I walked by Billy Hearst’s old headquarters in L.A.’s stinking downtown, chatting up the bums and streetwalkers. Turned out I was married to one of the gals back in ’02, but neither of us remembered much about it.

Then, while dodging dog poop on Broadway, I ran into that rare species of homo sapiens: an editor. Felt sorry for her immediately. She’s doing a years-long sentence, without possibility of parole, editing the dull intellectual scribbler whose high-minded copy usually occupies this space. His drivel might as well be a balloon of lead. (And I ain’t talking about the hot kind of lead that Dirty Harry shot at, lucky punks.)

I asked her to go with me for a drink, right then and there. After one or three bebidas, we agreed to evict that bastard Joe from this space right away.

Now you’ve got me as your columnist. Go ahead and applaud.

You, the bored readers of the previous columnist’s twaddle, deserve something spicier, like a Szechuan-Yucatan burrito. You deserve a voice that speaks your language, that reminds you what you already know, and tells you what to hear—all the things most people want in a column these days.

You don’t need some pointy-headed Pasadena teetotaler telling you what he thinks you should know about, rather than what you want to know. You don’t want to be stuck with some columnist who pontificates about Polish literature, French philosophy, or—I thought he’d never stop—participatory democracy.

In these political times, you need a columnist whose allegiances are dependable. You could never tell whether my snot-nosed predecessor was a Democrat, a Republican, an independent, or a Ukrainian Green. Maybe he himself didn’t know. People also want a columnist who speaks not just for himself but for a gender, a race, an ethnicity, or a demographic. The previous columnist might be Scots-Irish or Okie or Creek Indian or Chinese or not even American at all—I never could really follow.

All his misdirection was exhausting.

And you can retweet that, porfas.

Unlike the other guy, I’m one of you. I didn’t go to Harvard or a snotty private school across the street from Caltech. I cut my teeth on the streets of Bakersfield. You won’t catch me reading anything but paperback mysteries—I’m a sportsman and a hustler, though since I got some bank and hang with pretty people, they call me a philanthropist.

I’m the sort of the character that, if reporter-types ever wanted to represent the voice of John Q. Public, they’d have to invent me.

I decided to reclaim these precious column inches after seeing a funny little flick called American Fiction. Caught it at a matinee at the Maya, which you really should check out next time you’re speeding up 99 through Kern County. Movie is about a lost-up-his-own-butt type, a professor-writer named Monk. He’s Black but otherwise, he reminds me of your former columnist—he writes books about aesthetics and ideas that no one would ever read.

Then he gets drunk and gets wise and writes a real-world book, about a Black man named Stagg R. Leigh who is running from the law. It’s fiction, but he passes it off as real. That’s the kind of thing editors say I can never do in a column.

He first calls the book My Pafology. But then he decides to change it to something simpler, F—k. That inspired me to rename this column. What the hell did “Connecting California” mean? First I thought to go with “Streets of Bakersfield,” as homage to Buck and Merle. But during an afternoon at my local cannabis lounge, I decided to call it “California S—t.” More fitting.

American Fiction got five more Oscar nominations than the old version of this column, which never won anything better than third place at the LA Press Club. Most of it takes place in Boston, but it goes back to L.A. when this Hollywood producer Wiley, played by that sweet Jewish kid from The O.C., decides to make F—k into his latest film (his last two were called Middle Passage and Plantation Annihilation). Wiley spent a month in jail on a drug charge, and it changed him.

“That experience grounded me,” he tells Monk, who he thinks is Stagg R. Leigh. “The people I met in there allowed me to see a whole new world of underrepresented stories from underrepresented storytellers.”

Monk has to keep pretending to be Stagg, the writer-fugitive, to make a $4 million deal with Wiley. Monk is an obvious fake—he orders white wine in a restaurant—but he gets away with it because Wiley is so easy to fool. Californians will believe anything, which maybe is how my predecessor held onto this column for 11 years.

Course, it’s hard to know whether you find more truth in fiction or the real world. The old columnist here would probably quote Twain now, because he loves that 19th-century crap no one reads anymore: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.” But as a sportsman of the people, I give you Stephen King, who said that “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

King’s words go double-double for California. The line between fiction and truth here is even thinner than our movie stars.

Speaking of actors, you might say the Golden State’s biggest industry is producing fictions. Silicon Valley makes the tech to export the fictions Hollywood creates.

A more cynical way to put all this is that California is full of, well, “s—t.” Which means Californians, living in this fiction factory, confront more flavors of BS than Burt Baskin and Irv Robbins ever managed at their Glendale ice cream parlor.

When you’re enveloped in fictions, it can be hard to see the truth. You’re left with a choice among fictions—the same choice that Wiley and Monk face in American Fiction, when they debate how to end their movie within a movie. Should they just fade to black, and let the audience decide? Or should they provide a romantic, crowd-pleasing pose?

Eventually, they land on an ending that both surprises and perfectly expresses why we should be forgiving, of authors and ourselves, when fiction is used to fool us. Because these days it’s just too hard to distinguish between the real writer, and the fake the real writer dreams up.

