“I can't
tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie.
I did cut
it (the cherry tree) with my hatchet.”
--George
Washington
When a six-year-old
Washington accidentally damaged his father’s beloved cherry tree
with a new hatchet, George was driven by his conscience to own up to
his actions. This was the story told to me by my grade school history
teacher. And I, along with the rest of my gullible classmates,
believed every detail to be true.
George Washington, the
father of our country, could not tell a lie, and we all knew good
children of the 1950s must learn from George and apply that important
lesson of veracity in our lives.
However …
Fact and legend are often
confused. Imagine my surprise when I learned Mason Locke Weems, a
clergyman and one of Washington's first biographers, based this story
on hearsay. Weems was a moralist who wanted to create a role model
for young people like me, a boy all too eager to absorb an idealized
version of American history.
In fact, Weems’s The
Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington was first
published in 1800, but his anecdote about the cherry tree was not
added until the book’s fifth edition, which hit the shelves in
1806. Weems claimed he had heard the story from an elderly friend of
the Washington family, but there is no evidence to support his claim.
Nevertheless, Weems confidently related how the value of honesty was
firmly inculcated in Washington by his father. I guess most of us
gullible children just accepted the tale and understood it to be part
of a lesson to praise the value of the truth.
What About the Truth?
The truth? What about role
models? Now I am almost sixty-nine years old, and I fear the inherent
value of this virtue is almost extinct. I hear people say: “There's
your side. There's my side. And there is the truth” as if lying or
stretching the truth is perfectly acceptable behavior. In the present
partisan climate, Americans accustomed to “the slant” and “the
spin” value honesty less and less. Gone is integrity. It has been
replaced with “what I can get away with.” I think lies are so
much a part of the culture now that children see little value in
truth telling.
Oxford Dictionaries’
International Word of the Year for 2016 was “post-truth,”
defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which
objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than
appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The use of the word in
English language text spiked 2,000 percent in 2016 compared to the
previous year. Oxford said in its news release that the spike was
driven “by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing
distrust of facts offered up by the establishment.”
In a post-truth world,
alternative facts and fake news compete on an equal footing with
peer-reviewed research and formerly-authoritative sources. Even
though they are aware that the process of arriving at the truth can
be slow and even fallible, most people tend to reject the rigid
discipline of conducting unbiased investigation, preferring to put
credence into opinions that support their own predetermined
prejudices.
We live in a time when
many belittle science and expertise in order to oppose traditional
democratic institutions. People these days love theories,
conspiracies, and crackpot ideas. When the facts conflict with their
sense of identity or political ideology, then, to them, the facts –
and, of course, the truth – are disposable.
Commonly
Accepted Ignorance
“Epistemology,”
is the study of knowledge. This field helps define what we know and
why we know it. However, on the flip side of this is “agnotology,”
or the study of ignorance. The word stems from the Neoclassical Greek
words agnōsis, "not
knowing," and -logia, “maxim.”
Agnotology is not often
discussed because studying the absence of something – in this case,
the absence of knowledge – is incredibly difficult. More generally,
the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more
knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before. This
study of ignorance has increasingly become an effective political
tool.
“There
is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has
been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread
winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by
the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as
good as your knowledge.'”
—Isaac
Asimov
Powerful people often use
ignorance – agnotology – as a strategic tool to hide or
divert attention from societal problems in which they have a vested
interest. For example, conservative think tanks such as The Heartland
Institute work to discredit the science behind human-caused climate
change.
Combine the influence of
ignorance with research that says most people lie at least some of
the time, and truth loses intrinsic value. There, in the dark and
validated by agnotology, people
don’t think lies are that serious or of any real concern.
Even when they acknowledge someone has been caught lying, they
readily dismiss the offense. This has become part of the slow death
of the truth.
Never have so many people
had so much access to so much knowledge and yet have been so
resistant to learning anything. In the United States and other
developed nations, otherwise intelligent people denigrate
intellectual achievement and reject the advice of experts. They care
not about the truth.
Author Tom Nichols –
professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College
and adjunct professor at the Harvard Extension School – calls this
“the death of expertise.” This execution of evidence is not just
a rejection of existing knowledge. Also, it is fundamentally a
rejection of science and dispassionate rationality, the very
foundations of modern civilization.
Thus, Nichols believes any
inherent truth suffers from an irrational conviction among Americans
that everyone is as smart as everyone else. Nichols says …
“This is the opposite
of education, which should aim to make people, no matter how smart or
accomplished they are, learners for the rest of their lives. Rather,
we now live in a society where the acquisition of even a little
learning is the endpoint, rather than the beginning, of education.
And this is a dangerous thing.”
The search for truth and
the subsequent application of its attainment are noble moral and
educational practices. I believe the decline of ethics and religion
has made lying more acceptable. And, the death of expertise surely
has fueled this great indifference to the truth.
When parents tell children
that “honesty is the best policy,” but display dishonesty by
lying or adhering to principle supported by agnotology,
such behavior sends conflicting messages to their children. Parents'
dishonesty must eventually erode trust and promote dishonesty in
their children. As we know, it actually becomes easier to lie with
more practice.
Lying triggers emotional
arousal and activates the amygdala, but with each additional lie, the
arousal and conflict of telling an untruth diminishes, making it
easier to lie. Scientists (2026) have also found that the amygdala
became less active mostly when people lied to benefit themselves. In
other words, self-interest seems to fuel dishonesty.
Senior author of the study
Tali Sharot, PhD. explains ...
“When we lie for
personal gain, our amygdala produces a negative feeling that limits
the extent to which we are prepared to lie. However, this response
fades as we continue to lie, and the more it falls, the bigger our
lies become.”
The “danger flags” in
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and
Animal Farm are no
longer fictional symbols. Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book The
Origins of Totalitarianism …
“The ideal subject of
totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced
communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and
fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between
true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
If a novelist had
concocted a villain like Trump – a larger-than-life, narcissistic,
prejudice demogogue, she or he would likely be accused of witless
flights of fancy. Michiko Kakutani, writer and literary critic for
The Guardian, (2018) says …
“However, the
president of the U.S. has set the nation on the path of monumentally
serious consequences with his constant assault on truth and the rule
of law, and the vulnerabilities he has exposed in our institutions
and digital communications.”
The overriding fear –
already largely realized – is that Trump, in his kingly manner,
says so many thing that aren't true, that he and his gullible and
emotional believers will occupy a parallel universe of falsehoods in
defiance of any other interpretation or logical challenge. In his
alternate reality, Trump continues to gaslight the nation, blurring
fact and fiction.
According to The
Washington Post Fact Checker …
“In his first 869
days as President, Donald Trump said 10,796 things that were either
misleading or outright false, Do the math and you get this: The
President of the United States is saying 12 untrue things a day.”
The steady erosion of
truth continues from the top down, and now the abrasion threatens the
broader idea that we, as humans, have things on which we all can and
should agree. So many “cherry trees” have been laid to waste in
complete and false denial that their untold branches obscure a
functioning political landscape. Even if we do tell a child a
mythical legend about truth and an ethical future president, the
moral of the story is now lost in the times. That young person only
has to open his eyes and ears to the hypocrisy to dismiss the
virtuous behavior.
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