Clinging to truth in apocalyptic times
On Oct. 17, for the first time in recorded history, a black flag was raised above the Imam Reza shrine in northeast Iran, calling the worldwide Muslim faithful to greet the last caliph, the Mahdi who will lead Muslims to rule the world, in response to an Israeli missile strike on a Gaza hospital that killed 500 civilians.
Basically nothing about that sentence is true. It is far from the first time such a banner has been raised at the Shia Islamic holy site. The black flag is a sign of mourning, not a call to arms, nor a herald of the coming of the Mahdi. We now know that the event that inspired the flag definitely did not kill 500 people — 100 is the new best estimate — and was unlikely to have been caused by an Israeli missile.
None of that mattered, of course, as these claims ricocheted across the internet last week. People who didn’t know better as well as those who should — including journalists — excitedly boosted and legitimized them.
Few believed that the Mahdi was at hand, of course, but many believed that Muslims believed he was at hand, and were ready to go to war with the nonMuslim world. Many believed without questioning that Israel had targeted a hospital and that Hamas’s reports were credible.
Simplify, simplify
The most dangerous untruths are the ones we want to believe. They confirm our suspicions and prejudices; they fulfill our desires, whether consciously or subconsciously; and most of all, they simplify rather than complicate our thinking and our world.
Apocalyptic prophesies have purchase because we live in apocalyptic times. Many in both Israel and Palestine sense that the current conflict could be the end of one or both societies. Many here and in other countries fear that the conflict could lead to World War III.
Meanwhile, religious millenarianism is on the rise — but so, too, is the secular apocalypticism of climate change. Indeed, never since the Middle Ages has it been so popular to believe the human world is ending in our days.
Apocalypse appeals to us. When the world is ending, the righteous and the wicked are finally revealed, and everyone knows where they stand. The moral drama of human existence surges to the foreground, and each person gets to play the part he has always imagined for himself.
If Muslims were being summoned to Iran like the Borg to the mothership, political morality would be so much easier. There would be an obvious and implacable enemy, with existential stakes against which all other considerations melt away. And our own lives would have real meaning beyond paychecks and pills and TikToks.
Except it’s not that simple.
Justifying lying
Many people, from Hamas propagandists to edgy American undergraduates to Arab-state foreign ministers, really wanted there to be 500 dead Palestinians
in that hospital, killed by Israel’s hand. It would have supported everything they believed about Israeli perfidy; it would have confirmed their own righteousness; and it would have clarified the moral stakes while justifying further action on behalf of the unblemished innocents of Palestine.
In fairness, however, credulousness has gone both ways. Early reports of 40 beheaded babies in Kfar Aza, clearly evoking the Biblical massacre of the Holy Innocents, proved to be imprecise, at best. But that hasn’t stopped the story from serving as the ultimate example of Hamas’s barbarism.
Needless to say, there’s no need for exaggeration. The truth suffices.
The trouble is discerning what the truth actually is. Today, everyday people — not to mention journalists and policymakers — don’t just have to contend with the propaganda of words. Without much sophistication, intelligence agencies and individual troublemakers can conjure up artificial images, audio and video; with no sophistication at all, anyone can slap a misleading caption on a piece of media from a different time and place, post it on the internet, and cause a world-changing sensation.
And when the stakes of a conflict appear to be politically existential, not to mention theologically charged, everyone involved not only has an incentive to lie, but feels morally justified in doing so.
Nothing but the truth
One of the problems with apocalyptic thinking is that if it truly is the end of all things, then it’s easy to decide the usual rules don’t apply.
After all, if the stakes are high enough, it would seem to be wrong not to deceive. What’s a lie against the good of survival? Against the good of justice? Against the good of the victory of righteousness over wickedness?
The temptation is to believe you’re so obviously and inalienably on the side of the angels that no tactic is out of bounds — that the very fact that you have chosen an action, and chosen it to achieve a good purpose, makes it virtuous. But in the process, you become exactly what you claim to hate: the corrupt, the bully, the deceiver.
In other words, the belief that we live in an apocalyptic time encourages the deceit — and therefore the distrust and the division — that makes it more and more apocalyptic.
There can be no righteousness, no peace, no justice outside of truth. These goods can never be built on a foundation of deception or fantasy. We can only understand and pursue what is right when we first understand, and cannot imagine betraying, what is.
This is all the more important, for every person, in times of crisis and confusion — not just in far flung places, but in our own politics — when truth itself becomes the battlefield. If we don’t commit to loving and seeking the truth, regardless of its difficulty or complexity, we will be deceived, and in turn deceive others.
It is our rejection of the truth that is both the result and the beginning of our rejection of each other. The morality of a perceived apocalypse hastens a real one.