The post California Is Full of Sh–t appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Los Angeles is an unreliable narrator. The very cityscape is an illusion, albeit on the grand scale—streets and buildings, the human design of it, erected on a bed of sand and tar. If you want to know what it is about the place, you need only visit my favorite local site, the La Brea Tar Pits, where the kitsch of Fiberglas mammoths comes face to face (literally and figuratively) with the existential reality of the tar lake, which are the existential realities of Los Angeles itself. The tar, after all, is where the city emerged from, and it is the tar to which we will eventually return—a sinister coeval to the false cheer of the palm trees and the sun. As such, perhaps, the tar is the only reliable narrator, since everything that’s been constructed upon it will disappear. In the end, the truest thing about Los Angeles may be that we are all just making it up as we go along.

I wanted to play with signifiers of noir in my novel, Thirteen Question Method, which features its own unreliable narrator, a character hiding out from both his past and the larger present, in a bungalow court in Hollywood. Noir, I’ve long imagined, is an essential Southern California aesthetic, not only, or even mostly, because of all those glorious black and white movies of the 1940s and 1950s (Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, The Big Sleep, In a Lonely Place, Kiss Me Deadly), but rather because of what the late Mike Davis characterized in his touchstone work City of Quartz as “the master dialectic of sunshine /and noir.”

For Davis, sunshine/noir was a defining dichotomy, a conundrum that arose from the city’s status as aspirational—a place both to succeed and fail. That’s a cliché of Los Angeles, although that doesn’t mean it is untrue. If our sense of this place and its essence has densified and broadened since Davis introduced the idea in 1990—less a city of transplants than a complex mix of communities and cultures, many of which have been here for millennia—the essential relevance remains. What happens when you aspire to something and it doesn’t happen? What happens when you take the risk and it fails? That could mean moving to California to pursue a dream that turns into a nightmare, which is where the story of noir begins. “The real city,” the narrator of Thirteen Question Method observes, “unfolds in apartment complexes and bungalow complexes, in the sprawl of neighborhoods over crests and flatlands, in 4 million people trying to make it through the day.”

Part of what the Tar Pits conceal are the real stories of some of those people: I’m reminded of La Brea Woman, the first known homicide in what is now Los Angeles, who was beaten to death, her body discarded in the Tar Pits, until 9,000 years afterward, her fossilized remains were recovered and preserved.

Who was La Brea Woman? We’ll never know the answer; in that sense, she is another vivid emblem of the city’s unreliability. It is we who impose the burden of story on her. It is we who assert significance. “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?” Raymond Chandler writes near the end of The Big Sleep. “In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill.  You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.  Me, I was part of the nastiness now.”

Chandler is saying that it is easy to get lost here, that it is easy to be erased. This is what happens, after a fashion, in Thirteen Question Method, which is built around a narrator who wants nothing more than to get out from under his history, to live in a never-ending present tense. In that regard, he is a quintessential sort of Angeleno, rootless, disconnected, adrift in an ever-deepening state of dissolution—noir after the sunshine is eclipsed.

I wanted to tell this story because I am drawn to the unreliable. I have long found myself surrounded by unreliable narrators, both in Los Angeles and everywhere else. I began writing the novel in 2015, but I hit a wall and set the book aside for a number of years. The reason was simple: the necessities of narrative. As an essayist, I’m used to living the story before I write it. As a novelist, I don’t have that luxury. Luxury? Yes, the ability to know where it is going, although in the unreliable city, how much can we ever truly know?

When I returned to the book in the summer of 2020, I was as isolated as the central character; locked down in the early days of COVID, experiencing Los Angeles as a scrim, a stage set, something to be viewed in two dimensions through a window, except during the long walks I took every morning, before anyone else was out. I was beset by the lies of the Administration, the president’s insistence that the pandemic was some sort of ruse. “Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous—whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” he wondered at an April White House briefing. “… [S]upposing you brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way.”

Then, there was the insurrection of January 6.

Could there be a more unreliable narrator than the author of that fiction? There’s a reason my narrator, when he needs to leave the bungalow court, puts on a blue suit and a long red tie.

Also important was the matter of my own unreliability, all the things about the character, about this narrative, that I did not (want to) know. I was compelled by these ambiguities, much as I have long been when it comes to Los Angeles. My narrator had been married at one point, but where his spouse might be now was an open question. He had the money to support himself, but I couldn’t say how. As the novel progressed, he began to go mad, in the 19th century sense of the word. I found I didn’t want to assume too much—or perhaps the better word is: control. Instead, I wanted to observe, to discover what would happen; I wanted to see where he might go. Because he was living in a willful twilight, drinking too much and devoted to forgetting, it seemed useful for me not to possess too much foreknowledge, not to understand much more than the character did himself.

Such amnesia, let’s call it, has long been a hallmark of Los Angeles; it is a city that erases itself. “The most photographed and least remembered city in the world,” the urbanist Norman M. Klein has written, referring to the countless times it has appeared on television or in the movies, often “playing” somewhere else. That’s the case as well for those who, like the narrator of Thirteen Question Method, wash up here with nowhere else to go. Sunshine/noir, the mammoths and the tar lake—what we’re getting at, really, is artifice and authenticity.

This is less a divide than a sliding scale: a circularity. What is true about the city is equally untrue about the city. Something similar might be said of noir, which is the quintessential form of Los Angeles narrative because it reflects the city’s starkest polarities. What is authentic here is unreliability. What is authentic here is all we do not know as we live it day to day, moment to moment, caught between the darkness and the light.

The post Los Angeles Is an Unreliable Narrator appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The numbers—70,000 detained, 35,000 tortured, 3,200 killed—represent the victims of President Ferdinand E. Marcos Sr.’s era of martial law, from 1972 to 1986. They serve as a reminder of one of the darkest periods in the Philippines’ history.

