What I’m reading (and teaching): McIntyre’s Post-Truth

I’m more nervous than usual about the upcoming semester.

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Part of the problem is that I haven’t been in the classroom much lately.  Administrative-style work—I finally finished my term as Academic Senate President, but I’ve taken on other roles this year—has replaced a lot of my teaching time. And what little teaching time I have left has usually consisted of an online class and the journalism lab.

None of that requires me, a card-carrying introvert, to spend those first days of the semester in rooms full of undifferentiated human beings, most of whom are staring at me with various levels of fear, interest, skill, or commitment. (The others are probably staring at their phones.)

This semester, enrollment for the journalism course was too low for the course to “make,” and I had to find another course to fill my schedule. So, a couple weeks from now, I’ll be standing at the front of a classroom, hiding my stage fright behind an ice-breaking exercise and self-deprecating humor.

That fear will go away quickly enough. Muscle memory will kick in, and within a few weeks the sea of unfamiliar faces will morph into recognizable individuals. I’ll learn all their names, however imperfectly (there are always two whom I can’t keep straight). I’ll spend a few minutes with each of them, after class or during a conference in my office, which goes a long way toward humanizing them. I’ve done it all plenty times before, even if it’s been awhile, so I’ll quickly be on familiar ground.

No, what I’m really nervous about is the text I’ve chosen to teach to this one-level-below-college-level composition course: Lee McIntyre’s Post-truth.

I’m not nervous about the difficulty of the reading. It’s part of MIT Press’s Essential Knowledge Series, which, as the publisher advertises,” offers accessible, concise, and beautifully produced books on topics of current interest” aimed at “nonspecialists.” I’m a few chapters in, and that description seems accurate. Parts will be hard for the students to understand, for sure, but that’s kind of the point.

However, I am nervous about the fact that the text explicitly addresses the status of truth in the age of Trump (and Brexit). I expect that my class will consist largely of people who hold fairly passionate views about Trump, whether for or against.

In the mid- to late-2000s, early in my tenure at the college, I taught courses that dealt with a range of controversial topics, most notably the US presence in Iraq. I was able to referee fairly productive discussions; the students often disagreed strongly, but they expressed that disagreement with an admirable level of civility.

But things have changed. Given our culture’s current polarization, I’m not sure how such conversations will go this year. And that makes me nervous.

I spent a couple weeks resisting the decision. I know that I won’t be (or even seem) unbiased; my position on Trump is as polarized as anyone’s. So I considered other topics that might be safer, but still relevant to the students’ lives—education, the “American Dream,” poverty, and so on.

In the end, though, all of those issues are complicated—maybe even rendered incoherent—by the way we treat truth in public discourse. And my shying away from that issue started to feel uncomfortably spineless.

So I chose Post-truth as my main text for the semester. I had a few different reasons, in addition to my desire not to succumb to cowardice:

• As I already said, McIntyre’s book has no alienating subtitle, as Kakutani’s text has. We’ll have to tackle the issue of Trump’s rhetoric soon enough, but at least it won’t be an issue before they even open the book. (I wonder if  Kakutani’s subtitle guarantees that she is only preaching to the converted, so to speak).
• While McIntyre acknowledges that Brexit and Trump’s election led him to write the book, most of the text is a look at how we got where we are, and not a direct examination of Trump (or Brexit).
• I don’t buy one of McIntryre’s main premises: that “postmodernism is the godfather of post-truth.”

That last point is the most important reason that I chose the book. The fact that I disagree with McIntyre will, I hope, help the students to understand that they also have permission to disagree—with the book, with me, with their classmates.

Unfortunately, the specifics of my disagreement probably won’t get a lot of play in the class. An argument that engages postmodernism requires a “schema”—that structure of previous knowledge that’s required to make sense of a text—that most of these students simply won’t have at this point. By the end of the class, I may have been able to build their schema (e.g., by introducing them to some history and concepts of philosophy), but I suspect that my particular disagreement with McIntyre won’t resonate much with them.

That’s okay. My main goal is not to get students to understand my position—or even to agree with me. My main goal is to create an opening for meaningful conversation, to find a way beyond our current divisiveness and polarization.

That’s why I chose a second text, Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s They say/I say: The moves that matter in academic writing, to supplement Post-truth. It’s a fairly simple book, and at times more formulaic than I like. But it focuses on the aspect of academic writing that offers at least a possible way out of today’s polarized public discourse. Listening or reading for understanding, accurately reporting another person’s position, and engaging with that position—these all make space for genuine discourse born out of curiosity and empathy.

Wish me luck.