Philosophy in the Contemporary World: Post-Truth, Fanaticism, and Facebook

In 2002, Hubert Dreyfus published a paper, “Anonymity versus Commitment: The Dangers of Education on the Internet” where he decried the effect of the Internet on the quality of education. With the constant availability of information, Dreyfus compares the situation with Kierkegaard’s analysis of the newspaper which gives rise to a faceless public. As the public read the newspaper, jumping from one page to another absorbing the information presented there without committing themselves to anything in particular, the modern students also jump from one course to another, samping this one and that, also without committing themselves to any course in particular. This does not mean that students are not taking any course for credit, but it means they study any of these courses without going deeply into their content.

For example, students take a philosophy course only perhaps to fulfill their requirement; they do whatever they need to do in order to get the credit, and then they forget about it as soon as they got the grade. In the same way, the newspaper reading public move from one topic to another, without committing themselves to any content in such a way that the content becomes their lives. Kierkegaard sees the newspaper reading public as lacking individuality and identity; they lack the sense of who they really are and how each of them finds things that are uniquely their own. The public are then faceless in the sense that they are all the same; each thinks the same way, presenting a united front asserting what is now known as “public opinion” that shapes up public policy.

Dreyfus argues that information technology and the World Wide Web enables only Kierkegaard’s first two stages of life, namely the aesthetic and the ethical. The last stage, one which alone makes meaningful life possible for Kierkegaard, is not possible through the technology. In this way the World Wide Web acts in the same way as the newspaper did in Kierkegaard’s time. Both provide information to the reading public, who then becomes a rather amorphous entity. However, the World Wide Web in 2002 is now, sixteen years later, a dated technology. Surely the web is still there, but it has become ubiquitous. Sixteen years ago people were largely still excited about “the Web,” but nowadays it has become as commonplace as the air we breathe or the electricity we use.

More importantly, the nature of the web itself has changed tremendously. Nowadays the buzz is of course the social media, which functions in much more powerful way than the web of 2002. Instead of sitting back and consuming information provided through the web, participants in today’s social media, mostly Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, have become producers of information themselves. This can be seen most clearly when someone posts their images of their beloved cats on Facebook or Instagram. This was not possible 16 years ago. If you want to post images of your cat back then, you have to open up your own website or post your images on some kind of web discussion forum. It was much more cumbersome.

So the question is: Is today’s social media something that would enable Kierkegaard’s Third Stage? That was the topic of my paper published early this year in the journal AI & Society. Basically the answer is yes and no. On the one hand, social media provide information, including those shared by one’s friends that appear on one’s newsfeed, so in a way the situation is still similar to that of the older web and even the newspaper in that the subject consumes information. That is the no part. But on the other hand, the fact that social media make it very easy to share information has made it an ideal platform for those who are committed to their cause to gather others who share the same viewpoints and share their committed opinions to them. This is the yes and a very interesting part. This gathering of like-minded people was much more difficult to do in the newspaper age or even the age of the older web. In order to galvanize people in the pre-Internet age, you have to set up your own point of information dissemination. This could be your own newspaper, or you have to print a ton of leaflets and put them up on trees all around the city, or stand up on wooden boxes and start your own public speech through a megaphone. In short, it was very difficult to do. To set up your own newspaper required huge amount of investment, something out of reach for ordinary people.

Even in the age of the older, pre-social media web it was also quite difficult; you have to set up your own website and then get people to know your web address and so on. It was possible to galvanize people this way–it’s a bit easier than putting up posters on trees–but with today’s social media it was very easy. Naturally people have their own circle of friends and acquaintances, and when almost everybody has a Facebook account it becomes really easy to get your views across and then your views can be shared by members of the circle. Things can become “viral” much more easily.

An implication of this is that Kierkegaard’s Third Stage becomes inverted. What I mean is that instead of the Third Stage–the stage of total, unconditional commitment–to be a cause for the good as in Kierkegaard (such as total commitment to the Christian faith, or to one’s existential condition), the Third Stage here can become fanatical. Instead of being committed to “unconditioned commitments and strong identities necessary for turning information into meaningful knowledge,” as Dreyfus says in his paper (Dreyfus, 2002, p. 20), today’s social media have created a platform for unconditioned commitments and strong identities–it is true–but instead of turning information into meaningful knowledge, it has created what is now known as the “post-truth” phenomenon instead.

I can imagine Søren Kierkegaard himself, if he were alive today, having a bad headache when he learned that his philosophy has been inverted in this way. What is happening is that unconditioned commitment has created post-truths, fake news and fanaticism. This is not unique to the US, by the way. At least the situation is correlated with the growing use of social media worldwide. And I am thinking of some kind of an explanation as to why there is such a correlation. So, yes, social media have resulted in Kierkegaard’s Third Stage being realized in a way, but it is a strange one and I don’t think it is exactly the kind of Third Stage–the religious sphere of existence–that Kierkegaard envisioned.

