Writers Must Resist and Persist in Era of Decaying Truth
/by Philip Caputo
Recently, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith concluded his nightly broadcast with a surprise announcement — he was quitting Fox. His declaration shocked just about everyone in the media, not least his Fox News colleagues. Smith was known for his quality reporting. He really was what his network claims to be but often is not — fair and balanced.
Smith didn’t say why he was leaving, but friends and co-workers told reporters who cover the media that he had gotten sick of Fox’s hyper-partisan journalism and by the public insults and digs from its hosts and guests.
Indeed, Fox seemed to have morphed from a conservative broadcast network supportive of President Trump into a virtual extension of the White House press office.
Until recently, that is. When Fox aired a poll unfavorable to the President and Smith anchored a couple of segments critical of him, Trump remarked, “Fox just isn’t delivering for us anymore.”
Smith quit soon afterward.
Winding up his announcement, he said: “Even in our currently polarized nation, it’s my hope that the facts will win the day, that truth will always matter, and journalism and journalists will thrive.”
I was thinking about his comments when I came across the term, “truth decay,” in The Death of Truth, a new book by former New York Times literary critic Michiko Kakutani. “Truth decay” was coined by the Rand Corporation to describe the condition of the written and spoken word in today’s America.
And the condition isn’t good. Facts aren’t winning the day, truth doesn’t seem to matter the way it once did.
We’re all too familiar with the lies and disinformation spewed by Trump’s tweets or by his spokesmen, as well as by political websites, online news outlets, corporate lobbyists, and Russian hackers trolling social media. These fabrications reveal not only an unwillingness to communicate truth but a refusal to recognize that objective truth even exists.
Truth decay is advanced. Arresting it may require a metaphorical root canal, for we are deep into the era of alternative facts and false narratives purporting to be true, no matter how much they deviate from reality.
Okay, you know most of this, and you may be asking yourselves, what has it got to do with me? I write children’s books; I write or read or publish mysteries, thrillers, romances, literary novels; I write or read or publish poetry.
I’ll grant you that the corruption of truth affects journalists and historians directly; but it also bears on other kinds of writers, both as citizens and as writers.
As citizens, because the violation of truth makes people susceptible to the mendacity and false promises of leaders seeking unconditional power.
As writers, because you are dangerous to authoritarians. The first thing tyrants do when they seize power, after they’ve eradicated their political opponents, is to imprison, exile, or execute any and all journalists, novelists, and poets who will not compromise when it comes to speaking truth.
And don’t think that it can’t happen here. You’ve heard the ominous threats to free and honest expression from Trump’s White House — statements that sound like they could have been uttered by Stalin or Mao - for example, “the press is the enemy of the people.”
But the impact on writers goes beyond such concerns, critical as they are.
John le Carré once made this observation: “without clear language, there is no standard of truth.”
Writing well demands a fiendish precision in the use of words. There is no such thing as an approximate word. As the old saying goes, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. A word can, of course, have several meanings, but it does have meaning. It can’t signify any old thing you wish. Precise words precisely ordered create Hemingway’s holy grail — one true sentence.
Language is the writer’s clay, and the war on truth is at its heart a war on language itself.
I’ll say more about that in a few minutes. But first, we need to answer the question, how did we get here? How in America did we come to the point that millions of our citizens no longer care about truth, preferring to stay locked up in their partisan silos? Buzzfeed reported that reader engagement with the phony stories Russian trolls posted on Facebook and Twitter in the 2016 election far outpaced the real stories in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other mainstream media.
In her book, Michiko Kakutani traces the origins of truth decay back half a century to abstruse philosophies once fashionable among left-wing scholars and literary theorists: deconstructionism and post-modernism.
The two are inter-related. Deconstructionism, she writes, has many threads in its fabric but is essentially nihilistic, claiming that the efforts of journalists and historians to discover the truth through the careful gathering and weighing of evidence are futile.
Futile because — here is where postmodernism comes into play — all truths are not objective but are subjective functions of one’s race, gender, social class, life experiences, and on and on. Hell, I suppose we could throw in one’s hair color, height and weight as skewing one’s perspectives of what’s true and what’s not.
These concepts would have been mere curiosities if they’d remained confined to academic bubbles and intellectual salons, but they seeped into the general culture of the west, and over time, migrated, ironically, to the right, particularly to the populist right, also known as the alt-right. Steve Bannon, founder of Breitbart News — arguably the voice of the alt-right — once described himself as a Leninist.
And postmodernist arguments have been exploited by today’s anti-vaxxers and climate change deniers, by creationists, and by people who cling to screwy conspiracy theories long after they’ve been debunked by facts.
“Divorcing words from their meaning is the tyrant’s way of maintaining his infallibility.”
President Trump has probably never read a deconstructionist or post-modernist text, but he was practicing the dogma of “one opinion is as valid as any other” when he equated the people protesting a white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia with the white supremacists.
