Oh grow up Terry and get over your Trump obsession. Do I need to bring out the long list of supposed conspiracy theories that turned out to later be true? I also know plenty of people for whom terms like “God”, “liberty”, and “equality” mean tangible things. You are the postmodernist who believes less and less in things like truth or ideologies (except for socialism). If you care so much about truth, where were you when it came to things like Covid-19, the Russia Collusion Hoax, and claiming CRT was a myth? Then for some reason you play word salad with the concept of “truth”. Here let me help. Truth is stating the facts and ideas of the world as honestly and reasonably as you can. How do you think we got into this mess in the first place?

Load of drivel.

‘The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to trump up” as “to invent a false accusation or excuse”.’ Yes, that is true, according to my copy which was published before Donald Trump was born. So what’s your point?

Terry Eagleton espouses half a philosophy presenting it as a complete story, again.
Yes, there are social truths which ebb and flow as fashionable beliefs come and go. The nature of these change with social attitudes. But there is a boundary where social truths do not hold up – they are social lies. Noble lies perhaps but still not truthful.
Some cases are clear cut. The value of pi cannot be 3. The world orbits around the Sun. Speed doesn’t kill but smashing into objects at great velocity can. And rather to the point, absolute moral social truths do not exist – there are too many societies with different moralities, too many different gods, and too many ‘exceptions’ granted for ‘moral’ purposes.

Instead of railing about Trump you might have offered up the post-modern version of sex and gender as distortions of truth.

This article took a strange turn. Most people who are anti-Trump seem to believe that the great Unwashed were gullible fools ‘taken in’ by his ‘lies’. Trump certainly is no paragon of virtue but, unlike our current crop of politicians, never has he pretended to be.
C.S. Lewis summed this sentiment up very well in this oft-quoted passage of his essay on Theology:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” 

Even setting aside his Trump Derangement Syndrome, Terry Eagleton is a rambling, long-winded bore.

No one:

Babe, babe, wake up! New Terry Eagleton article just dropped.

Some of the great modern truths overturned the dominant ‘truth’ of their day. Evolution. Relativitity. Non-Euclidean geometry. Germ-theory of disease. The nature of oxygen. Our immutable truths must be open to challenge. We have to ask the question, what, if it’s not true, what would that mean? Would it make sense or tell us something new?
And we have to judge most truths as likelihoods weighed by evidence and judgement. There is a chance you are wrong, or missing data, or biased by the observations you see, the articles you read, or the priors you have. You sometimes need to step into other people’s shoes to see a truth as they see it, to understand why both you and they are wrong.

According to the ruling ideology of liberalism, you can believe [and do] whatever you like as long as it doesn’t stymie other people’s freedom to do the same, or pose a serious threat to their wellbeing. 
That is now called libertarianism.

Thank goodness we live in a world where “you can believe whatever you like as long as it doesn’t stymie other people’s freedom to do the same, or pose a serious threat to their wellbeing”. If the alternative is living in a world where we have to attach credibility to even so much as a sentence of this latest offering from Mr Eagleton, please count me out.

Clever clever Terry hopping around like a bird with his clever word games and cleverly juxtaposed quotes ripped from context. Too clever by half to do anything so mundane as draw a conclusion when there are so many shiny objects for his jackdaw mind to snaffle and arrange in pretty patterns. How tiresome it all becomes by the end. And that’s the truth.

I think you have raised some important truths. However, I don’t think an important truth is being left out of the discussion, and that is this. The old idiom that if you don’t stand for something you’ll fall for anything is still a truism. So when you had a culture like America who formerly agreed on those protestant, puritanical (aka: attempting to take the bible seriously) beliefs which gave form to the commonly held universal ethics such as the so called “family values”, and then you detach them from that, hollowing them out, you can fill the void of that formal religion with something else, even something totally secular. Such as global warming, politics, social transformation, gender issues, race issues, etc.
Advancing those causes gives mankind a deeper purpose, a deeper meaning to their existence. Today if someone was to seek to control those hollowed out people with top-down information pressed down on them they could.
I think it’s true that weaker people, those who consider themselves vulnerable, often single women, or low-confidence men all parse information through a filter, not of “is this true?” but of “is this safe to believe and say?”.
Because fitting into the chosen tribe makes them safe, and if every screen they see, and every voice they hear is saying the same thing over and over again, well, that must be the right “safe” view, and so, anyone who expresses a different position is dangerous, radical, harmful, etc. So, the current state of things is something that I don’t think just happened, but it’s been promoted by those who want to control. Those who want to say what the truth is today, and censor, shut out, and silence those that aren’t useful.

Terry is such a tedious windbag. Does he pay Unherd to publish his stuff. He’s 80 in the shade and hasn’t had a thought for twenty years. Please stop.

I don’t know many people who think that a car bomb killing fellow citizens isn’t part of reality, so I fail to see how we’ve been weakened, at least in this respect, by becoming, “… increasingly sceptical and relativist.” A little less inclined to believe that Islam is “a religion of peace,” as some politicians assure us, perhaps, though that seems to reflect a healthy scepticism.

Matt Hindman needs repeating
” Oh grow up Terry and get over your Trump obsession. Do I need to bring out the long list of supposed conspiracy theories that turned out to later be true? (nb In fact all of them re Trump) ….. If you care so much about truth, where were you when it came to things like Covid-19, the Russia Collusion Hoax, and claiming CRT was a myth? Then for some reason you play word salad with the concept of “truth”. Here let me help. Truth is stating the facts and ideas of the world as honestly and reasonably as you can. “

“Other people’s beliefs are ideological in the sense of being rigid, doctrinaire, immune to argument and detached from the practical world, whereas one’s own convictions are flexible, pragmatic and eminently reasonable. Capping child allowance so that more families are plunged into poverty is pretty much common sense in an economic crisis, while heavily taxing the oil companies springs from socialist dogma.”
Boringly blatant non-sequitur. Come on Terry. Do better.

https://newdiscourses.com/2022/12/dialectical-inversion/