Every summer, bookshops lay out stacks of blockbusters designed to be devoured in an afternoon and forgotten in a week. But at UnHerd we prefer books that leave a lasting impression. In this series of Summer Reads, our contributors recommend overlooked books that will engage and enrich you, not just distract you.
Rather than unleashing an era of liberal democratic orthodoxy, as many predicted, the end of the Cold War produced a world where grand narratives ceased to exist. The disappearance of these narratives has led to an erosion in the value of truth and objectivity.
This is one of the arguments put forward in This is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality, a new book by the journalist and author Peter Pomerantsev. As Pomerantsev writes:
“If the need for facts is predicated on a vision of a concrete future that you are trying to achieve, then when that future disappears, what is the point of facts?”
Many articles have been written about how the internet has encouraged us to create our own ‘filter bubbles’. However Pomerantsev’s book delves much deeper than similar accounts. It is not merely ‘information abundance’ that is screwing with our politics. The root of the current crisis also rests in our loss of faith in the future and, with it, the Enlightenment notion of objective truth.
One hundred and thirty-seven years ago Nietzsche declared God to be dead. Yet while the Enlightenment ‘killed’ the possibility of belief in a deity, religious faith persisted under avowedly secular guises. During the 20th century communism partially filled the void left by the retreat of religion. The materialist conception of history held out an answer to every question just as the Gospels once had.
In time the communist God failed, and the future was viewed as one of liberal progress, an ‘end of history’ as Francis Fukuyama termed it. Yet the global financial crash – and arguably the Iraq war with it – destroyed faith in this narrative too.
If the 20th century was the age of ideology, it has been replaced by an era of subjectivity and competing truths. A few on the extreme fringes still cling to grand narratives – the Islamic State for example – but most big ideas have slipped away. Today we each shape our own narrative. We choose what is true based on our own solipsistic inclinations. The result is a hyper-individualised political climate where concepts such as objectivity and impartiality have passed out of fashion.
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