The Nazis as Simulacra
On 'fact' versus 'truth'
On the weekend of March 11th, when all the brouhaha surrounding Gary Lineker’s ‘cancellation’ over his Twitter comments was at its peak, I found myself discussing the matter with an acquaintance at, of all places, a kids’ birthday party. Wishing to avoid having to express an opinion about the subject and thereby getting drawn into a fight (perhaps a duel with cocktail sticks or plastic forks), I offered the tepid observation that I would enjoy being able to watch Match of the Day without having to listen to the pundits. But my fellow dad simply didn’t want to let an opportunity to show he had the right opinions go to waste. ‘The thing is,’ he replied, ‘Lineker was speaking the truth in those tweets.’
Aside from what the comment revealed about contemporary middle class mores (i.e. it’s fine in any context to basically say whatever pops into your head, unfiltered, no matter how crass and ill-informed, as long as it’s expressing something negative about the Tory Party), I also found the turn of phrase fascinating. It wasn’t merely that this bloke thought Lineker had a point. Rather, it was that he thought Lineker was speaking the truth. This immediately called to mind Jean Baudrillard’s gnomic opening to his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation: ‘The simulacrum is true.’
‘Postmodern neo-Marxists’, as Jordan Peterson would call them, get a bad rap. This is unfortunate, because the French post-structuralists were remarkably, and depressingly, prescient. Their most well-known contributions essentially boil down to Nietzsche’s old adage that ‘there are no facts - only interpretations’. But it is worth digging into how they got to that conclusion and what inferences they drew from it.
First, to oversimplify, for the postmodernists, there is an underlying physical reality, but it is not directly accessible to human beings because we access that reality through language, and there is no inherent connection between the words we use and the real things which they purportedly refer to. This is often presented as being a profoundly objectionable and outré claim, but anybody who has ever mastered a foreign language - particularly one that is not related to their mother tongue - will instantly recognise it to be true. Famously, for example, in Japanese the word that is often translated into English as ‘blue’ (ao) is also the word that Japanese people use when describing the colour of the first shoots of spring, or of the ‘go’ signal on traffic lights, which English speakers would say is green. Japanese has a perfectly good word for other things which we call ‘green’ (midori). But freshly watered grass is described using the word that also describes the sky: ‘blue’. Is there, then, such a thing as ‘blueness’, or ‘greenness’? Is one language ‘right’ and the other ‘wrong’? Perhaps, but since we access the very concepts themselves through words we cannot know for sure: we might point to scientific definitions of colour, but, to repeat, those definitions are themselves reliant on language, and not the underlying reality itself.
We come to the world, then, not as objective perceivers of reality, but bearing predetermined and socially constructed interpretations. We all agree (like the Japanese) that 2+2=4, because that is something about which we have a near-universally accepted stable interpretation of the relevant concepts (of ‘twoness’, of arithmetic, and so on). We don’t all agree, for example, that trans women are women, because we don’t have such a universal interpretation. The plea to a scientific definition of womanhood does not win the debate, because it is itself contingent on a prior interpretive framework that also rests upon language. To (again) oversimplify - this time the work of Stanley Fish - there is a very big ‘interpretive community’ that accepts a shared set of concepts indicating that 2+2=4. But there are two smaller and competing ‘interpretive communities’ concerning the concepts indicating what a woman is.
Second, owing to the above, when we get into arguments about what is ‘real’, we aren’t really arguing about reality. We are instead arguing about realities which we have constructed. This is why any debate about anything that matters is almost never resolved by an appeal to ‘the facts’. We don’t debate whether 2+2=4, because we all live in the constructed reality in which that is accepted to be true. But we do debate whether, for example, trans women are women, or climate change is man-made, or white privilege exists, or the ‘pizzagate’ conspiracy is real, and so on and so forth, because when it comes to those issues different groups of people live in different constructed realities in which a particular interpretive framework is imposed. And we never resolve those debates through evidence - the two sides in any such argument come to that evidence with already-existing interpretive stances, and hence do not agree on its significance or truthfulness. The problem is not that we come with competing sets of facts that contradict each other. The problem is that we don’t accept the other side’s facts as true.
