by Thomas Neal
The following article is a transcript of a Middle School assembly given by Mr. Neal in the DRT on Monday 12 June 2017.
The following article is a transcript of a Middle School assembly given by Mr. Neal in the DRT on Monday 12 June 2017.
British politics was
dominated last year by the EU Referendum; in America, it was the Presidential
election. Both campaigns caused spikes in the usage of the phrase post-truth. But what is post-truth? The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as:
when facts are less influential in
shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
So, we’re not talking here about
lying (OED: ‘an intentionally false
statement’), nor are we talking about searching for the truth through studying,
debating, and conducting experiments. No; instead we are talking about living
in a world in which facts no longer
matter—a world in which the truth
simply doesn’t matter.
But I believe facts do matter. I believe there is such a thing as truth, which means I believe some things are true and some things
are false; some things are right, and some things are wrong. And I believe that
if we lose our sense of truth, then we lose what it means to be human; we lose
our sense of reality, our sense of perspective.
*
* *
Published in 1949, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a fantasy,
social science fiction novel. In it, the U.K. is renamed ‘Airstrip One,’ a
province of ‘Oceania,’ in a futuristic world in which the all-powerful
government (‘The Party’) engages in perpetual warfare, surveillance of its
citizens (‘Big Brother’), and manipulation of the public. In Oceania, truth doesn’t matter anymore: truth is regarded as politically
incorrect. The only thing that matters is whatever the ruling party says matters, and whatever the party says is ‘true’.
In place of the truth, the Party requires all citizens
to believe the obviously false dogma that 2 + 2 = 5. Now, I hope you all know
that 2 + 2 in fact equals 4. But in Oceania, that doesn’t matter. The Party
says 2 + 2 = 5, and that is what its citizens must believe.
Clearly, this is
nonsense, although it is by no means a new idea. Way back in 1562, the German
theologian Johann Wigand said:
No-one can lawfully doubt that two and
two make four, because that type of
knowledge is part of our nature.
The great
eighteenth-century scholar Samuel Johnson—some of you might have heard of
Johnson’s famous dictionary—said in 1779:
You may have reason why two and two
should make five; but they will still
make four.
But, scarily, we are
seeing this kind of attitude creep into our everyday lives: in our politics, in
our religion, in our morals. George Orwell was right. We are now living in a
world in which facts count for
nothing. What matters today is opinion, feeling, emotion.
*
* *
The President of the
United States of America, Donald Trump, is the leading exponent of something
called post-truth politics—that is,
politics which relies on statements that feel
true, but have no basis in fact.
You might remember
that the morning after Mr. Trump’s swearing-in as President, his Press
Secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed the event had attracted ‘the largest audience
ever to witness an inauguration […] both in person and around the globe’. But the
photographic evidence tells another story. The
New York Times estimated that President Trump drew a crowd of about
one-third the size of President Obama’s in 2009.
Even worse, when the President’s
counsellor, Kellyanne Conway, gave a TV interview just a few days later, she
stated that Mr. Spicer had not lied, but presented ‘alternative facts’. The
interviewer responded: ‘Look, alternative facts are not facts. They’re
falsehoods.’ What I find really interesting, though, is that within four days
of the interview—which was covered by newspapers and TV stations around the world—sales
of George Orwell’s book Nineteen
Eighty-Four had increased by 9,500%, and jumped to the number-one bestseller
on Amazon.com.
But Donald Trump is not alone. Back
in 2010, the then President of Poland, Lech Kaczyński, was one of 96 victims of
a terrible plane crash: with no evidence, the Polish government claimed he had
been assassinated by Russia. And on 15th July last year, there was
an attempted coup in Turkey; soon afterwards Turkish politicians claimed the
perpetrators had acted on orders issued by the CIA, although again there was no
evidence to support their theory.
One of the recurring themes of Mr.
Trump’s presidency has been his criticism of media organisations such as the
BBC and CNN as ‘Fake News’. But what is Fake News? Fake News is journalism that
consists of deliberately false information or hoaxes, usually spread via the
Internet, with the intention to deceive the public.
To be clear: Fake News is not the
same as bad reporting. The media do, of course, occasionally get it wrong.
After the US election result was announced, Dana Schwartz, a journalist working
for The Observer, tweeted a
photograph of the new president, claiming it had been photo-shopped to make his
hands look bigger; she said she was ‘100%’ sure this was the case. The tweet
received 37,193 likes, and was shared 25,910 times. Within a few hours, several
other media companies had produced conclusive evidence that this was, in fact,
false information: the photo had not been edited. Ms Schwartz then issued
another tweet, admitting she had not checked her sources. But the damage had
already been done. And Ms Schwartz couldn’t resist taking another dig at Mr.
Trump: ‘I do hope Trump saw this and it ruined his day,’ she wrote. This last
comment, I think, exposes Fake News for what it really is. Ms Schwartz was not
making an honest critique of Mr. Trump’s policies; she was making an emotional
attack on his character—and even if the facts didn’t work out, at least it made
a good story. The truth just doesn’t
matter in Fake News.
Still, I am not suggesting Mr.
Trump is blameless; he is as guilty of spreading Fake News as any media organisation.
