Of facts, reality and truth

Bill Knight column for Thursday, Friday or Saturday, Aug. 17, 18 or 19

For years, it seems now, reality just existed, like gravity – virtually invisible but accepted. But today, people’s trust in facts and stats, government and the press has eroded. There’s a profound disconnect between reality and feelings.

The issue is ably addressed in “The Trouble with Reality,” a 92-page trade paperback by Brooke Gladstone, co-host of National Public Radio’s “On The Media,” a treasured colleague of mine at the Washington Weekly 33 years ago.

These days, President Trump proclaims journalism to be “fake news” and the “enemy of the people,” she writes, comparing such attacks to history’s authoritarian phrase-makers such as fascist Adolph Hitler (who called Jews the “enemy of the people”) and Communist Mao Zedong (who used the term to criticize educated Chinese). And Trump is also a serial liar, not just wrong or prone to exaggeration. (As Arnold Isenberg, author of “Analytical Philosophy and The Study of Art,” wrote, “A lie is a statement made by one who does not believe it with the intention that someone else shall be led to believe it.”)

In her book and an interview with the Poynter Institute for Media Studies (where I’m a 1995 “alum”), Gladstone steps back from the fray and then steps up to clarify how we all absorb, process and use information.

First, she admits that perhaps it was actually always this way. After all, haven’t politicians always been dishonest? Didn’t people always disagree, even if past means of communication made being disagreeable and uncivil harder? Maybe “reality” has never been what we perceived it to be.

Most journalists, for instance, diligently try to be complete, fair and accurate, but it’s difficult-to-impossible to be absolutely objective. In fact, personal hero Heywood Broun – the New York columnist who founded the News Guild labor union for journalists in 1933 – once wrote, “It has been said that the perfect reporter ought to be patterned more or less along the physical and chemical lines of a plate-glass window … in the hope that he will find the truth.

“I am not altogether certain whether these requirements are wise,” he continued. “I am not glass, either clear or opaque. When hit, the result is something other than ‘Tinkle! Tinkle!’ ”

Gladstone summarizes her perspective as, “Facts – even a lot of facts – do not constitute reality. Reality is what forms after we filter, arrange and prioritize those facts and marinate them in our values and traditions. Reality is personal.”

Gladstone cites the phenomenon of “Unwelt,” meaning the tiny slice of the universe different creatures coexisting at the same time and place individually experience, depending on factors like senses. For example, ticks are blind and deaf and rely on smell and temperatures; some fish use electrical fields; bats depend on air-compression waves. Human beings use our five senses, plus have opinions and stereotypes. If new facts upset people’s old stereotypes, we treat those facts as attacks and fail to concede differences between our own limited universe and the actual universe around us.

“What I am talking about is the difference between things we observe, that we can fact-check, and the broader context. The unseen things,” Gladstone says. “So you've got facts, and you've got the truth.”

In tackling the topic, Gladstone doesn’t focus on some unattainable “Kumbaya” universal agreement on things, she says.

“I wasn't as much concerned about the idea of consensus as of having common pools of information,” she says. “Consensus is the bedrock of democracy. [But] when political actors can’t agree on basic facts, compromise and rule-found argumentation are basically impossible.”

Gladstone scoffs at idealistic Thomas Jefferson’s famous maxim, “Truth is great and will prevail if left to herself… She is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict.”

She comments, “Oh, come on,” adding, “The laws of human nature do not provide for the triumph of reason. If only it were that easy. Our lives are much more about the filtration than the accumulation of information. Not all information is created equal. We instinctively resist unwelcome information.”

Still, she’s hopeful.

“Facts are real and will reassert themelves eventually,” she writes. “In order to repair our reality, we need more of them, from people and places we do not see.

“Eventually, the real world catches up with us all.”