By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi You are probably already aware that Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year is “po...
By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:
@farooqkperogi
You are probably already aware that Oxford Dictionaries’
word of the year is “post-truth.” It is an adjective, which the dictionaries
define as "relating or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are
less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal
belief."
In other words, the word signifies the demotion of
verifiable empirical proofs and the elevation of feelings, biases, prejudices,
etc. in the formulation of thought-processes and courses of action. The reality
the word lexicalizes isn’t by any means new, but it’s a voguish new addition
to our vocabulary.
“Post-truth” joins a long list of trendy words that capture
the sense of instability and dislocation that has accompanied human progress in
the last few decades. Words like “postmodern,” “post-Christian,” “post-structural,”
“post-Marxist,” “post-feminism,” etc. have existed in the English lexicon,
especially in academese (i.e., the distinctive language usage of scholars), for
years. But they are no longer the awkward academic neologisms they were years
ago; they are now crossing over to mainstream usage.
“Post-truth” most certainly derived etymological inspiration
from the arcane language of humanities and social science scholars who seem enamored
with the “post” prefix. But it is a useful concept to explain the dissolution
of certainties, the explosion of settled narratives, and the stubborn
persistence of wrong, mistaken, and patently false beliefs even in the face of
what lawyers call clear evidentiary proofs.
It is telling that “post-truth’s” lexical birth was actuated
by two politically consequential seismic shocks the world just experienced:
Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.
"It's not surprising that our choice reflects a year
dominated by highly-charged political and social discourse," Oxford
Dictionaries president Casper Grathwohl told the AFP. "Fuelled by the rise
of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by
the establishment, 'post-truth' as a concept has been finding its linguistic
footing for some time. We first saw the frequency really spike this year in
June with buzz over the Brexit vote and again in July when Donald Trump secured
the Republican presidential nomination."
Buharism’s Post-Truth
Politics
It isn’t just Brexit and Trumpism that luxuriate in and
exploit our emergent post-truth world; post-truthism is also the lifeblood of
the President Muhammadu Buhari administration in Nigeria. In the face of its
crying failures and ineptitude amid the worst economic crisis in recent memory,
the administration is whipping up emotions, turning logic on its head, and
doing so much unconscionable violence to truth and basic decency as a defense
mechanism.
Lies, deceit, and mindless propaganda are now the oxygen of
the Buhari administration. If you deprive it of lies, deceit, and mindless
propaganda, it will suffocate and die.
And there is a shrinking but nonetheless potent corps of
Buharists, especially in the Muslim north, who perpetually lie to themselves—and
to others—to the point of believing their own lies that Buhari’s administration
is the savior of the nation. For example, they believe their own—and the Buhari
government’s— lies that Boko Haram has been “technically” defeated. The facts of
the unceasing Boko Haram attacks in Borno State and the tragic spike in the
murder of our soldiers there do nothing to change this narrative.
The fact that Nigerian soldiers have not been paid their
legitimate salaries, not to talk of their allowances, for at least three months
is hidden from the public by government’s propaganda machine and is dismissed
as “untrue” by Buhari supporters blinded by the plague of post-truthism. So is
the heartrending malnutrition among, and deaths of, internally displaced Boko
Haram victims, especially children—and the sexual exploitation of their young
women.
Buhari is hailed as “fighting corruption” even when no one
has yet to be prosecuted for corruption more than one year after the government
came to power—and when clear cases of corruption against the president’s own
loyalists are brazenly swept under the carpet. Post-truthist Buharists almost
always retort that “corruption is fighting back” when anybody calls attention
to the invidious selectivity and insincerity in government’s so-called fight against
corruption.
Buhari is still called a “man of integrity” even when it
came to light that he didn’t tell Nigerians the truth when he claimed he was so
poor that he couldn’t afford to buy his party’s presidential nomination form and
had to take a bank loan. At the time he made the claim, at least two of his
children were studying at UK universities.
The president had said in the past that he had no other
house outside of the houses he had in Kaduna and Daura, but his partial,
half-hearted asset declaration in 2015 said he has a house in Abuja. Only
multi-millionaires and billionaires own homes in Abuja. Yet the president feigned
that he was poor in order to win voters’ sympathy—and their donations.
He has repudiated even his most basic campaign promises,
such as fully declaring his assets like the late President Umar Musa Yar’adua
did, yet he is still touted as a “man of integrity.”
He is also called a “frugal” and “modest” man even when
evidence shows that he is probably Nigeria’s most profligate president. He is,
for instance, the first and only president to spend millions of naira to build
a helipad for his exclusive use in his hometown, which will be useless after
his presidency. He is the only president in recent memory who officially goes abroad
for “holidays” while the vast majority of the people he governs writhe in agony
as a consequence of his economy policies, and so on.
It is only post-truthism that can blind anybody to the truth
that Buhari’s government is pushing Nigeria to the brink of the precipice, that
he is not the poor person he said he was, that his claims to “integrity” “modesty”
and “frugality” have no basis in evidence.
But for post-truthers, emotion is all that matters. Evidence
is a pesky, expendable encumbrance.
Runners-up to
Post-Truth
In what follows, I reproduce AFP’s story on the choice of “post-truth”
as Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year. Enjoy:
The runners-up for words of the year included the British
term "Brexiteer" used for anti-EU advocates.
"Alt-right" also made the shortlist, defined as an
ultra-conservative grouping in the United States "characterised by a
rejection of mainstream politics and the use of online media to disseminate
deliberately controversial content".
Trump's appointment of anti-establishment media firebrand
Steve Bannon, seen as a leader of the "alt-right" movement, as his
chief of staff earlier this week has proved highly controversial.
Capturing the mood
Oxford Dictionaries said the word "post-truth" had
become "overwhelmingly" associated with politics.
Charlotte Buxton, associate editor at Oxford Dictionaries,
said the term "caught the public imagination" in Britain and the US,
with social networks playing a key role.
"It's tied in quite closely with the social media world
now and how people are accessing their news," she told AFP.
"I think it reflects a trend of how emotion and
individual reactions are becoming more and more important.
"People are restricting their news consumption to
sources that don't claim to be neutral."
Social media networks, in particular Facebook, have come
under fire since the US election for allowing "fake news" and misinformation
to be widely shared.
Google and Facebook responded to the criticism Tuesday by
pledging to cut off advertising revenue to fake news sites which some claim
influenced the US vote.
The term "post-truth" is "reflective of the
mood of the past 12 months," said Buxton, but it has been around for some
time.
Oxford Dictionaries traced its first use to a 1992 essay by
late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine about the
Iran-Contra scandal and the Gulf War.
"We, as a free people, have freely decided that we want
to live in some post-truth world," Tesich wrote.
"There is evidence of the phrase 'post-truth' being
used before Tesich's article, but apparently with the transparent meaning
'after the truth was known' and not with the new implication that truth itself
has become irrelevant," Oxford Dictionaries said.
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New Words in Oxford Dictionaries You Should Know
More New Words in Oxford and Other Dictionaries
New Words in Oxford Dictionaries You Should Know
More New Words in Oxford and Other Dictionaries
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