Western civilisation can't regain lost trust

THE present pandemic has revealed more than medical truths of virology, ascertained by brilliant scientific researchers in hospitals and universities across the globe, the best of our education system,

in the tragedy of populism, millions of ill-educated adults, who reject all this information, having persuaded themselves that, with no effort whatever in their lives, they have some more accurate knowledge.

The situation is more desperate than the 15th century, when printing was invented, and the majority of the population could not read.

At least that majority recognised their own limitations, that, without years of formal study, it cannot be possible for one person to reach the truths of this universe.

I know people who tell me that they have ‘researched’ a subject, by poking buttons on a mobile phone.

A phone is a wonderful teacher, to supply a vast number of reliable and specific answers to questions, but education is much more substantial than that.

The science of virology has its basis, not just recent lab work, but upon discoveries made over centuries, in a progressive, accumulative endeavour by geniuses such as Louis Pasteur and Edward Jenner.

The best of us are the inheritors of that treasure of knowledge, which is dependable, because each part supports the other parts, in a structure of universal science.

The tragedy of phone, and Social Media, is the self-appointed authorities, in gross error, often out of conceit, and, even more corrosive, the army of liars, who have chosen dishonesty as the path to their own success.

This is a technological extension of that deceitful culture in which we had been held by some press moguls, for forty years.

Western civilisation has lost the essential cement of trust, and will not find it again.

C N Westerman, by email