Newspaper columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. has finally put into words something that’s been bothering me for a long time: In the political world, and increasingly in other facets of life, facts no longer matter. Pitts also has coined a name for this new paradigm. He writes:
“A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.” That nugget of wisdom dates from the 1800s — decades before anyone ever heard of the Internet, much less Fox ‘News.’ If a lie traveled that fast in the 19th century, you can only imagine its speed in the 21st, when media and the Web have given it wings. Indeed, in 2016, the lie is so broadly and brazenly told as to cower truth itself and to render impotent and faintly ridiculously the little voice insisting, against all evidence, that facts matter. It seems increasingly obvious that to many of us, they simply don’t. Not anymore. We find ourselves embarked upon a post-empirical era in which the very idea that facts are knowable and concrete has become quaint. These days, facts are whatever the politics of the moment needs them to be. We’ve seen this over and over in recent years. … Lunatic assertions that fly in the face of the known are now the norm in American political discourse.”
This, of course, is deeply troubling at many levels. Let’s start with this: Facts are stubborn things; no matter how much you try to bend, twist, or distort them, reality ultimately rules. If you jump off a cliff believing you can fly, you’ll discover gravity works, even if you don’t want it to. A bigger problem is that when science denial becomes the political norm, the danger increases exponentially that reality-deniers will drag us all over a cliff and, unlike Wile E. Coyote, we won’t survive our collision with reality. Willful ignorance is dangerous to your well-being, and this political season is overflowing with it.