Every year the Oxford English Dictionary chooses a Word of the Year that achieved special prominence that year. As you might know, the Word of the Year for 2016 was “post-truth.” Here’s the definition: “Circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal opinion.”
It used to be that objective facts created a level playing field for intelligent argument. Whether you were a politician discussing climate change or a Cubs fan arguing whether Antony Rizzo or Kris Bryant should be MVP, you might argue the meaning or interpretation of the facts, but you agreed that objective facts existed. Batting averages, RBI’s, home runs, do exist. Increase in global temperatures, rising sea levels, drastic shrinking of polar ice caps, do exist. It used to be when someone said, “just look at the facts,” they were taken seriously.
But No More!! In a post-truth world, facts have no authority. It’s how I feel about something that makes it true. It’s whether something lines up with my personal opinions or worldview that makes it true. If I have an inherent bias toward Italians, I’ll never think Anthony Rizzo could be MVP, no matter what his batting average or how RBI’s he has. If I can rally my political base by denying climate change, all the facts in the world mean nothing to me. I get to choose what is true, based solely on my feelings and opinions.
The recent flap about the photographic evidence of President Trump’s inauguration crowd is an obvious example. It resulted in another new term, alternative facts, an unnerving parallel to George Orwell’s novel 1984 in which the government defines facts and truth and most everyone goes along.
But I’ve noticed something about post-truth. I’m guessing that most people engage in post-truth to the degree that they are not personally impacted by the “truth” they create.
What if a congressman denying the science behind climate change suddenly has his doctor show him an MRI revealing he has cancer? Now he probably has a different attitude toward science! In fact, rather than discounting science, I’d guess he is eager to learn all that science might offer in treating his cancer.
Or what if the same congressman had to sell his house in a leafy suburb in the US and live instead on the one of the Solomon Islands that disappeared last year due to rising sea levels?
Or what if the same congressman had to move his three little children ages to parts of Africa where rising temperatures create warmer climates so that malaria carrying mosquitoes—which previously never existed there because of colder temperatures—are now causing a whole generation of children in certain areas to die of malaria for the first time, ever?
Objective facts do exist and do have consequences. We ignore them at our peril. How to get decision-makers to believe in objective facts when someone else usually faces the consequences of ignoring those facts is the dilemma.
As Christians, we have an important perspective on Truth, true Truth, not relative truth. I would love to see examples from your book, or from the Bible, where facts were irrelevant, and the crowd mentality reigned supreme. We have other sources for current political rhetoric, and not so many opportunities to share what people today really need – faith in Jesus.
I have been reading Helmut Wasser Smith’s 2003 book “The Butcher’s Tale. Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town”. Smith recounts the true story of murder in the small Prussian town of Konitz on March 11, 1900. A young man, Ernst Winter, was murdered. In the course of events the Jews of the town were accused of ritual murder. It was just prior to the Passover and the Christian residents were inflamed by a myth that asserted that Jews required the blood of a Christian child as a “Blood revenge sacrifice”.
None of what we are witnessing now is new. The need for scapegoats for our fear and anger requires it seems justification by myth, the presentation of alternative facts which are no facts at all. If this is indeed a “Post-Truth” era it is because the order of magnitude of falsehood in recent years pales before the gross weight of lying that has come from our government and those who support it.
As one advisor to the president has stated in the past there is power in darkness. “Darkness, Darth Vader, Satan! That is where the power is.” (Steven Bannon).
To know the truth that sets us free is to know and live in the light, shining the light of the one who is “the Way, the truth, and the Light” into the darkness. The Darkness cannot overcome that light. Herein is our trust and our hope.