Now we must defend the truth

One of the worst parts of the political climate in which we find ourselves is the erosion of faith in the truth. People believe what they want to believe, and, because they can find someone online who supports their position, they won't give up on those beliefs, even when presented with evidence proving them wrong. The innocent guilty, the guilty innocent. The broken fixed, the fixed broken. The right wrong, the wrong right. Polls tell us society has lost faith in everything — the military, the police, the courts, the church, the media, academics, Washington, the statehouse, city hall — and so many of us no longer trust any arbiters of truth. We only trust ourselves. When you have no lighthouse upon which to find the shore, you float adrift, wondering if every wave or current will bring you home. You follow many false courses, and, sometimes, you end up at the bottom of Thunder Bay. It's bad enough when that happens among voters who make decisions based on falsehoods. It's worse when our politicians knowingly lie for no other reason than to rile and confuse the populace and lay claim to power. Politicians have always lied, will always lie, because the quest for power can always corrupt. But, in the old days, we always had something upon which to lean to find our grounding — our pastor, our newspaper or a trusted newscaster, researchers who could verify or dispute the claims coming out of Washington or Lansing or city hall. The politicians knew that and most of them stayed within a few degrees of the truth on most issues. Those who didn't — those who spewed the most outlandish claims and refused to follow the evidence — were relegated to the fringes of the political spectrum, remembered only as also-rans. Now, the politicians know so many of us have lost our guardrails, so they've gone off the deep end into many public flights of fancy. They've taken many of us with them. The political spectrum has collapsed upon itself, and the fringes now occupy the majority, the middle squeezed to near-irrelevance, respect for facts and the truth nearly pressed out altogether. Politicians who once would have screamed from the fringes into cheap-rate megaphones now speak before sleek teleprompters to sold-out crowds on their way to school district headquarters and city halls and legislative chambers and the halls of Congress, on their way to the White House. We have to stop it. Without truth and a grounding in basic underlying facts, we cannot righteously debate or craft policy. If we don't agree on what the science says or the math says or other evidence says about the causes of a problem, how can we fix it? How can we even talk about fixing it? If you have a fact-based understanding of a problem, you can debate the right solutions (a tax cut or a tax hike, a new regulation or removing a regulation, something in between those things), but, when we engage in mistruths or exaggerations or outright lies — even half-truths — we muddy the waters and chase what we think we want instead of what might actually work. So we must demand our political leaders engage with the truth. When they lie, we must call them out on it. We must press them to tell the truth and debate in good faith. When they continue to lie, we must vote accordingly. And we have to find a way to find faith in something once again. We must recognize that the people who spend their whole lives studying a subject might know more than we do about that subject. We must recognize independent sources who have no skin in the game as more trustworthy than those who have something to gain or lose. We must respect those who provide evidence for their claims over those who simply demand that we trust them. Not that we can't or shouldn't have a healthy level of skepticism. We should always expect our sources to show us their cards, explain their process. We should ask whether they've been peer-reviewed and expect them to open up their cross-tabs. We should check our sources against other sources, look for video or photographic evidence, named witnesses. But, if a source passes all those tests, we ought to at least consider believing them, even if they present an inconvenient or uncomfortable or outright scary truth. Because, at the end of the day, the truth will exist whether we believe it or not, and it will come back to haunt you when you turn away from it. Justin Hinkley is publisher/editor of The Alpena (Michigan) News. He can be reached at jhinkley@TheAlpenaNews.com.