Truth

April 15, 2020
A professional fact checker says that if you think we live in "a uniquely fact-resistant time," you need to check your facts. Phillips, the London-based editor of the nonpartisan fact-checking organization Full Fact, sounds a distinctly British keep-calm-and-carry-on note in this anecdotal rejoinder to the idea that "we live in a 'post-truth' age." "Don't get me wrong," he writes. "I'm not trying to convince you that our present time isn't stuffed to bursting with a hundred thousand flavors of horseshit--it absolutely is! It's just there's a simple problem with the idea that we live in a 'post-truth age': it would mean that there was a 'truth age' at some point that we can now be 'post-' about." Lacing profanity into jaunty but often sophomoric arguments, Phillips notes that ancient clay tablets record the misdeeds of an apparently dishonest Mesopotamian merchant. Later dissemblers include showman P.T. Barnum, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, and Benjamin Franklin, a "gleeful perpetrator" of literary hoaxes under pseudonyms. Why do we tolerate lies? The reasons range from laziness (it's too much trouble to check facts) to the cognitive bias called "anchoring," "our brain's tendency to latch onto the first piece of information we get about any subject and give it more weight than anything else." Phillips allows that lies can kill--"when our leaders lie, sometimes really, really, really large numbers of people die. There can be wars and stuff"--but we needn't "freak out" about perfidies like "fake news." We can survive them "just as long as we don't throw up our hands and go all, 'LOL--nothing matters.' " The author's jolly style at times has the air of insouciance he warns against, and in a presidential election year in which a candidate's lies can have perilous consequences, this book may strike Americans as tone deaf. A lighthearted history of lying that may play better in Britain than in the U.S.

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