Monday, January 9

?

Anyone got a good argument for why the truth/fiction of this dude's story matters?

At least momentarily, the online Times cover story is that author James Frey seems to've richly embellished his "memoir," A Million Little Pieces. The bestseller is about a man's rough life of jail, overcoming addiction, and so on. And now there is an apparent hubbub that the author didn't live out all the experiences in the story.

So what? Why is this news?

K. So here's what came to mind while looking at this artcle. We have a truth/belief/something problem. The problem for so many with the revelation that this author didn't actually live through the purported experience is not the falsity of his account; rather, it is that the readers' sense of what happened is disrupted. The only real affect this story being false or true has would be if the author's point has some stake in it actually happening...like a ufo account, or a cure to cancer.

So why does a meaningless falsity raise such a bother?

We have a peculiar relation with knowledge in present society. We seem to want some conclusion on things, but we don't seem too bothered with a careful search. Reflect upon our opinions of the private lives of celebrities, the guilt or innocence of defendants based upon scant gossip (ie, modern media), even, sometimes, our own sense of being. In trials. we have an entire set of rules by which we observe purported facts- and the full purpose of those rules is to offset human fallibility in the manner in which we receive information (we have forgone conclusions, we remember things differently, we tend always to live in assumptions). And so, we've set up an entire system based on two people presenting two sides of a story as best they can, and bound by certain rules of presentation, to allow the jury to come to an answer of what happened.

But life outside is the full opposite. We sit cozy with our opinions of Michael Jackson, OJ Simpson, ladies with McDonalds coffee, and the mindset of Presidents without any concern for the truth. What to call this? We are a society of opinions mistaken for truth.

Normally, once a posiiton is held popularly, society refuses reflection. OJ, the coffee, it is all set in stone popularly. So was this guy's story of drugs, jail and redemption. When popular society is forced to see that it was hoodwinked, the uneasy reckognition of the vulnerability of knowledge causes a massive stir. And it is a stir we generally tend to avoid. See ,for example, the dragged out recognition of faulty Iraq statements, and the continued insistence that Congress and the President made decisions with the same information. Or note, to be fair, the ease with which we simply ascribe stupidity or evil to the administration's policies.

Opinions are fine. Opinions without the vulnerability of attempted knowledge, though, will lead to the full on stupidity of our Nation.