What is the cost of lies?
It’s not that we’ll mistake them for
the truth. The real danger is that
if we hear enough lies, then we no
longer recognize the truth at all.
What can we do then? What else is
left but to abandon even the hope of
truth, and content ourselves
instead… with stories.In these stories, it doesn’t matter
who the heroes are. All we want to
know is: who is to blame?
Kid #5 and I have been watching the HBO/BBC 5-episode series Chernobyl (at his request). I’m “enjoying” it (as much as one can enjoy a series about near-global disaster, official deceit, and human suffering) – it’s well-constructed and the Soviet 80’s vibe is fascinating, and you also have five hours of Emily Watson looking extremely concerned and Jared Harris (Lane!) being thoughtfully frazzled and throwing back vodka shots.
Widely praised, with some critics – most instructive to me was this, from the New Yorker – on what the series got wrong about the Soviet system. The series’ focus is about lies, secrecy and authority, but this writer says it doesn’t go far enough and creates a “truth-teller against the establishment” narrative in a system where that was largely impossible.
The Soviet system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.
(See, in another context, Fargo, season 3.)
Be that as it may.
The point is the rise of narrative over any sense of objective truth. There are deep roots of this, aside from human beings’ self-protective defense mechanisms. And you see it all over the place. And you see it, especially these days, when we are all overwhelmed by information. Who can dig through all the data available to us and determine truth on our own? Who has time? Who has the skills and understanding? Much easier to develop and narrative and stick to it.
It’s much easier to get people on your side by developing an emotionally-appealing narrative and push it, unrelentingly, and then vilify those who dare to question and dig.
This self-protective narrative construction can happen anywhere – in personal conversations, on social media, in institutions.
It’s fairly simple to identify, more challenging to combat. How to identify?
If the response to your question or inquiry is to call you a name, characterize you according to some identifier or alliance, or, more seriously, seek to expel you from whatever form of civilization is at stake – there you go.
And of course, social media, especially Twitter, lends itself to this tendency quite effortlessly and perhaps purposefully.
Even on Catholic Twitter (should I even say “even?” No reason to…) – the narrative-shaping, manufacturing of consent, caricatures and excommunications are constant – and as McLuhan says, there’s that media shaping the message again, because when you have 280 characters, who has time to present a case?
Slapping on labels – that is, creating the story – then pointing and laughing at whoever we’ve declared is to blame is much, much easier.
“…for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.”
This sort of thing makes me think of the Fatima warning that Russia would spread her errors throughout the world, since the whole world seems now to be devoted to this sort of ideological mush.
Yeah, I know, Fatima is one of the many third rails of Catholic discourse, and I’m not making any claims about the secrets or the consecration or any of that. The warning just makes the situation we’re in now more eerie to me.
I wanted to like the miniseries Chernobyl. But as it went on, I found its narrative-shaping of the narrative-shaping tiresome. The major issue for me being Emily Watson’s character, a stand in for, iirc, “dozens of scientists.” I get you need to make a narrative for a narrative, but 99 of those 100 scientists would have been men. Men scientists, men risking their lives and careers, Men concealing, secreting, conniving, and bartering. There was no virtuous woman unyielding in the truth at all, and her character grated. The reflexive need to add the woman.
Now they shaped that narrative to reflect modern pieties. What else did they shape? You pointed to another article about the truth-to-power-narrative, but how many more elements were shaped we didn’t even notice? How many lies embedded in the lie that they were telling us the truth?
The idea we are even allowed to talk about the bad USSR is only because HRC dreamed up a bunch of lies to pin the bad Russia on Trump. Until then, communist Russia was always misunderstood, the hero of WW2, etc. Again, narrative shaping.
I realize this is farther and farther afield of your point, but art differs from propaganda in that while art is shaped by its time and place, it reaches for something true beyond it, transcends, while propaganda chooses to use what’s true to shape the time and place.
Taken far enough, we come back to vanity, all is vanity. I know, it’s just a show. But I’m tired of the house of mirrors.
We as Catholics should learn to appreciate art again. Real transcendence. What lies are we telling ourselves about what doctrine says? What lies do we tell ourselves about cooperation with evil? What lies do we tell ourselves about how right we are with God? What lies about how good we are at telling the truth? How can I start to find out in a world that loves narratives? When our
own psyches define them as archetypes, even?
I don’t have an answer. But I find myself more allergic to, distrustful of the narratives now.
I absolutely agree with you I really do. It’s why I tend to shy away from dramatized biographies and historical pieces – set in a period, yes, but purporting to dramatizing a specific event – no, for exactly the reasons you say. We’ve got one more episode to go, and I’ll say that what I like are the individual scenarios of the impact of the explosion on human beings, workers and so on. But episode 4 ended with Emily Watson declaring “Someone’s got to tell the truth!” and….yeah. That happened….