“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life…You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.” So says the ridiculous Mr Gradgrind, owner of a model school, in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times. He takes his beliefs to an absurd degree, telling the class that they shouldn’t have wallpaper with pictures of horses because “do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in reality - in fact?”
As the novel goes on, it becomes all too clear that denying children their imagination, particularly his own children, does not end well. Mr Gradgrind is a parody of an education system in which learning by rote is the only kind of learning allowed. Yet more than 150 years on from when the novel was first published, it seems that our relationship to facts, and by extension our public and political discourse, has swung in the opposite way.
If Tony Blair’s Labour government was famous for its ‘spin’ - essentially a form of propaganda that put his policies in a favourable light, Donald Trump’s tactic is to say whatever comes into his head, no matter how ludicrous, and present it as fact. Television pictures which clearly showed the number of people who attended his inauguration was much fewer than Barack Obama’s audience? Fake news. Negative responses to his travel ban against predominantly Muslim countries? Fake news. Claims that Russian intelligence interfered in the US elections? Fake news.
Tom Rosenstiel, the executive director of the American Press Institute, recently said President Trump’s habit of calling any story he doesn’t like as fake news was “Orwellian” and said a 90-second video posted as part of the president’s “real news” series on his Facebook page was “riddled with errors and inaccuracies”.
Yet sadly the practice of referring to any fact you don’t like as “fake” is spreading. Earlier this month leading historian and classicist Mary Beard was trolled on social media for defending a BBC animation depicting a black Roman soldier. Any reasonable human being might think that a woman who has spent her adult life dedicated to the study of ancient Rome might have greater insight than an ‘alt-right’ blogger. But not so. Blogger Paul Joseph Watson moaned that the animation was not historically accurate and was an example of “the Left… literally trying to rewrite history”. Yet when Professor Beard said the animation was “pretty accurate” and pointed out that a governor of Britain, Quintus Lollius Urbicus, was born in what is now Algeria, she got a torrent of abuse for her troubles, with trolls, none of whom had her experience or qualifications, highlighting everything from her age, gender, shape and professional competence.
We know that those in power have, down the centuries, tried to suppress facts that they did not like. The Italian 16th century astronomer Galileo was tried by the Roman Inquisition for heresy when he dared to suggest that the earth orbits the sun. Meteorologist Alfred Wegener was ridiculed in the early 20th century for his theory of continental drift - the idea that all the continents had once been joined together. Both Galileo and Wegener’s theories are now accepted as scientific facts. The trouble is that internet trolls, and indeed Donald Trump, are not Galileo, or Wegener or Mary Beard. To be able to debunk long-held beliefs or give new historical insights requires hours of patience, research and study. It requires us to think deeply and look at what is presented to us rather than be swayed by opinions.
In 1980 the science fiction writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov railed against hostility to intellectuals or education in the US, claiming that public life had been beset by the “false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’ ”.
Thankfully we still have an education system which teaches facts and asks children to apply them. But we also have a society which allows us to publicly air our views, often erroneously displayed as facts. Have an outlandish opinion or odd conspiracy theory? Then you too can find like-minded people online who have even more ridiculous ideas.
“In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!” Mr Gradgrind says. Our difficulty now is that we don’t want facts, we want everything but facts and dismiss those facts which don’t please us. But we shouldn’t. If we only ever want validation of our own opinions, then we’re not really adults.