Another reason why I think Kierkegaard would have a bad headache is that the post-truth and fake news phenomenon can be seen as arising directly from the kind of unconditioned commitment that he advocates. Given a choice between truth and reason on the one hand, and unconditioned faith and commitment on the other, Kierkegaard would settle for the latter. After all he is known for being an ardent critic of rationalist philosophy–witness his unceasing attack on Hegel. But this is only a short step to post-truth. Unconditioned commitment trumps over truth and reason. In Kierkegaardian terms this is the step from the ethical to the religious sphere. One overcomes reason to embrace faith. You are willing to accept what appears to reason as false and contradictory if your faith demands it. And you accept it wholly and uncritically.

The problem is that in the post-truth era this means you only accept something if it aligns with your political agenda or your prior beliefs and commitments without paying any attention as to whether it is in fact true or not. The post-truth era is characterized by a proliferation of disinformation and misinformation designed to influence public opinion. So if a number of people believe a set of statements without pausing to check whether they are true or not, the situation indeed becomes post-truth; that is, truth has been superseded and left behind.

To be fair to Kierkegaard, I don’t think his view inevitably or automatically leads to the post-truth phenomenon. His total commitment is to God, which remains the source of truth and reason no matter what, and not to some mundane and temporary political agenda. However, a full defense of Kierkegaard has to be attempted elsewhere. My point here is that Facebook and Twitter have generated a kind of a return to Kierkegaard’s religious sphere, but an inverted one where mundane agenda have become the center of faith rather than God.

Of course those who advocate their own version of fanaticism always talk about God, but I don’t know if their talk of God is a self-serving one or not. In any case, if they are fanatical, then I don’t think their version of God is correct. If God is the creator of all things, then he is the creator and the source of truth and reason too. In this light Kierkegaard’s religious sphere cannot be a total one where one abandons all truth and all rationality; otherwise one descends to paradoxes and contradictions and falsehoods. In such a case it is more likely that those who so descend do not have any faith at all.

In fact we don’t need to talk about God when we discuss Kierkegaard’s three stages. The unconditioned commitment of the third stage can then be understood as a critique of an overreliance on reason, something Hegelian where reason itself is the embodiment of the world. And what we are committed to does not have to be God; it could be something that we care for so much that we are willing to spend the majority of our time and effort on it. Here the social media can be a useful tool. Instead of using it for setting up groups of fanatics, it can be used for better purposes. In Thailand where I live Facebook is used regularly by more than 46 million people, and it is number one in terms of time spent on the smartphone per day. This is huge when we consider that it is a country of some 66 million people. Facebook is used by all kinds of groups. I myself am an avid user of the media, having exactly 5,000 “friends,” the maximum number allowed. I did not seek out and ask these people to be my “friends”; they know about me and asked to add me instead. Perhaps they know about me from my various interviews with the Thai media and my frequent criticisms of the ruling military regime.

In any case, the point is that Facebook can be a force for positive change. There are certainly negative aspects, such as it takes away my time so much that I often have to tell myself to leave my phone aside and get back to work. But on the whole it also creates a lively forum for political discussion, an open atmosphere which was not available in Thailand before. Certainly this open atmosphere also gives rise to fanatical groups propagating fake news, and there is a fair share of such groups in Thailand too. But at least from my own individual perspective being a frequent user of Facebook in Thailand, I think the fanatical groups are still on the margins. People want to know the truth and they yearn for democracy and the rule of law, something perhaps taken for granted in the West.

Of course there are the negative aspects of Facebook, most notorious among which is their lax control of user data. Furthermore, there are many well documented incidents of other negative aspects of the social media, such as internet shaming and encouragement of dangerous behaviors including even suicide. These are clearly instances of the post-truth phenomenon we are talking about and are  indeed worrying trends that need to be dealt with as soon as possible. I don’t even know whether they detract from the more positive points I am making about the medium here. It is as if Facebook has opened up a channel where we can peer into people’s private lives if they are not careful enough. Certainly we need to think more about these problems.

What this means in the end, however, is that we need to be always vigilant (and very careful about what we share online). Democracy and the rule of law is not a given. We have to continue working on it and fighting for it. In this fight the social media can be a useful tool, but we also have to be careful and know what we are doing when we are using them too. The bottom line perhaps is that we need always be in control of them and we can’t let them control us. Then the unconditioned commitment would be toward this end. Perhaps Kierkegaard and Dreyfus would approve.

Soraj Hongladarom

Soraj Hongladarom is an international associate member of the APA. He teaches philosophy at Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, and got his Ph.D. from Indiana University, Bloomington in 1991. His most recent books are The Online Self: Externalism, Friendship and Games, published by Springer in 2016 and A Buddhist Theory of Privacy, also by Springer.