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January 20, 2006A world “always at the edge of falsehood”Daniel Henninger has an important, must-read piece up at opinionjournal.com, concerning the fallout - or absence of same - from the discovery that James Frey’s multi-million selling “memoir” A Million Little Pieces is in fact, basically fiction. He finds the rationalizing and acceptance of “fake but accurate” to be a very troubling indicator of where we are headed as a society. In this view, fiction or even traditional nonfiction isn’t providing the hyper-real narrative many people now crave from an assembled memoir like A “Million Little Pieces”, no matter that it has been proven a fraud, or at least a fraud as formerly understood. But perhaps this suggests some people can’t handle the truth anymore, so they’d just as soon be lied to so long as the lies fit their belief system, such as belief in the power of personal “redemption.” We live in a world of reality TV shows, of newspaper photographs and fashion photos routinely “improved” by the computer program Photoshop, of nightly news that pumps more emotion than fact into its version of public events such as Hurricane Katrina, hyper-real TV commercials manipulated with computers, the rise of “interpretive” news, fake singers, fake breasts, fake memoirs. Morris Dickstein of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York described this world as “always at the edge of falsehood” and so people come to tolerate it “as part of the overall media buzz of their lives.” He’s right. But there is a political dimension to this, which many of what are no doubt politically liberal writers upset at James Frey and Doubleday ought to consider [...] We all know those widely shared categories were broken and blurred the past 38 years, leading to terrible political fights between social conservatives and liberal liberators over disintegrating standards of personal behavior. Welcome to what it has wrought…the culture really is in a million little pieces. Truth no longer matters. Anything you want to hear, anything that shores up opinion has become your “personal truth.” I received an email yesterday from an officer serving in Iraq, who was writing about a discussion he’d had with another officer on moral relativism - on whether it was possible that one man’s “truth” is as credible as another, given - say - the circumstances in which he was raised. Moral relativism holds that there is no “truth.” There is only perspective. It has always struck me as an idea someone came up with while under the influence of cannabis - possibly while eating cheese doodles. Relativism is one of those things that sounds wise and tolerant, “if a man has been raised to believe it is good to kill Jews, then to him it is good, and that is legitimate, even if we do not agree.” In truth, the embrasure of such muddled thinking gives tacit permission for bigotry, persecution and chaos. And it is also, quite simply, a big lie. Writes Henninger: Before all this, most people operated from a common personal standard, a broadly held superstructure of right and wrong, integrity and dishonesty, which they probably learned in Sunday school. You can see and hear it in hundreds of old Hollywood movies. “The Maltese Falcon,” written by Dashiell Hammett, a Communist, is full of this moral tension and resolving clarity. As my li’l bro Thom has said, “There is truth, guided by natural law, and conscience, and some sense of morality, (even among nihilistic unbelievers) and then there are simply “different versions of an event” which some would like to call “truth.” We seem to be slipping, very quickly into the thick and clinging bog of feel-good-falsehoodism. In a world where schools obsess over self-esteem, touting it as more valuable than the truth of an actual, merited grade or ranking , in a world where a life-long journalist like Dan Rather can straight-facedly propose that false documentation be accepted as “fake but accurate” - it almost seems inevitable that we would come to this new and troubling place, wherein the truth is whatever makes you feel good about yourself, whatever makes you more comfortable when the world dares to assault you with either moral clarity or, you know, “facts.” http://theanchoressonline.com/2006/01/20/a-world-always-at-the-edge-of-falsehood/trackback/ 12 Responses to “A world “always at the edge of falsehood”” |
January 20th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
When a Muslim kills a Muslim, it’s no big deal.
When a Muslim kills an American, it’s the American’s fault.
When an American kills a Muslim, it’s an act of war.
When a Muslim kills a Jew, it’s a legitimate political statement.
When a Jew kills a Muslim, it’s terrorism.
That’s the result of ‘feel-goodism.’