Mr. Trump now uses the term ‘Fake News’ as an insult to hurl at any reporting
he doesn’t like. Back in February, Mr. Trump actually said: ‘Any negative polls
are Fake News!’ Dana Schwartz used Fake News to sway public opinion; Donald
Trump used the accusation of Fake News to hide public opinion. Both were
attacks on democracy, attacks on the truth.
But amid all this talk
about Fake News and how to deal with it, one fact seems to have got lost: Fake News is not new; it has been around
for centuries. Fake News took off at
the same time that news
began to circulate widely, after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press
in 1439. As printing expanded, so
flowed Fake News, from spectacular Pagan stories of sea monsters and witches,
to Protestant claims that sinners were responsible for natural disasters.
·
Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United
States, created Fake News stories about murderous Native Americans working with
King George III of England, in an effort to influence public opinion for the
American Revolution.
·
In 1844, Protestant newspapers in Philadelphia
falsely claimed that Irishmen were stealing Bibles from public schools, a Fake
News story which led to violent riots and attacks on Catholic churches.
·
Over a two-year period, 1932–33, The
New York Times published numerous articles by its Pulitzer Prize-winning
Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty, denying the fact that the Soviet Union had
starved to death between ten and twenty million of its own citizens in the
Holodomor famine, which is now regarded as one of the worst atrocities of the
twentieth century.
·
Throughout World War II, both the Nazis and the Allies employed Fake
News in the form of political propaganda to encourage the folks at home and
discourage the enemy. In England, we had the British Political Warfare
Executive; in Germany, Joseph Goebbels headed the Reich Ministry of Public
Enlightenment and Propaganda.
Today, however, Fake News is a worldwide
phenomenon, spread through websites which specialise in creating
attention-grabbing headlines, such as: ‘Obama signs executive order banning the
Pledge of Allegiance in schools nationwide,’ which received 2,177,000 Facebook
shares, comments, and reactions; and ‘Pope Francis shocks the world, [and]
endorses Donald Trump for President,’ which received 961,000 Facebook shares
and likes. In fact, recent research from academics at Northwestern University,
Illinois concluded that over 30% of all Fake News traffic can be linked back to
Facebook—as opposed to only 8% of ‘real’ news.
So, how do we spot Fake News? The International
Federation of Library Associations and Institutions has come up with a list of
tips: consider the source; read beyond the headlines; check the author; check
the supporting sources; check the date; ask yourself, ‘is it a joke?’; ask
yourself if your own prejudices and biases could be affecting your judgement;
and, of course, ask the experts.
But what about the Fake News which never
dies? What about the Fake News which is already ingrained in us? Here are three
common misconceptions:
·
Many people believe the nineteenth-century plumber Thomas
Crapper invented the flush toilet. Wrong.
Flushing toilets were first used in the Indus Valley civilisation, around 4,600
years ago (in the 26th century BC).
·
Many people believe that lightning never strikes the same
place twice. Wrong. There is no
scientific reason why lightning couldn’t strike the same place twice. Objects
and places which are most prominent or conductive are most likely to be struck:
so, the Empire State Building in New York, for example, is struck by lightning
around 100 times a year.
·
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” is surely one of the most
famous catchphrases of all time, spoken numerous times by the great Sherlock
Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s popular novels. Wrong. In fact, the phrase doesn’t appear in a single Sherlock
Holmes novel. The phrase originates in P. G. Wodehouse’s 1909-10 serial novel Psmith, Journalist.
So, as Mark Twain once said: ‘A lie can travel
halfway around the world while the truth is [still] putting on its shoes.’ Or
did he? Some attribute that quotation to Winston Churchill, others to Thomas
Jefferson. In fact, the quotation has been traced to an article published in
1710 by Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s
Travels.
So, how do we combat living in a post-truth age?
There are loads of fact-checking websites out there, including: www.snopes.com and www.factcheck.org There is also
an organisation called the International Fact-Checking Network, launched in
2015, which supports international efforts in fact-checking and provides a
vetting process for media and news organisations. These things are all great.
But, more than anything, I urge you to think—I
urge you to question, challenge, and explore. As the English philosopher
William Penn said: ‘In all debates, let truth be thy aim, not victory’.
Now, these examples probably seem fairly trivial;
who cares who invented the flush
toilet, or who did or didn’t say a line in a novel? But what
about ideas and views which affect people’s lives at the most profound level?
Truth is a subject close very
to my heart because, as some of you may know, I am a Catholic. What you
probably don’t know is that I was born into a committed, church-going Anglican
family, and converted to Catholicism after completing my university studies. It
was my own search for the truth which led me to the Catholic Church. As a
Catholic, and as a teacher, I am obsessed
with the truth. And I want to encourage you, too, to seek the truth in
everything you do: no matter how tough it can be, no matter how difficult the
journey, or how unpopular it makes you.
Another line from George Orwell: “In a time of
universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”
Ladies and gentlemen, I urge you to never grow tired of seeking for what is good, honest, and true. Combat
the Fake News and the Alternative Facts of this world we live in. And finally,
be prepared that the truth can hurt sometimes: if you seek the truth, you are
not always going to have an easy life, but you are guaranteed a happy one.
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