From a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic comes an impassioned critique of the West’s retreat from reason.‘The Death of Truth is destined to become the defining treatise of our age’ David Grann‘The first great book of the Trump administration … essential reading’ Rolling StoneWe live in a time when the very idea of objective truth is mocked and discounted by the US President. Discredited conspiracy theories and ideologies have resurfaced, proven science is once more up for debate, and Russian propaganda floods our screens. The wisdom of the crowd has usurped research and expertise, and we are each left clinging to the beliefs that best confirm our biases.How did truth become an endangered species? This decline began decades ago, and in The Death of Truth, former New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani takes a penetrating look at the cultural forces that contributed to this gathering storm. In social media and literature, television, academia, and political campaigns, Kakutani identifies the trends – originating on both the right and the left – that have combined to elevate subjectivity over factuality, science, and common values. And she returns us to the words of the great critics of authoritarianism, writers like George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, whose work is newly and eerily relevant.With remarkable erudition and insight, Kakutani offers a provocative diagnosis of our current condition and presents a path forward for our truth-challenged times.
Оглавление
Michiko Kakutani. The Death of Truth
Copyright
Dedication
INTRODUCTION
1. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF REASON
2. THE NEW CULTURE WARS
3 “MOI” AND THE RISE OF SUBJECTIVITY
4. THE VANISHING OF REALITY
5. THE CO-OPTING OF LANGUAGE
6. FILTERS, SILOS, AND TRIBES
7. ATTENTION DEFICIT
8 “THE FIREHOSE OF FALSEHOOD” PROPAGANDA AND FAKE NEWS
9. THE SCHADENFREUDE OF THE TROLLS
EPILOGUE
NOTES. INTRODUCTION
1. THE DECLINE AND FALL OF REASON
2. THE NEW CULTURE WARS
3. “MOI” AND THE RISE OF SUBJECTIVITY
4. THE VANISHING OF REALITY
5. THE CO-OPTING OF LANGUAGE
6. FILTERS, SILOS, AND TRIBES
7. ATTENTION DEFICIT
8. “THE FIREHOSE OF FALSEHOOD”: PROPAGANDA AND FAKE NEWS
9. THE SCHADENFREUDE OF THE TROLLS
EPILOGUE
ADDITIONAL SOURCES
About the Author
About the Publisher
Отрывок из книги
For journalists everywhere working to report the news
TITLE PAGE
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THE DECLINING ROLE of rational discourse—and the diminished role of common sense and fact-based policy—hardly started with Donald J. Trump. Rather, he represents the culmination of trends diagnosed in prescient books by Al Gore, Farhad Manjoo, and Susan Jacoby, published nearly a decade before he took up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Among the causes of this decline, Jacoby (The Age of American Unreason) cited an “addiction to infotainment,” the continuing strength of religious fundamentalism, “the popular equation of intellectualism with a liberalism supposedly at odds with traditional American values,” and an education system that “does a poor job of teaching not only basic skills but the logic underlying those skills.”
As for Gore (The Assault on Reason), he underscored the ailing condition of America as a participatory democracy (low voter turnout, an ill-informed electorate, campaigns dominated by money, and media manipulation) and “the persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary.”
