What can we believe?

One of the best lessons I received from my English private school in the 1970’s was one they never meant to teach me.

They organised occasional lectures for us. I can’t remember many of them at all. But one sticks in the memory even now, from a posh, arrogant bloke in a military uniform.

He had very fancy slides and maps, at least for the time. And his subject was the threat of the then Soviet Union. Seemingly, things were bad. His maps and charts all had menacing looking Russian tanks and missiles all over them, pointing mainly at Eastbourne (where I happened to be). And the defence force seemed to have deteriorated markedly from the halcyon days of Dad’s Army.

By the end of the talk, I was half expecting the Russians to just march in through the back door of the building and take over. Nothing seemed to be stopping them.

One of the themes of the talk was that Russians were evil. I didn’t really understand what sort of evil, that involved long words. But they were certainly evil. All of them. Every single Russian was sitting at that moment in their kitchen or living room, or on their tank more likely, filled with thoughts of hate for us, well for me actually.

But I was a child with a subversive streak even then, and I was smart enough to think a bit more deeply. Of course Russians weren’t all evil. They were people. According to the BBC, they had enough trouble putting foods in their mouths. And no doubt they were more concerned with who was chatting up their daughters, or where to get a lottery ticket or how to avoid the boss. Thoughts of invading Eastbourne probably didn’t get much of a look in, despite what this posh bloke would have us believe. His talk merely made me suspicious. Later in life I met some real Russians, and my suspicions were confirmed and my sceptic nature became more engrained.

Another key moment of truth for me came in my twenties. I’d started working for Shell and each day walked twice past the Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. Ken Livingstone was in charge at the old GLC at the time and had cheekily installed a statue of a black man along the walkway. I had never heard of him, but read that he was something to do with the anti apartheid struggle in South Africa.

The media and establishment gave little attention to the statue nor indeed to the wider South African issues. The official line seemed to be that the regime there might not be all that savoury but it was a hard place to govern, the locals weren’t really up to it, the black leaders were aggressive terrorist types and anyway we had some interests there via companies and expats. All too difficult, and the best we could do would be make occasional diplomatic noises to try to change the regime slowly.

I didn’t give this much thought, until I later walked past the same statue in the 1990’s and read that his name was Nelson Mandela, by then a hero even in the UK. While Ken Livingstone is hardly everyone’s cup of tea, especially later on his career, he had been ahead of the curve on that one. By the way, he also drove through lower tube and bus fares and later the congestion charge, visionary, courageous and correct policies, so he can argue that he has created a pretty strong legacy.
Anyway, I was able by luck to connect back to my own apathy from the 1980’s and reflect on different versions of truth and also the potential untrustworthiness of establishment sources we tend to take on trust without challenge.

It is a struggle all the time to know what to believe. Truth is elusive and usually nuanced. Just think of your own family or even your recent relationship history, and consider how even nearby things can be distorted or subject to different viewpoints. Multiply in the dimensions of complexity, scale and time, and especially context and bias, and we should all become very sceptical indeed.

Venezuela is a current case in point. In the last month I have read articles about Venezuela and Chavez in both The Economist and The Guardian Weekly. The former was utterly damning, the latter lauding. Each quoted statistics, the former of inflation and growth, the latter of poverty reduction. It is clear that there is some establishment bias at work – the failed CIA supported coup in the early days of Chavez was the clearest example of media censorship I can ever recall – yet The Economist is generally pretty sound. No doubt, as usual, the truth, such as it is, lies somewhere in the middle.

I like the approach of British comedian Dom Joly, who has just published a book, The Dark Tourist, describing his journeys to unlikely destinations such as North Korea or Iran’s ski slopes. Maybe he can go to Venezuela for us. Even then, of course he has his own bias and what he will see can only ever be a tiny fraction of what is going on.

As an example of how complexity, time and bias can overtake a story, take Christ’s Passion. I was lucky enough to be in Oberammergau last weekend for the famous ten-yearly play there. The play had some modern takes, for example on the role of Mary Magdalene and the Jews. It also did a good job of leaving room for doubt in interpretation. The roles and attitudes of Caiaphas, Pilate or Judas can all be interpreted in many ways. I usually go with a messy reading that most people are just trying to do a job but are often misinformed and fairly incompetent. History has seen far more cock up than conspiracy. Then there is interpreting Jesus himself. Wow.

After creating a case to make us all paralysed by scepticism, next week I’ll try to find a way forward. In the information age, this problem is only getting worse. Sure, Wiki and the internet give us so much information, but that only adds to the potential for mistakes. How can we live sane, informed lives in this environment?