Honesty, Integrity

Honesty, Integrity – dooya luv it?
Honesty can be a difficult thing because truth can be a difficult thing. Consider, if you will, the various perspectives of the scientist, psychologist and philosopher. The perspective of the scientist is perhaps most interesting because journalists are so often criticised for misrepresenting or misreporting science – as indeed, they do. But the scientist is often curiously complicit in the deception: the basic model of science – the so-called ‘hypothetico-deductive’ model – is beautiful in its naïve optimism. Broadly, it takes us from the specific to the general and back to the specific, using induction and deduction to bridge the two respective gaps. So, for example, if we see a white swan (and then another) we can use induction from these specific observations to arrive at the general theory that all swans are white. Once we have a general statement (‘all swans are white’) we can deduce the specific prediction ‘the next 10 swans I see will be white’. Of course scientists know that the first part is (logically) flawed – no matter how many white swans you see you can never be entirely sure that the next one won’t be black – but hey, get real, it’s the best you can do if you are not God. That’s why scientists are so coy about truth – because they are conscious that all they have are theories that haven’t been disproved yet. At best they might talk about their theories being ‘approximations’ to the truth – but what, exactly, is the status of an ‘approximation’ to the truth? So, scientists – good guys, defenders of truth and objectivity? Sadly, no, because scientists actually turn out to be a lot like journalists: the hidden presumption is that a scientist’s observations of the world – those specific pieces of data that lead to general theories – are accurate and unbiased, turns out to be flawed. Scientists are only human – they tend to look for the things that they want to see, and interpret them in ways which fit with what they already want to believe. Much like a journalist the scientist will tend to make the facts fit the story. This is what is meant, for example, by the term ‘experimenter bias’.

Psychologists also have a name for this general phenomenon – ‘perceptual set’ – the tendency to see what we expect to see. Or what we want to see. Truth, at a personal level, is a valuable commodity. When Charlie left the Big Brother house (albeit temporarily) she heard people cheering. Really? Everybody else heard people boo-ing. The ‘truth’ is that people will distort the world to an extraordinary extent in order to fit their version of the facts with what they believe. Elisabeth Loftus discovered that memory is almost completely malleable if it means protecting belief – witnesses to a crime can be made to ‘remember’ things that didn’t happen or forget things that did if it means fitting in with a belief about what ‘really’ happened. On a personal, day-to-day level though there is a rule of thumb that holds good: the more deeply held the belief, the more central it is to our sense of self, the more determinedly we distort reality and abuse truth. As a specific example of this general theory you find that people with very demanding images of themselves devote the most time to distorting the world around them – wanting to be a big success can make you a big liar.

Philosophers to the rescue. Actually, philosophers have been experiencing some problems with truth for a while now. The last time it looked in good shape was a long time ago, and the general consensus these days is that it is dead. The first person to notice that truth was dead (although the observation is, to some extent open to interpretation) was Nietzsche. It seems that, rather like a cold-war era Russian leader, truth may have been dead for a while before anyone noticed and despite the fact that it was supposedly in charge.
But who cares what philosophers think, anyway? The problem seems to be that news of the death of truth has been leaked and has since percolated throughout society in various guises, such as cultural & moral relativism, and the Die Hard series of movies. The upshot is that the boundaries between right and wrong, significant and insignificant, possible and impossible, true and false are far more negotiable than ever. And not just because Jade Goody became a celebrity.

In a massively interconnected world it is increasingly possible to construct a channel – a dawn-to-dusk multimedia experience – that pretty much says exactly what you want to hear: that you are good, that you are right, that you are successful. And that is the job of the entertainer, I suppose – to figure out what your audiences want to hear, want to see, and tell the stories. Of course, it is not always enough to tell stories as stories – I don’t want my personal beliefs to be insulted – I want to feel like I am really right, authentically right, righter than all those people who just think they are right. So my stories must be real stories – must be news - Like Big Brother – which is not just a bunch of actors but real people. That’s why I watch it.

Cue Baudrillard-like anxiety at this point as you notice that ‘real’ people are increasingly adopting stereotypical Hollywood-ish behaviours and thinking patterns. Reality, it seems, must now copy the movies. News must diversify and prepare itself to cover all the angles without fussing about the internal contradictions (except, of course, for appearances sake). News, entertainment – whatever. And who said that truth had to be consistent – jeesus, man, get with the program…

Personally, I think the RDF episode makes for a great story. Please can we have it as a docu-drama with a title like ‘Faking Faking It – The True Story’. Perhaps RDF could redeem themselves by producing it…