Truth? I don’t know what that means. Just give me the
facts.”
--My journalism professor,
Conrad Fink
The problem with Internet quotes is that you can’t
always depend on their accuracy”
--Abraham Lincoln, 1864
Throughout the ages, all the
great philosophers have asked, “What is truth?”
The past few weeks, the
not-so-great philosophers (my friends and I) have been discussing truth, as
well.
For some reason, we’ve found
ourselves discussing the topic of honesty again and again. While this post is
not directly related to a specific area of law, a lawyer’s life’s work is
applying the facts of a case to the law. When you think about it, these
fact-based judgments are a non-lawyer’s life’s work, too: Will this person be a
good marriage partner? Is it safe for me to walk down this street? For which
candidate should I vote? Am I saving enough for retirement? Etc.
To do this life’s work,
then, and to make the best judgments, we need to start by finding as many facts
as we reasonably can. I’ve been surprised by the repeated failures of myself
and others to do just that. We’ve got access to more information than any other
people in history, and we’re still ingesting a fact-free diet, both personally
and globally. Why?
Liar, liar, pants… are really tight
In one of my recent
discussions about honesty, I confessed to my closest friend that I have been
dishonest for much of my life and plan to work hard to improve this personality
flaw. While I am quite honest in the traditional way (I give back the change
when the cashier gives me too much, report all income on my taxes, etc.), I
tend to lie to myself in two key ways (and, as Shakespeare could tell you, it
means I’m not being honest with others):
1) I have befriended and
even dated people who did not share my values. I told myself that I was being
accepting and forgiving, when in fact I was making an unholy bargain—I’ll turn
a blind eye to your immoral or just plain mean behaviors that don’t square
with my values of hard work and integrity, and you will reward me by loving me.
(Yes, I’m aware of how pathetic this sounds and I’m uncomfortable writing it in
a blog that is intertwined with my professional life, but… you know, honesty....)
Predictably, I am devastated later when they turn their bad behavior on me,
thereby failing to hold up their end of the flimsy bargain. Then, I’m angry
and that “you knew I was a rattlesnake when you picked me up” fable is ringing
in my head—but who was the more dishonest person here? 2) I tell myself that
I’m doing everything I can to solve a problem (for example: running every day
and eating right—ignoring the many days I didn’t run and the chocolate bar I
just ate) and then—yep!—being frustrated when I discover that my jeans have
magically become jeggings while folded up in my drawer overnight.
While these examples sound
humorous, this self-deception has serious consequences and erodes my ability to
control my own life and to take care of myself.
Truth is beauty?
In another honesty-related
discussion, I was wondering with another friend (who is a professional actor)
what makes a good performance. He noted that a good “performance” is not a
performance at all. While the actor has never been in that character’s precise
situation, he or she has felt those precise emotions, and the actor must convey
that to the audience. It’s not “acting”—it’s honest communication. I added that
I had read an article in which a philosopher (OK, so it was a post by a
self-help guru on Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP blog) argued that bad acting
performances are so painful to watch because they are so clearly untrue. In
other words, humans are so hungry for truth that they instinctively reject
anything that is false.
This is a wonderful comment
on human nature, but I wonder if THIS can be true. If we humans desire truth so
much, how do you explain, for example, the nonsense that people post on
Facebook? How come well-educated, reasonable people are unable to spot an
obvious falsehood and even defend it when someone else refutes it using several
credible, fact-based sources?
Bad news
I think we’re being fooled
by Internet sources that are not as trustworthy as they appear to be.
Just twenty years ago, it
took a lot of time and money to print a newspaper or to produce and air a
television show.
Now, one need only have an
available internet connection. It’s cheap and easy to write a blog or to post a
video to YouTube. Even though we know it’s just that easy, we still trust these
homemade efforts as if they were the fact-checked and edited newspapers and
magazines of the past.
Further, the quality of the
content of newspapers, magazines, and newscasts used to be guarded by a
gatekeeper—an editor or producer—who ideally ensured that the limited space or
airtime was used for its highest good. Now, countless bloggers can write
whatever they want and no one questions it. Then, these blog posts are picked
up by legitimate-looking aggregator sites such as salon.com, slate.com, or
huffingtonpost.com, and the “articles” start to look like news.
