Thought for the Week

by Rev David Watson

Clark Memorial Parish Church.

This week Donald J Trump will be inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States. Rumours are rife the Russian government has in its possession, material with which they could blackmail the new president. What used to be called “kompromat” in the days of the Cold War. This narrative feeds into idea that Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win the US election. That the Russian secret service, the FSB, actively tried to damage Hilary Clinton’s election campaign and that they leaked politically sensitive documents which had been hacked from the computers of leading Democrats. You could hardly make all of this up, but who knows?

In recent times new phrase has entered the political lexicon and the Oxford English Dictionary –post truth. Post truth is an attempt to describe a phenomenon which is partly driven by social media. Fabricated stories, so called Fake News, can be circulated on social media and presented as fact without any of the verification which is required by broadcasters and publishers. Blatant lies can be tweeted and re-tweeted. Entirely fictitious stories go viral and can gain currency in the repetition. Fake news has become big news.

On one level this is hardly new, gossip and rumours are not an invention of 21st century. We have always tended to read newspapers which reinforce our own political biases and hence the stories which we are inclined to believe. In the age of social media we follow on twitter those who articulate what we might think or believe but are too afraid to say out loud. Those who hold extreme positions may be inclined to think that their ideas are mainstream when they see tweets in similar vein from others who hold similar views. Social media was described to me recently as an echo chamber in which we hear our own ideas repeated back to us.

The first casualty of our ‘post truth’ culture is the truth itself. In order to discern the truth we must also be willing to listen to the point of view of those with whom we disagree. None of us should be arrogant enough to think that we know the whole truth and that we have nothing more to learn. If we really want to know the truth, we should always be wiling to have our prejudices challenged.