I’ll return now to the war on language. Linguistic engineering has been employed by tyrants and totalitarians for centuries, going back to Robespierre in the French revolution and continuing through to Maoist china, Nazi Germany, and the former Soviet Union. Control what people can or cannot say, and you’ll eventually control what they can or cannot think.
Divorcing words from their meaning is the tyrant’s way of maintaining his infallibility. Think of the so-called ministry of truth in Orwell’s 1984, turning words inside out. War is peace, love is hate, and so on.
The acids now eating away at meaning are not flowing only from the likes of Breitbart; some emanate from what we think of as liberal, progressive institutions. In the name of inclusiveness, social and sexual justice warriors are attempting to control language — and behavior — with directives that muddy clarity to the point of unintelligibility.
Example: a rule book at Colorado State University commands what can and cannot be said by students and faculty alike. They must not say or write that a person is “mad” or “a lunatic” — they should say he is “surprising” or “wild.” They must not say or write “male or female,” they should say “man, woman, or gender non-binary.” They must not say or write “American” because that excludes other cultures; words like “Eskimo,” “freshman,” and “illegal alien” are also forbidden.
Re-naming things in this way is not restricted to college campuses. It has seeped into the broader society.
One website provides a guide for human resources departments in mid-size businesses. It’s titled “gender neutral pronouns — what they are and how to use them.” There are 62 of them!
I won’t go into all 62. Here is a representative sample: he/she become zie, sie, ey, ve, tay, and e. Well, I think that “zie” and “sie” in place of “he” or “she” is the opposite of the clear language essential to a standard of truth.
HR employees are further urged to use “they” whenever possible, even when referring to an individual. As in “I spoke to the marketing director and they said they’d get back to me.” A grammatical atrocity, but who cares? Correct grammar also must be sacrificed to advance an ideological point of view. It’s political correctness run amok.
But right-wing political correctness, being so pervasive these days, poses a greater danger to truth than the loonier ideas spilling out of faculty lounges. The populist right is also focused on renaming things, or, in the case of climate change, not naming them. All references, written or otherwise, to climate change are prohibited in the department of the interior and the environmental protection agency. Why? Because the President has declared that climate change is a hoax.
“The consequences of accepting this new normal as normal are unacceptable.”
Meanwhile, immigration has been rechristened; it’s an invasion; migrants are rapists and murderers; mass killings committed by psychopaths armed with assault rifles are “the price of freedom,” meaning a second amendment with virtually no restrictions.
But when it comes to a blatant disregard for, and contempt of, truth, no one can beat President Trump. He is the king of mendacity, having uttered or tweeted more than 10,000 falsehoods and half-truths in the 1,000 days of his presidency.
Ah, Tweets. Ah, Twitter. Facebook. By enabling propaganda, disinformation, and misinformation to travel to all corners of the globe at light speed, social media have greatly contributed to truth decay.
In a sense, they cause it. In their digital wild west, Facebook and Twitter make no judgments as to whether an ad or political post is false or true. That laissez-faire attitude was what allowed foreign trolls to spread lies and deceit in the 2016 elections.
But the social media mandarins have no intention to significantly mend their ways. Facebook’s new policy, unveiled just last month, improves security but leaves an important loophole: it will not moderate politicians’ speech, nor fact check their ads. Ditto for Twitter. It’s an open invitation to the trolls to roll out the phony videos, the fraudulent narratives, the falsified photos once again.
Mark Zuckerberg said in a speech at Georgetown University last Thursday that Facebook’s policy reflects his company’s dedication to free speech. His critics say he is using the Constitution to protect Facebook’s bottom line. At any rate, it appears that Zuck doesn’t believe in the old adage that free speech doesn’t include the freedom to yell fire in a crowded theater.
Where does this leave us writers? What should we do? To extend the truth decay metaphor, writers can act to prevent it by resisting and persisting. Resisting all attempts, from wherever they may come, to accept as true what we know to be false, persisting in our fidelity to clear, meaningful language, to an uncompromising accuracy in the use of words, and to the proposition that objective reality and verifiable facts are what they are and not a matter of opinion or perspective.
The consequences of accepting this new normal as normal are unacceptable. The decay of truth will lead to what writer Tom Nichols terms the “quiet and gradual decay of our democratic institutions into an authoritarian technocracy.”
The prospect of dystopia has jumped off the pages of novels like 1984 or Brave New World or The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s here, now, in our daily lives; it’s right around the corner, and if we’re not careful, it will come to meet us.
Philip Caputo delivered these remarks at the Connecticut Book Awards on October 20, 2019 in Hartford. He has written 17 books, including two memoirs, five books of general nonfiction, and nine novels. His latest effort, just published, is HUNTER’S MOON. Caputo has won 10 journalistic and literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. He lives in Connecticut and Arizona.
