{"id":6957,"date":"2014-01-30T10:33:53","date_gmt":"2014-01-30T18:33:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=6957"},"modified":"2014-01-30T10:33:53","modified_gmt":"2014-01-30T18:33:53","slug":"the-poison-of-postmodern-lying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-poison-of-postmodern-lying\/","title":{"rendered":"The Poison of Postmodern Lying"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Victor David Hanson \/\/\u00a0Tribune Content Agency<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Fabio
Fabio Premoli via Flickr<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

All presidents at one time have fudged on the truth. Most politicians pad their resumes and airbrush away their sins. But what is new about political lying is the present notion that lies are not necessarily lies anymore — a reflection of the relativism that infects our entire culture.<\/p>\n

Postmodernism (the cultural fad “after modernism”) went well beyond questioning norms and rules. It attacked the very idea of having any rules at all. Postmodernist relativists claimed that things like “truth” were mere fictions to preserve elite privilege. Unfortunately, bad ideas like that have a habit of poisoning an entire society — and now they have.<\/p>\n

Texas\u00a0gubernatorial candidate\u00a0Wendy Davis\u00a0was recently caught fabricating her own autobiography. She exaggerated her earlier ordeals, lied about the age at which she divorced and was untruthful about how she paid for her\u00a0Harvard Law School\u00a0education.<\/p>\n

When caught, Davis did not apologize for lying. Instead, she lamely offered that, “My language should be tighter.” Apparently, only old fogies still believe in truth and falsehood — period. In contrast, Davis knows that promoting a progressive feminist agenda is “truth,” and she only needs to be “tighter” about her fabrications to neutralize her reactionary critics.<\/p>\n

Massachusetts\u00a0Sen.\u00a0Elizabeth Warren\u00a0for years falsely claimed that she was a Native American. That fabricated ancestry proved useful in upping her career trajectory. When pressed about her racial background during her 2012 campaign, the Harvard law professor denied any deliberate misrepresentation and went on to be elected. Such progressive crusaders assume that they serve the greater truth of social change.<\/p>\n

In the gospel of postmodern relativism, what did it matter if the president of\u00a0the United States\u00a0promised that Obamacare would not alter existing health-care plans when it was clear that it would? Instead, the good intentions of universal health care are the only truth that matters.<\/p>\n

For that matter, the “law” that requires a president to enforce legislation passed by the\u00a0Congress\u00a0is likewise a construct. If ignoring bothersome laws — whether the individual mandate and timetable of Obamacare, or federal immigration law — serves a greater social justice, then such dereliction also becomes “truth.” Blindly enforcing legalistic details of the law that are deemed no longer in the interest of the people would be the real lie, or so the reasoning goes.<\/p>\n

Without notions of objective truth, there can never be lies, just competing narratives and discourses. Stories that supposedly serve the noble majority are true; those that supposedly don’t become lies — the facts are irrelevant. When Sen.\u00a0Hillary Clinton\u00a0in 2007 heard the factual details of the successful\u00a0Iraqsurge as related by Gen.\u00a0David Petraeus, she said it required a “suspension of disbelief.” In her postmodern sensibility, fighting an unpopular war was a lie, but opposing it was the truth — and the actual metrics for whether the surge was working or not were simply an irrelevant narrative.<\/p>\n

Later, as secretary of state, Clinton dismissed the circumstances surrounding the murders in Benghazi with the callous exclamation, “What difference does it make?” She had a postmodern point. If President Obama, then-United Nations Ambassador\u00a0Susan Rice\u00a0and Clinton herself all wrongly and deliberately assured the nation that a politically incorrect video had triggered the attacks in Benghazi, were they not on the right side of opposing religious bias and helping a progressive president to be re-elected? How could that good intention be a lie?<\/p>\n

If Director of National Intelligence\u00a0James Clapper\u00a0lied under oath to theCongress\u00a0that the\u00a0National Security Agency\u00a0does not snoop on American citizens, how can that be perjury if Clapper’s goal was to silence Obama’s right-wing critics? For that matter, if Clapper wanted to show tolerance for Islamists, how could it be a lie when he testified earlier that the radical Muslim Brotherhood was “largely secular”?<\/p>\n

By what arbitrary rules can one claim that “Piss Christ” or other provocative anti-Christian art is blasphemous or inferior, if its apparent purpose is to lessen the influence of a purportedly pernicious religion? Was Obama’s autobiography truth or fiction, or something in between — as hinted by the president himself when he was caught in untruths and then backed away from some of his stories, claiming they were now just “composites”?<\/p>\n

Part of old America still abides by absolute truth and falsity. A door is either hung plumb or not. The calibrations of the Atlas rocket either are accurate and it takes off, or inaccurate and it blows up. Noble intentions cannot make prime numbers like 5 or 7 divisible.<\/p>\n

But outside of math and science, whose natural truth man so far cannot impugn, almost everything else in America has become “it depends.” Admissions, hiring, evaluations, autobiographies, and the statements of politicians and government officials, all become truthful if they serve the correct cause — and damn any reactionary discrepancies.<\/p>\n

To paraphrase George Orwell, everything is relative, but some things are more relative than others.<\/p>\n

C) 2014 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor David Hanson \/\/\u00a0Tribune Content Agency\u00a0 All presidents at one time have fudged on the truth. Most politicians pad their resumes and airbrush away their sins. But what is new about political lying is the present notion that lies are not necessarily lies anymore — a reflection of the relativism that infects our entire […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[146,11],"tags":[1045,360,1053,1043,1021,494,398],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1Od","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":9776,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/fake-news-postmodernism-by-another-name\/","url_meta":{"origin":6957,"position":0},"title":"Fake News: Postmodernism By Another Name","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 26, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/Defining Ideas After the election, Democrats could not explain the inexplicable defeat of Hillary Clinton, who would be, they thought, the shoo-in winner in November. Over the next three months until Inauguration Day, progressives floated a variety of explanations for the Trump win\u2014none of them, though, mentioned\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Putin"","block_context":{"text":"Putin","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/putin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8073,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/lying-for-the-cause\/","url_meta":{"origin":6957,"position":1},"title":"Lying for the Cause","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 9, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"If myths do more for social progress than facts \u2014 then why worry? by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Well aside from \u201cIf you like your doctor you can keep your doctor,\u201d or blanket amnesty that is and is not lawful for a president to grant, there is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Identity Politics"","block_context":{"text":"Identity Politics","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/identity-politics\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"(Joe Raedle\/Getty Images)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/12\/pic_giant_120914_SM_Michae-Brown-Dont-Shoot-G-500x291.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7964,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/7964\/","url_meta":{"origin":6957,"position":2},"title":"Our Make-It-Up World","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 30, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Facts now pale in comparison with the higher truths of progressivism. by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Online Do bothersome facts matter anymore? Not really. This is an age when Americans were assured that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles. Obamacare allowed us to keep\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 12 comments","block_context":{"text":"With 12 comments","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/7964\/#comments"},"img":{"alt_text":"WIth a wave of his hand... 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