Excerpts:

Let it be said clearly. We have always, in politics, been adrift in an entirely post-truth environment. Read Plato’s Republic – the very first complete book about politics – to see how this is the oldest problem in politics. (Plato, too, like Matthew d’Ancona, Evan Davis and Sam Leith, wanted to defend truth from mere opinion: doxa in Greek.)

The reason this has become a problem in the last few centuries is because of the imperial expansion of politics. Since 1789 we have witnessed a vast politicisation of the world. And with that vast politicisation we have seen the usually admirable extension of the liberal antithesis of wisdom/folly into our daily politics. Toleration of others, justified opposition, and all that. But as the state has extended its activities beyond the usual ‘law and war’ of a hundred years ago, to health, education, and the entirety of what Germans call the ‘life-world’, creating secular religions of various sorts, and funding scholarship, so we have entered a new earth in which it is hard to tell the difference between the two things which Plato was extremely concerned to keep distinct.

The point is that before our modernity there was a world of truth/falsity outside or beyond the inner world of politics and wisdom/folly. In our modernity it is hard to tell the difference between them. For most of us there is only the monopolistic doxa of the mainstream institutions who are constitutionally incapable of recognising their own biases. Here we have the ideology of ‘settled science’ and ‘established consensus’: the world of the IPCC, the WHO, the Royal Society, Nature and Science, the Meteorological Office, the EU, the BBC, and other twisted-distorted-corrupt-established institutions. Including the Universities. This is a world in which politicians see no clear distinction between public service and private activity, pay for censorship by offering or withholding advertisement revenues, and behave conspiratorially in the service of mostly failing but sometimes successful corporate assaults on the mountainous possibility of monopolistic wealth.

~snip~

Let me be exact. The problem is that the political field – the field of wisdom/folly – has expanded. In expanding, like a red giant, it has encompassed other fields, including the great outer field of truth/falsity.

I do not expect politicians to tell the truth. I suppose I am Machiavellian about this. But I do expect politicians to leave the truth alone, and not to usurp truth/falsity for the sake of holding onto power and serving whatever interests they serve at any particular moment. I am not Machiavellian about that.

Now, this may be too fine a distinction: but I think anyone who 1. understands anything about politics and 2. shares my judgement of the politics since COVID-19, has to make such a distinction. If one is too Machiavellian, then one has no way of criticising the COVID-19 policy. And, indeed, alas, Ankersmit seems to have supported it. But if one is not Machiavellian at all, and perhaps too many people are not Machiavellian enough, then they tend to believe politicians, especially when flanked by scientists. The fact that Johnson’s words about COVID-19 are still ‘the narrative’ despite his own fate and reputation is a sign of how effective the entire trick was.

What we call ‘mainstream’ political culture is simply incapable of understanding the importance of a genuine, non-rhetorical, non-politicised insistence on truth, whether this truth is religious, as a sheer alternative, or, of course, scientific, in the sense of genuine, modest science: not the sculpted and politicised narrative of the Lancet, Nature, Science, the American Political Science Review and many others.

The ‘post-truth’ language is an attempt by the established wisdom/folly brigade to illegitimately use the language of ‘truth’ against any of us – including odd bods like Russell Brand – who are honestly trying to remember what ‘truth’ is so that we can resist the use of it against us.

Sixty years later, Free Speech has done a complete 180, and "progressives" rejoice...