Abuse of Belief - Truth, Lies and Videoscape
Talk about Power of Story! Literally *and* figuratively.
This week the news includes a provocative book about true believers versus doubtful thinkers, confessions and confrontations, legalized academic cheating, even a new lawsuit about God-given truth as fraud. Who is manipulating innocent masses, and with what lies? Can cheating and conspiracy to defraud ever serve the larger cause of truth?
What do we really owe people we believe are getting conned?
With James Frey versus Oprah as only the latest public chapter in this powerful story, we're being forced on every front to face our ambivalence about truth and lies and how we confuse them to our own detriment -- is my blogging either, neither or both? I feel a headache coming on, and that's both truth and lie -- so maybe it's not surprising that now the Bible itself is legally challenged as fraudulent memoir rather than historical fact and redemptive truth, thereby duping those desperate to believe.
A righteously indignant Maureen Dowd labels Oprah the saint, Frey the sinner, his bestselling book "bunk" and our President no better than Frey, that he too defrauded us and the wages of his sin are death, not redemption.
She does this with a straight, Pulitzer-Prize winning face, omitting equally true facts of her lying news colleague Jayson Blair, and her venerable publication's contradictory roles in the Wilson-Plame-Miller circle of cynicism -- fact-stacking for dramatic effect, self-interested stonewalling and hype, and general manipulation of its public powers -- which together left us with no one to believe about any of it.
Note to the New York Times, and to public and private eyes and spies everywhere: whatever competitive lying that whole mess turns out to have been about, don't expect us to "believe" that any of YOU believed in our right to the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. (Sadly, even the guy on the white horse of truth, whom I liked and admired, apparently had rules and codes he believed in more than unexpurgated, unspun facts and truth.)
So our belief in academic and intellectual accountability is manipulated everywhere, in public and private acts big and small. Prominent historians such as Stephen Ambrose come under fire for fraud. Scientists defraud research journals. Teachers cheat with standardized testing, pandering to our need to believe they represent facts and truth and critical thinking. Charities cheat with money entrusted to them for making the world a better place, child protection employees falsify reports with tragic results, ad nauseum.
Thus we're all too familiar with belief issues when it comes to public stories from textbooks to memoirs, politics and news. The new twist is religious issues as fraud.
Intelligent Design versus evolution. Catholic Church child abuse scandals, with institutional lying for generations to cover it all up.
(Isn't Maureen Dowd a good Catholic girl? Hmm . . . she is right in the
middle of ALL of this, isn't she? I may need to learn more about her,
connections keep popping up . . .didn't she just publish her own somewhat dubious nonfiction memoirs?)
We lie to our friends and lovers, and whether we get caught or not, maybe personal lies aren't different when it comes to the larger harm -- Excalibur's Merlin darkly warns his brash and ethically challenged warrior-disciple that "when a man lies, he murders some part of the world."
Oscar Wilde said our supposedly harmless lie about telling the truth, the one we teach our kids about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, reflects how truth-worshipping our lying culture is, a point reiterated this week by Jerry Stahl:
" . . .The anecdote, Wilde noted, perfectly exemplifies the American psyche: all about honesty, and completely contrived.
Now, as then, we are a people grown fat on fabrication. The truth is just another artificial flavor . . ."
We scream for a little (head)chopping in the name of truth now and again, ho-hum, makes great fiction for the news and publishing industries, but all we can come up with
as society-wide solution -- seriously?? -- is re-labeling the other guy's truth? And alternately defending and confessing our own lies while continuing to teach them to our kids? What good is that?
No wonder public schools are dysfunctional and public education an oxymoron. There IS no truth we can
agree on objectively, to teach kids. And the truth is we know it and won't fix it.
Wilde again:
. . . tired of the intelligent person whose reminiscences are always based upon memory, whose statements are invariably limited by probability . . . Society sooner or later must return to its lost leader, the cultured and fascinating liar.
Catholic leaders claim The Da Vinci Code is
manipulation of belief, fraud for profit, harmful lies we must warn the world to reject.
Now comes the titillating and, one supposes, quite predictable reverse play, the
crowning glory of the news and belief cycle (whoops, not to be redundant!) -- historical Christianity itself challenged as fraud, with the courts as the objective Standard of Truth.
It's being called "abuse of popular belief" by the plaintiff.
Can we even call these stories about the stories actual news -- or is it closer to
sensationalized fiction in service of larger redemptive "truth?" Words
seldom fail me, let's see, where's the connected Power of Story in all
this . . . yeah, " abuse of popular belief" is a keeper.
I think it's time we add it to our mandatory graduation standards -- if we can find anyone qualified to teach the course.
