Opinion: What is our relationship to the truth?
The most dangerous feature of our troubled society is our massive confusion about the truth and our relationship to it.
A letter to the editor of the Arizona Daily Star complains about this “post-truth” era when, with Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left, there are “no unbiassed news sources anymore.” As if there was a golden age of truthful, objective reporting we've lamentably left behind.
Such a golden age of journalistic objectivity never existed. When slavery was the law of the land journalism often reflected racist, pro-slavery bias. During World War II our most trusted newspapers didn't feel the need to present a balanced view of Nazis and U.S. allies.
Polls show trust in news sources at historic lows. Has journalism actually changed? Is it for some reason no longer able to access the truth, perhaps no longer even interested in it?
That seems extremely unlikely. Something else seems to be going on.
All of the emphasis these days is on censorship, on protecting the innocent public from dangerous content. Will Mark Zuckerberg take seriously his responsibility to save democracy by banishing untruth — stolen election lies, Sandy Hook denial, QAnon craziness — from his platform?
Will, we worry, Elon Musk, if he takes over Twitter, doom democracy by giving Trump back his soapbox?
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It's not clear why we expect the perpetrators of these contemporary platforms to guarantee their positive use when as far as I know we never expected that of Johannes Gutenberg or Alexander Graham Bell, whose inventions have been instrumental in all the most terrible as well as the most wonderful events since they became staples of civilized life (both Nazism and its defeat, for instance).
It’s not as if hucksters trying to sell you snake oil for what ails you, or the Brooklyn Bridge, or politicians pitching pie-in-the-sky are a new thing. In a free-speech society, there’s a soapbox in every town square, and people availing themselves of them to persuade you this way or that.
At least for those of a certain age, a big part of growing up American was coping with this chaos of variously motivated opinions. Hence the cautionary slogans: “Don't believe everything you hear (or read) and only half of what you see.” “There's one born every minute” (the sucker P. T. Barnum was actually celebrated for exploiting.)
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It was clearly up to the consumer to avoid being sold the Brooklyn Bridge; there will always be those trying to sell it to you. There will always be wooden nickels, up to you to keep from getting stuck with one.
There is the phrase “marketplace of ideas.” Caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.
Schools (still I hope) talk about how their goal is to teach “critical thinking” rather than rote learning of facts, to equip the student for that marketplace: The facts don't speak for themselves. Consider the source. Distinguish between bias and opinion. Between demonstrable lies and opinions you don't agree with.
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Sure, condemn lying and liars, dangerous, democracy-threatening ideas — especially if you value a democratic form of government. Lying makes the world a worse place. But a gullible public with a naïve attitude about our relationship to the truth is little better. Looking to billionaire CEOs to safeguard the truth hardly makes any more sense than buying Trump's certainty that he won the election in a landslide when all actual counting of the votes by bipartisan counters about the election says otherwise. Or a version of Jan. 6 that contradicts what you saw on TV. (Or that the TV version was faked.)
So, what's my relationship here, in this column, to the truth? A Chicago Tribune columnist in a piece several months ago suggested, in defending newspapers against the charge of liberal bias, that the paper has a strict code requiring of its writers strict objectivity in news stories and even in opinion columns like hers. That sort of naïvete, all too common among newspapers, is part of the problem. I make no such claim here.
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As I hope is clear, I'm doing my best to get at the reality of a difficult subject — and feeling, I admit, far from certain that I am succeeding — but at the same time “objective” is not the word I'd use myself for what you are reading. Clearly, I have a dog in this fight, as the saying goes. But my hope is that the writing itself will make it clear to readers that I really am interested in this very important subject, and that though I have a dog in this fight, as do we all, I have, as far as I am aware, no ulterior motive. That seemingly contradictory conclusion is, I think, as close as I can get to an explanation of our relationship to the truth.
Brent Harold, a Cape Cod Times columnist and former English professor, lives in Wellfleet. Email him at kinnacum@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: Lies, deception are nothing new. Are we up to the challenge?
