Facts no longer inspire faith

‘ ‘ ‘ Something is rotten in the election in America. This unrest is not because elaborate ad… ‘ ‘ ‘ Something is rotten in the election in America. This unrest is not because elaborate ad protests of Obama teaching kids about sex continually disrupts our beloved prime-time television. It’s not because Sarah Palin is looking to upset pornography as the queen of Google searches. No, it’s because something is terribly broken about the way we respond to facts. ‘ ‘ ‘ Never before has it been so fast and simple to vet our presidential and vice-presidential hopefuls and monitor the election. We have FactCheck.org, RealClearPolitics.com and armies of bloggers living in their mothers’ basements who are unusually skilled at cutting through lies and rhetoric. YouTube gives us the ability to watch anything that anyone even remotely related to politics has ever said, making gaffes and policy reversal impossible to disguise. We could not ask for greater political omniscience. ‘ ‘ ‘ However, the electorate is more confused than ever. Why? Is the answer as simple as an admission that we are oversaturated with information? It would seem like we cannot make our minds up because every day there is a new, hot leak raring to damage a candidate’s reputation. Therefore, must we assume that all the candidates are liars and cheats and that the only option we have is to play electoral controversy hot-potato? The candidate who is the subject of a controversy closest to Election Day must lose, right? It’s bad logic, but it’s all that we’ve got. ‘ ‘ ‘ I don’t trust this analysis. This isn’t because I have any faith, whatsoever, in the American electorate or American intelligence, but because I think this explanation doesn’t go far enough. ‘ ‘ ‘ We are not disillusioned with politics. We are disillusioned with the entire nature of fact. We are disillusioned with truth. ‘ ‘ ‘ Palin’s past can be as checkered as a ska clothing boutique, but voters will fight, even if the face of direct evidence, to say that her critics are misinformed. Obama can lay out a tax plan as fiscally ridiculous as my plan to sell lemonade in Iraq to fix the national debt, and supporters will accuse opponents of faulty math. ‘ ‘ ‘ Why this sad state of affairs? We have ceased to have any faith in facts beyond their ability to stir a controversy for a few days and then die down. We should put facts toward making full opinions of a candidate, but, instead, we react and then dismiss. Why? Because we don’t trust the facts. ‘ ‘ ‘ We really should have seen this coming, too. Art and philosophy have been telling us for over a century that facts and truth may be socially constructed. We watch ‘The Matrix,’ and suddenly, ‘What if this is all a computer simulation, man?’ Michel Foucault announces, ‘Truth is linked in a circular relation with the systems of power which produce and sustain it … A ‘regime’ of truth.” Oprah and ‘A Million Little Pieces’ break our hearts. We are swept away by paranoia: What if I am buying into fake truth? ‘ ‘ ‘ So what do we do? We become obsessed with verifying everything that is said. Our roommates tell us we are out of milk and we vet the source with precise dairy-metrics to make sure they aren’t misleading us. Then, we go a step further, and we stop believing research as well. It might be lying: Maybe some errant youth changed the data on Wikipedia, and maybe the witness didn’t see or hear correctly. Before long, our fear has captured us, and we have lost all faith in truth. ‘ ‘ ‘ When our confidence in fact disappears, all that’s left for us to decide political bouts is the simple pleasure of the knee-jerk reflex. At least with arbitrary decision there is no chance that we are buying into lies. Sure, the hot-button controversies to which we react are probably untrue, but we can be outraged by them without having to actually commit ourselves to believing anything. It’s safer to sneer at Obama for allegedly being a Muslim than to have to stand behind a full opinion of the man. ‘ ‘ ‘ This might seem completely counterintuitive, and this is why it has gone unnoticed. Furthermore, it’s why we can be both skeptics and gossip lovers. If we were really just being smart fact-checkers, why would we buy into the manufactured controversies? ‘ ‘ ‘ It isn’t entirely a bad thing that we have lost faith in truth, as it keeps us from blindly following leaders. We don’t have to fear a Fourth Reich in America, as there is no way we could be dedicated enough to the ideology. However, this is at the cost of our ability to decide on anything. We are trading ignorance for immobility, and we must be careful. Believe in Erik at ech15@pitt.edu.