Malta too has succumbed to the post-fact phenomenon
This piece in The Telegraph is relevant to what has been happening in Malta for the last five years or so. Facts are no longer relevant in people’s minds. That is how Joseph Muscat won the general election and how he continues to manipulate public opinion.
As somebody whose reasoning is always fact-based, I was one of those who were completely out of the loop in the run-up to 2013 – happily so, though, because irrationality is anathema to me and I would rather be rational and unfashionable than irrational and fashionable. I found the way so many people spoke and wrote about things to be perfectly disturbing.
The irrationality phenomenon is not Maltese, but global. Maltese people are particularly prone to it because of high levels of illiteracy, subliteracy and generally poor education even among the supposedly educated and socially privileged. Facts simply don’t matter; facts are not considered necessary as the basis on which to form an opinion, and the right to hold and express an opinion is confused (because of that lack of education) with equality of opinions.
Challenge a person’s opinion on the basis of facts, and he or she will say or write defensively: “I have a right to my opinion.” Sure you do, darling, but how about basing it on facts, listening to others, and putting some thought into it. We now inhabit a world in which Mark Carney’s – the governor of the Bank of England – views about the consequences of the UK pulling out of the EU are worth as much as those of Michael Gove and a pub patron in some Godforsaken village in the Midlands. Well, actually, Michael Gove’s and the pub patron’s are worth more because they are “authentic”.
Yes, this is a world in which people of my frame of mind are pilloried, ridiculed and described as “the arrogant elite” for saying that we think the views of the experts are crucial, more important than our own, and that is why we consider them seriously.
The piece in The Telegraph begins with an anecdote:
One day in summer 1999, the comedian Stewart Lee was riding through London in a taxi when the driver turned to him. “I think,” said the driver, “that all homosexuals should be killed.”
Somewhat taken aback by the abruptness of this announcement, Lee asked why. “Well,” said the driver. “Because homosexuality is immoral.”
Politely, Lee suggested that notions of morality are far from immutable. For example, he said, modern Western society derives many of its fundamental principles – in ethics, aesthetics, philosophy and more – from ancient Greece: a society in which love between two men was regarded as the purest love of all.
The driver, however, was unimpressed.
“Yes, well,” he huffed. “You can prove anything with facts, can’t you?”
When Lee repeated this line in his stand-up shows, audiences laughed. Maybe they shouldn’t have. Like all great revolutionary thinkers, that taxi driver was simply ahead of his time. Because, if I had to pick a quote to sum up British politics in 2016, it would be that.
We apparently now inhabit a world that appears to be increasingly anti-fact. It’s a world in which campaigners for Brexit unblushingly asserted that Britain sends £350m a week to the EU, and pledged to spend the entirety of this imaginary sum on the NHS.
It’s a world in which the defence minister, Penny Mordaunt, falsely told voters that Britain has no veto over Turkey joining the EU. And it’s a world in which 84 Tory MPs happily voted for a leadership candidate, Andrea Leadsom, who has made numerous deeply questionable claims about her career before politics.