That darkness is enveloping the nation and its diaspora once again. In May 2022, 38 years after his family was exiled from the Philippines in the People Power Revolution, Bongbong Marcos Jr. was elected to a six-year presidential term alongside vice president Sara Duterte, daughter of former president and authoritarian Rodrigo Duterte.

Marcos and Duterte supporters romanticize martial law as a “golden age,” but many Filipinos—including diasporic Filipino Americans like us—question or outright reject this distortion of history. This past year’s developments in the Philippines urge Filipinos and non-Filipinos alike to preserve and reinforce our historical memories of dictatorship. Indeed, the fight to preserve our historical memory goes hand in hand with the fight against fascism. Many Filipino activists reference the popular aphorism, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Only through a transnational movement of truth-based remembering and community organizing can we confront the present-day threat of the Marcos-Duterte administration.

When Marcos Sr. rose to power democratically in 1965, he posed as a populist—but made unpopular decisions. He supported the U.S. war in Vietnam, which allowed for the increased use of U.S. military bases in the Philippines; he devalued the peso relative to the U.S. dollar, increasing prices of basic goods and services for working Filipinos; and he violently put down student protesters who opposed his plans to run for a third term.

In 1972, under a questionable interpretation of the Philippine Constitution (ratified when the Philippines was still a U.S. colony), Marcos declared martial law to bypass the two-term presidential limit. Alongside the growing communist movement, opposition grew from multiple sectors of Philippine society exercising their right to political dissent: workers and peasants, youth and students, women, and Indigenous peoples.

Because martial law outlawed protests, activists organized underground to fight for social and political change. Their demands ranged from the restoration of civil liberties to winning a socialist revolution, but they all wanted to end the Marcos dictatorship, and they worked to end human rights abuses, such as political detention and torture, and to halt economic plunder, some of which came in the form of public works projects that violated Indigenous sovereignty.

Mass arrests, especially in the first years of martial law, caused many activists to flee the country and settle in major cities like Los Angeles. There they met like-minded Filipino Americans who were politicized by the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the labor activism of Filipino farm workers who migrated as U.S. colonial subjects in the 1920s and ’30s.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Filipinos in the U.S. and their allies formed organizations such as the Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino, National Committee for the Restoration of Civil Liberties in Philippines, Movement for a Free Philippines, and Friends of the Filipino People. They educated the broader U.S. public on the atrocities of the Marcos dictatorship, lobbied Congress to cut military assistance to Marcos, and raised funds to free political prisoners. Our activism grows out of this tradition.

U.S. presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan supported Marcos; as part of the Mutual Defense Treaty, Marcos helped the U.S. maintain its security interests in Southeast Asia, and in return, Marcos received military aid. But eventually he became too great a liability. In 1986 hundreds of thousands of Filipinos joined the People Power Revolution, flooding the streets of EDSA Boulevard in Manila to protest Marcos’ attempt to steal the election from Corazon Aquino. Outflanked, the Marcoses fled to Hawai‘i via a U.S. Air Force transport plane.  

Now, in a blatant act of historical revisionism, President Bongbong Marcos Jr. claims that the Philippines made economic and social progress under his father. But the data shows that Marcos Sr. left the Philippine economy in shambles. Over the years since, through subsequent presidents and large-scale land and agrarian reforms, widespread distrust in government combined with widening class divisions created the perfect conditions for the return of a fascist government via Rodrigo Duterte in 2016.

Duterte took pleasure in using violence to consolidate power. During his presidency, from 2016 to 2022, he urged civilians, law enforcement, and military alike to kill an estimated 30,000 Filipinos as part of a so-called Drug War, which he alarmingly likened to the Holocaust. Victims of the Drug War are still waiting for the Philippine government to cooperate with the International Criminal Court and hold Duterte accountable, while current president Marcos has promised to continue his predecessor’s campaign of terror.

Duterte also declared martial law for 60 days in Muslim-majority Mindanao, a historically resource-rich and war-torn region with the highest rates of poverty in the Philippines and a 400-year history of resisting colonial forces. Philippine presidents continue to receive support from foreign powers for these militaristic ventures. The U.S. gave the Philippines $600 million in military aid during Duterte’s presidency.

Activists at Unidad Park in Los Angeles’ Historic Filipinotown standing in front of the “Gintong Kasaysayan, Gintong Pamana (A Glorious History, A Golden Legacy)” mural by Eliseo Art Silva.

Faced with another era of fascist rule, activists with organizations such as Bayan USA and Malaya Movement USA channel the spirit of People Power. On September 20th (September 21st in the Philippines), we held a rally at L.A.’s Unidad Park in Historic Filipinotown to mark the 50th anniversary of the declaration of martial law—to remember the activists killed under Marcos and Duterte, to decry historical revisionism and Marcos Jr.’s visit to the United Nations that very day, and to encourage more people to join the movement. It is crucial at this time to remember accurately and to speak out against censorship and share fact-based news, since Marcos Jr., following his father’s example, has taken an aggressive stance against press freedom. And it is especially important for Filipinos and our allies in the U.S. to put pressure on the Biden administration to end support of the current Marcos administration through the Philippine Human Rights Act.

The fact that the Filipino masses, with support from progressive media and the U.S. Congress, could oust Marcos Sr. in 1986 suggests that we have the power today to prevent another period of dark and bloody history.

