From Your Minister
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My roommate in college was a chronic liar. Though in ways we were close to one another, her constant lies ensured that we could never be too close. To this day, I don’t know if her father really died during our sophomore year or if that was another lie. Actually, I don’t even know if the living father she talked about was a real person at all or a fantasy person she wished to know. In retrospect, her lying says to me that she wanted big parts of herself to remain safe and out of reach.
Because of her lies, I could never relax. I was on edge and uncomfortable. I hesitated to assert anything she had said before, because her lies were not even consistent from day to day, and I didn’t want to hear new lies that would pour out if I seemed to challenge her about that inconsistency—though sometimes I fantasized about pinning her to the wall and demanding “The Truth” about various things.
Lately, a similar discomfort and edginess has been constant as I’ve negotiated the U.S. political landscape. Oxford Dictionaries named “post-truth” the word of the year in late November, 2016. They describe “post-truth” as:
“relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In this case, the “post-” prefix doesn’t mean “after” so much as it implies an atmosphere in which a notion is irrelevant.
The folks at Oxford go on to analyze the indifference with which voters treated actual, measurable, facts in several elections, including the vote in Britain to leave the European Union, and the Presidential election in the U.S. in 2016. In the U.S., since the election many of us have been dumbfounded by the constancy and ridiculousness of some of our President’s lies. Why say things that are so easily disproven? I was helped in my understanding by Masha Gessen, a Russian journalist who documented Putin’s rise to power and now writes about the similarities between Putin and Trump. She writes:
Lying is the message. It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself…. They communicate a single message: power lies in being able to say what they want, when they want, regardless of the facts. [Putin] is president of his country and king of reality.
Assertion of falsehoods is a demonstration of power, pronouncing oneself king of reality. For those of us who are committed to some shared understanding of reality that is born out in evidence, it is sheer assertion of raw power over us to declare that we are now “post-truth.” There is nowhere to go in a conversation with someone who insists, despite all evidence, that 2 plus 2 is 7 or the War of 1812 took place in 2014. We are left stranded on an island, alone, wondering if there is a bridge that can reconnect us to the person we are trying to communicate with.
I’ve read studies that say confronting people with inconsistencies in their beliefs causes them to double down on them. I’m sure I’m included in “people” here, but I will say that being confronted with facts that contradict my opinions has actually changed my mind from time to time, if the facts come from reliable sources. The term “liberal” in “liberal religion” means that we are open to new ideas, new learning, new ways of thinking. That doesn’t, however, mean all ideas are equal, or worthy of respect.
Back in the 1990s, when I was obsessed with the so-called “religious right” and read a great deal of their literature, I was stunned to learn that they traced the beginning of the fall of America to the Unitarian’s takeover of Harvard in 1805. They remember with longing that, prior to the Unitarians, students memorized the Bible and did not challenge its authority. Unitarians were committed to critical thinking (which has been explicitly denounced in recent Texas Republican Party platforms, but has long been suspect.) This conflict between those who want to keep learning and evolving, developing a multidimensional and complex view of truth, and those who want Biblical authority to be the ultimate King of Reality, has been around for a long, long time, and it’s not going anywhere. The permutations are new each day, as the same fundamentalist Christians who claimed to care about Biblical authority now seem to want only raw political power, waving aside wildly unethical behavior on the part of their leaders.
I comfort myself by knowing that truth has a power of its own. Over and over, I have heard the stories of people who kept insisting things that they knew were not true, to protect themselves from truths that eventually won out and broke them down. I comfort myself that, at some fundamental human level, “Post-truth” is yet another lie.
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