TRUMP AND THE BIZARRE DISTORTION OF REALITY

"He alone is free who lives with free consent under the entire guidance of reason." - Baruch Spinoza

We can only shudder with horror and disbelief at the destruction that one man can do. But, of course, Trump could not effectuate his designs unless the political environment had already been prepared to receive him, and millions of followers were ready to accept what Trump proposes and has set in motion.

But beyond the rampaging policies Trump has enacted at lightning speed, is his assault on the most fundamental pillars which make a coherent social reality possible. This includes undermining the moral norms we are raised with from the earliest age – basic respect for others, decency, honesty, compassion, fairness, and many others that receive continual reinforcement as we mature. I often ask myself, what transpires in the minds of parents who support Trump and are also dedicated to the ethical upbringing of their children? How do they reconcile their adulation for Trump with how they teach their children to relate to their siblings and friends, elders, and others?

Perhaps even more offsetting is Trump's disregard for and upending of the epistemological foundations that make life intelligible and functional at the most basic levels. Trump seemingly has no regard for the truth. It makes no claim on him. He is a perpetual and chronic liar. He possesses and spreads a mendacious mindset. To lend support to Donald Trump, to conclude that he is competent to serve as president, is to embrace his lies and, to varying degrees, internalize his standards as one's own. In great measure, it is to conclude, as he does, that the truth and truthfulness are matters of indifference.

We cannot know precisely how many people have acceded to Trump's mendacity as at least acceptable and at most normative. Nor can we be certain how deeply it has penetrated into the psyches of his followers and transformed their own modes of thinking. However, given Trump's influence, we can conclude that these transformations in their reach and depth are not negligible or small.

What Trump has accomplished is to radically alter and substitute the everyday norms by which we operate and replace them with an upside-down reality. In a world in which speaking the truth is of no consequence, that which is false now becomes true.

The famed psychologist, Robert Jay Lifton, writing in the current issue of Scientific American, has a brief article on what occurs when a nation embraces a false reality. He states as follows:

“...when factual truth breaks down -with a denial, say, of the outcome of a legitimate election – a rush of falsehoods may inundate an entire society. This is because a factual untruth requires continuous additional untruths to cover and sustain the original one. And the defense of continuous falsehoods relies on more than repetition; it requires intimidation and can readily lead to violence.”

“What results from this situation is 'malignant normality,' society's routinization of falsehood and destructive behavior. This shift can produce psychic numbing, the inability or disinclination to feel, which can reach the point of immobilization.”

Lifton's observation that “factual untruths require continuous additional untruths to cover and sustain the original one,” is useful in explaining the grip that Trump's lies have on vast sectors of the population.

But most phenomena, especially large ones, are multi-determined. The dynamics of what people construe as true are, in great measure, socially set in place and reinforced. What we hold as true is, to a great extent – but not totally – socially constructed. The “not totally” caveat is absolutely critical to the ability of people to set the ship aright and regain a commitment to valorizing truth and truth-telling.

Many beliefs a person holds as true are adopted because they are commonplace in the culture to which they belong and are reinforced by others. Since the 17th century, it has held as true that the earth revolves around the sun. In the Middle Ages, the majority of people believed the Earth was the center of the universe, and all celestial objects, including the sun, revolved around it. In pre-modern times, beliefs accepted as true were transmitted to the public at large via hegemonic authorities, primarily the Church's and by scripture, which itself was interpreted and transmitted by the Church. For those few who had access to philosophy, Aristotle was the leading authority who formatted Western thought.

This radically changed with the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and was followed by the Age of Enlightenment, which reached its high-water mark in the next century. For many complex political, sociological, and economic reasons, the relatively static intellectual world of medieval Europe broke down, and with its breakdown came a radical change in the acquisition of knowledge and assessment of truth.

The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment ushered in the epistemic framework on which the modern world is based. To abbreviate a very complex and intellectually rich phenomenon, this dramatic historical period saw an assault on the intellectual authority of the Church and its leadership. Having wrested free of ecclesiastical authority, liberated thinkers of the time were free to understand nature on its own terms rather than exclusively as a product of divine creation. With science came a deepening appreciation of objectivity, and a realization that nature operated according to its own laws, free of divine purpose and independent of human interests.

The second pillar of Enlightenment thought was the primacy of reason. The scientists of the age came to the revolutionary discovery that the employment of reason when applied to a process of observation and experiment could uncover the mysteries of nature. Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, and Huygens were among the luminaries of the age. But, the greatest scientist of the period was Isaac Newton, who was heralded as an unsurpassed genius in his own time. It was the famed British poet Alexander Pope who, in praise of Newton, wrote: "Nature and nature's laws lay hid in the night. God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!" Newton was recognized by many as “the divine mind.” The laws of nature Newton discovered were heralded as no less than the content of God's mind.

