Untrol: Post-Truth and the New Normal of Post-Normal Science

ABSTRACT

The idea that there exists a natural relationship between intellectual freedom, legitimate political authority and enjoyment of a dignified life was central to the European Enlightenment and to the radical social change it inspired. This normative claim was rooted in an epistemological proposition: truth is not revealed in private to a select few but discovered in public, through observation, dialogue and critique. Material transformations associated with that proposition have since literally changed the face of the earth. While the materially transformative potential of this proposition has been realized across the planet, its social justice implications have not. This leaves an underdetermined space in democratic discourse: fact claims are treated as apolitical, while the causes and consequences of the Anthropocene are uncertain and values regarding its importance polarised, rendering that status obsolete. In addition to contributing toward understanding human-environment relationships, fact now also serve to destabilize political discourse. Their instrumentalization exerts control in the absence of normative intention, ‘untrol’: truth claims matter not only because they call the moral subject to action but also because they can proffer political standing. Humbly embracing the epistemological complexity of the Anthropocene through Eagleton’s posture of ‘hope without optimism’ is proposed as an antidote.

KEYWORDS:

• The Anthropocene
• post-normal science
• epistemological complexity
• European Enlightenment

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In this text, the geological and social pertinence of the Anthropocene is taken as given. While critiques of the use of the term bring forward further issues related to intellectual colonialism, it is beyond the scope of this text to address them here in detail.

2. While it has been argued by Horkheimer and Adorno [1944] 2006 from a political philosophy perspective, and Merchant (1981), from a methodological one, that failure to realize the liberating potential of EE ideology is built into the logic of replacing faith in divine enlightenment with faith in reason, engaging with the subtleties of those arguments would bring us away from the present topic. While it is certainly important, eventually, to determine the cause of a fire that has brought down a building, at the moment of the fire itself, what is of utmost importance is to identify viable routes that one can use to escape.

3. This manifestation of Latour’s Parliament of Things is a complicated and busy space, occupied, not only by our current companions but also by a broad array of non-human moral objects – from polar bears to diverted rivers – by a spectrum of feminist and queer subjectivities, and by a host of actors and matters of concern relating to the rights and dignity of colonised peoples across the planet, whose cosmologies and contexts do not fit the euro-descendent idea of progress. While these actors and matters of concern are assumed to play a part in the workings of both ‘untrol’ and ‘hope without optimism,’ it would be foolhardy to try to also unpack here their accompanying.

4. Original Spanish text of the quote from (Lander 2000, 12): ‘ … la naturalización de la sociedad liberal como la forma más avanzada y normal de existencia humana no es una construcción reciente que pueda atribuirse al pensamiento neoliberal, ni a la actual coyuntura geopolítica, sino que por el contrario tiene una larga historia en el pensamiento social occidental de los últimos siglos.’

5. Haraway, like Vandana Shiva (Shiva 1989) and Carolyn Merchant (1981), explicitly links EE culture gender discrimination with her epistemological position. Although that matter is not of immediate pertinence to the position being developed here, it should be noted.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this text was conducted under the auspices of the author’s position as a staff member with the Department of Biology, Faculty of Natural Science and Mathematics, Universidad del Rosario and did not include reliance on any third party financial support.

Notes on contributors

Katharine N. Farrell

Katharine N. Farrell is an Ecological Economist, member of Pi Sigma Alpha, and holds degrees in Political Science, Urban Policy Analysis and Management, Environmental Engineering, and a PhD in Politics. She recently successfully defended her Habilitation with the Agricultural Economics Department of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she served 2010–2016 as Assistant Professor in Resource Economics. Her current research focuses on production of ecological economy: how it works and how it can be brought about, in the context of mangrove conservation and recuperation in northern Colombia. She has worked as a senior researcher with the Danish National Environmental Research Institute (NERI), University of Aarhus, L’Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, Germany and was awarded a Marie Curie Individual Driven Fellowship to conduct the research project Accountability and Legitimacy of Governance Institutions that support Viable Environments (ALIVE) at UFZ from 2006–2008. She is currently Associate Professor of Ecological Economics in the Biology Department of Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá, Colombia, Visiting Professor with Universidad del Magdalena, Santa Marta, Colombia and Associated Researcher with the Berlin Workshop in Institutional Analysis of Social-ecological Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.