The Death of Truth Book Review La Times
For decades until her retirement last year Michiko Kakutani reviewed the large books of the civilisation every bit chief literary critic of The New York Times. In The Decease of Truth she brings her close reading of these and other works, also every bit recent history, to carry on "a earth in which fake news and lies are pumped out in industrial volume by Russian troll factories, emitted in an endless stream from the oral cavity and Twitter feed of the president of the United states," nativism and xenophobia are on the march and social media is cleaving us into hermetically-sealed factions.
The result is a riveting exegesis of the collapse in our fourth dimension of consensual reality merely also, perhaps, an artefact of the polarisation information technology describes.
The lord of the dance is Donald Trump who opened a beachhead for his presidential bid with scurrilous crypto-racist musings on "birtherism" – wondering aloud, purely innocently, of course, about the birthplace of his predecessor in the White House.
Kakutani situates Trump squarely within Us tradition. This comes in two strains – exemplary and cautionary: America, the moral prefect and monument to our better selves, simply besides America, the seat, in Philip Roth'due south formulation, of "the indigenous American berserk".
He'southward also the effluvium of America's shrill, partisan politics. The Republican party has long peddled inverted snobbery and trashed expertise. Soapbox punditry on cable news and the attendant emergence of "infotainment" has further fanned polarisation. And the cynical determinism of Bush administration officials commissioning "forward-leaning" intel to foment war in Iraq anticipates a president, who, as ex-advisor Steve Bannon puts it, reads strictly "to reinforce".
Weaponise
The operative word of our age is "weaponise", Kakutani writes. Abetting Trump in distilling garden-multifariousness Republican populism into toxic sloganeering such every bit "Build That Wall!" has been social media, which selects incendiary content over measured, cogitating takes. Then there's post-modernism, conceived in part to admit neglected voices to the soapbox simply, in the hands of Trump and his apologists, a toolset for dissembling and prevarication.
The air is thick with overblown comparisons to the 1930s
These forces take allowed demagogues to conjure an alternative, simpler reality resonant to those feeling threatened past immigration, off-shoring of industrial jobs and the prospect, through automation, of further redundancies.
The air is thick with overblown comparisons to the 1930s, and Trump'southward demotic populism or the Botox-plumped kleptocrat Russian president, Putin, seem far-removed from the sweat-lathered spittle-flecked harangues of Hitler or jut-jawed preening of Mussolini. Just the analogy Kakutani draws is shrewd, invoking Jorge Luis Borges' fable about a cabal of intellectuals who concoct a fictive planet, Tlön, objects from which brainstorm materialising. Gradually, the populace becomes indoctrinated in "a fictitious past".
"Borges drew directly parallels between the power of fictions almost Tlön to insinuate themselves into human consciousness and the power of deadly political ideologies based on lies to infect entire nations," Kakutani writes, "both, he suggested, provide internally consistent narratives that entreatment to people hungering to make sense of the earth."
The Death of Truth pulses with progressive conviction. Merely I wonder if this doesn't lead to a blind spot.
Kakutani closes with rousing calls for "resistance" and rallying around democratic institutions equally bulwarks against untruth and tyranny.
But, in America at least, the best, least abstract, most immediate, antidote is to vote the bum out of part at the adjacent opportunity. This entails changing the minds of those liable to vote for him again.
There's piffling in the spirit of outreach in The Death of Truth.
Kakutani is correct about the rightward shift of the Republicans. But America'south left has non been unaltered past this; it would exist remarkable if it had. Where the right has become befuddled; the left tin can exist self-absorbed and prone to piety.
The Death of Truth traffics judiciously in the allegorical writings of George Orwell. But, consider a review Orwell wrote in March 1940, almost Nazism's apogee, of Mein Kampf. Information technology's a squib, simply Orwell was known, in the words of Edmund Wilson, to "load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings". His dour ascertainment almost the appeal of strongmen – and the corresponding urgency of reaching those who might be susceptible – remains germane:
"[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Most all western thought since the terminal war, certainly all 'progressive' idea, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire null beyond ease, security and avoidance of hurting. In such a view of life there is no room, for example, for patriotism and the armed services virtues . . . Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with infrequent strength, knows that human being beings don't only want condolement, safety, curt working-hours, hygiene, nascency-control and, in general, common sense; they likewise, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. Withal, they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life."
Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-death-of-truth-review-riveting-righteous-and-relevant-1.3580869
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