Mark Twain said it best in his own time. “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Twain understood the Cartesian crisis – the question of how do we trust what we think we know – better than anyone. But also, he didn’t see it as an epistemological crisis, he saw it as a persuasion opportunity.
Twain saw that the news business was a narrative selling machine and so he created stories. The more fantastic the stories, the more people wanted them. “Fact” is stranger than fiction when the “fact” is pure fantasy.
Twain wasn’t captured by his fantasy. He had the grounding of frontier experience where the cost of failure to prioritise material want over narrative was very visible all around.
In our hyper-real world, how do we know what’s real? Can we trust anything that is relayed on our screens? These screens which, it seems, have given us access to the world. Do we have real access or are we merely watching shadows play out morality tales and deceptions while the real world of material and senescence is hidden, distorted, and refashioned by the ubiquitous screens that have hijacked our dopamine systems? Is seeing still believing when what we see is digitally created?
We are on the brink of a deluge of hyper-reality, where the majority of videos that fill our algorithms will most probably be AI created deceptions masquerading as a reflection of the real world. A parallel reality custom made for each of us, if you will. How can we trust what we see? How can we know what’s real, and how do we separate reality from illusion?
Perhaps the only way to be sure is by feeling and being. If you feel the pangs of hunger, you know the experience is real.
In an age of created and curated reality, real spaces and real contact are desperately needed. Not just desirable, but required. Shared experiences in “real time” in physical space will be the most valuable and valued thing we offer or create – direct conversations in the presence of each other about things that matter. Things that matter to you on a psychological or spiritual level that is. Things which might be the subject of global conversations or deep philosophy, but could also be trivial but deep, and personal, and authentic.
Over the past few months I have had a weekly conversation on Zoom with a friend who lives thousands of miles away, about how to interpret song. This extended conversation dug deep into the shape of language; the musical contours of words; and how these curves and contours can be assembled into lyrical phrases. How words are invested with meaning, and within that arrangement of stressed and unstressed meaning, finding the lyrical pulse of a song.
This experience, I can say with certainty, was real, because it was authentic. It was experienced and created at the same time. It flowed back and forth between us and I revealed things that I knew but had not ever expressed at this level before, because I had not been asked to share it. Is this what “real” means: to share something that comes out of your own contemplation?
How many of these conversations do we have in our own lives? Statistics (always a source of equivocation according to Twain) tell us that we are experiencing a loneliness crisis. That connectivity has not brought us together but has atomised us.
Mark Twain’s incredible reporting was devoured because it came from his own inventive mind. A mind that understood the human propensity for stories, because he talked and listened to people, and experienced the physical and muscular world every day!. As the Americans say, he “touched grass.” The creative experience is fed by this.
We, the human species, need to feed our minds and souls. Let the imagination soar, and do it with other people. The second part of that last sentence is far more important than we can imagine.
Lorcán Mac Mathúna