Last week I went to see a recording of BBC Radio's satirical
sketch show, Newsjack. Inevitably,
two subjects dominated the skits and jokes: Brexit and Donald Trump. In many
ways, it is a difficult time for writers of satirical sketches as reality is
often weirder and more absurd than anything a script writer could devise, but
on the other hand, there is material in bucket loads. Meanwhile, one of the
twentieth century's greatest pieces of fiction - George Orwell's dystopian novel,
1984 -has apparently seen an upsurge
in sales, prompting many people to wheel out that old saying, "1984
was not supposed to be an instruction manual."
It is true that certain aspects of politics seem to have
taken an Orwellian turn in recent months, with both Brexit and Trump. The
Orwellian sounding term 'Post truth' is not new (it was first coined as far
back as 1992), but the EU referendum campaign - in particular the oft repeated
and much debunked claim that EU membership cost the UK £350million per week -
brought the expression into common usage. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Michael Deacon said that in the culture of post
truth, "Facts are negative. Facts are pessimistic. Facts are
unpatriotic." Facts which do not fit with the preconceptions of a
particular group or individual are, therefore deemed unreliable: somewhere
there are better facts, facts that more readily support that group or person's
position. It also strikes me that proponents of certain post-truth ideas are
like many conspiracy theorists; the more vociferously their theories are denied
and debunked, the more they believe them to be validated. Denial equals proof.
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| No matter how often the message on the bus was debunked, and even after Nigel Farage admitted it was a "mistake," this post-truth 'fact' was still oft quoted. |
The media has often
been accused of not letting the facts get in the way of a good story, but what
exactly are facts? Years ago I worked for a manager who would refer to
"true facts," which I always thought (but never said), was
tautological: by definition, a fact must be true. A fact is a thing that is
known, or proved, to be true, so what type of fact could there be, apart from a
true one? Today that definition of a fact is under attack: opinions and
downright falsehoods are being dressed up in fancy clothes and sent out into
the world to masquerade as facts, and as Lenin said, "A lie told often
enough becomes the truth." With the amount of news that we can access
today - through television, radio, newspapers and the internet - a statement,
regardless of its provenance, regardless of its accuracy, becomes a fact
through repetition and through it being published through a multiplicity of
sources. Fact checking using just the internet is unreliable: a wildly
implausible statement cannot be treated as verified simply because two or three
different outlets report it, but with our voracious appetite for 'news' and
with the media's equally insatiable desire to be the first with a story, our
critical faculties need to be heightened. Under the constant bombardment of
post-truth stories, alternative facts and fake news, sifting the wheat from the
chaff is more difficult than at any time in history. Simply put, we need to be
less credulous and more sceptical.
If Orwell were
writing 1984 today, he would probably
quietly tear up his manuscript and never think of it again. He would
undoubtedly concede that no work of fiction could compete with the absurdity,
the contradictions and the downright cruelty of the world we now live in.
Equally, he would be horrified that the ideas that he set out in his work have
been treated less as warnings and more as guidelines. We now live in a world
where, whether we know it or not, whether we like it or not, doublethink, hate
crime, and doublespeak - to name but three of the concepts from 1984 - have become part of our normal
life. The last of these is particularly prevalent (just think of downsizing when used as a
euphemism for redundancy) while doublethink is so ingrained in politicians and
many of their supporters that most will not even recognise that they are guilty
of it.
The twin concepts
of post-truth and alternative facts have led us into a world where the
President of the United States of America squabbles with an actress over social
media because she had the temerity to criticise him in a speech at an award
ceremony, and berates the press for publishing what he calls fake news simply
because their reportage is uncomplimentary, while blithely making unverifiable
statements about voter fraud and the size of his inauguration crowd. If The Donald is that thin skinned, it bodes
ill for the day he is attacked by a political heavyweight, or the day when one
of his controversial policies fails. If it were not so serious it would be
funny.
It remains to be
seen whether a wall is ever built along the border with Mexico - and Trump does
seem to have diluted his guarantee that Mexico would pay for such a wall to a
suggestion that he will claw the money back somehow once it is built - and
equally his executive order that halted the entire US refugee programme, indefinitely
banned Syrian refugees, and suspended all nationals from seven countries may
turn out to be short lived in light of legal opposition following a case filed
by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). But if we criticise Trump for his
actions, we must at least concede that unlike many politicians, he is already
making good on many of his campaign promises - no matter how objectionable many
people think they are.
Just as Orwell's
seminal work becomes more prophetic with each passing day, I cannot help but
feel that we may be in a world that bears more than a passing resemblance to
the sort of alternative realities that Philip K Dick created. Worlds like the
one inhabited by Ragle Gumm in Time Out
Of Joint, where the reality Gumm believes he exists in begins slowly to
unravel and expose the real world outside. One can almost believe that one day
soon we will pick up a discarded newspaper that was not supposed to be found,
and find an obituary of John F Kennedy, who we will discover was not
assassinated in 1963, but lived to be one-hundred years of age and died peacefully in a Florida nursing home. And from that discovery, our world will
suddenly start to morph into one in which Donald Trump is a professional golfer
with no political ambitions, the European Union never came into being and Nigel
Farage is still trading commodities on the London Metal Exchange.
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| Philip K Dick |
The late US senator
Daniel Moynihan said - presciently, in 1994 - "Everyone is entitled to his
opinion, but not his own facts," and a great deal of what are being presented as
facts on all sides (where they are not downright falsehoods) are largely just
opinion and speculation. Despite the opprobrium in which Trump is held and the
intense opposition there has been to Brexit, time will judge Trump's Presidency
and Britain's exit from the EU and may even do so more swiftly than any of us
expect. Maybe, in years to come we will look back at Brexit and the election of
Donald Trump more positively than we can currently imagine - personally I doubt it, but I could be wrong - but whatever
history makes of this period, the time is ripe for 'true facts' to make a
comeback.
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