Post-truth: Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
Oxford University Dictionaries’ definition of the word of the year for 2016
You are entitled to your own opinion; you are not entitled to your own facts.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan

In the prison house of language. In the wide open and free spaces of language. Or in the convoluted labyrinth of language. All are metaphors for the great variety of things we make language do for us and/or against those we hate, despise and wish to dominate, if not wipe off the face of the earth. These were the thoughts that crossed my mind earlier this week when I got the news that the custodians of the evolution of the English language at Oxford English Dictionarieshad settled on the compound word, “post-truth”, as their choice for the word of the year for 2016. I think it is safe to say that to nearly everybody who read of this declaration from the etymological gurus of the OED, the first thoughts were about the American presidential elections, especially with regard to Donald Trump and the new word that his advent has given the English language, Trumpism. [Generally, it is still capitalized; when the capital first letter is dropped to give us “trumpism”, it would have achieved its full normalization or even apotheosis] Now, though Trumpism means or implies many things, at its core is the complete indifference, the total and amoral antipathy to facts. Literally, there are hundreds of examples to give of this Trumpian disregard for facts and truth, but the one that I personally found the most annoying and confounding during the campaigns was the president-elect’s stereotype that all African Americans live in inner city ghettoes that Trump considered a war zone worse than Afghanistan. In this Trumpian construction, the millions of African American middle class and upper middle class professionals who live in suburbs did not matter, did not count; all he could see, all he wanted his overwhelmingly white and conservative audiences to see are African Americans whose conditions of life, in Trump’s opinion, are close to what they were right after the abolition of slavery.

But this essay is not about Trump and Trumpism. It is about language in general, with special reference to the OED’s disturbing choice of “post-truth” as the word of the year 2016. Many decades ago, the highly respected American Senator from the State of New York, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, expressed the words of the second epigraph to this essay: You are entitled to your own opinion; you are not entitled to your own facts. This shows clearly that the phenomenon of substituting opinion for facts has been around in American politics for a long time. One can even go back in time and to other countries and cultures to establish the long, perhaps even ancient roots of this phenomenon of substituting opinions – very often extremely wild, improbable and dangerously untruthful opinions – for facts and truth. Thus, I think here of Aristophanes and his play, The Clouds, written and staged in ancient Greece more than seven thousand centuries ago but still incredibly relevant in our age in its dramatization of how, among the Sophists, it was considered much better to have clever opinions than truth or wisdom on one’s side in an argument or struggle. Closer tin time, I think of George Orwell’s novel,Nineteen-Eighty-four(1949),and the neologism that it gave to the English language, “newspeak” which denotes use of language that manufactures facts from mere opinion and then declares the new “facts” the very essence of truth. And still much closer in time to the present moment in history, I think of the American presidential elections of 2012 when Mitt Romney’s campaign manager made the following loud declaration: our campaign will not be dictated by Fact-Checkers! This was made in response to the many, many lies that were found in the Romney campaign’s lies about the welfare policies of the Obama administration. Indeed, I think here of the use of the prefix “post” with some key words to produce terms that are then liable to mean different things to different peoples, terms like “post-feminist”, “post-racial”, “post-Marxist”, “post-historical”, “post-political” and even “post-contemporary”. “Post-truth”, I contend, comes in the wake and wears the composite mask of these “postist” terminologies. What does this mean?

In the present discussion, we have room or time to consider only “post-racial” and “post-feminist”. In both cases, there is a doubleness and an ambiguity in the suggestion that while racism and patriarchy seem to have respectively been transcended, those who have been the historic victims of racism and patriarchy cannot afford to rest on their oars, secure in the knowledge that racists and misogynists can never again accede to power and authority in the country or the world. In other words, the prefix, “post” suggests in these two terms that the world is beyond racism and patriarchy, at least in their old and consolidated forms; but the most astute and effective anti-racists and anti-sexists insist that racism and misogyny are still very much around, sometimes in their most backward and recalcitrant forms and expressions. As a matter of fact, in the campaign of Donald Trump in the recent American electoral cycle, racism and misogyny of the most pernicious types reared their heads and struck viciously once again. So much for talk of the post-racial and post-feminist as mobilizing, energizing terms and slogans for radical and progressive women and men!

