Truth, trust, Trump and the US way
The schism in America taps fundamental questions of existence, says Peter Boyer
AS the pandemic wave swept the US late last year, hospital staff were faced by patients who didn’t like them wearing masks, and who believed to their last breath that they could not possibly have the virus because it was fake news. It’s hard to fathom.
The nurses, aides and doctors, suffering from too little sleep and the trauma of caring for very ill patients in an overstretched hospital, had a right to think patients would at least be civil to them.
But that’s what happens when people who believe any regulation is a breach of their human rights have their prejudice reinforced by everything they see, hear and read. For them, traditional news sources have been supplanted by search and social platforms like Google and Facebook, whose oftenuseful algorithms can also draw users into some very narrow, very dark alleys.
Those dark alleys led to the Congressional censure last week of Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly elected member who has repeated false slurs against political enemies, while promoting calls for House speaker Nancy Pelosi to be shot and claims that Joe Biden cheated to win the presidency.
Last week she sought to distance herself from the more hair-raising theories under the QAnon banner, but she clearly likes going down those dark alleys, like some others, including Australian federal MP Craig Kelly.
Drawing on clinical evidence, Australian health specialists have concluded that drugs touted by non-scientific sources as effective treatments for COVID-19 are ineffective and probably unsafe. Though neither a doctor nor a medical scientist, Kelly has objected strongly to the findings. It’s his story and he’s sticking to it.
Challenges to established historical and scientific knowledge by people with no specialist expertise would have been unimaginable to this cadet journalist in the 1960s.
Back then, journalism was presented to me as something akin to science, where truth reigns supreme. Like all conscientious journalists, I worked hard to separate objective truth from my beliefs and prejudices.
It’s why many journos were driven to despair by Donald Trump as he sought to make his fabricated universe the national norm. Despite Trump’s best efforts, objective truth remains the touchstone of modern journalism, but over many years I came to discover that in the free-for-all of humanity, it’s not the whole story.
Understanding human life requires us to investigate ourselves. Scientists have been able to reach objective truth, or something close to it, about the composition of stars and the dynamics of climates and ecosystems to how atoms and viruses behave. But they have never quite nailed themselves.
Centuries of scientific study have failed to reveal what the mind is, or consciousness. We know a lot about how brains and nervous systems pass signals by means of electrical impulses, but science is at sea over feelings like hope, love, anger, fear and pain. We know they exist, and science can tell us what caused them, but it cannot pinpoint what they are.
Science struggles with our allegiance to religion, political ideology, nation, corporation, and law. We have invented all these, and more, as part of the process of organising life. They are not real objects or phenomena, things science can define and categorise. Yet these imagined things shape the stories that define us.
As a journalist, I can’t observe humanity objectively because I’m part of it. We all attach ourselves to one or other of those imagined things and their stories not because we’re in la-la land but because they help us make sense of our place in the scheme of things.
Kelly, Green, the protesting patients who survived and those who trashed the US Capitol all have their stories.
Saying they’re wrong, ridiculing them, prosecuting them will not change their minds. Only time and circumstances can do that.