Post-Truth

My book of the week is Post-Truth by Lee McIntyre. This is a slender volume from MIT’s Essential Knowledge Series that looks at one of the most disturbing trends of our time: the increasing dismissal of science, evidence, facts, and truth itself. The author gives us an intelligent account of why it’s happened and a compelling reminder that we should all fight back against this dangerous nihilistic idea.

This is a gem of a short treatise. Lee McIntyre’s Post-Truth is a perfect counter to a problem that has erupted in our national consciousness—alternative facts. McIntyre’s enumerated suggestions on how we must all be our own fact checkers in this post-truth age should be taped to the computer keyboard of every journalist, politician, and reader in America, before the next election.

McIntyre’s book is perhaps the most thoughtful of the post-truth set….[He] argues persuasively that our methods of ascertaining truth—not just the facts themselves—are under attack, and that this assault is especially dangerous.

What I like about this book, which is more of a philosophical tour, is that the author isn’t just concerned about the fate of particular facts or truths, but he thinks what is really under assault here is the very method by which we ascertain truth or get to truth, in particular, science.

Lee McIntyre is a Research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. He is the author of Dark Ages- The Case for a Science of Human Behavior and Post-Truth, both published by the MIT Press.

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