MUS31330 Post-Truth, Politics & Music

Academic Year 2021/2022

In 2016 both the Brexit campaign in the UK and the US elections have brought the notion of a new age of “post-truth” into sharp focus. Alongside it “alternative facts”, “fake news”, "cancel culture" and similar terms have become more and more commonplace. Expertise appears to be discredited, gut feeling at least as important as facts, and facts themselves no longer valid and reliable. How and why did we get to this point, are there ways out of it, and has it really become impossible to distinguish between facts and their different interpretations?
This module will track philosophical, sociological and political concepts that shaped today’s competing world views, beginning with the enlightenment. The module’s core hypothesis is that since the late nineteenth century the focus of academic attention shifted more and more from the observation of the world around us (“realism”) to the way in which our societal and individual predispositions, the unconscious part of our brain and our emotions influence how we perceive and interpret that world. We will follow this trajectory starting with Nietzsche via Freud’s psychoanalysis and Popper and Kuhn’s theories of scientific progress up to poststructuralist and postmodern positions which appear to aid a complete relativism in which “anything goes”. The module will conclude with recent pushbacks against these tendencies, including calls for a “new realism” and neuro-scientific findings regarding the interaction of perception and emotion. All of these concepts will be interrogated with an eye on how they relate to issues of morality and fairness – concepts that are conspicuously absent among post-truthers and bullshitters. Finally we will look at the significant impact of the internet on our behaviour and our ways to gain and assess information.
In the first class of each week we will discuss a philosophical or sociological concept while looking at how it is embodied by a piece of music – usually an opera – in the second hour (after all, I'm a music lecturer). Room will be given to questions raised by students with regard to issues they are particularly concerned about.