Forget the gatekeeper: The
aggregator sites appear to be loosely edited if they’re edited at all. Not only
is no one fact-checking the “articles”—no one is separating the wheat from the
chaff. After all, now there’s unlimited space and therefore no limit to how
many pieces can be published. We get everyone’s report on everything—some
fact-based and some not, some based on credible sources and some not—and it all
looks equally legitimate and relevant. (I mean, how many times can you
deconstruct an episode of “Mad Men” or “Girls”?)
I recently became painfully
aware of this process when I was arguing with two high school friends about
whether a report of an African-American family (25 people in all) being refused
service due to their race at a Wild Wings Café in North Charleston, S.C., was
true. (I have little doubt that the party was asked to leave. I am arguing that
it is almost certainly not as simple as: “We don’t like black people! Don’t
serve them!” The restaurant is a chain restaurant in a populated, diverse
community, and it apparently serves and employs people of all races on a
daily basis without incident. This is not a 1960s Woolworth’s lunch counter, so
I am highly skeptical of a claim of such blatant racism. Eventually, Wild Wings
Café placed its manager on administrative leave and launched an investigation.
They apologized to the party, asked them to come in and meet with management so
they could apologize in person and discuss the incident, and offered a free
meal to all 25 people.)
The first report of the
incident came from one of the family’s members’ Facebook post. Someone blogged
about it, and this was parroted by other blogs until it appeared on
huffingtonpost.com. It then appeared in a London tabloid, in USA Today, and on
a local TV news station. Incredibly, no one interviewed the man himself, any
other member of the dining party, or any other restaurant patrons or staff. It
was all single-source and unverified, and still they ran with it.
One of my two “opponents” in
the debate said, “Well, we were right. It looks like it happened just as we
thought!” When I asked how he knew this, I was directed to “all of the news
reports”—blog after blog, simply reposting the original post word-for-word (or
re-stating it with no new reporting and no new information), no questions
asked.
Why are we so willing to
believe such an awful tale before we know it’s true? Racism is a serious
accusation, and now, because we’ve published this story far and wide, we’ve
accused the wait staff and the restaurant manager of a terrible thing, and
we’ve jeopardized their jobs. Plus, we’ve told African-Americans they still
can’t eat at certain restaurants in the South, further damaging race relations
in this country—all based on a story with very little basis in fact.
Why are we willing to take
such a specious tale and accept it as fact? What makes the implausible
plausible to us?
Confirmation bias
We don’t gather facts and
then form our opinions based on them. Instead, we form our opinions, and then
we select facts to support our beliefs. We give more weight to facts that
support our beliefs and downplay those that don’t. This cherry-picking effort
is called “confirmation bias.”
If we can’t accept that
we’ve got an incurable disease, we’re likely to downplay the scientific opinions
of trusted doctors and go to Mexico for nonsensical oxygen therapy. If we don’t
support the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”), those outlandish Facebook memes
start to appear reasonable to us. We’ll start “sharing” preposterous stories
that the federal government can now implant every man, woman, and child with
electronic tracking chips or that death panels will now refuse treatment to
costly senior citizens.
The harm here is clear. On a
personal level, we waste money, endanger our health, stay in bad relationships,
etc. With politics, we don’t debate the real strengths and weaknesses of our
political candidates and their proposed legislation, instead squabbling about
whether our new mandatory RFID chips will make it easier for us to be rounded
up into FEMA camps. We miss every opportunity to effect real change.
What’s the answer?
Beats me! It seems we’ve
been lying to ourselves and others since the dawn of humanity, so it looks like
dishonesty is here to stay. As for me, I’ve joined a running club for
accountability and I’m going to start speaking up when I’m not comfortable with
someone else’s deception. At least I can be honest with myself, and then I can
fit into my jeans.
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ReplyDeleteThe gatekeepers weren't as adept as we like to remember. Participating in the antiwar movement I saw big city newspapers whose reports on demonstrations were unrecognizable to those who were actually there. Death tolls in the riots after Martin Luther King was killed were the lead story on all the TV networks, but somehow they neglected to mention that most all who died were black. I remember the anti-black sentiment a case generated in the Boston Area: http://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/stuart-charles.htm.
ReplyDeleteThat being the case, you're right that with the internet, "news" is too often dispensed by the inmates who run the asylum.