POST-TRUTH WORLDS A C GRAYLING BBC

Grayling wrote a short book on Wittgenstein which I read about 35 years ago now.

We have been in such a developing, or emerging, or perhaps better, long evolving, post-truth world for a very long time.

In some ways, it has been since the beginning, 450 BC; in others, only some hundreds of years.

What is called relativism is an old concept.

Most people have always been illiterate. Literacy itself is a relatively late phenomenon.

Hume set a certain skeptical floor.

Kant, patched together a halfway house.

Phenomenology, then, as it developed, was in a sense a marker for what we call the modern world.

Every age has thought of itself as the modern age.

Now it is called post modern; it is the same thing again later.

Quantum, another marker.

One point I would make, about Grayling's thesis, here, is that democracy itself, the ideology of democracy, is a great threat to truth, and not the other way around, not merely what is called a post-truth world. The post-truth world is quintessentially the world of democracy.