So far in this discussion, there has been a rather indirect or muted suggestion that terms coined from the prefix, “post” are ideologically and politically neutral, subject to use or deployment by both the Right and the Left. In general, this is factually correct, though I would argue that on balance, more leftist radicals and progressives use the terms than do right-wing ideologues. In other words, you generally cannot tell whether a pundit or an analyst is left-wing or right-wing simply by the use or deployment of any of these terms, “post-racial”, “post-feminist”, “post-political”, post-ideological” etc., etc. I think the philologists of the OED probably intend the same kind of ideological neutrality in their definition of “post-truth” though, of course, they do not seem to withhold moral critique from their definition. If that is the case, the question arises as to why I am in this essay applying the term, “post-truth” exclusively to the right-wing anti-globalists of the present period, as implied in that part of the title of this piece that talks of “the anti-globalism of the Right”. Is this an expression of ideological bias on my part?

My answer to the preceding question is, quite frankly, I hope not. Although as a Leftist, I am not ideologically neutral, I do not however claim superior moral rectitude or sanctity for the Left. In my personal experience of intellectual and ideological struggles within the Left both in Nigeria and internationally, I have found as much opportunism and as much cynicism as can be found in the general population of all the countries of the world. If this is the case, it seems to me that there is a special reason why “post-truth” is far more in evidence among the Right than the Left in contemporary history’s anti-globalism. This observation leads to the concluding thoughts of this piece in which I address this central thesis of why “post-truth” is almost exclusively a feature of Right-wing demagoguery of European and North-American nations, with perhaps the possible exception of the Right-wing jihadists of the Middle East and its European diasporas.

At this point in the discussion, it is perhaps useful to give a few concrete examples of the most volatile and “active” of the “post-truths” of the Euro-American anti-globalist Right. One of the most infamous is their claim, expressed as a “fact”, that global warming and climate change are nothing but hoaxes invented by globalists to keep American and European workers as perpetual victims of ever faltering levels of industrial production. There is also the feeling greatly touted as a “fact” that the United Nations is a “World Government” in disguise whose real aim is to ultimately subjugate America to the dominance of a cabal of bankers, financiers and hedge fund manipulators. The so-called “clash of civilizations” between the East and the West, between Christianity and Islam, is another major item in the obdurate “post-truth” of the worldview of these new ideological armies of the Right in America especially but also in Europe. Is this construction also an item of “post-truth” which states that the end of the world is near, that things are about to change worldwide into patterns of new alliances of friendly and enemy nations and regions of the world? I think it is. One of its strangest expressions has been the persistent belief of close to two-thirds of the American Right that Barrack Obama is not an American; that he is a Moslem whose mission in America was or has been to weaken the country so decisively that its enemies can then easily finish off the rump that remains of the once-hegemonic and exceptionalist global superpower.

We end these sobering reflections on a note that brings all our observations in the essay to a consideration of the links between language, bigotry and power. We started by identifying and affirming the many metaphors that we have of language: as a prison; as free, open spaces of light and freedom; and as a labyrinth in which one can get lost irredeemably. In none of these metaphors is there a real or strong hint of the play of power. This is all well and good, at least nominally. Any individual, any group can play with and in language, as long as the effects, for good or ill, are confined to the self/selves and its/their immediate circles of friends and associates. But once the link is made or forged with the interests or fates of millions, of hundreds of millions, once we are talking of the survival of entire peoples or indeed of our planetary community, we are talking of language as a basis for the actualization of our worst fears and nightmares. Look carefully, dear reader, at each and all of the items in our profile of the “post-truths” of the American Right and think on this observation: with Trump in the White House and with many of similar leaders of “white nationalism” on the cusp of gaining power in forthcoming general elections, all these “post-truths” are about to become state policies of a segment of the world that has economic and ideological power far beyond any other region of the planet.

It is not my intention to end this piece on a note of pessimism and despair. For this reason, I shall end with the following crucial observation: there was and still is an anti-globalism of the Left and the progressive forces of the diverse regions of the world that did not and does not base itself on “post-truths”. Let us hope that its ideological and moral force will be more than equal to the oncoming policy onslaughts of the anti-globalism of the Right.

Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                 This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.