Existential commentary about truth - an echo essay from Texas

"....truth is an organic need.....both the most human and divine thing about us"....echo opinion published in the Dallas Morning News*

Truth needs another hero like George Orwell

Truth is a writer's first responsibility, to conquer the lie, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said.

Our need of truth is "more sacred than any other need," Simone Weil wrote. 

A compulsion, Aristotle taught, rooted in human nature, our need to hear and know the truth is ineradicable. 

It's why there are lies, because of our desire for truth.

It's why the loss of the arts and crafts of truth (the decay of literature, the demise of journalism) is a grave social problem, even existential, something more than economic, political or cultural. Because truth is an organic need, both the most human and divine thing about us.

The external threats to truth, of course, are familiar: shifting markets, the short-term logic of profit, aesthetic and moral tastes deadened by pop cultures and politicians, themselves merely instruments of profit. These are the tolls taken on our culture's guardians of truth. 

Newspapers, writers, those with public voices have been changed into something else. Most have been refitted to more lucrative business models or perished; survivors have been made into mere cashiers of influence.

Yet, there are dangers to truth that are equally deadly, and maybe more so, insofar as they go unnoticed. Not bias, but something else: it's the self-inflicted, unspoken temptation to write "sentences that sell," as Mark Thompson of The New York Times put it. 

This desire to be liked, to be hired, to be thought sufficiently "woke," is primevally serpentine, the Luciferian desire to shine. 

At the core of our cultural demise lies narcissism, that so many of us are untruthful for likes, for gigs, for ego.

Which is why we who write need a new hero to exemplify truthfulness. We need a hero who shows us how to resist those forces internal and external bidding us to betray truth. A hero like George Orwell, obscure as that may sound. 

After reading again books like 1984 and Animal Farm, I think him now something like a prophet or patron saint, a writer whom every writer should read.

This summer marks 70 years since the publication of 1984. Dorian Lynskey's fascinating new book, The Ministry of Truth, a "biography" of 1984, makes a similar appeal. He says Orwell's classic is a book "we turn to when truth is mutilated." It's a book, he says, "I urge you to read again," because it "continues to define our nightmares."

He's right. In this fake news, Russian-influenced, strangely over-screened world, and before yet another presidential campaign, we should read 1984 and Orwell's other works, because truth was his theme. Born from his experience of the Spanish Civil War, of seeing firsthand the evils of communism and totalitarianism. He saw, too, his confrères on the Left turn a blind eye as blatantly as those on the Right. It's a novel born of what he called the "nightmare feeling caused by the disappearance of objective truth."

It's the nightmare of 1984. In a world of rewritten history, suspicion and hate, the first, most mortal crime is "thoughtcrime," the crime of free thought unsanctioned by the Party. 

Everyone in the book holds everyone else in suspicion, and everyone acquiesces. "Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe," says the character Julia, explaining her charade as a good member of the Party. This is the moral substance of 1984, and of Orwell generally, and it's why the book's still so relevant and Orwell the sort of hero we still need.

Orwell's work underlines what's at stake. "Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death," wrote Winston, the main character, in a diary he thought private and secure. They're words fit for an epitaph, for ours. They show what we lose when we choose ideology, identity, institution, party or political loyalty over truth, especially in a world in which we're afraid we'll be ridiculed and ratioed.

Tribal civil society, fickle corporate mob morality, politics and politicians of misinformation screaming "fake news," dividing the nation to strengthen their base: This is what we've become. Certainly, it's not yet Oceania. We've not yet come to the gray darkness of Airstrip One nor to the terrors of Room 101. Yet we've come too close. The terrors of Orwell's fiction are not fiction. 

We're in danger again, because truth is in danger. And where are the writers, the reporters, the preachers of truth?

It's why those who work in words should read Orwell again. Before history is erased and common sense becomes the heresy of heresies.


*Joshua J. Whitfield is pastoral administrator for St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas. He is a former Anglican minister. He was ordained a Catholic priest through the Pastoral Provision of Pope John Paul II in 2012. Before he became Catholic, he went to seminary in England at the College of the Resurrection. He holds degrees in theology from the University of Leeds and also Duke University. He is also the author of Pilgrim Holiness: Martyrdom as Descriptive Witness(Cascade, 2009). Whitfield is a frequent contributor to the Dallas Morning News.