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| Mars — nothing to do with the Moon |
I write a lot of children's non-fiction, a lot of adult non-fiction and some children's fiction. Fiction is currently beset by arguments about what counts as cultural appropriation. I'm not going into those arguments, but they revolve around ownership of story and whose truth should be told by whom. This is not going to be about cultural appropriation, but about truth.
The truth about human history, whether of an individual person or a nation, is partly subjective . There are facts, though they are not always discoverable — how many people died of a plague, how many people attended a president's inauguration ceremony. Then there are causes, which are more complex and open to interpretation: what really caused World War I, why does Trump lie about his inauguration crowd? These are not objective truths; we can discuss them until we agree but we might still be wrong and there is no conclusive proof to be found.
It used to be universally acknowledged that you could get a straightforward fact right or wrong. What was accepted as true might change over time as more is discovered, but it wasn't a matter of opinion. The age of the universe was until this year thought to be 13.77 billion years. New data suggests it might be a billion years younger. But the universe does actually have an age which we could, in theory, discover. People have never liked challenges to what has long been perceived as true. When European scientists first discovered that Earth orbits the Sun rather than the other way round, they were condemned and forbidden to teach this new knowledge as it was seen as a contradiction of the Bible. Consensus reality has a powerful hold, especially when backed up by religious belief. But still, the new truth - or more accurate version, the closer approach to the truth - usually takes root. Now, only some rather odd people believe the Sun moves round the Earth.
Let's take that small faction as an example as that belief is less contentious than some others we could use. There is no emotional investment in what celestial bodies do, as there is in, say, the anti-vax position or whether climate change is 'real'. It is clearly demonstrable with mathematics that the planets orbit the Sun, and if you don't like mathematics, you can go and sit in a space station and watch. There is no argument to be had. Yet some people prefer to believe something demonstrably untrue. Why? Is it because they don't like being told what to think? They don't 'trust' science, even though they have no better way of judging for themselves? They prefer to feel special (humans are at the centre, despite not having existed for the first 4.4 billion years of the solar system)? They are just uneducated and think it's a matter of opinion?
The latest nonsensical bit of untruth is Trump claiming yesterday that the Moon is part of Mars. Reader, the Moon is categorically not, and never has been, part of Mars. Some Americans will presumably now believe this. Some American children will grow up believing it (unless he backtracks today, of course). When did objective truth become a matter of opinion, or of choice? When did it become OK to spout nonsense? We are seeing some of the impact in the 'lies on the bus' issue. It's going to get a lot worse if truth has no perceived value. How can we proceed with education, or with writing factual books, in this kind of climate?
It is an odd world in which fiction demands more truth (the 'true' experience of the right kind of writer) and fact demands less. I waiver between thinking my job is utterly pointless now and thinking it is needed more than ever. Maybe both are true at the same time. Writers and educators must keep the flame of the Enlightenment alive so that fire of rational enquiry can be rekindled later. How much later, though?
