Mrs Mortimer’s spiritual heir is the former Lonely Planet writer Thomas Kohnstamm, who cheerfully admitted this week that he had written a section of the Colombia guide without having visited the country. Bogus travel writing has a long and inglorious history, but in another way Kohnstamm is representative of a wider and more modern malaise: writers reviewing books they have not read, politicians claiming to have braved dangers they never faced, novelists depicting places they have not seen, memoirists describing a past that never happened, journalists making up stories about people that never existed, and, most pernicious of all, writers simply cutting and pasting words they have not written.
In most cases this is not active deception, but rather a strange cultural blurring of truth and fiction, the confusion of first-hand knowledge with second-hand electronic cuttings, the elision of personal experience with a reality borrowed or imagined from elsewhere.
This is the victory of information over experience. In Wiki-world, where so much semi-reliable information is available at the push of a button, there is no need to see something first-hand in order to be able to describe it with conviction and authority. A comparison of Paris guidebooks reveals entire chunks of identical text for some tourist spots: why actually visit somewhere to find out what it is like when one can merely paste together a version of reality?
To Macintyre’s list we could add: the temptation to make our lives and ministries more exciting, heroic and selfless than they really are so as to get ‘good copy’ in sermons.
It’s called lying, and I think the Bible is against it.
This is simply one clear example of what happens when an entire society lives in a world of the second hand. The virtual world of the internet has so absorbed – subsumed perhaps is a better word – the real world that they have become indistinguishable to the participants.
Life at first hand is slowly becoming too first hand to be comfortable, especially since it can’t be edited – but then, it has always been that way, but in the past, we have been unable to avoid the real and primary. It is this unavoidability that has forced mankind to mature, to grow up, and unpleasant undertaking which, as you know, can now be circumvented. The result is a society of adolescents, unable to grow up, a society of perpetual narcissists. LM