"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free." (John 8:32). Quite obviously, Jesus didn't have to deal with the internet. For the rest of us mortals who do, the glut of information and misinformation that is public currency often makes it nearly impossible to deduce the truth, writes Farhad Manjoo, who manages Machinist, a daily news blog at Salon.com. His new book is True Enough -- Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.
It used to be that a course in critical thinking was sufficient for a reasonably intelligent person to sift fact from fiction, but no longer. And this dilemma, Manjoo argues, has serious implications for democratic societies, devaluing what Harvard's Robert Putnam called "social capital" a decade ago in his book, Bowling Alone.
Social capital is the totality of our social interactions with one another. If life experience teaches us to trust our pharmacist or a particular news commentator, we can move through life more quickly and determinedly, accepting their judgment on certain issues rather than having to search out other opinions. But a combination of increased corruption (or at least, reported corruption), greed, and conflicting representations of the truth means that many folks are ceasing to trust anyone outside their family circle. And the increasingly skillful manipulation of information makes it hard to know "what it is" rather than simply "what it means."
Manjoo tells of a political scientist named Edward Banfield, who spent nine months in a town in Southern Italy to live among the peasants, to study why they were mired in failure while similar villagers in Northern Italy were succeeding nicely. His conclusion was that the townspeople had a woeful lack of trust for one another, to the point that they'd confide in no one and refuse to work together in any project for the common good.
One arresting statistic Manjoo reports is from a study in which Americans were asked, "Do you believe that most people can be trusted or can't you be too careful in dealing with people?" In 1960, 60 per cent reported that they trust most people, a number that plummeted to 32 per cent by 2006.
But, you know, the author doesn't attriibute that study. Maybe he has an axe to grind. And his name, Manjoo, sounds kinda foreign to me, don't you think? I don't know what to believe anymore. Think I'll just stop reading books.