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Accountability
School Stories
Submitted by JJ Ross on 28 January 2006 - 9:08pm.
And never mind the Bible stories even, it's school stories I was particularly thinking of as "abusing popular belief" -- you know, the endless litany of things folks just "believe" that kids must be taught and made to do in certain ways, by certain ages, that they must learn from certified teachers in schools, in rows of desks, with grades and schedules and codes of conduct and of course, punishment and high stakes and lots of other students in their faces all the time.
It's just so disconcerting after you've been away from it for years, or out from under it, to remember how vested in these "beliefs" (not truths!) most folks are -- even liberal thinkers who aren't hidebound in any other aspect of Life. And the schools and politicians pander to it, and to *all the money* folks are willing to put behind their quaint and unexamined school beliefs, in what I've come to believe are some extremely unethical ways. JJ
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Literally true?
Submitted by JJ Ross on 29 January 2006 - 10:48am.
Didn't mean to blow by Nance's main point, because it's the key to how we abuse popular belief and dumb down the whole culture - facts. We quibble over factoids stripped of context and meaning, and use literal, unprocessed bytes of information as blunt weapons against real understanding and larger truth. Everything has to be OR rather than AND. So instead of a ladder of knowledge with many steps, all of us helping each other climb higher to elevate society overall, we're down fighting to the death on the bottom rungs over minutia, unable to do more with facts than beat each other down. Hence the cultural nose-holding we must do, to endure most of what passes as public discourse.
Society's false popular belief that training kids to bubble in thousands of bottom-rung facts adds up to true education "accountability" is one of the biggest public lies going, and just makes this problem of climbing the Thinking Ladder worse rather than better.
People believe standardized testing is evaluation, supposedly the highest rung of the education ladder:
# compare and discriminate between ideas
# assess value of theories, presentations
# make choices based on reasoned argument
# verify value of evidence
# recognize subjectivity
Yet I don't see much above that fits the provisions of NCLB, nor education politics nor schooling itself, does anyone? Abuse of popular belief.
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Redated and promoted to the front of the page
Submitted by liza on 29 January 2006 - 1:03pm.
Too good not to 
I'll come back for in depth comenting!
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Cool, that will be educational!
Submitted by JJ Ross on 29 January 2006 - 2:53pm.
Being such a novice at all this, I can't wait to see how it works. And I'm wondering if there's some way to tie it all in with Lorraine's excellent commentary too?
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Schoolish beliefs
Submitted by NanceConfer on 29 January 2006 - 1:48pm.
JJ: It's just so disconcerting after you've been away from it for years, or out from under it, to remember how vested in these "beliefs" (not truths!) most folks are -- even liberal thinkers who aren't hidebound in any other aspect of Life.
********
The school/learning "beliefs" are the ones I focus on the most -- a set of beliefs so similar to the other irrational beliefs that it is startling.
And being away from them (we unschool) does make it even more startling when you realize perfectly reasonable, progressive, thoughtful people still cling to this particular set of beliefs.
On the one hand, there's the "all or nothing" thinking that is such a waste. If I don't swallow every iota of belief system X as the literal truth, then we might end up squabbling over those unimportant things and never get time to benefit from the important message/moral/lesson or just enjoy the entertaining story.
On the other hand, the set of assumptions that comes with the school belief system -- all the garbage about the benefits of "socialization" in school, testing, standardization, PCness in the extreme, etc. -- even without NCLB, this "it takes a village" "we know what's best for you and your child" "everyone needs the same thing" approach -- are the unspoken starting point for so much.
Got a poor family? Send the kids to pre-school. Need medical or psychiatric help? Send the kids to school. Don't have good learning resources in the community or at home? Send the kids to the local public school. Kids need food? Send them to school.
All problems are to be solved by the magic pill of public school.
And it's not working. No matter who is in the White House churning out what policy.
Because the underlying problems are never really addressed. Poverty. Healthcare. Decent, affordable housing. These persist and parents want something different for the next generation. And what, other than clinging to the "belief" that public school will be the cure, is being offered by candidates for the next Presidential election, for instance?
I had some moments of hopefulness about Sen. Edwards a while back -- he was talking about poverty. Now, I don't know. . . so much spin, so little connecting.
Nance
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absolutely
Submitted by Lorraine on 29 January 2006 - 1:48pm.
We have too many people in this culture who are incapable of critical thought. The truth is never simple, but it's a whole heck of a lot easier to believe that it is.
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How Oprahness Trumped Truthiness
Submitted by JJ Ross on 30 January 2006 - 5:33pm.