Reason was the major tool by which to uncover nature's mysteries. It lay at the pinnacle of the period's science and philosophy, and when applied to social relations, became the foundation of the liberal democratic government set in place by America's founders. Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson were all rationalists. Despite the politically fueled movement by contemporary evangelicals to retroject their religious doctrines onto the Founding Fathers, virtually all the founders were proponents of deism. Deism was a religious view that held that once God had created the universe, he left the scene to enable nature to unfold in accordance with its inherent laws. Contrary to reason, there was no place in the view of deists for miracles, divine intervention, or the self-validating pronouncements of churchmen, which they derided as superstitious.

In sum, it was high regard for reason and objectivity that stood as the basis for science and the modern world, and, more broadly, the framework within which truth operates. Consideration of science conventionally brings to mind a method characterized by the incessant testing of assertions through observation and/or experiment and revising or discarding those theories that fail the test.

An inherent corollary of the scientific method is its falibilism. What this means is that all empirical knowledge is tentative, incomplete, and subject to revision in the light of new evidence. Truths discovered by science change. But this reality does not by any means suggest that truth can merely be asserted as a matter of whim. On the contrary, science's changing truths require recognizing the conservative nature of knowledge. Its truths emerge from the evolution of prior assertions.

The scientific attitude extends far beyond the formal disciplines we associate with the technical work of learned professionals. In a broader sense, it extends to the way in which we assess what is true and believable as we go about our lives. The noted NYU physicist, Alan Sokal, noted the following:

“I stress that my use of the term 'science' is not limited to the natural sciences, but includes investigations aimed at acquiring accurate knowledge of factual matters relating to any aspect of the world by using rational empirical analogous to those employed in the natural sciences. Thus 'science'... is routinely practiced not only by physicists, chemists, and biologists, but also by historians, detectives, plumbers, and indeed all human beings in...our daily lives.”

The scientific paradigm, very broadly, applies to how we in the modern world assess what is worthy of our belief, what serves as the best indicator of knowledge, and what we believe to be true. This applies, as stated, not exclusively to science in the technical sense, but to how responsible people who concern themselves with the truth generally behave. If we value the truth, then at a basic minimum we need to consider facts, weigh evidence, and apply reason.

Donald Trump, applying the full weight of his authority, defies and destroys the epistemic environment in which truth is valued, discovered, and affirmed. As noted, the social environment had already been set to accept Trump's devastation of truth and honesty. Here we can look to the impoverishment of the schools and their failure to educate students in the means of critical thinking. But my view is that the causes that have weakened the scaffolding that supports truth are broader.

While much of what transpires in academia never reaches down to inform popular culture, at times ideas generated in the university do trickle down to influence trends on the ground. If modernity can be characterized by the centrality of objectivity and the discovering of truth, as well as recognizing the authority of reason in enabling the acquisition of truth, then postmodernism, which has informed multiple fields - including literary criticism, art, architecture, and philosophy - has worked to deconstruct these foundations on which modernity has been built.

Postmodernism, which can be understood as a mood more than an organized doctrine, holds to certain identifiable premises. At its heart lies an obsession with power, as well as a governing concern with the reality of power inequities and the impulse to overcome those inequities. In this sense, we may conclude that the intentions of postmodern thinkers are primarily benign and humane. Yet, it is my contention that this mode of thought is highly destructive, foments conflict without proffering modes of resolution, and is intellectually unsustainable. Postmodernism, I suspect, has been inspired by increased realization in the era of decolonization of the oppression and destruction wrought by the West on the developing world. With it has come an attack on the Enlightenment and its essential epistemic values - objective truth, or at a minimum a search for truth, and the place of objectivity in our apprehension of the larger world. As is often noted, for postmoderns, all knowledge is exclusively perspectival and our understanding of the world is comprised of subjectivity all the way down.

In my view, the consequences of postmodernism are nothing other than grim. If we erase objectivity, if there is no third point that adversaries can appeal to in order to resolve disputes, then we are left with nothing but power struggles.

With regard to the status of science, for postmoderns, it is merely comprised of the subjective viewpoints of the culture which proffers it, again, as an expression of the power interests of that culture. In this sense, science and its findings claim no greater credibility than the mythologies of premodern peoples.

But closer to the issue of the moment, the denial of objectivity, and with it the abandonment of the search for truth, leads to the conclusion that all viewpoints, all opinions, are as valid as all others. It is this mode of thinking that, I contend, plays into the disparagement of expertise, what would otherwise be considered warranted authority, and the denigration of science despite its extraordinary role in enabling human flourishing in countless arenas of life.

