The destruction of truth is at the heart of Western cultural decline

‘There’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it as there is in so-called objective facts.” So says Prince Harry, who may be as credible a philosopher as I am a weightlifter. But his words summed up the big question of our postmodern age. What is truth anyway?

The prince across the water is now the world’s most famous truth bender, but he is far from alone. Last Friday, Trevor Noah, the South African comedian and US television presenter, defended the notorious skit in which he asserted there had been a “racist backlash” in Britain when Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister.

Rather than present proof of his claims, or apologise for his error, Noah argued that a joke can only be judged by its intended audience. “I wouldn’t tell a joke about South Africa the same way in South Africa as I would outside South Africa,” he explained. In other words, it mattered not that British people knew his joke to be untrue: he was making the joke for a liberal American audience, who believed it was true.

Of course, this defence is not available to the Wrong People. Cancelled academics cannot argue that their lectures were meant for the intellectually curious. Gender-critical feminists cannot insist that their beliefs arise from their desire to defend and protect women. Most comedians cannot protest that critics mistake the subject of a joke for its target.

But for the Worthy People truth can be whatever they like, words can mean whatever they choose, and what is said to be offensive in a different context might be reasonable – even progressive and brave – when they speak. This is how we end up with events and job opportunities restricted to people based on skin colour, and the Left writing off black conservatives as not really black, or white people for supposedly inherent guilt.

The intellectual origins of this nonsense go back to the postmodernism of thinkers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. Discourse is oppressive. Language, custom and tradition exploit the weak and sustain the powerful in their privilege. Victims of the powerful participate in their own oppression through their assumed social roles.

These concepts have been taken further by thinkers and radicals in America, and the arising critical theories are not only commonplace there but increasingly a matter of consensus among academics and politicians here as well.

And so truth is reduced to a battle between discourses. Whatever the evidence, the truth might be said to be merely “your truth”: a story that exploits one group and perpetuates the power of another. History and the shared stories and habits that amount to national identity may no longer be legitimate: instead they might be evidence of oppression that imposes patriarchal, white, Christian, Western norms on what the Left now likes to call “the global majority”. Even those who do not consider themselves victims are told, because of aspects of their identity, that that is what they are.

This is all nihilistic nonsense, for there is no peaceful endpoint for these radicals: equal rights are not enough. “Equity” is the goal, and equity means retribution and redistribution of power. Oppressive discourses perpetuate exploitative hierarchies, so people who share the characteristics of those at the top should be penalised. If we do not understand how our social roles are constructed, others understand better than we do the true meaning of what we say. Because discourse is a tool of oppression, language is the battlefield. Words are twisted to no longer mean anything at all. Even violent “direct action” can be a legitimate response to what we say.

Of course, Prince Harry has probably not read Foucault and Derrida, nor more recent thinkers like Judith Butler and Robin DiAngelo. But through the education system and wider culture their assertions have seeped into the modern consciousness. In America – where elites use therapy to justify their decisions, and become even more self-absorbed and detached from truth, and politics is a choice between the competing narcissisms of hands-off-my-money libertarianism and identity-based self-realisation – the land was fertile already. In Britain, our America-brained elites have greedily gobbled the fruits.

And now it is everywhere. You can be a prince living in a $33.5 million mansion, and claim not only that you are a victim, but also financially hard done by. You can be a comedian, and simply wave away the untruthfulness of what you said. You can be a historian, and for reasons of ideology and politics, pretend that Britain has always been far more ethnically diverse than it ever was. You can write screenplays about historical events and figures, and insert fictional characters and moments to mislead audiences in the name of supposedly higher, eternal truths – which are of course no such thing.

The crime is always exploitation, and the currency is always victimhood because that is what the theories say. The truth must be bent to fit the template, and, handily enough, the theory tells us the truth is malleable anyway.

Nuance and complexity are out. Men can call themselves women, but women cannot defend their identity as women. Successful minorities are written off as “white adjacent”, while true believers produce “hierarchies of racism” to explain away successes that should be impossible in structurally racist societies. White people are “privileged”, however poor and whatever their experience. To even question the deluge of contradictions is to prompt accusations of “white fragility”, “gaslighting” and other invented concepts.

And technology has the potential to make it all worse. Artificial intelligence will have moral and political assumptions programmed into it. The not unreasonable concern about misinformation risks seeing online content that challenges progressive beliefs expunged as dangerous.

In a postmodern generation that believes truth can be mine or yours, telling the truth and restating old wisdoms can be a revolutionary act. And for many, it can come at a high price. But it is vital that we do so. Perhaps the deep scepticism with which the public reacted to Prince Harry shows there is life in truth and objectivity yet.