Toward a Post Post-Truth World?

How do we know what we know? Why do we believe what we believe?

According to Rudolf Steiner, the bee hive was a gift from advanced super-sensible beings living on the planet Venus, indicating the future evolution of humanity’s cognitive capacities, based on the clear separation between our faculties of thinking, willing, and feeling.

Recently, I have been entertaining the idea that Ken Wilber proposes in Trump and a Post-Truth World and other books, that there is a stage of development ahead of us, the integral stage, that will end the divisiveness we see everywhere around us. Wilber argues that the postmodern (or green level) trope of there being no universal truth was shattered by Trump’s 2016 victory. Even postmodernists now realize we cannot survive for long in a post-truth, fake news world. This shattering was, in some sense, good and even necessary, Wilber believes, because it drives us toward the next evolutionary stage. 

Wilber argues we need “a developmental-based discriminating wisdom, in order for evolution to again start moving forward in a truly self-organizing and self-transcending way… Little by little, in other words, an Integral awareness is helping to embody an evolutionary self-correction in its very actions.” This integral stage, for Wilber, transcends and includes earlier stages of consciousness development, and by doing this, it will heal the divide. 

As part of this movement toward the “Holy Grail” of Integral consciousness, I deemed it necessary to define a path back toward coherence — toward a commonsense of shared truth, collective agreements. I found, in Charles Eisenstein’s recent work, a falling into the “aperspectival madness” that Wilber rightly rejects. 

I applied ideas from Daniel Levitin’s book, Weaponized Lies, where he offers a model for critical thinking that, he believes, can help us work our way back to a shared understanding, a post-post-truth world. We can learn to evaluate the likely accuracy of any source of news, evidence, or information, and denounce lies and fabrications. However, Levitin’s approach prioritizes institutional knowledge such as peer-reviewed science and mainstream media outlets. On the other hand, whatever their deficits, these sources at least undertake rigorous fact checking and source-verification, although they do, also, have pronounced ideological biases and make many mistakes, including intentional ones.

I now admit (to be honest I already knew this, but forgot it temporarily, seeking a shortcut to rediscovering shared truth) that Levitin’s presentation is not philosophically grounded enough, although I sympathize with what he seeks to accomplish. Let’s give it another try. This may not be my last attempt.

Today — challenged by the fiery comments I received on my last essays — I am reflecting that perhaps defining a path to collective coherence may not be possible. What if, despite Wilber’s certainty, there is no new developmental stage up ahead of us that transcends and includes the previous ones and, in some sense, reestablishes a shared framework through which we can understand and establish what is true, not just for us individually but for the collective? Perhaps these developmental stage concepts are, themselves, embedded in outmoded (liberal, progressive) framings of the world? 

I understand that many indigenous people use far more phenomenological precision when they make statements about “reality.” Often this more advanced phenomenology is embedded in the semantic structures of their language. A fascinating book on this topic is Benjamin Whorf’s Language, Thought, and Reality, which mainly looks at the Hopi language. In particular, I recommend his essay, “An American Indian Model of the Universe.” 

According to Whorf, the Hopi language does not contain the concepts of “space” and “time” as we understand them (although later scholars have challenged Whorf’s thesis). Instead, they divide the world between the unmanifest or subjective and the manifest or objective. The manifest and objective is what has already occurred and is immediately tangible. The unmanifest and subject encompasses what is possible or what is potential. Whorf writes: 

As the objective realm displaying its characteristic attribute of extension stretches away from the observer toward that unfathomable remoteness which is both far away in space and long past in time, there comes a point where extension in detail ceases to be knowable and is lost in the vast distance, and where the subjective, creeping behind the scenes as it were, merges into the objective, so that at this inconceivable distance from the observer — from all observers — there is an all-encircling end and beginning of things where it might be said that existence, itself, swallows up the objective and the subjective. The borderland of this realm is as much subjective as objective. It is the abysm of antiquity, the time and place told about in the myths, which is known only subjectively or mentally — the Hopi realize and even express in their grammar that the things told in myths or stories do not have the same kind of reality or validity as things of the present day, the things of practical concern. … The dim past of myths is that corresponding distance on earth (rather than in the heavens) which is reached subjectively as  it is placed BELOW the present surface of the earth, though this does not mean that the nadir-land of the origin myths is a hole or cavern as we should understand it. It is Palcitkwapi 'At the Red Mountains,’ a land like our present earth, but to which our earth bears the relation of a distant sky — and similarly the sky of our earth is penetrated by the heroes of tales, who find another earth-like realm above it. 

Isn’t it the case that what we know at any instant — compared to what we infer, remember, or believe — is very minimal? As I write this, I am driving through the countryside in Costa Rica. Do I know that New York City or London actually exist? They exist, at the moment, only in my memory and the memories of the people directly around me, sitting in this car. They are inferences. If this was a dream, the memory of these cities would just be part of the illusory background of the dream, dissolving immediately upon waking.