We have seen history repeat itself in a harrowing way with the return of the Marcoses to Malacañang, but we could see it repeat favorably with another mass movement of remembrance that can hold the Marcoses and Dutertes accountable for their crimes. In doing so, we can uplift the history of activism that brought an end to martial law and, drawing on that legacy of people power, build a genuinely democratic Philippines.

The post Using Memory to Fight Fascism in the Philippines appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Twitter’s answer has been to add fact-checks to misleading statements, a move that has led to a showdown with President Donald Trump. While this fight has been framed as an issue of free speech, ancient Greek philosophers, who worried deeply about what “fake news” meant for their own societies, would say it’s much more profound and more urgent than that.

As technologically advanced as the fight between Twitter and Trump now seems, this dilemma is not new at all. The world’s very first democracies—in ancient Greece—had their own difficult debates about truth, knowledge, and democracy. If the ancient philosophers were alive today they would say this is no mere scuffle over Tweets, but a moment that asks us to make a fundamental choice about whether we want to live in a society that values the truth. The Athenians’ approach to this question shows why allowing propaganda and disinformation to stand, unquestioned and untested, could unravel democracy itself.

Long before “Fake News,” the Greeks had a lively set of ideas about truth. The philosopher Socrates argued that absolute Truth (Sophia) is knowable and that we communicate best when we communicate only that Truth. His student, Plato, went further, saying that one can arrive at the Truth through the method of dialectic—which meant a process of questioning and testing. Taken together, Socrates and Plato proposed that wisdom isn’t based purely on possessing the “truth,” but—rather ironically—on being aware of one’s own ignorance of it.

While we remember Plato as a great philosopher of democratic Athens, in fact he wasn’t fond of democracy because he thought that not everyone could access Truth through dialectic. He also didn’t care for skilled oratory—rhetoric—for a related reason: he worried that people without knowledge of the Truth would use manipulation and “base rhetoric” to persuade audiences who couldn’t tell the difference.

For these reasons, Plato was especially skeptical of the teachers of rhetoric known as the Sophists, who included Greek rhetoricians like Gorgias—self-proclaimed “wise men” who charged fees to educate the aristocracy about morality and speechmaking. From Plato’s perspective, Sophists used clever rhetorical tricks that won them clients but did not advance the Truth. Plato thought that the Sophists were people who didn’t know the Truth themselves but who, nevertheless, made a living educating others, who also didn’t know.

Plato’s criticism had some truth in it, but, in a larger sense, he was being unfair.

Sophists, despite their weaknesses, proved to be necessary players in creating a functioning democracy. Why? Because most political decisions couldn’t be resolved with Plato’s dialectic. The Truth wasn’t already out there, or easy to find. So Sophists taught the skill necessary for the practice of democracy—how to reach consensus about the truth. They taught people how to create arguments, to persuade audiences to believe their side, and to solve thorny political problems.

In contrast to Plato’s quest for a philosophical Truth, the Sophists’ goal was Phronesis—practical truth. They taught how to make the stronger argument through debating competing narratives. And rather than seeking Socrates’ absolute knowable Truth, Sophists saw Truth as whatever a community of equals with diverse opinions convinced one another to believe was true.

Of course, viewed from the perspective of absolute Truth, Phronesis looked shady. When you hear people today use “sophistry” as a synonym for making a disingenuous or misleading argument, you’re hearing Plato talking to us through the ages.

So are modern-day propaganda and disinformation merely sophistry? Not quite. Our democracy actually embraces, and even values, modern sophists. By the standards of the ancient Greeks, today’s professors and lawyers—the two professions that we, the authors of this essay, represent—would be considered more like Sophists than like Philosophers. Professors offer their own interpretations of evidence in their scholarly disciplines. Lawyers employ their skills of logic and oratory to make the most compelling argument they can on behalf of their clients. (And like the Sophists, both make money for their efforts.)

To defend ourselves against any Plato super-fans out there, we must point out that lawyers and professors also place an equal emphasis on finding the truth. In university classrooms, students question their instructors and are encouraged to challenge them with their own arguments. (Law professors actually teach by the Socratic method!) In courtrooms, witnesses are cross-examined, and juries—who are chosen because they are a tabula rasa (a blank slate)—are expected to arrive at a “truth” which is understood to lie somewhere between the competing sides.

America embodies a version of democracy embraced by Aristotle, which combines the best of Plato and the Sophists. Aristotle explained that rhetoric (Phronesis) is the counterpart of dialectic (Sophia). Both methods of truth-seeking are necessary to solve political problems and arrive at the truth.

But the problem is that propaganda and disinformation lie outside of either of these models. When we encounter propaganda and disinformation, its origins—the sources that produced it and the method used to arrive at the result—are typically obscured. Propaganda and disinformation neither offer a skilled argument, nor do they invite rigorous testing. Propaganda and disinformation are persuasion without consent: In fact, by offering new versions of “facts,” their authors try to hide that they’re persuading us at all. These forms of communication provide a conclusion based on manipulation rather than reason. Propaganda and disinformation create a realm where disbelief is disloyalty, rather than a shared attempt to search for truth.

In short, the goal of propaganda isn’t persuasion, but rather compliance—it doesn’t employ either Sophia or Phronesis. That is why it is the favored form of communication for authoritarians. It simply demands that we believe, rejecting all other claims to the truth. It’s like asserting the existence of absolute truth, but without using the method of dialectic to reach it, and instead claiming some secret method of truth-finding. The charge that something is “fake news”—without evidence or justification—is itself the ultimate demand to, in the words of George Orwell’s 1984, “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.”

