So I just got this article sent to me about the “End of Truth”.
This article bothers me because what it appears to me as, is someone suddenly becoming aware of a problem in society and then labelling it as new and attaching technological implications to it.
It talks about the media being biased as though there was ever a media that WASN’T biased. It’s the kind of attitude that expects us to trust the government implicitly even though every government in history has lied to it’s people.
It’s gems like this one that kind of bother me, because it makes it seem as though there was ever a truth that we knew was real. In my opinion it was fragments of truth used as a foundation for lies. What I see happening now is an increase in the truth, as we cease to believe the grand lies that we used to believe as true. It’s not as though now we don’t believe in the truth, it’s that we don’t believe in the lies as much.
Then there is this one:
Which implies that because Munich and Syriana don’t show the terrorists as mindless blood thirsty zombies, that they are somehow vandalizing the truth. It’s complaint about “the Da Vinci Code” and “The Book of Daniel” are equally ludicrous, as though Hollywood, an industry dedicated to creating “FICTION” has some moral obligation to upholding the truth. :rolleyes:
I don’t think Truth is under any attack from the access to information or post-modernism. I think that what we are seeing is a dismantling of what we previously THOUGHT was true, but wasn’t entirely so. We are becoming aware of how nebulous a concept “Truth” actually is, and how unreliable information can be.
I don’t know what Golden Age of “Truth” Alvin Toffler thinks we are exiting, but I’ve never seen any evidence of it. I see this sort of idealisation of the past as nothing more than sentimental bullshit created by pessimists who like to pretend that there was something better and more pure about a bygone era.
Now that I’ve said my piece about the “End of Truth”. What do you think?
Erek