Playing the game for keeps

But no English school-boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the very simple reason that he is never taught to desire the truth. From the very first he is taught to be totally careless about whether a fact is a fact; he is taught to care only whether the fact can be used on his “side” when he is engaged in “playing the game”.

G K Chesterton – What’s Wrong With the World (1910)

Strange times we live in. For example, it is obvious enough that many people willingly adopt an idea they consider to be ‘right’ even though it is equally obvious that the idea is dubious, misleading or even false. In other words, truth is not always the high point on a scale of values. For some people and some subjects a scale of values may peak at ‘right’. In this distorted world a true idea can be wrong in the sense that the favoured alternative already sits at the top of the value scale.

Right > True > False > Wrong

It is worth adding that ‘right’ is more personal than true – it has a sense of ownership, kinship and collective virtue which truth cannot match. Truth is more austere, remote and difficult. That last one is important for mass persuasion – truth is difficult when issues are complex and nuances must be acknowledged. Difficult is rarely popular.

To argue any debating point is futile if true is not even a staging post on the way to ‘right’. This leaves us with an odd situation where wrong may be worse than false. Wrong may be far right, imperialist, xenophobic or numerous other variants but they all equate to wrong where wrong is worse than merely false.

In other words a true idea may be denounced as wrong and therefore worse than false because it is much further down a scale of values. Those who insist on truth as the ultimate arbiter may be seen as bad people or a basket of deplorables rather than merely mistaken. From here is no great leap for true ideas to be denounced as evil and beyond serious consideration by the ‘right’ people.

None of this is new and of course there are complex nuances because truth is usually conditional or merely the best we have rather than unambiguously true. Yet the problem is still with us and is getting worse. However nuanced it may be, truth as the ideal arbiter has to form common ground for any debate or there is no debate at all. Unfortunately no debate at all is what many activists want, including institutional activists such as the BBC.

Unfortunately ‘right’ always feels justified in suppressing true – so it does. Again this is what the BBC does. There is no common ground because ‘right’ cannot understand a common ground which isn’t ‘right’. It’s an old problem but now the game is being played globally and for keeps.