Top 10 stories of the year
Four sentences that we should never have had to write: 1) Barack Obama did not found Daesh. 2) Muslims did not celebrate en masse in the streets of New Jersey as the Twin Towers fell. 3) Mexico does not exile its “bad” citizens to the United States. 4) These, of course, were among the thousands of falsehoods Donald Trump propagated on his way to the White House.
The fact-checking website PolitiFact reports that 84 per cent of Trump's statements range from “half true” to “pants on fire.”
The U.S. president-elect says these insidious things, we expect, not because he believes them to be true, but because they serve his demagogic purposes — and because he understands that it doesn’t matter that they aren’t true.
His innovation is not lying, of course; that’s a tactic as old as politics. Rather, it is his instinctive sense that the truth has become immaterial, coupled with his own agnosticism on the issue.
He is not alone. Brexiteers in the United Kingdom repeated ad nauseam and without basis that membership in the European Union cost Britons 350 million pounds every week.
Russian President Vladimir Putin assured the world that there were no Russian soldiers in Ukraine at the very moment that Russia could be observed taking Crimea.
As the year ends, a growing group of mendacious leaders in Poland and Turkey and many countries around the world are thriving in this moment of post-truth politics.
The Oxford English Dictionary, which named “post-truth” its word of 2016, defines the term as “denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
How else to explain the rise of a U.S. president-elect who is known to be truthful roughly 16 per cent of the time?
The causes of this alarming state of affairs are many and complex. Some point to cognitive science, which has shown that humans are not predisposed to seek truth, but rather to avoid it.
We tend to believe information that confirms our pre-existing biases and cherry-pick data to avoid the hard work of questioning our assumptions. The Enlightenment, it seems, was an uphill battle.
The Internet has no doubt compounded reason’s struggle. If our brains want to be exposed only to ideas that confirm our biases, the digital age has made that possible on a grand scale.
The proliferation of online news outlets and the echo chambers we’ve constructed within social media allow us to avoid contrary opinions — and more to the point, inconvenient facts — with unprecedented ease. Amid the unfathomable reams of information, why not pick the “truth” we like best.
But perhaps no factor is more crucial to the current skepticism than the one Brexit leader Michael Gove alluded to in predicting his side's victory: “People in this country have had enough of experts.”
The experts seem to agree. For decades, polls have shown eroding trust in the institutions that, in the secular age, have traditionally been charged with sorting true from false: government, academia, media. As trust has deteriorated, doubt has spread and conspiracy theories, pseudoscience and fake news have taken root.
For this, the institutions themselves are partly to blame. In English-speaking democracies, where trust has declined most precipitously, the state distortions used to justify the war in Iraq left the public wary.
Perhaps more profound, decades of a market-driven version of globalization, touted as the apotheosis of the Enlightenment ideal of self-interested rationalism, did not yield the promised benefits to the many, instead enriching the richest few.
Trust took a battering with the 2008 financial meltdown. No wonder so many voters seemed ready to accept Trump’s claim that the game is rigged.
Scholarship, too, and in particular science, is less trusted today than it has been in many years, perhaps the result in part of a seemingly endless stream of mutually contradictory studies.
Wine, tea, milk, tomatoes, coffee, butter — these are among the many foods that have been shown by some studies to cause cancer and by others to cure it.
The trouble isn’t really science, but what masquerades as science. Unrigorous and biased experimentation can produce just about any result.
Meanwhile, scarce funding and the competitive academic job market have prompted many scientists to exaggerate the significance of their findings in an effort to get attention.
A recent study in the British Medical Journal found more than one third of press releases from top U.K. universities contained exaggerations.
How media covers science also plays a role. Too often, we report studies out of context or without acknowledging their limitations. Too often in our search for sexy headlines, we forget that science is an incremental, fundamentally unsexy enterprise, that any one study is far more likely to provide another small piece in a vast, complex puzzle than it is to be “revolutionary.”
Chasing audiences creates problems beyond science reporting, as Craig Silverman, media editor of BuzzFeed Canada, argues in a report for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism.
In our obsession with clicks, “news organizations play a major role in propagating hoaxes, false claims, questionable rumours and dubious viral content, thereby polluting the digital information stream.”
The loss of trust in our truth-producing institutions is a disaster for democracy. Facts, of course, are not enough. No policy automatically follows, for instance, from the premise that climate change is real.
How we balance the needs of the living with those of future generations or weigh the acute short-term costs of economic upheaval against the longer-term consequences of environmental degradation depends entirely on where you place your priorities. Facts must be interpreted through a moral lens.
But without facts, there can be no democratic debate. If we feel we cannot trust what 98 per cent of scientists say about global warming, then we become vulnerable to a demagogue who would say against all evidence and reason that climate change is a Chinese hoax.
If we refuse to believe the emerging consensus that working-class stagnation is at least in part the result of long-standing economic policies, then we may be seduced by those who would pander to baseless fear and seek to scapegoat outsiders.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist,” the German-born Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in 1951, “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
The triumph this year of Trumpism and Brexiteers no doubt reflects our neurological nature and inexorable cultural trends, but given the stakes, fatalism must not be seen as an option.
Those whose job it is to tell the truth must now tell it in the face of growing opposition — and we must tell it better.