Tower and Town, June 2019

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Clergy Letter: Was There Ever A Truthful Society?

Quakers have expressed a concern shared by many about the Post Truth society in which we are now living and ask us to think what we could be doing to counter it. What does this mean?

Sadly, we have to challenge so much of what we hear and read and delve deeper into ourselves. We must think what really matters: developing our spiritual lives, living simply, decluttering and making time and space for what really matters: love, truth and integrity in all our relationships.

Two things recently particularly affected me. One was an article in the Week magazine headed “‘I’ve seen things I can never unsee’: Life as a social media moderator.” It was about a housewife who was a moderator for social media platforms, a job she could do at home to supplement her income. She is one among thousands, and was employed to assess, and if necessary, delete material that breached the organisations’ rules. It involved engaging daily with hundreds of instances of bullying, racism, sexism, pornography and violence. Facebook alone has trebled its number of moderators, from 4,500 to 15,000 in the last 18 months. After 8 years she resigned with post-traumatic stress disorder and an inability to trust anyone. How can we police social media without doing more harm than already exists?

The other was a conversation reported on the radio by a mother, between herself and her 5 year old son. They were on a plane. The boy said that there was a man on the plane like his daddy. He was the only black man on the plane and his father is black. The boy then went on to say he was frightened the man was going to rob everyone on the plane. His father is an upright man. How had he come to this thought?

We absorb so much information consciously or unconsciously that affects our attitudes from the media, press, TV and internet.

How can we make efforts to counter this ‘post truth’ world in which we live and learn to challenge and question what is presented?

In our little red book of Advices and Queries, No 38 says

‘If pressure is brought upon you to lower your standard of integrity, are you prepared to resist it? Our responsibilities to God and our neighbour may involve us in taking unpopular stands. Do not let the desire to be sociable, or the fear of seeming peculiar, determine your decisions.”

Rachel Rosedale