While there is ostensibly a huge gulf between Donald Trump's contempt for the truth and the deliverances of erudite scholars - and I greatly doubt that Trump has devoured the works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida - I contend that the influence of postmodernism, filyered through intermediate social phenomena, has softened a respect for truth in the culture generally, enabling Trump to emerge as an extreme purveyor of deliberate falsehoods.

The most pervasively influential of these is religion. The postmodern turn has enabled diverse factions on the ground to espouse their beliefs while foregoing any commitment to the restraints of evidence or the demands of truth. We may conclude that the mainline sects of Protestantism, non-Hasidic Judaism, and Roman Catholicism have generally appropriated Enlightenment values. Evangelical Protestants and other fundamentalist sects have not. Rooted in biblical literalism, they oppose the secular and theoretical underpinnings of modernity, including science and democratic governance.

The arguments of postmoderns, asserting that all truth claims are socially constructed, have enabled political extremists to appropriate the very same arguments in the service of pushing ahead their agendas. But postmodernism, to the extent that it has influenced the zeitgeist, has also widened the space of those promoting their religious extremist doctrines while decrying empirical evidence. While Evangelical Christianity has flourished on American soil since the early 19th century, it has become increasingly identified with its extreme right-wing political agenda. It has infiltrated the public schools and has increasingly moved into the public square. Christian nationalism, its most militant expression, seeks to transform our secular government into a Christian one imposing its fundamentalist beliefs on all Americans regardless of their personal beliefs.

Evangelical Christianity and kindred groups are fonts of irrationalism and anti-intellectualism. They are Trump's major supporters and he would not have been elected without them. He is a staunch ally in return and is bringing his right-wing Christian supporters under the roof of the White House. More broadly, their faith-based disregard for science and the wider epistemic worldview, which holds scientific principles at its center, has helped sustain the utter denial of truth, evidence, and intellectual consistency that has gripped the MAGA crowd and its leadership.

Needless to say, there are other sources that feed into Trump's inversion of truth. America, since its origins, has sustained a tradition of hucksters, swindlers, and con men, of which Trump is a consummate example. A good source for this tradition is writer Kurt Andersen's Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire. Andersen confirms that “Trump is really the apotheosis of a long history of delusion and fantasy in the US.”

If America is saved from the jaws of authoritarianism, there will be an extraordinary amount of political rebuilding to do over many years. This holds also for damage done to the truth.

I believe we have some inborn allies to assist in that effort. As a broad statement, we may conclude that human beings are truth-seeking animals, and there is good reason for this. It was William James, a major expositor of philosophical pragmatism, who concluded that we equate what is true with what works and brings satisfaction. Say to me “2 times 2 equals 5,” and you are speaking an untruth. It also doesn't work. You cannot build your bridges or engineer your smartphone on that presumption. But state “2 times 2 equals 4,” and you conveying an idea that we discover does work, maybe not in the first instance, but when applied over time. Its workability, and its utility, are what bring satisfaction. This is true psychologically, not exclusively with regard to objects and incumbent ideas that emerge outside ourselves. Purely logical concepts are what James referred to as “brain born.” They exist without reference to outside events or objects. In my example above, if I ask you to hold in mind the statement “2 plus 2 equals 5,” the result will be some degree of internal disquiet. The logical premise does not hold. But if I say to you “2 plus 2 equals 4” you may respond with a feeling of relief.

An important corollary to the pragmatic theory of truth is that the workability or verification of an idea needs to go beyond the individual alone. It is not merely personal or subjective. If it were, many lies might prove workable, and hence true, from the standpoint of the individual who is stating them. Rather, when we construe that an idea works, we mean that it coheres with the entire panoply of all funded ideas of which we are the beneficiaries. We can't make it up. When an idea so fits, when it coheres with the jigsaw puzzle of all inherited truths, we may conclude that it is true.

The success of the scientific paradigm is that its mistakes, given the requisite process, are self-correcting. And if we construe our everyday approach to ideas as an extension of the scientific method, generally construed, then we may be guardedly optimistic that the veil of mendacity that has been imposed upon us will begin to lift. In time, we may hope that Trump's lies and policies derived from them simply will not work. They will collapse and provide the opportunity for a politics that is truth-based to, refreshingly, replace them.

Such conjecture cannot be an alibi for passivity. Our democracy is deeply threatened and despotism looms. We need to fight back as never before. We need to demand that our representatives drop the decorum of decorous legislators and don the activism of militant street fighters. We need massive strikes among workers, consumers, and among those engaged with civil society. And we need protests in the streets. We cannot afford to tire.

As implied, maintaining clear thinking, grounding our opinions and politics in evidence, supporting the deliverance of science, and extolling truth and reason, given the bizarre and mind-bending times we are in, are also acts of resistance. This we can do, and need to do, everyday.