To return to Baudrillard’s insights, this problem is getting worse, because the sheer amount of information available to us floods our real experiences and replaces them with ‘hyperreal’ narratives (or what we might nowadays call ‘memes’) that arrive pre-packaged for easy download into our receptive brains. We no longer even bother to try to grapple with the question of what really happens. We instead consume simulacra, ersatz accounts of reality, which then pre-emptively arrange the ‘facts’ for us - as though we are literally living in simulations from which there is no possible escape.
Nowhere is this more in evidence than the prevalence of the ‘Nazi’ slur, which is now sprayed with gleeful abandon wherever anybody even vaguely right-of-centre dares to express an opinion that is out of step with elite left-liberal consensus. If you were to ask Gary Lineker exactly what it was about the government’s policy concerning ‘small boat’ migration in the English channel that was analagous to what the Nazis did, he would not be able to tell you. But that’s completely missing the point, which is that to Lineker, the simulacrum (whatever the Tories do is akin to Nazism) precedes fact. ‘Fact’ in that sense could not in fact matter less, and as Lineker himself repeatedly proved, no set of ‘facts’ could be adduced which would possibly cause him to abandon his simulated reality in which the Conservative Party are the baddies and he is the goodies. He has simply adopted a prior interpretive frame which causes any and all ‘facts’ presented to him to further his prior beliefs or be jettisoned.
This makes my acquaintance’s use of the word ‘truth’ particularly instructive. To go back to Baudrillard, remember that it was his insistence that ‘the simulacrum is true’. All this really means is that the fake or ‘hyperreal’ narratives that we create and think of as true are genuinely so in the sense that they always supersede the facts of what really transpire. There are many facts about the Nazis, but they are hidden by what is ‘true’ (perhaps I should write, ‘True’) - i.e. the simulation which has seduced the modern left, in which anyone in the world that they disagree with is evil and, since the Nazis were the epitome of evil, everyone they disagree with must be a Nazi. To them, this is what is true, and whatever ‘facts’ they percieve are simply arranged in conformity with it. It is no good to point out that this narrative is not ‘in fact’ true (pun intended), because it literally is true in the only way that matters - that is, inside the heads of those who have fallen for it. And since it is true in this sense, it trumps anything that might properly be called fact. The truth understood in this sense might be said even to hide (Baudrillard’s word) the facts. How the Nazis came to power and what they did with it becomes concealed by the fog of the wider ‘truth’ - as does what people on the right-of-centre actually believe and do, what the Conservative Party actually does when it is in power, what its policy is towards illegal migrants, and so on.
The prioritisation of simulacra and simulation to create ‘truths’ which triumph over fact are of course everywhere, and readers will quickly be able to think of their own examples (the Covid era was particularly ripe with illustrations). This phenomenon indeed seems to have been put on steroids since the creation of the internet. Earlier on, I called the postmodernists ‘prescient’, and I think indeed that their prescience is, in light of what I have said here, hard to deny. I also called them ‘depressing’, and dwelling on the quality of our public discourse in 2023 I suspect there will be very few readers who would disagree with that assessment either. We appear to have entered, not so much a hall of mirrors, as many different halls of mirrors, each of which are constructed to arrange our vision in different ways. How we will ever get out of these glittering prisons again is anyone’s guess. But it certainly won’t be through appeal to ‘the facts’. As the postmodernists showed us, facts are hidden by what is ‘true’.
We can't rely on the media to help us get to the truth and perhaps more importantly universities. It concerns me that school are also not teaching how to think but what to think. Climate change is an ideal topic where schools should be correcting poor science. The ice core temperature and carbon dioxide records going back about 450,000 years are a good example. Al Gore used them to convince people that they showed a correlation between the two and that carbon dioxide was driving the temperature changes. It is impossible to see correlation in such complex graphs. This is where school should have used this conclusion to demonstrate mathematical correlation analysis to establish the true connection between the two variables. Instead of pupils knowing the truth through maths they believe the nonsense of politicians.
Einstein discussed this in his book "The world as I see it". He said because of our expanding knowledge every scientist has a constantly narrowing sphere of knowledge, comparing the situation to the Tower of Babel. The point he was making was that it was becoming more difficult for scientists to see a bigger picture because of specialisation. But his use of the Tower of Babel seems even more relevant today because the truth has become difficult to establish.