The implicit demand for obedience contained in deliberately false information is what is most destructive to democracy. When we share a commitment to finding the truth and agree about the method for discovering it, we are setting important democratic ground rules. Not only do these shared values and belief in the process help us arrive at collaborative solutions, but they also give us a bond that sustains our society when our governments reach decisions or make policies that we might disagree with.

So when Twitter tries to insert facts into Trump’s tweets, it is using a very old and democratic method that goes back to the ancient Greeks. It reminds us that we have a responsibility to ourselves and to our fellow citizens to search for, and debate, the truth. It encourages us to be loyal to our shared values and higher principles, not to a person or party.

But when decision-making is based on “choosing sides,” rather than on reasoned argument and discovering truth, these ground rules are eviscerated. Research shows that beliefs premised on loyalty—to, say, a person, or to a partisan affiliation—are especially impervious to facts that question or disprove them. Without a shared factual reality as a starting point, the Aristotelian ideal of debating ideas and achieving consensus on our common issues becomes impossible.

When propagandists, be they presidents or anyone else, reject any attempt to provide facts in the face of lies, they are rejecting the pillars of truth-finding upon which a democratic society is based: curiosity and debate. Accusations—rather than argument—and compliance—rather than persuasion—are incompatible with a democratic dialogue. The ancient Greeks rejected unquestioned propaganda and disinformation as well outside of democratic norms. So should we.

The post The Ancient Greeks’ Guide to Rejecting Propaganda and Disinformation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The three panelists—New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, Boston University philosopher Lee McIntyre, and RAND Corporation political scientist Jennifer Kavanagh—confronted the evening’s topic from perspectives ranging from the artistic to the scientific. Sandy Banks, former columnist for the Los Angeles Times, moderated the discussion before a full house at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Kavanagh, co-author of the book, Truth Decay: An Initial Exploration of the Diminishing Role of Facts and Analysis in American Life, explained that today’s concerns about fake news and diminished truth are not new. She pointed to three early periods that saw similar crises.

The rise of “yellow journalism” in the 1880s and 1890s, she said, led to sensationalism, exaggeration, and the bending of the facts “to sell more newspapers.” The birth of radio in the 1920s and 1930s elevated the opinions, agendas, and conspiracy theories of charismatic and powerful hosts over the facts. And the 1960s and 1970s saw the rise of powerful television news that brought the Vietnam War directly into American living rooms, “but also provided many more ways to manipulate and change information.”

What do these three periods have in common, Kavanagh asked? Her answer: These were all periods when, first, society mistrusted authoritative institutions and second, when technology changed the way we create and disseminate information. The current era has those same characteristics, but with new twists, in Kavanagh’s view: the “divergence between data and people’s opinions” and “a willingness [of people to] push aside data and objective, factual information” and cling to their “preexisting beliefs and anecdotes.” She cited the skepticism about vaccines and GMOs as examples of this.

McIntyre, the B.U. philosopher and author of the book Post-Truth, traces this skepticism back to the rise of postmodernists in the 20th century who questioned both scientific fact and scientists. McIntyre sees postmodernism as being defined by two principles—one, that there is “no such thing as objective truth,” and two, “that any claim to truth is nothing more than an assertion of will … [or] political dominance.”

And while McIntyre said he is “not claiming that Kellyanne Conway is reading Derrida,” the tools of postmodernism, he believes, were adapted by the right when they realized “if you could question facts about science, you could question facts about anything.” The size of Trump’s inauguration crowd or the reluctance to accept climate change, for example

But don’t skepticism and the questioning of authority make a society healthy? Certainly, said New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, there is value in a skeptical outlook. But, “at the same time, the automatic or routine doubting of anything that anybody with any claim to authority ever said can be very corrosive,” he said. Scott worries about “the decay of some kind of public sphere … or common ground of accepted principles … through which the discussion of truth can take place.”

Scott said he understands that there are different forms of facts and data. In his work, he “deals in art and aesthetics” and the “subjective rather than objective truth.” And so, in criticism, “the data you have is very often an experience or a feeling”—that is, subjective truths rather than facts.

“Art,” Scott said, “… can’t overcome cognitive bias. but it can offer a way into a reality or set of experiences that can enrich the quality of your own.”

But today, “art itself is subject to and a weapon” in our prevalent polarization. Indeed, politics has fueled skepticism about facts and truth in all sorts of fields of knowledge. “There’s an assumption that everything is political and that everything is operating according to a bias or an agenda or the exercise of some kind of power,” said Scott. He added that the experiences of picking up a book, seeing a movie, or looking at a painting actually need protection from such relentless politicization.

What is the motivation for manipulating facts and creating false narratives? For the panelists, one answer to that question was profit. McIntyre pointed out that virtually all news outlets profited from the 2016 elections. Another motivation is power. By collapsing our varying political identities into narrow partisan identities, parties find it easier to keep their camps cohesive and motivated, because each camp shares all the same beliefs. With so much agreement within parties, the issues that divide the parties have become more important.

While we might not be able to agree on everything, Kavanagh said, “we should be able to agree of facts.” After all, to have a public sphere where we can engage in civil discourse requires a starting point, with, “a common set of facts,” Kavanagh said. If that breaks down, you have a decay in public dialogue. So, when policy makers don’t agree on a common set of facts, they simply argue about the facts, rather than focus on creating policy.

