It just makes truth so much more complicated in an atomised and individualised world. Watch a family of five in a food court, all apparently eating together but each one is engaged with his or her device. That is how an atomised society looks like. Today’s Gospel gives an idea of how fraught the journey to truth is.
Jesus was feted by the crowd because He was eloquent and was able to hold the crowd’s attention but when He got near to the truth, it sat uncomfortably with His hearers. In general, we shy away from unvarnished truth preferring a sugar-coated version of it. In this, I am reminded of the movie which propelled Tom Cruise to celebrity status and also starred a veteran Jack Nicholson: A Few Good Men where Jack exploded in a contemptuous sneer at Tom:“You can’t handle the truth”.
This disability applies to many of us as it it did to the throngs surrounding Jesus. For many of us, truth is akin to the icon “Like” on your facebook. As long as people like it, then what is posted must be “good” and therefore “true”. In a sensationalised world, clicks are all that count, not the substance. Thus, in 2016, “post-truth” entered the Oxford English Dictionary and our imagination. It was followed closely by “fake news”. The algorithms of our social media do what they do best. They do not really challenge us; instead, they gather our likes and exclude our dislikes. This kind of separation works rather well with our ghetto mentality. Investigative journalism does pride itself as a purveyor of truth but in reality, it merely uncovers a point of view. Sometimes what we want to search for will lead us to the conclusion that we desire. “Echo chamber” is the proper term to describe a post-truth universe that is hyper polarised and parochially partisan—in other words, we preach to the choir because we often believe more readily that which we prefer to be true, rather than what happens to be true.
But truth remains our deepest calling as we heard in the Prophet Jeremiah. It is our vocation. In the context of the second reading, truth must be preached in love. In fact, truth is best served by a loving attitude. There is a person I know who prided himself as a pillar of righteousness. He could be right in most of cases but he was right in a way that was not helpful others. When someone got hurt by what he said, his usual reply was, “It is true what”.
His version of the truth is a timely reminder that it does not take much for truth to be a form of power. This makes truth more a possession than a persuasion. For the longest time I have been looking for an anecdote of one of the greatest minds we had last century—Albert Einstein. Here, I am going out on a limb to paraphrase what he said because he provided a humility that inspires us to seek the truth not so much to possess it but rather to serve it.
Apparently, he was asked what he thought about his greatest achievements. In regard to his discoveries he replied, “I don’t want to be right. I just want to know if I have been right”. To be right is fantastic but a desire to know if one had been right is a moral and ethical stance. It is a posture which puts a person in the service of the truth. Just to be right alone does sound as if truth has become a prized possession. Whereas the desire to know if one has been right keeps one humble in such a way as to allow for God to break through our defences, our prejudices or righteousness. For example, in giving an assessment on a person, I may state the facts and the facts speak for themselves. However, what prevents me from arrogance would be questions like, “Was I fair to the person in my judgement? Was what I said true?”. In other words, have I been right? Such a humility gives space for truth to persuade rather than it being an expression of power.
We all pillory or excoriate the ex-PM, do we not? In many a conversation, we “taruh” him and everytime his name is mentioned, some of us roll our eyes or we just smirk. The thing is, even the devil can speak the truth. When the devil tested Jesus in the desert, every fact he described of Jesus is true—(1) the Son of God, (2) who can turn stones to bread and (3).would definitely gained material wealth if he just worshipped the devil. For us, in our collective consciousness, our King of Trolls has committed crimes so unspeakable that there is nothing about him that is redeemable. But, just like the devil our enemy, Najib could say something true. Our love for truth should encourage us to ask the question rather than simply dismissed what has been posted in his facebook account: “Is it true”? Sadly, we have lost the civility of listening that we no longer see past a person’s crime, behaviour or sins. Our brand of justice may just be thinly-veiled vengeance.
Whilst there is a need to uncover the truth, truth in a post-truth, fake news and echo-chamber universe is characterised by power in that he who shouts the loudest often holds sway. I once lived with a Jesuit whose line of argument was not reason but rather a loud, raised and close to a shouting voice. And that “was” truth that no one would engage with him. The partisan divide of the USA is another cogent example because neither is hearing the other side but each preaches to its own choir. Just watch CNN and Fox News and you know what I mean.
Within a world which is so broken and in need of fixing, the search for truth cannot be divorced from love. In fact, truth and love reside in one person: Jesus Christ. For in Him, we have logos and agape, wisdom and love. Thus, the path to truth (logos, wisdom, reason) is at the same time, the path of love. Without love, truth becomes hard for it is mere facts which often does not inspire change. But without truth, love becomes sentimental for it pretends that nothing is wrong and thus, it sugar coats without the challenge to change.
It does not appear so but our engagement of social media exposes a longing whereby we all hunger to be right, yearn to be heard, need to have the last word and finally to win an argument. To this truth-deficit world, St Augustine teaches us an attitude which might assist along the way. He says that, in all thing essentials, let there be unity. In all things unessential, let there be diversity. Above all, let there be charity. So, you do not have to be right all the time. It is possible to do things differently but most all, whatever it is, let there be love in our actions.
