‘Bring more research to dissenters’
Trump was the architect of the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. This is apparent from the official final report on this ‘coup’. With misinformation and fake news, Trump people managed to riot against the identical election fraud and prevent Biden’s inauguration. Many people believed him, but according to the final report he himself knew very well that he had lost the election.
The truth has been under pressure long before the Trump presidency. The New York Times elected in 2015′truthfulnessas a word that well reflects the American zeitgeist. truthfulness means that something is felt as truth, even if it is not true. This phenomenon is also recognizable in the Netherlands. Think of people who accept that the climate is changing and that this change requires action.
At the same time, I also recognize a contraction on the part of journalists, investigations and policymakers in the current crisis of truth. Ever since Trump, people have been talking about the importance of ‘the’ facts and ‘the’ truth. Fact checkers scrutinize allegations, communication consultants are flown in to see the ‘real’ truth.
And that’s not all. The Twitter Files make it clear that the US government is active with companies such as Twitter, YouTube and Instagram to silence spreaders of alternative facts.
Crisis of listening
Is it wise to be people with unwelcome public domain achievements? Ethically, I make a distinction between hypotheses that you disagree with and trusts that are a no-go. Racism is a no-go and deserves a ban. Incitement to hatred and violence as well. But the embrace of ‘super-diversity’ in education is open to debate. That should also be possible without the critics being immediately dismissed as the antigen of ultra-conservatives, as Member of Parliament Roelof Bisschop of the SGP ended up in NRC Handelsblad.
The philosopher Byung-Chul Han speaks of a “crisis of listening” that our democratic parties are playing. We find it complicated to hear people who have a diametrically different view of the world than we do. Not only during Christmas dinner, also in the newspaper and at university and college. We are in enormous intellectual bubbles and, unlike in the age of pillarization, there is no mutual tolerance.
Take the one-sided reporting of the war in Ukraine. Hardly anywhere in the quality media is critical of Western support for Ukraine in this conflict. Now I do not doubt that Russia is the aggressor, but how sensible is the acceptance of the EU and US with this conflict? The lessons of the Cold War seem to have been forgotten, namely that a war against a nuclear power cannot be won. Moreover, Russia is a large and strong country. Are we in the West not going too far in the self-image of Ukraine as a David who can infect Goliath?
Polders lost
These are questions that the philosopher Jürgen Habermas raised last spring in a newspaper article entitled Krieg and Emporung. Readers and intellectuals based on the same reflex with which Trump is supposedly fought. Germany was too small and Habermas one Inverted. As if he no longer has the facts straight and trusts even a certain opinion.
These kinds of reactions are also marked by the level of public debate in the Netherlands, where ‘facts’ and ‘truth’ are quickly protected at the expense of a multiple debate. What is missing in the public debate is the space to meet and exchange perspectives and to do justice to the ambivalent policy reality.
Since Trump, and strengthened by corona, there has been a strong consensus among policymakers, journalists and scientists about political issues. It also seems that these professional groups secretly think that ‘we’ in the Netherlands should agree on everything, even though the public debate does not mean that differences are acknowledged.
With Trump we have lost the long Dutch tradition of tolerance and poldering and we cling uncritically to knowledge and science. The criticism of some political parties of RIVM regarding their nitrogen models is being ridiculed instead of investigated. Pieter Omtzigt’s historical argumentation in the House of Representatives about the new pensions has been taken for granted. The digital identity is organized at a European level, despite a movement by the SP with a parliamentary majority not to do so. Under the motto there is no alternative one is not prepared to listen to criticism.
Human required
The German intellectuals Richard Precht and Harald Welzer speak in their book Who celebrated Gewalt (the fourth power of media) of a rousing concern and limited ‘elite consensus’. This consensus ensures that many Germans feel alienated from knowledge institutes and the media. Considering how often their skepticism spills over into conspiracy thinking, the question arises how wise it is that media and knowledge institutes do not sufficiently meet their interests. Dutch highly educated people should also ask themselves whether they fulfill their duty of care for a good social debate and do not arrogantly look down on thinking differently like boomers of wappies.
I hope that in 2023 we will have more opportunities to think differently. In quality media, for example, it is a foregone conclusion that the MH17 and Bijlmer disaster were accidents, while conspiracy theorists are looking for a perpetrator. That seems to me to be a human requirement that we can answer accurately.
Another example is the power of the World Economic Forum. Noam Chomsky and in our country Rutger Bregman have already criticized this network, but in the depths of the internet the criticism has become even greater. Is that conspiracy thinking or is it finally time for the Netherlands to open up about the networks in which Rutte discusses future scenarios for Dutch farming?
Jelle van Baardewijk is a lecturer in business ethics at Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences, assistant professor at VU University Amsterdam and creator of YouTube program De Nieuwe Wereld.