate opposing views, as if such things are toxic to the public weal.
How much have we lost? How much trouble are we really in?
Did Nietzsche really say, "Facts are precisely what we don't have."? I think he did, and that was all the pinheads teaching "English" at our higher ed facilities had to see. Under some of the meanings of the word "fact" Nietzsche was right. But Orwell's gift for clarity comes to the fore in his "Looking Back On The Spanish War" article. I will perforce quote an entire paragraph, which will serve to benchmark how much we have lost:
I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that 'the facts' existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost everyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be that body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as 'the truth' exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as 'science'. There is only 'German science, 'Jewish science' etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, 'It never happened' -- well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five -- well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs -- and after our experiences of the last few years that is not a frivolous statement.
Here's the money quote: "It is just this common basis of agreement, with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys." For our journalism profs we are not all of "one species of animal." We are either in the ranks of what the wonderful John Derbyshire terms the "good white people," or we are dangerous insurrectionists plotting our next destructive foray into the gated communities of the Beautiful People. We are in Bizarro-World, which unsurprisingly Orwell described perfectly in his essay Politics and the English Language (1946):
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.