David Carr's business story today -
". . With network news crippled and major newspapers suspect, Ms. Winfrey is regarded as a bulwark of veracity. But as this episode proves, she can be had when a narrative bends to her belief system or touches on her sense of moral outrage.
Just last September, she visited New Orleans after the flood and spoke with Mayor C. Ray Nagin and Chief Edwin P. Compass III about life inside the Superdome. "We had little babies in there, some of the little babies getting raped," the mayor said. "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
Not much of that was true either, but there was no well-considered corrective, no royal summons for the mayor and police chief to come to Chicago and explain themselves. In that case, the damage done was to the reputation of a flooded city, not the Brand Called Oprah. . .
If Mr. Frey is the pathogen, then Ms. Winfrey will be the catalyst. Look for a great deal of noise about fact-checking and the book industry's sacred trust with the reader.
But Ms. Winfrey will not fix the book business any more than she fixed television when she dumped the tabloid elements of her show years ago. She is a cultural Dustbuster, someone who cleans up messes by living her values and focusing on what is good and right. . .
The most important thing that Ms. Winfrey can do for publishing is pick better books."
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Something Else about Rival Truths
Submitted by JJ Ross on 29 January 2006 - 8:51pm.
[quote]It was not that he found unanimity among them . . .
on the contrary, he was at pains to accentuate their differences. . .
philosophical conflicts called . . .for sincere and anguished
contemplation.
It was necessary to "grant equal rights to rival interpretations", and
philosophy would perish if it took the easy path of opting for one
side or another of the essential dilemmas of existence. . .[/quote]
OBITUARY
**Radical Christian philosopher struggling with the dilemmas of existence
Paul Ricoeur, philosopher, born February 27 1913; died May 20 2005
by Jonathan Rée
Monday May 23, 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk
Paul Ricoeur, who has died in his sleep in his flat just outside Paris,
at the age of 92, was the last survivor of the mighty generation of
French philosophers - including Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul
Sartre - born before the first world war. . .
He was never to lose his commitment to problems of action, and
his Christian faith gave stoical steadiness to an existence that was not always easy. . .
The aim of all Ricoeur's work - some 20 books and 600 essays in all -
was to teach us to feel the full force of authentic intellectual
discomfort. . .
The Symbolism Of Evil (1960) gave a new formulation to Ricoeur's sense
of philosophical responsibility. His key term now was "hermeneutics",
meaning the art of interpretation.
"The symbol sets us thinking," in Ricoeur's famous phrase: we were not
so much the creators of our symbols as their creatures, and philosophy
was our ever-incomplete attempt to discern their multiple meanings.
The purpose of thinking was not to gain knowledge, but to learn to consider the world in the light of our irremediable ignorance.
In the 1960s and 70s, Ricoeur was drawn unwillingly into controversy: he found the so-called structuralist movement philosophically dogmatic, especially in its antagonism to subjectivity and to realities independent of language. . .
Ricoeur took his tasks as an educator very seriously too. In the early
1960s, he was appalled by the failure of the French university system to
face up to new circumstances, especially the explosion in student numbers.
So it was with high ideals that he set off, in 1967, to help create a
new type of university in the suburbs of Paris, at Nanterre. As dean of
the school of letters the following year, he tried to impart his
sceptical pluralism to a new generation of would-be revolutionary
students, only to be rewarded with bins of rubbish emptied over his head. . .
Subjectivity was neither a transcendent fact nor an ideological
illusion; it was, rather, an artifact of the metaphors and narratives
through which we endlessly seek to "configure" the riddles of our
existence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1490178,00.html
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Apropos of nothing (maybe)
Submitted by Jeffrey Langstraat on 30 January 2006 - 9:25am.
I just bought all three volumes of Ricoeur'sTime and Narrative on Friday. Now, to find some time to dig in.
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And Rival Fictions Too
Submitted by JJ Ross on 30 January 2006 - 6:04pm.
Just found this in my (supposedly) nonfiction backlog -- JJ
"It says everything about the Democrats' ineptitude that when they spin
fiction, they are incapable of meeting even the low threshold of
truthiness needed to make it fly in this lax cultural environment.
The Republicans would never have been so sloppy. Indeed, hardly had Mr.
Kennedy's melodramatic stunt blown up in his face than they came up with
a new story line . . .
(from) a P.R. outfit called Creative Response Concepts . . ."
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/opinion/22rich.html
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Literally true?
If we need these stories to literally be true in order to get their message -- that's when we run into problems, it seems to me.
It's easier if you're not a believer.
I can just get the point of the fable or enjoy a good yarn, never expecting it to be about facts.
The time we spend on the vast majority of people who live as if all these stories are really, really true and that others believing as they do -- or not -- matters . . . well, it could be better spent.
Nance