Tangerine Dream

o, what are we going to do about the truth? Sergeant Joe Friday of Dragnet would instruct a witness to ‘just give me the facts ma’am, the facts’. He thought that these were clear, fixed and immutable, like rocks on a river bed. But one of the defining characteristics of the 21st century is the degree to which the truth is regarded as plastic, malleable, open to debate and interpretation. Not like the rocks at all. More like shifting sands.

Scientific rationalists and religious philosophers, working from radically different positions, blame post-modernism. Frankly, in Hog Haven the former are on firmer ground than the latter. And maybe they’re right. 
But maybe the post-modernists are just the intellectual fairies atop the tree of modern life. They didn’t make it so, they’re just part of how it is.
Let’s take Tony Blair’s confession that he stretched the truth ‘to breaking point’ in phone conversations with the Rev Ian Paisley and Sinn Féin representatives during power-sharing negotiations. He told the Irish Times last Saturday that he believes that politicians are obliged to conceal and distort the full truth from time to time, where the interests of the bigger strategic goal demand it.
There are those who might argue that this is exactly what the Irish Government has been doing with regard to Anglo Irish Bank – and they might therefore beg to differ with Blair. It comes back to the question: who agreed to the particular ‘bigger strategic goal’? And where, on a possible scale of deceit, can we place the myth of Weapons of Mass Destruction, the truth, stretched to breaking point, on which the Iraq war was based?
A second influencer in the decay of truth has to be the media. I’m not talking about those few journos who blatantly abuse the truth or make up stories in order to create a denial that then becomes the story, although these, clearly, are central to the corruption of truth.
No, I’m thinking about gullible or lazy hacks who don’t understand anything about scientific method or standards of proof, who resort to the internet for all their information and who sloppily reproduce what they come across irrespective of how ungrounded in truth it is.
As a small and banal example, take the case of Gordon Brown’s tangerine-throwing tantrum. This was reported in the Daily Telegraph some time back under the headline, “Gordon Brown accused of throwing a tangerine”. The Telegraph claimed that “one of the factory workers had told the Sun” all about the incident.
But the story originated in a hoax call from Robert Popper (http://www.robertpopper.com) to London talk radio show LBC in which, on air as ‘Robin’, he told the show’s host that he’d met Brown during a factory tour and that the PM had lost his temper and thrown a tangerine into one of the machines, causing it to break down. Popper also claimed that Brown had called a fellow worker a “citric idiot”.
So it was all a prank, a fiction! Nonetheless, it made headlines and fed into the debate about Gordon Brown’s alleged bullying …
One is tempted to suggest that some of our crankier phone-in shows should be targeted in this way. But, of course, they are already, if not by Duchampiste pranksters then by packs of influencers, jokers and crackpots.
The third major driver in masking and clouding the truth is, indeed has to be, the internet and, more recently, twitter. Why? Because anything goes and everything is included to such a degree that if you don’t have confidence in your own capacity to reason and interpret, you are at the mercy of every arsehole quack and manipulator under the sun.
The internet is the more powerful on a global scale, simply because of the unimaginable amount of information that a search can yield. Twitter is the more insidious on a personal level, based as it is on an essentially adolescent notion of being in with a crowd and following someone whose opinion and approval chime with your view of yourself.
Finally and above all (to coin a phrase), faith, both religious and taste, is central to all plasticity of truth. People, it seems, are drawn to those ‘facts’ and that information that are consistent with their own beliefs, gut feelings and personal tastes and prejudices. 
How else are we to explain that almost one in five Americans believes that Barack Obama is a Muslim despite his very public avowal of Christianity? And that this is almost double the number that believed it a year ago?!! Furthermore, the research, which was carried out by the Pew Research Centre, was conducted before his recent comments about a mosque at Ground Zero.
The view that he’s a Muslim increased most sharply among Republicans. Those who think he’s a Muslim are also the most critical of his performance. Right, so who now cares about the facts, Joe?
Observers of the world of the 21st century argue that the grand narratives have broken down, that we no longer have big shared stories and belief systems, that the old ‘truths’ haven’t been replaced with a new set of truths, but with a mosaic of personal options.
In that scenario, we are at increased risk of manipulation and viral myth-making unless we build a solid base of scepticism, rational analysis – and genuine knowledge.
To paraphrase Bob Dylan, a world in which ‘You’re right from your side and I’m right from mine’ will leave us all ‘one too many mornings and a thousand miles behind’…