2016: The Year Truth Was Irrelevant

If you had to pick one word to sum up 2016, what would it be?

Each year, Oxford Dictionaries chooses a word or expression to “reflect the passing year in language.” For 2015 they made a lighthearted and rather surprising choice:

This year the selection was much more serious. For the Word of the Year 2016, they chose post-truth.

Truth—Meh, It’s Irrelevant

Oxford Dictionaries defines the adjective post-truth as

Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.

In this case, the prefix post- doesn’t mean after as it does in post-war. Rather, Oxford notes that it “has a meaning more like ‘belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant’.” So in a post-truth world, truth is irrelevant.

In the past year this word, coined in the 1990’s, saw a 2000 percent increase in usage. Particularly it’s used in the phrase “post-truth politics” in reference to Brexit and the US election. Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Dictionaries, says

It’s not surprising that our choice reflects a year dominated by highly-charged political and social discourse. . . . Fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time.

He adds, “I wouldn’t be surprised if post-truth becomes one of the defining words of our time.”

My Beliefs, My Opinions, My Truth

What exactly is a post-truth culture? It’s a culture where truth is no longer an objective reality. It has become subjective. It’s what’s true for me—my beliefs, my opinions, determine my truth. Dr. Al Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, sums it up as the mindset that

All truth is relative, all truth claims are relativized, and all statements of what might be called traditional or conservative moral judgment are just very well disguised efforts at oppression.