Trapping The Rational

When the intellect becomes the slave of vices and passions, the supporter of lies,  it becomes not only a perversion, but also an illness, and we cannot see the difference between truth and falsehood, good and evil, virtue and vice.

William Ellery Channing Cited in Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom

Channing, as previously noted in this book, was the Boston based preacher who was the principal voice put forth the dissenting idea that became Unitarian Christianity. His was a confident, somewhat strident voice as a fervent Abolitionist, and his sermons were more likely to emphasize the possibilities of human ethical perfection than his Calvinist colleagues, who would have been more apt to dwell on” the wages of sin!” 

His emphasis on reason and ethics would be sorely dismayed with the level of societal and political discourse in our world today. With the advent of social media, our society haphazardly has confused opinion with fact, and perniciously has become the “supporter of lies” in a way that  Channing would abhor!  

In many ways, Channing held the pursuit of truth on an equal plane as theology, because you could not arrive at the truths that belong to God without grounding them in reason. It offered an assurance that one possessed an ethical clarity that made sense to the reasonable person in the pews or in life…

As I look at his forceful statement, it cannot help raise the issue of how we now have allowed deceit and lying to hold a hallowed place in our electronic and political conversations! The coarse and craven manipulation of information to serve or suit a political agenda or a vested self-interest is certainly not new in politics, or our socio-economic systems and yet, I find that it has gone off the rails! From my viewpoint, it is as if the novel, Brave New World, and its acceptance of doublespeak has become our societal norm!

Some of these rational commentaries would hide behind the altruistic statement of the 1st Amendment and call it free speech. I call it an abuse of the public trust! Growing up, I trusted the news I saw and heard; that commentators such as Cronkite, Huntley-Brinkley etc., sought to be objective, fair, and clear in their presentation of the news and worldwide current events. 

The distortions of that ethical responsibility in journalism and in social media platforms corrupts today’s worldviews, makes everyone distrustful and cautious-that is, IF they have the wits to discern, and not blindly swallow lies whole and digest them as truth!

It is quite possible that the virulent problem of misinformation will be the greatest challenge to the well-being of our society!

Just as there are limits to the 1st Amendment concerning public safety, I consider it to be vital to the future of our society to place ethical limits on all the distributed electronic information. The enormous flow of this electronic verbiage so that it is double-checked before being allowed to be broadcast or assumed to be reliable, just, fair, and true!

IF the truth is lost in a swamp of biased opinions, and if there is not a serious and sustained demand for factual information much that we hold as culturally necessary, even culturally essential information will be lost!