Living In A Post-Truth Era

MSNBC’s Katie Tur shared her attempt to talk with some of her friends on various political issues and presenting the  “facts” about  each topic discussed.  Her friends responded by saying they really didn’t care about the facts—they weren’t sure her “facts” were really fact anyway,  Her friends refused to listen to “objective reality,”  preferring instead to accept their already established political opinions.

Two congressmen were interviewed.  Each one had his own set of facts and the facts of one contradicted the facts of the other.  The moderator presented his facts during the interview and his facts were not those being expressed by the two gentlemen!  Three sets of facts?  A fact is “something that actually exists; reality, truth.”  Are there three different existences, three different realities, three different truths for these three different people?  Is there no such thing, then, as objective truth, reality, fact?

Michael V. Hayden in his new book, The Assault on Intelligence, writes about this new and  strange phenomena:  the question of truth.  “It was no accident,” he says, “that the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year in 2016 was “post-truth,” a condition where objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion or personal belief.”  Hayden’s friend, a British philosopher characterized this  emerging post-truth world as “over-valuing opinion and preference at the expense of proof and data.”  The president of Oxford Dictionary has predicted that the term “post-truth” could become “one of the defining words of our time.”  Within the last  two years since “post-truth” was the “word of the year,” I am more and more convinced that the new word is indeed defining our time.  

Can I live in such a world?  A world where expertise, scholarship, education, data, study, rational evaluation of ideas and happenings—the centrality of fact—is no longer deemed important or central to our life?  No, I cannot.  More than ever, now, today, we need “truth-tellers”—scholars, journalists, scientists, and politicians, writes Hayden, “to preserve the commitment and ability of our society to base important decisions on our best judgment of what constitutes objective reality.”  Can we overcome our narcissism?