Combating our “post-truth” era is even harder because social media allows opinions and personal anecdotes to be so easily shared and exchanged. And technology is likely to advance new ways for facts to be manipulated and falsehoods to be spread. McIntyre warned of “voice capture” and “face capture” technologies, which, “in real time can manipulate both speech and movement.”

“Are we just in for a long ride of this, or is this something we can combat?” Banks asked the panelists. Is it possible to create a society that can navigate the digital age and learn to discern fact from opinion? Education is one tool, and so can journalists who present information that makes clear what is fact and what is opinion.

During the question-and-answer session with the audience, one attendee pointed to the way that the concept of truth is deployed—as a means to advance agendas when needed—and wondered “if truth as a concept in our society is becoming … less relevant?”

In response, McIntyre said he found a danger in that idea and offered a quote from the German-born, American philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

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Philosophers can bring humanness out of the inhumane, as they can bring beauty out of ugliness and peace out of war. So philosophy is a powerful human tool for forgiveness, but it can also radically rethink the idea of forgiveness as the bearer of dignity. This is why philosophers are more than philosophers; they are individuals who can give meaning to the dignity of the human race. It was this flame of dignity and the power of philosophy to ignite it which led me to become a philosopher in the first place. However, philosophers have differed widely as to their answers to the question of forgiveness.

First, we have to establish what forgiveness means, in a political way. It is not an end to suffering. Suffering is part of life. As the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, “If the immediate and direct purpose of our life is not suffering then our existence is the most ill-adapted to its purpose in the world.” As such, each new generation, and every new human being, must pave anew the path of suffering.

The important question is how we deal with that suffering. One option, often taken in political situations, is to go for revenge against the person or people who have caused the suffering. But revenge doesn’t offer consolation. Only insofar as the heart can draw things into itself are they of any value. We are not only animals of reason, but also beings capable of compassion. It is only through forgiveness that we can derive consolation from the troubles of life.

Neither does forgiveness mean forgetting the wrongs that were done. Entering the process of forgiving does not necessarily mean that we hold back the bitter past. There are always memories of evil that we cannot forget. Many Holocaust survivors believe that forgiving the Nazis would fail the memory of past victims. But isn’t it true that forgiveness cannot forgive anything but the unforgivable? Otherwise it will lose its meaning.

What is important is how the action of forgiving works. Forgiving, as much as revenge, is one way of entering into a relationship with the Other. But while revenge is the negation of Otherness of the Other— because it disregards and discards the Other as a moral person—forgiveness, instead, tries to enter into a dialogue with that Other.

Forgiveness is both the condition for dialogue and is also realized through dialogue. Dialogue is not a phenomenon that occurs from nowhere and goes nowhere—engaging in it establishes a shared past and creates a future. Furthermore, dialogue requires both questioning oneself and caring for the Other. Thus, forgiveness is about moral repair and rebuilding decency, trust, and hope.

Unlike revenge, forgiveness is not an automatic response to injustice. It requires much more reflection and thought. All human beings can be reflective, in the sense that thinking about what one does is part of doing it. Maybe what perplexes individuals so much about the concept of forgiveness is that forgiveness is seen and felt as a newcomer in our lives. Yet forgiveness, by including both the self and the Other, gives humanity a common horizon, and a shared future.

It is the creation of a shared future that makes forgiveness important in a democracy. A truly moral conception of citizenship requires that one listen to the other with empathy and learn from the past. It is the action of learning to forgive that can reverse the meaninglessness and thoughtlessness of the de-civilizing process we are currently going through.

However, there are pitfalls. The language of exclusion can easily lend itself to the invention of a revengeful worldview. When justice is no longer about compassion, it is only a table of abstract regulations that people use or abuse without care for others. This kind of formal “justice” lacks empathetic listening to the other and voids the possibility of forgiveness. In fact, forgiveness is more than a simple event: It is a paradigm shift to a new outlook on human affairs. If we seek forgiveness, whatever form it may take, we must labor to find it rather than work for an insignificant world based on values such as greed, power and hatred.

This is a responsibility that our human civilization should accept without fear or apprehension. The ethos of shared responsibility finds its best expression in the process of taming violence through acts of forgiveness. The best example of this can be seen in the moral and political efforts of Nelson Mandela to establish national reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa. As Mandela said: “If you want to make peace with your enemy, you have to work with your enemy. Then he becomes your partner.”

This is where we should look for a political exercise of moderation and empathy and where a climate of cooperation and reconciliation could flourish.

Today, in a world suffused by feelings of insignificance and violence, indifference is no longer an option. To fail to recognize this is to betray our conscience. Indifference has cheapened our human life. Therefore, forgiveness is a quality that cannot be manufactured by businessmen and politicians. What’s more, it must have a level of sincerity—individuals have to see past their own arrogance and hostility to pursue decency and human dignity.

Its ongoing relevance makes forgiveness all the more compelling in current debates on violence, democracy, and culture. As Archbishop Desmond Tutu said in the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “It is ultimately in our own best interests that we become forgiving, repentant, reconciling and reconciled people, because without forgiveness, without reconciliation, we have no future.”

While some will follow Tutu’s advice, others will think that what he suggests is madness. If there is only one beautiful madness in the world which can free us from all forms of political and religious lunacy, it’s the act of forgiving the person while not forgetting the event.