That was courtesy of Michael Andreyakovich.
January 20th, 2006 at 4:35 pm
But this was only to be expected. The feel-goodists start from a set of counterfactual premises. Since this produces perverse results, they have the subsequent alternatives of (a) changing their minds, or (b) denying reality. The reachables ones — i.e., the ones who still understand that reality trumps theory — choose (a). But this has been going on for a long time now; there are very few reachable ones left. The concentration of the remainder amplifies their malady. At least that has the virtue of making them more easily recognizable to passers-by.
January 20th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
“Emotional Truth” Is A Logical Falsehood
Daniel Henniger explores how the spirit of 1968 has taken us to James Frey, Oprah Winfrey’s favorite author, whose best selling A Million Little Pieces has been proven to be a million little lies. But as Henniger writes, Oprah stands…
January 20th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
Nice to know not all of Oprah’s followers condone this book of lies or her acceptance of it.
January 20th, 2006 at 7:32 pm
Roll-your-own morality (I love the cheese doodles reference!), is natural in a society that claims to worship tolerance and inclusiveness above all else. (Of course those on the left don’t really those things: tolerating a conservative POV is seen as intolerant. Go figure. The whole thing falls in on itself of course, when the worse possible kind of intolerance and exclusiveness (the Islamofascist variety) comes to represent the pinnacle of goodness in the left’s eyes.
January 20th, 2006 at 11:03 pm
I was reading either St. Thomas Aquinas or Abelard the other day.
Either way, he said that the arguement that there is no moral truth disproves itself. Because it has to be true that there is no truth. Therefore, the argument is proved illogical and stupid.
January 21st, 2006 at 12:10 am
That ain’t truth they’re throwing…
Anyone who hasn’t done so should read Dr. Sanity’s whole front page right now. It says it better than I ever could.
January 21st, 2006 at 5:14 am
Anchoress, don’t you know that YOUR truth trumps anything else? I mean it’s all about the feeeeelings. After all you have the right to be affirmed in your specialness.
January 21st, 2006 at 10:16 am
Perception is not ALWAYS Reality.
I heard Larry King ask his guests a question on Bin Laden that started with, “if perception is reality?” and neither of them corrected him to say, “that is a trite phrase and reality is reality.”
Perception is often in the eye of the beholder but it is not necessarily the truth.I am so tired of hearing people who should know better say “perception is reality”. Even though we may perceive a liar to be telling the truth, he is not telling the truth.
January 22nd, 2006 at 12:31 am
The final paragraph of your post perfectly captures the problem of “truthiness,” an execrable term; the whole post exemplifies why “the Emperor has no clothes” is the mostly highly under-rated of moral punch lines.
(Linked)
January 22nd, 2006 at 1:15 am
“If a man has been raised to believe it is good to kill Jews, then to him it is good, and that is legitimate, even if we do not agree.”
Yes, to that person it may be a “good,” I’ll agree. It is in the “that is legitimate” that I cannot. Recently in Massachusetts, a couple allowed their child to starve to death because of a “vision” by a relative: to them this seemed proper, but I (and the state) disagreed.
It is not entirely a new attitude. When the then-Governor of India William Bentinck started to crack down on sati — suttee he was called back to England and told by the heads of the East India Company to stop doing so. However, upon returning to India, he promptly defied them and made it law that sati was considered murder. Famously, he responded to those who protested that it was a traditional practice that [paraphrase] “I will respect and allow the practice of this tradition, but in return you must respect and allow the tradition of my people to hang those who participate in murder.”
January 23rd, 2006 at 4:14 am
This is part of the average culture response in a society where “God is dead.” No absolute truth, no absolute right or wrong. Truth is all a matter of opinion — and a “poll” will decide what is true, today.
The strongest defense of the book is that, for many people, it is helpful. In other words, the help justifies the lies — the end justifies the means.
Not a good principle for advancing civilization.