Living in our misinformation age

Among our day’s more glaring cultural ironies is this: a much-touted “information age” rife with massive, daily doses of disingenuousness and outright deception.
   Perhaps some are old enough to remember those bygone days when statements didn’t require “crafting” and when words didn’t need to be parsed. Remember when evasive terms such as “disinformation” and “selective memory” were better known by the leaner, more accurate term; lying. Remember when words were used more as tools for expressing thought rather than elaborate mazes designed to conceal it.
   Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed, “In all the superior people I have met I notice directness — truth spoken more truly, as if everything of obstruction, of malformation, had been trained away.” Emerson would be hard-pressed to find many superior people these days.
   Yet, our current aversion to honest forthrightness is not really new at all. Centuries ago, centuries before Emerson, before popes, before Mohammed, before many world leaders, Jesus taught, “But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil” (Matthew 5:37).
   James echoed the same truth: “…let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay; lest ye fall into condemnation” (James 5:12).
   And long before the New Testament age, the Weeping Prophet lamented one of the evils of his people: “And they bend their tongues like their bow for lies: but they are not valiant for the truth upon the earth” (Jeremiah 9:3).
   Circumventing truth by means of creative and confusing rhetoric is not a failing unique to our spin-crazed generation. But we are swiftly transforming an age-old problem into nothing short of a modern-day art form. Perhaps it’s better billed, “the misinformation age.”
   One can call it what he will; craft words as he wishes.
   The truth is still the truth (John 8:32).
   And lying is still lying.