This is when we enter the stage of history not from the back door, but by being fully present in the agora in order to predict the horrors and warn others. As Hannah Arendt says: “Men in plural can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.” As such, forgiveness, as a new beginning, is not when the past is forgotten or hidden in a corner of our mind, it is when our past sufferings are not repeated and we do not repeat each other’s.

We accomplish the politics of forgiveness when we are capable of organizing our societies around the idea of decency of humanity. There is no reason to think that this struggle is a lost cause.

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This is the kind of irritation I have been experiencing whenever I hear the word “post-truth.” And I’ve been hearing it a lot. It’s inescapable on social media feeds and in international news reports. It dominated an event my organization, Democracy International, recently co-hosted in Spain. At home in Cologne, Germany, I hear the word “postfaktisch” (the German version of “post-truth”) on talk shows and read it in the press, where commentators often say “postfaktisches Zeitalter”—“era of post-truth.” The German Association for Language named “postfaktisch” its word of the year for 2016, following the Oxford Dictionaries, which chose “post-truth” as its word of 2016 internationally.

The problem is that all this usage hasn’t made “post-truth” any more helpful, or accurate, in describing our current situation. So let me post the truth about post-truth: We don’t understand the phrase well and we don’t use it correctly, so its ubiquity is giving us the wrong idea about the problems our democracies face.

Or to put it more bluntly, the signature feature of the post-truth era is that we can’t even get post-truth right. Which is why we should ditch the term—as soon as possible.

Post-truth stands for a very broad claim that very large numbers of people no longer base their judgments on facts but on unsupported beliefs, bogus conspiracies, and their emotions. The trouble with such a claim is that “post-truth” is itself—forgive me—a post-truth.

It enhances a largely rhetorical and artificial societal divide between two camps—the supposed “establishment” and the supposed “populists”—who are purportedly battling for all kinds of power, including the power to decide what is true. And that’s bunk.

The “establishment” and “populists” in societies inevitably draw from social, financial and educational elites—like the billionaire, Ivy League-educated populist who just was elected president of the United States. This artificial divide in our “post-truth” world then is used to attack and discredit other democratic constitutions, which is why you hear yelling against the “liar’s press” and the “lamestream media.” And that in turns fragments dialogue, where democracy needs dialogues, especially in the digital public realm where most of us now have a voice.

To see “post-truth” do such damage is especially irritating when the term itself is phony. It assumes there had been some clear “truth,” shared and accepted, at some earlier point. Is there anything such as “truth”? From Aristotle to Immanuel Kant to Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophers have thought deeply about the question of “what is truth.” Generally speaking, “truth” is a statement about what is perceived as real. Truths, or facts, can be empirically verified, but the degree of verification varies. There is the hard-core truth that the earth revolves around the sun, proven by natural science. But many truths are more difficult to prove. For example, which medicine really helps to cure a disease? Or, exactly how high is unemployment and what are its causes?

The truth is that truth is always contested. Facts can always be challenged and interpreted differently. If shared by many in a society, truths turn into societal beliefs.

What may be different about this moment is that the battle for truth feels larger—given our globally connected world—and thus especially bitter. In my work supporting campaigns and activism in favor of greater democracy around the globe, I keep observing two camps that are fragmenting in Western societies. One camp involves those who previously had the power to make public statements about truth. They were “gatekeepers” or “guardians of truth.” Many politicians, journalists, scientists, and influential intellectuals belong to this camp; the traditional media (TV, radio, print) have been their instruments. For decades this camp was acknowledged and respected, though more and more, this camp is scolded as the “establishment.” And this is the camp that uses the word “post-truth.”

The other camp has evolved through the power of social media. Such media are democratic in that they give a voice to everyone, regardless of gender, origin, age, education, or status. We all can participate in making statements about how we perceive the world. This has brought about a pluralism of facts. There is no selection and little censorship. The so-called “populists” are one people among many offering their own truths through new media, claiming many wrong facts to be true. They find followers for fake news, distorted facts, hate speech, and conspiracy theories. Such people must be condemned and combatted.

But does this behavior justify calling the moment we’re in right now an “era of post-truth?”

Not at all. We are simply seeing the democratization of competing claims, and in the process that contest is becoming much broader (and, in ways, more dangerous). But while there is peril in this moment, there is also great promise. The social media channels that have divided us into camps allow us to communicate. But we need to build a smarter digital public realm and include everybody in the debate on what is true.

The debate is inevitable. The thing to worry about is not falsehoods—but isolated falsehoods, that can be repeated without conversation or contest. And it’s now clear that creating a true digital public realm starts with disempowering the private internet companies—Facebook, Google, Twitter, and their ilk—that have gained far too much power and influence.

Such companies should not have the power to define algorithms that allow us to filter contrary opinions or put us in a bubble. They do not have the right to narrow our views, and to fragment us into camps.

The channels of digital communication belong in the public realm. But who should manage such a realm, which crosses all sorts of national borders?

Why not the United Nations?

The U.N. is hardly the perfect solution, but in our globalized world, it’s the institution best equipped to define rules and to create structures in the public sphere. That’s a digital analog of its mission in the physical world. And I see the U.N. as taking a firm hand, actually maintaining and administering the public servers. The private data of the world’s people should no longer be on private servers; they also shouldn’t belong to states. The best solutions are international, inter-governmental structures like the U.N.

In this new digital realm, social media platforms should exist, and people of all camps would exchange their statements on how they perceive the world. Journalists should play the role of facilitators of dialogue, making sure that every person is taken seriously and has a say. Journalists would also examine and question the claims of truth made by different camps.

Today, the internet has its “darknets,” the term for overlay networks that can only be accessed with certain authorizations or via gated ports. What we need is a “brightnet”: This is the term I’ve come up with, inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment, to describe social platforms that enable us to critically question our assumptions, to respectfully talk with others, and to commonly decide on what is true.

After all, there is no “post” in this new digital age we need to build. It is profoundly an age of truth. And the avant garde will be those who commit their intelligence and energy to this new, inclusive project of giving people around the world more ways to debate and discover what is true.

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As a cognitive psychologist, I study the ways that memory and belief go awry: How do we come to believe that things are true when they are not? How can we remember things that never actually happened? I am especially intrigued by the concept of truthiness—how smart, sophisticated people use unrelated information to decide whether something is true or not.

For instance, in a classic study by Norbert Schwarz and Rolf Reber at the University of Michigan, people were more likely to think a statement was true when it was written in high color contrast (blue words on white) as opposed to low contrast (yellow words on white). Of course, the color contrast has nothing to do with whether the claim is true, but it nonetheless biased people’s responses. The high color contrast produced a feeling of truthiness in part because those statements felt easier to read than the low color contrast statements. And it turns out that this feeling of easy processing (or low cognitive effort) brings with it a feeling of familiarity. When things feel easy to process, they feel trustworthy—we like them and think they are true.

In my research at UC Irvine, I have collaborated with psychologists in New Zealand and Canada to discover the ways we can be tricked into thinking something feels familiar, trustworthy, and true. In our studies we have focused on how photos and names can have surprisingly powerful effects on our memories, beliefs, and evaluations of others.

Photographs can boost comprehension and make it easier for us to learn and remember new information. But cognitive psychology research shows that photos can also have an insidious influence—they can lead us to believe and remember things are true when they are not. In a study by Elizabeth Loftus and others at UC Irvine, people who saw a doctored photo of President Barack Obama shaking hands with the former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad actually remembered the event happening—even though it was completely false. Photos can even trick us into remembering false events from our own childhood. People who saw a doctored childhood photo came to remember a false event (riding in a hot air balloon) with the same detail and emotion that you would expect from a real memory.

Photos are a record of real events, so it’s not surprising that we often view them as the best evidence that something actually happened. What is more surprising is our recent work showing that photos can alter our beliefs even when they do not provide any evidence for the claim at hand. In a study we conducted in New Zealand at Victoria University of Wellington, we found that when people read a statement (such as “Macadamia nuts are in the same evolutionary family as peaches”) alongside a decorative photo that simply related to the claim (a bowl of macadamia nuts), they were more likely to believe that the claim was true. That is, these decorative photos produced truthiness—photos that were related to but did not depict the claim encouraged people to believe the claims were credible. Moreover, this truthiness effect persisted over days, not minutes, and could have long-lasting effects on people’s beliefs.

But visual cues are not the only source of non-diagnostic evidence that people use to evaluate claims. People can be influenced by even more subtle features of information, like the linguistic attributes of a word.

We know that pronunciation can influence our judgments about products, stocks, and activities. Put simply, people prefer things that are easy to pronounce. We think that Magnalroxate is a safer food additive than Hnegripitrom. We think that the roller coaster called Ohanzee is less risky than the one called Tsiischili. And in the stock market, easy to pronounce ticker codes (like KAR) perform better than their difficult-to-pronounce counterparts (RDO)—even after just one day of trading.

It is one thing for pronunciation to influence perceptions of products, amusement park rides, and stocks. Surely we wouldn’t let such an irrelevant cue influence our ideas about another person?

But it turns out that we do. People who have easier-to-pronounce names are thought to be safer, less risky, and more familiar. We give them more votes than their counterparts with difficult-to-pronounce names. We even use the pronunciation of a person’s name as a source of information to evaluate the credibility of his or her claims. In our most recent study, we asked people to evaluate the truth of a series of statements—half were attributed to someone with an easy-to-pronounce name, and half were attributed to someone with a difficult-to-pronounce name. We found that when the claims were paired with easy-to-pronounce names, people were more likely to think they were true. People believed the claim “Turtles are deaf” more when it was attributed to “Andrian Babeshko” than when it was attributed to “Czeslaw Ratynska.” The easy names produced truthiness.

Of course, the pronunciation of a name or a loosely related photograph should have no influence on people’s judgment of truth. So why do they influence our judgments? Like the high-color contrast statements, claims with an easy name or those accompanied by a photo feel easier to process. The easy names require less cognitive effort; a photo helps people to visualize and understand a claim more rapidly. This feeling of easy processing is often taken as a sign that information is familiar, credible, and true. To the Fred Flintstone parts of our brains, that feeling of familiarity signals something that we can trust, while information that’s difficult to process signals danger.

This feeling of familiarity could influence us in a variety of contexts. In the courtroom, an easy name might make a witness or expert seem more credible. In the workforce, an easy name might help an individual’s resume float to the top of a stack. And in the news, a photo—even one that is only loosely related—might make a story seem more credible.

So how can we avoid being taken in by a false sense of truthiness? Cognitive psychology research has shown that people are often unaware of their biases or how information influences their judgments. But simply being warned about the influence of names and photos might just make us a little more cautious—leading us to look for truth that comes from books, and not the gut.

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