Is it just me, or does it increasingly seem many people are living in an alternate reality? People of all political stripes seemingly ignore irrefutable facts, and make up their own truths. This new cultural habit of ignoring facts en masse is at once dumfounding and utterly predictable. Allow me to explain.
The futurist author and philosopher Aldous Huxley once stated, “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” You have probably heard the terms post-modern, post-colonial, post-national, post-racial. A new noteworthy “post” buzzword is post-truth. Apparently at some point in the distant past the truth mattered, but it seems we’re past that now.
Politicians and pundits ignore truth and stick to talking points, often telling outright lies. People troll social media posts online with vitriol of the lowest kind, never questioning the lies that made them so angry to begin with. How do you pursue truth in a world where truth increasingly doesn’t seem to matter? This is one of the most pressing questions for the Church in the 21st century.
“Post-truth” was Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year for 2016, beating out “alt-right” and “adulting” for the number one slot. Amazingly, the use of “post-truth” increased in usage by over 2,000 percent in the last 18 months. The Oxford Dictionary defines 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.
Objective facts being “less influential” seems to not go far enough in many cases, where objective facts seem to have no bearing whatsoever on people’s impressions of truth.
“Obama is a Muslim!”
“Bush was behind 9/11!”
“Climate change isn’t happening!”
“Russia had nothing to do with it!”
“All evangelicals are bigots!”
Such baseless claims find no merit in verifiable fact, but rather appeal to people’s emotions and personal biases. Many of us may scratch our heads at the advent of the post-truth trend, but in many ways post-truth is a natural conclusion to post-modernism and the rise of continental philosophy — hardly an invention of the alt-right. The rich irony here, as pointed out in a recent Newseek op-ed, is many of those gifted intellectuals who have pushed us past the compartmentalized boundaries of modernity (even in helpful ways) are seeing the fruit of their work play out in culture.
One could certainly argue that postmodern philosophers and theologians did not create postmodernity, but have only given voice to a global paradigm shift in human thinking. Regardless of how we got here I believe this is, above all, a spiritual issue of the first order.
Will we continue to allow the culture of post-truth politics, post-truth news, and even post-truth religion to define life in 2017?
James 3:17 states, “But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.”
If we are not peaceable and open to reason, we surely lack godly wisdom in our lives and in our culture. Moreover, God’s Spirit is personified as “Lady Wisdom” in the Scripture (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes). When we fail to reason with one another, and make every decision or feigned outrage based on emotion and personal bias, we shut God’s Spirit out of our lives.
Perhaps one of the best things we can do for our own spiritual (and even physical) health in 2017 is to turn off the talking heads, pundits and network news stations, to pay no attention to partisan hacks and radio personalities posing as journalists, and to refuse to read fake news or let it influence our thinking.
Perhaps also, our spiritual health might increase if we admit our own bents up front, avoid confirmation bias when we seek information, drop our agendas, and truly listen to one another. Maybe then we wouldn’t ignorantly take every opinion different from our own as an affront to human decency. Conceivably, we might even respect leaders who make informed and principled decisions, even those we disagree with, instead of labeling them as categorically “divisive.”
The post-truth culture is the post-wisdom culture. A post-wisdom culture is a culture that also rejects a key attribute of God’s self. It was when imploring his disciples to stand for gospel truth that Jesus said, “What does it profit to gain the whole world but lose your soul?” (Mark 8:36). Many, it seems, have indeed lost their souls in search of power at the expense of truth.