‘What is Truth?’
Pontius Pilate
The BBC has received widespread plaudits for its latest series of ‘The Traitors’, which concluded last Friday night. The programme has been spectacularly successful, not only in the United Kingdom but also in the United States and Australia.
At the end of the 2024 series, the programme appeared to put dishonesty on a pedestal. However, this year's design was intriguing as it contained a new element designed to find a balance between good and evil, while at the same time demonstrating clearly (but perhaps, not intentionally) how the promotion of dishonesty also undermines trust between honest people. The introduction of the new feature, the ‘Seer’, at its conclusion showed the BBC's effort to prove that truth does matter — that deceit cannot always be allowed to win.
In a more serious context, the relatively recent introduction of ‘BBC Verify’ seeks to achieve the same for news reporting in general. It's in stark contrast to developments in social media last week, as Mark Zuckerberg felt sufficiently empowered by the new Trump regime to strip away fact-checking from his Facebook and Instagram networks.
The question ‘What is Truth?’ goes back for millennia, and the distortion of truth is nothing new: George Orwell and Aldous Huxley laid bare the extent of deception in their 20th century masterpieces, ‘1984’ and ‘Brave New World’.
There could be no more direct modern-day example of these misnomers than the naming of Trump's ‘Truth Social’ network.
Over the past week I have heard a number of unprompted conversational reflections about the way that social media is setting people against each other, rather than drawing us together.
Its extraordinary penetration makes this an issue of real concern due to the huge level of aggressive opinions now being broadcast, and whose emphasis on difference rather than convergence is causing immense damage. In particular, a very high proportion of young people now say that they get their news flow entirely from social media.
Pontius Pilate’s question at the start of our commentary, ‘What is Truth?’, was in response to Jesus saying, ‘The reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me’.
This reflects the essential role of truth within the context of faith, and a search for the word ‘truth’ in St. John's gospel comes up with no less than 23 responses: this, from the apostle who really got to the heart of Christian spirituality.
But the huge decline in spiritual awareness in our modern world leaves people very vulnerable to the pandemic of dishonesty which is infecting everyday access to communications, as fact and distortion are stirred in the melting pot of public opinion. It leaves people at best very wary of others and at worst, encouraged to aggression.
How can we address this danger, in a world which has now chosen someone who represents the essence of distortion as its leader?
One solution might be for people of faith to establish a social media network which reflects the importance of truth and the willingness to engage with and appreciate others, however different they may be.
Organisations such as Premier Christian Radio and United Christian Broadcasters have made a significant contribution to the broadcasting world over recent decades, and they have done much to present the Christian faith in a modern context: arguably, doing so considerably more effectively than the established churches.
But traditional broadcasting is now largely overshadowed by the huge development of social media; so it may help considerably if the values which underpin these Christian broadcasters could also form the basis for a new social media channel to which people could subscribe without being confronted with lies and aggression.
In a world where governments are not prepared to moderate that aggression, or to ensure that free speech gives due reference to truth, this form of self-regulated action may provide a way forward. It would also offer a real alternative to the messaging indulged in by the leaders of government and those social media businesses who, notwithstanding their insistence that their platforms are merely ‘message boards’, use them to propagate their own often warped ideology.
A further thought about social media — should the very practise of keying comments into a mobile phone or tablet ‘liberate’ people from the common rules of decency and self-control which are so important in everyday conversation? If you are not prepared to say something to someone face to face, why should it be acceptable to say it through the faceless medium of your mobile device?
And, returning to ‘The Traitors’ for a final thought — the last scene showed how the four remaining ‘Faithfuls’, with no remaining ‘Traitors’ among them, were whittled down to the minimum allowed level of the last two because none of them trusted anyone, anymore. What this should tell us, is that if you put dishonesty on a pedestal, the ultimate result is that trust evaporates.
And if trust evaporates across society, so also will our intelligence and civilisation, leaving us no better than animals.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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