A nice review of my book Truth be told: Living truthfully in a post-truth world by Stephen Driscoll, author of Made In Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You. Stephen writes:
Lionel’s book clearly describes our modern truth problem. Trust in all sorts of institutions has collapsed, because the perceived truthfulness of those institutions has collapsed.
Lionel writes that, “in the USA: “Between 1958 and 2015, those who professed to ‘basically trust the government’ fell from 73 per cent to 19 per cent”!” (p31).
Some of this may, in a roundabout way, be related to things like postmodernism. It could be related to cultural polarisation, where truth is made secondary to loyalty. It could be related to our new information ecosystems, with social media and the smartphone exposing us to so many lies that we end up cynical. There’s a lot of things it could be related to.
Intellectuals deserve some of the blame. Francois Chollett once wrote, “In science, it’s better for your ideas to be wrong than to be vague.” We’ve had intellectuals for several generations who delight in being vague, and who haven’t been particularly right.
Politicians deserve plenty of the blame, and neither side is innocent.
The decline of the community and the sense of shared norms is certainly a big driver.
We could go on and on assigning blame for our modern truth problem.
Lionel, however, points out that we’ve always had a truth problem, that preceded these modern trends. Humanity has a very deep, very foundational tendency to avoid the truth and state lies, externally and even internally. It’s easy to assume that the world is divided into the truthful and the liars, as a result of some power dynamic, but Lionel writes:
“But there’s a problem with the concept of speaking truth to power’. It assumes that there are only two kinds of people in the world: truthful people and powerful people. And when you or I use the phrase speaking truth to power’, we’re clearly putting ourselves on the side of the truthful people. Sometimes, that’s legitimate. But often, it’s not that simple. Why? Because the truth problem is more elusive and more pervasive than that. The powerful don’t always lie. The weak may be just as untruthful.” (p16).
Lionel shows how Christianity offers a deep diagnosis and solution to our truth problem. Truth is important, but we are bad at being truthful. God values truth and sends a person full of “grace and truth”. We are called to imitate and grow into a mirror of that person, with honesty and repentance for the many times we fall short.
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