Whose Reality is This, Anyway?

I recently saw a video clip on the internet in which Newt Gingrich was being interviewed about his support for Donald Trump for president. In this clip, the former Speaker was making a distinction between truth and peoples’ perceptions of the truth, saying that he didn’t care about the truth but he did care about peoples’ perceptions of the truth.

But Newt hasn’t been the only person in the news lately to spout such nonsense. A senior official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), when questioned about the accuracy of a report by the ODNI concerning the torture of detainees after 911, was quoted as saying, “it doesn’t matter what’s in the report. It matters what people think is.”*

And now it’s been announced that the head of the Commission on Presidential Debates has been quoted as saying she doesn’t think fact-checkers should weigh in on conflicting claims about what the Bureau of Labor Statistics says about the unemployment rate. “If you and I have different sources of information,” she posited, “does your source about the unemployment rate agree with my source?” **

This might sound reasonable until you realize that, as the article points out, “there aren’t different sources of information about the unemployment rate;” there’s only one source–the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

To equate objective truth with individual perceptions of the truth is to imply an arrangement in which the two are accorded equal status, as if to say reality is subject to interpretation. If this were so, then objective reality, stripped of its defining feature–reality–would no longer have meaning. In the absence of a concept of “objective reality,” my perception of reality would have equal validity to your perception of reality.

While that might sound very democratic at first blush, when you think about the effect it would have on reaching agreement on matters ranging from lawsuits to disputes between nations, it quickly leads to problems.

If, having equally valid perceptions of reality, the opponents views are not in harmony with each other, how is one to arbitrate, much less, adjudicate a just and fair outcome?

If we don’t have a commonly agreed-upon mutual understanding of whatever it is that we call “objective reality,” how are we to have a basis with which to compare, evaluate and understand each other?

Just like bees need honey, eggs need sperm and corrupt congressmen need gullible voters, people need commonly agreed upon norms in order to interact and cooperate toward the achievement of mutually beneficial goals.

The news medias’ failure to challenge the gross dishonesty inherent in Gingrich’s ( and others of his ilk’s) message is egregious. To quote the Washington Post’s Matt O’Brien, “letting untruths go unchallenged is . . implicitly taking sides against reality.”

If we’re not very careful, the fundamental disregard for the truth evident in our social discourse today could signal the beginning of the unraveling of our society as we have come to understand it.

*https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/10/cia-senate-investigation-constitutional-crisis-daniel-jones

**https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/09/26/the-person-in-charge-of-the-presidential-debates-just-took-sides-against-reality/?wpisrc=nl_wonk&wpmm=1

Petaluma, CA

28 September, 2016

Tim Konrad

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