Truthiness\u2013The Colbert Report<\/a><\/p>\nThere is little doubt that we find ourselves in a world of truthiness, where fact-checking is an obsolete job description and how one feels is a better guide to what is true than anything an \u201cexpert\u201d might have to say. Pilate famously asked Jesus\u00a0\u201cWhat is Truth\u201d?\u2014the post-fact world answer is \u201cwhatever most aligns with how you feel,\u201d or more simply, \u201cwhatever the hell you want it to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is no surprise, of course, to anyone who has paid even marginal attention to politics over the past few years. As Donald Trump and his spokespersons make outrageously false and overblown statements on a daily basis, fact-checking sites fall over each other establishing the falsehood of many of his claims. And it doesn\u2019t matter. Unaware that we are in a post-fact as well as a post-truth world, many people since the rise of Trump have predicted that\u00a0this<\/strong>\u00a0time the outrageous attack on facts would derail his campaign. Those making such predictions (including myself) were under the false impression that one should be held responsible for how well what one says coheres with facts. But as former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski noted at Harvard University\u2019s campaign postmortem symposium after the 2016 election three years ago,<\/p>\nThis is the problem with the media\u00a0<\/strong>[and I guess with millions of others as well]. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn\u2019t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes, when you have a conversation with people, whether it\u2019s around the dinner table or at a bar, you\u2019re going to say things, and sometimes you don\u2019t have all the facts to back it up.<\/strong><\/p>\nOr as CNN\u2019s Scottie Nell Hughes (a Trump advocate), commenting around the same time on a Trump tweet that millions of votes\u2014roughly the number of votes by which he trailed Hillary Clinton in the popular vote\u2014were cast illegally, said:<\/p>\n
One thing that\u2019s been interesting this campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts \u2014 they\u2019re not really facts. Everybody has a way \u2014 it\u2019s kind of like looking at ratings or looking at a glass of half-full water. Everybody has a way of interpreting them to be the truth or not true.\u00a0There\u2019s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, as facts. And so Mr. Trump\u2019s tweets, amongst a certain crowd \u2014 a large part of the population \u2014 are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some facts \u2014 amongst him and his supporters \u2014\u00a0and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies and there\u2019s no facts to back it up.<\/strong><\/p>\nApparently, we are also living in a post-coherence world.<\/p>\n
Feeling the truth in one\u2019s gut does a nice end run on the inconvenient and often challenging activity, as I regularly challenge my students to do, of earning the right to have one\u2019s opinion. Constructing arguments, supporting one\u2019s premises with facts, and being open to changing one\u2019s views in the face of contrary evidence is just so damned annoying and a waste of time.\u00a0As philosopher Roger Scruton notes, in the world before post-truth,<\/p>\n
People interested in truth seek out those who disagree with them. They look for rival opinions, awkward facts and the grounds that might engender hesitation. Such people have a far more complicated life than most.<\/strong><\/p>\nBut I should be fair here, assuming that we have not yet entered a \u201cpost-fairness\u201d world as well. I have said and written more times than I can count over the years that uncertainty is a good thing, that certainty is vastly overrated, and even that there are some areas of human activity (such as philosophy) where facts and definitive answers are far less important than open-ended inquiry and the conviction that the most important questions are never closed. Isn\u2019t this, in its own way, a push-back against the importance of facts?<\/p>\n
Even more importantly, the life of faith seems by its very nature to be immune to fact-checking. During the\u00a0holiday season, for instance, conversations among persons of Christian faith often touch base with the foundational stories of Jesus\u2019 birth in the gospels. Did they really happen in the way the authors claim? Does it matter that the stories are not entirely consistent with each other, that none of them include all of the features of the nativity story that we are so attached to? What if we found out that none of the details really happened in the ways described?<\/p>\n
In truth (!), it\u2019s just about guaranteed that none of the \u201cfacts\u201d of the nativity story are \u201ctrue\u201d in a fact-checking sort of way\u2014such is the nature of ancient texts and events that occurred (or didn\u2019t) over two millennia ago. Does this then reduce faith to a \u201cgut feeling\u201d in the same way that \u201ctruthiness\u201d reduces truth and facts? On a surface level, perhaps; but on the deepest levels, absolutely not.<\/p>\n
I once asked a class a number of years ago, \u201cIf you consider yourself to be a Christian, would it make any difference to your faith if it could be definitively proven that Jesus never existed and that none of the stories in the gospel accounts are factually true?\u201d I received a wide range of responses, but one in particular has stuck with me. A young lady, after much thought, said \u201cNo, I would still be a Christian because it makes me a much better person than I would be if I wasn\u2019t one.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is a great deal of wisdom in her comment. Faith holds the believer to a far more rigorous standard than mere feelings or even facts. Whether or not Jesus was born in a manger or Mary was a virgin when he was born is far less important than what difference the stories and teachings reported in the gospels make in ones\u2019 life. I have often said and written that the best evidence for the truth of one\u2019s faith is a changed life. As the blind man who is told by the Pharisee authorities that the man (Jesus) who healed him is a sinner said, \u201cWhether he is a sinner or not I do not know but I know this\u2014I was blind, and now I see.\u201d That takes the issue to whole different level than fact-checking.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Almost three years ago,\u00a0the Oxford Dictionary named \u201cpost-truth\u201d as its 2016 word of the year, an adjective defined as \u201crelating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.\u201d But those of us who pine for the good old Comedy Central days […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":18981,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[591,11,21,35,40,48,73,75,76,95,101],"tags":[114,169,197,221,242,383,388],"class_list":["post-18957","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-advent","category-bible","category-christianity","category-faith","category-god","category-human-nature","category-philosophy","category-politics","category-power","category-television","category-truth","tag-advent","tag-christianity","tag-donald-trump","tag-faith","tag-god","tag-philosophy","tag-politics"],"yoast_head":"\n
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