Last August publisher Thomas Nelson pulled David Barton’s The
Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You’ve Always Believed About Thomas
Jefferson because a number of
Jefferson scholars pointed out that the book was inaccurate. Jefferson, one of
the many U.S. founding fathers who was a deist rather than a committed
church-goer, is a splinter in the craw of evangelical Americans who claim that
America was conceived as a Christian nation, and Barton’s book is part of a
concerted campaign to re-cast Jefferson as not only sympathetic to Christianity
but a committed evangelical. Thomas Nelson found—much later than they should
have—that the facts got in the way of the book’s argument, but that didn’t
prevent Barton’s work from doing very well while it was on the market. Now that
the rights have been returned to Barton, no doubt it will soon be for sale
again, this time with a marketing blurb that says something along the lines of
“The facts mainstream publishers tried to suppress!”
When I taught rhetoric courses, I used
to do an exercise with my students, asking how many of them had actually
met Stephen Harper, how many had been to China or Afghanistan, how many had
actually witnessed the lunar landing, and so forth through a series of
commonplace facts, events, and people that “everybody” knows. Of course, though
the commonplaces were central parts of everybody’s knowledge, nobody in the
class had firsthand experience of any of them. The upshot of the exercise was
that of the vast mental picture of the universe each of us constructs,
only a tiny sliver actually comes from personal experience. In the
information-saturated global village, almost everything we think we know comes
from the texts and media around us, and that makes everybody vulnerable,
especially now that most of our information sources are concentrated in the
hands of a few corporate owners or, increasingly, conveyed through unverifiable
digital files that are changeable with a click of a button (See, for example,
the infamous
shift in the New York Times’s online coverage of how Occupy
protesters were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge).
For Renaissance thinkers, the imagination
was a kind of mirror that reflected an image of the external world to the
rational mind. If the imagination was warped, the decisions of the will would
be unsound even if they followed reason, because they were based on false
images: GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). Our media are our mirrors, and there’s
no doubt that various interested parties are struggling to shape those mirrors
to their particular ends. Of course, within the narrow bounds of our own
personal worlds, our views even of first-hand experiences are subject to our
own predispositions and biases. But if we’re fortunate life grinds away at the
distorting bumps and pits in the mirror of our imagination, polishing it so
that it offers a more accurate reflection. But as the personal is crowded out
by the vicarious, that corrective is becoming harder to find.
- Bruce
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