As seen on the shelves of a bookstore in New York, sales of the George Orwell's "1984" have soared since the news that the White House used "alternative facts" to bolster its claims on the inauguration audience. Richard B. Levine/Press Association.All rights reserved.In 2016, with the Brexit and Trump stories at an all-time high, post-truth politics was named word of the year by the Oxford Dictionary. The term was originally coined by columnist David Roberts in 2010. It highlighted the change in politics whereby rhetoric was increasingly becoming detached from policy ideas and focusing instead on emotion.
More recently, a presidential aid of Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, would use the term alternative facts (January 22, 2017) to defend the size of the inauguration crowd. The very notion of alternative facts was immediately (and rightly) linked to George Orwell’s book 1984, raising the book to most sold on Amazon. The bleak world described in Orwell’s famous book is not one to be taken lightly, but just how concerned should we be?
With this in mind, I turn to Hannah Arendt’s Truth and Politics, originally published in 1967, but still very relevant today. In her work, Arendt distinguishes between the non-political sphere, where a singular truth reigns, and the political sphere where truth is plural and factual. Factual truths are what arise when individuals come together in the public space (publicity) with their differences (plurality) and through a discourse come to a judgment. For example, global warming may be a truth in the scientific sphere but once it enters the political sphere, it becomes factual, open to debate and challenge. Factual truths are what arise when individuals come together in the public space (publicity) with their differences (plurality) and through a discourse come to a judgment.
