Are we Living in a Post-Truth Era?
Hans Rosling, through his lectures and his book Factfulness, seems determined to ground our view of the world, and our public discourse, on objective truths. Sadly, he may be fighting an uphill battle. As we confront a bewildering array of data from a burgeoning number of sources, we struggle to distinguish the signal from the noise. At the same time, public confidence in governments and other institutions to provide unbiased information has declined precipitously. Indeed, our post-modern sensibilities doubt the existence of “objective truths” in the first place.
For those of us who cling to the notion that objective truth not only exists but must – somehow – inform decisions at all levels of society, Hans Rosling offers something of a lifeline. Although the sources that he and his co-authors cite in Factfulness are now a bit dated (the book came out in 2018), the approach seems to us a useful one: continually search out the most robust sources of hard data and examine them dispassionately before forming judgments about the world and about the means to address its many problems.
Rosling does have a message for us, contained in the book’s subtitle: “Things are better than you think.” Whether that’s true, of course, depends on how bad you think things are!
As always, please share your views on this topic, and also on this week’s acrostic, which includes a variety of clues and answers relating to truthfulness or the lack thereof.
And speaking of things that are a bit dated, here’s a classic from 1975 that we referenced in Clue/Answer R.: