A highlight of Matthew D’Ancona’s short book, Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back (2017), published by Edbury Press, is the telling anecdote. And D’Anconna has many to tell. In the book’s preface, the writer relates how he was saved from a potentially life-threatening perforated ulcer and abdominal sepsis sustained in September 2016. D’Ancona, a political columnist with The Guardian and former editor of The Spectator, writes: “I marvelled at the medical science that brought me back from the brink: because the brink is a place where ‘experts’ – so often reviled these days – are just what you need”. How true. Most people, I wager, would in similar circumstances prefer ‘expert’ medical assistance to ‘non-expert’ medical assistance, and would be able to quite readily differentiate the physician from the quack.

Despite this - the choice between expert and phony - seeming so plainly obvious, much of D’Ancona’s book is about the brazen rebuttal of the plainly obvious in what has become defined as a ‘post-truth’ era. The term ‘post-truth’ was selected by the Oxford English Dictionary as its 2016 word of the year. The venerable lexicon defines ‘post-truth’ as “circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. A limitation of this definition, as is the inadequacy of dictionaries generally, is that it is apparently benign. But, post-truth, and all the epistemological and applied chicanery it infers, isn’t benign. It is, rather, a threat to social life as we have come to know it.

At any rate, the view that post-truth implies a real and present danger to public life is the central thesis of D’Ancona’s book. And, having defined a problem, D’Ancona goes on to suggest what can and should be done to reinvigorate veracity as the unchallenged mainstay of social thought and action. InThinking has, in recent months, also responded to this zeitgeist of our age, and you can find a selection of our materials here, here, here, here, and here.

Teachers and their students may wish to do additional reading on post-truth as a way of extending their understanding, and to consider an appropriate response for teaching and learning in the classroom and beyond. D’Ancona’s book is a good start. Its brevity gives it the advantage of being a quick overview, but it also ipso facto limits its scope and development.

Lucidly written and (in June 2017) bang up to date, it is the first part of D’Ancona’s book that is the most engaging. Admittedly his brush is broad and brisk, with a canvas that stretches from predictable suspects like Donald Trump and the architects of Brexit, to Freud, Nietzsche, Kant, Barry Levinson’s film Wag the Dog, Elie Wiesel, Lyotard, Derrida, and their post-modern cronies, Nixon (Watergate), Reagan (the Iran-Contra scandal), Bill Clinton (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”), Jimmy Savile (a notorious sex offender), the digital revolution, online cantonisation, Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO), men (why always men?) with sandwich boards, something called ‘homophilous sorting’, climate change denial, and of course the Ancient Greeks.

Wow! And that’s roughly half of the book covered. In all of this, D’Ancona’s central idea remains clear: We live in an age where the emotional and visceral represents a significant challenge to truth, and ‘we’ (an amorphous conglomerate that D’Ancona never adequately defines) need to do some about it. This is not a time, the author argues, for cognitive or real-world resignation. Teachers of the International Baccalaureate Diploma (amongst others) may agree with D’Ancona. I do. The question is what, if anything, can ‘we’ do?

Here, sadly, the reader may be disappointed, particularly if, like me, the title of the book lulls you to believe that the epistemological panacea par excellence is about to be delivered. It never arrives. Not really.

D’Ancona, to be fair, has a go. He suggests (poor soul) that schools need to ‘do something’. His precise prescription is, unsurprisingly, evasive. He also suggests litigation; my eyes glossed over. Other ideas include online fact checking that is somehow machine-driven and algorithmic, and the general ridicule of those would argue unabashed that 2+2=5.

One can’t help but feel that Mr. D’Ancona may be clutching at straws. He would probably confirm that is, to an extent, the case, but that action of some kind is better than inaction.

He has one argument, however, that I find more compelling. D’Ancona claims – and he is right – that truth, reason, objectivity, and confidence are notions that have emerged historically and form a virtuous narrative. Now, suggests the writer, is a time to reclaim this narrative’s centrality to human cognition and being. It’s not a nod to postmodernism – not exactly – but it is a recognition that as a species, in the first blink, we often function emotively, and that the stories we tell are the fuel for our emotions.  

D’Ancona’s book, somewhat ironically, seems to harmonize with the ‘Twitter cycle’, where being first is preferable to being best. His book, as a primer on post-truth is not a bad one. Better books should follow.