When I started this series of posts, Trump’s presidency still seemed like no more than an outside possibility. Things have changed a lot since then, of course, and what I thought of at the outset as a more or less antiquarian reflection has taken on, for me, an urgency and a contemporary reference. Paradoxically, this urgency has been manifesting as a kind of blockage: the newfound relevance of the questions I’m asking has compelled me to spend more time and effort trying to get the answers right.
What would it mean to make truth a numinous power that attached to rule? I had imagined this was an archaeological problem, a matter of recovering something substantive of the mode of thought that lay behind the Bisutun Inscription’s declaration that Darius’ rivals were “lying” in their claims to kingship – a mode of thought that was alien because it was ancient, as I had imagined. Of the many things Trump’s presidency has told us about ourselves, the one that surprised me most is that at least a third of American voters understand this mode of thinking perfectly well. When they voted for Trump, what they were voting for was exactly someone who could make their world-picture true by giving it the endorsement of the presidency. Where the rest of us saw in their vision of American decline brought on by immigrants and minorities a racist-paranoid delusion that could never be made to correspond with reality, they saw a truth that was waiting to take its place in the seat of power.
Trump himself understands this. It may be the only thing he understands. His solution for every stumble, setback and scandal is to deny, by fiat, that any stumble, setback or scandal has taken place. For the most part, the people who voted for him have been convinced by these denials – not, I think, because they think of Trump as especially honest or knowledgeable, but because they still believe that whatever he says ex cathedra as president is true. Twitter is Trump’s daily-updating version of the rock face at Bisutun.
So what started as an archaeological inquiry got transformed, somewhere along the line, into an essential problem of modern American politics. I didn’t want it to be this way, of course because Trump’s election win is a disaster but also because I was hoping not to have to take sides between what Herodotus, I think, characterizes as Greek and Persian modes of working with truth. It would have been nice just to map these onto the polycephalous world of the city-states and the monocephalous expanse of the Persian Empire, respectively, without having to choose between them. For myself, though, I’d certainly opt to live in the former rather than the latter, and that, now, is a choice that all of us actually face.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes: “it is part of the fundamental faith of all aristocrats that the common people lie. ‘We truthful ones’ – thus the ancient nobility of Greece referred to itself.” Nietzsche must be making this claim on the basis of Theognis, who was, after Homer, his favorite source as to the “ancient nobility of Greece.” Did it never occur to him that the repeated protestations of Theognis as to the elemental honesty of the aristocrats could itself have been a lie?
However that may be, Niezsche was right to see this claim as part of the ongoing struggle between mass and elite for cultural dominance that characterized the Greek fifth century. What Theognis and his fellows meant by it was at least, on the one hand – and as Nietzsche wants to read it – that honesty was a virtue belonging exclusively to people of high birth. At the same time, there’s also surely a measure of self-reference at work: Theognis is also making a claim for the truth of his poetry and the judgments expressed in it, for the fundamental correctness of the standards by which he, and other aristocrats, make distinctions.
To see that claim exploded, again and again, is one of the real pleasures of reading Greek literature – even Plato, who at least in this respect also counts as a democrat. Greek acuity of judgment in all concrete matters, the Greek sense for what a later writer, making the same discoveries, would call the “verità effetuale delle cose”: these are talents that develop in order to destroy a declining upper class’s metaphysical claim to truth by showing that this claim does nothing to save the phenomena.
Trump has already tried and will continue to try to frame his administration as the war of truth against the lie. We, in the meantime, need to stand up against this distinction, not only by reversing it – although it surely does some good to point out that Trump’s version of “truth” has more structurally in common with falsehood than does the mostly accurate reporting he attacks – but also by keeping our eyes open. More on this in future installments, under another heading.