Book Smarts
As a writer, I’ve always thought, as Hemingway said, “A writer’s job is to tell the truth.” But the truth these days is harder and harder to find because more and more it seems mostly to lie in the eye of the beholder. How else do you explain a man in North Carolina arming himself to hunt down representatives of FEMA based on lies he read on the internet. In his eyes there was a truth to behold. And he beheld it. And in days past, we would have simply chalked him down as crazy, but those days are gone.
The world is at war with the truth. Tom Nichols, wrote about it in his 2017 book, The Death of Expertise, in which he talked about the campaign against established knowledge. Today it’s question everything, ridicule experts, bring facts into doubt for political gain. Nothing can be said without someone countering, with a yes, but. And more and more I find people just saying things as if the saying of them makes them real, and as the guy in North Carolina proved, for some people, it does.
Of course, hating experts is nothing new in the world. Look at Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China, or Stalin and his gulags. Both leaders saw a problem with intellectuals, they think. Leaders who crave total power would prefer a less thoughtful electorate and who makes a better enemy than someone who talks about something no one really understands and knows something you don’t. It seems mysterious and threatening and untrustworthy. I wish I was smart enough to offer a solution. But maybe that will keep me from being purged. I’m not smart enough.