Hi, I got here via way of the daily sceptic.
I am afraid your conclusion here is a policy of despair. To allow that facts are hidden by the truth, such that facts cannot be a way out is to fall for “their truth”, and so you will never find a way out.
Yes you cannot un-convert someone with just facts when they were never converted by just facts in the first place. People are converted by power, emotion and facts and all three in various combination might undo or change things, but if you are not in any particular power then you are going to have to go strong on emotion and facts. The fact that wokeism is the new pan western Catholicism is proof of its power, and to them a justification for their lazy shouts of blasphemy, inquisition and cancelling. This bastion is without a doubt intimidating and to some extent formidable – but it ultimately has no foundation, and will collapse and leave its followers un-affirmed and un-satisfied. It is facts, emotion and power which will undermine it.
You seem confused about objectivity. Colour can be defined scientifically and is dependant upon both the descriptive language of math and nature's correspondence to that description. The fact that nature is perceived through a language is not any impediment when it’s a true fact that the bloody apple does in fact keep falling on your head whether you are Newton or Einstein or whether you like it or not.
Subjectivity is an objective fact, but as a result objective facts cannot be subjective.
Subjectivity can only meet and interact within the approximation of an objective common ground.
I cannot empathize at all with your feelings if the words by which you describe them are not common and so an approximation to objective. Your language translation point over the Japanese word for wet grass (blue) is like the difference between base 10 and base 2 in maths. (I also suspect you have misunderstood a nuance of the language). Pointing out how different they are, and that one cannot have the words of the other and so will require different thinking, does not alter the fact that they are both equally good as a math language. To focus on the differences as evidence of institutional subjectivity is to just look in the wrong direction, or the same direction as to where you say “truths” are used to hide facts. Math is just not an interpretive community it is a language based on the brute facts and existence of numbers, which are there whether you access them in base 10 or base 2.
The problem is we are all believers (whether you think you believe in anything or not), and all beliefs have base core facts about them, which are incontrovertibly true. All other possible truths are brought to these as a plum line and accepted or rejected accordingly. To have a firm foundation beliefs must have these core facts fully grounded otherwise we are just talking in circles and in the end there is no moral reason for or against any kind of behaviour. (infinite regression is a problem both physically and morally, and in the end is a problem to be resolved by all - but the more pressing issue is finding a common ground where it can be discussed in the first place))
Wokeism has of course only just come of age, it is political correctness gone evangelical/inquisitional, and it of cause needs it base morality by which it can judge itself righteous or not, because above all men crave affirmation in some way. Its fundamental weaknesses are both that it has no ultimate grounding, but amazingly it has also given up the common and reciprocal ground of secularism, which was carved out with blood from previous religious denominational divides. But secularism has been misunderstood by the religious and irreligious alike; secularism is not freedom from belief, but instead the common ground which gives freedom to believe. This was one key point of that tree in God’s garden. Secularism is God’s idea.
The thing about Lineker’s statement was not really what he said, although there is an argument in relation to his BBC contract. In a secular space he should be allowed/free to say these things. The problem with what he said was the ridiculous and hypocritical responses it has elicited all around, proving that both the secular free and reciprocal space is as good as lost, but also that people’s main response is emotional outrage or blasphemy. Lineker’s statement could have been dissected and pulled to pieces in such a way as to make him much more careful before opening his mouth again, without thinking things through more clearly (although he won is tax case, so maybe he did). But instead the response was he can’t say that, that’s blasphemy and then in subsequent support for him you can’t say that its blasphemy straight back to you. The fact is that to declare blasphemy is in the end always an act of violence against the other, it is in the end a denial of our common humaity by which we can express our diversity. We can only live together by allowing a common objective secular space, which enables freedom, and the new religion of Wokeism has to grow up quick and realise this as well. The way out of the hall of mirrors is to muster emotion with facts about this common space, which is also our common humanity, but fudging the idea of objective is not going to help. The fact that Wokeism is taking us back to a new dark age of blasphemies is of course depressing, we thought were living off the achievements of so many ‘modern’ ladder climbs up near the end of the board and now Wokeism has taken us down the bloody big snake. But the game is not to revel in being near the end with a wonderful view – the game is always onwards and upwards with steady patience.
Mr Dee