Presence and “objective facts”

The objectivity of facts is often illusory: our perceptions, power, and interests influence their definition, making reality complex, subjective, and always partial.

Media and Information Education

For several years, there has been a strong form of educational and civic engagement called Media and Information Education (MIE), which has been further strengthened during and after the Covid period. It aims to separate the wheat from the chaff in the information citizens are confronted with, especially young people, as we are concerned with deconstructing fake news, conspiracy theories, post-truth, etc. These trends seem to develop an imaginary that promotes non-rational thinking about the world. It is postulated that moving away from rationality is dangerous, and above all, that it produces increased vulnerability to manipulation and openings to dangerous political and religious extremism.

There is a civic project for the formation of critical thinking and understanding of manipulation systems. Thus, teachers, for example, when moderating a debate, whether on a conflict between students or on a societal issue, say that in order to be able to discuss, we must share what is indisputable, that is to say, the facts, that this is the starting point to which we must always return. These “facts” would be completely independent of the presence of people; it is an objectivity external to human perception. Specifically, relying on “facts” would make it possible to return to rationality in analyses, decisions, conflict resolution, and thus find the best possible social solutions to all types of problems. In theory, yes, it works; it’s a beautiful utopia to envision that the world would be completely external to our perceptions. This may be the case, but in reality, we don’t know, because we perceive the world only through our perceptions and the perceptions of recording machines such as cameras, seismographs, tape recorders, and other machines for observing stars or the infinitely small.

Mathematics, Amazon, and Classroom

But let’s not forget that these machines, even conceptual calculating machines like mathematics, which seem absolutely indisputable to us, since we see their effects in nature, do only one thing: they manufacture forms and information intended to be perceived and interpreted by human beings, to explain the world and to observe its present, future, and past effects, in short, to provide explanations and solutions. For example, building buildings that stand up, thanks to our good calculations. But, despite the impression that we touch an “objectivity” (for the construction of the building), in reality, we see the world in our own way, and never completely.

Thus, for example, in a certain Amazonian tribe, when a woman became pregnant, she would then go and make love with several men whom she chose, in order to receive their respective sperm, which, it was thought, would bring to the child the qualities of all these men, who would then become as many paternal references. This belief, which we judge today in light of our biological knowledge as belonging to the imagination and in no way to Cartesian logic, was nevertheless verified in the experience of perception: the child, invested as he was with these qualities chosen by his mother, could develop them. And the child who did not develop them was a child who was considered to have problems, as needing to be cured, just as for a very long time homosexuality was considered in the West by the greatest scientists, and still today by some, as a disease that needs to be cured and not as a possible characteristic for humanity.
Let’s enter a classroom during a session intended to resolve a conflict. The teacher specifies that we must start by establishing the facts. In reality, in this situation, since there are several interpretations of the same situation, as many versions of the facts as there are witnesses, with all the nuances, the person who will define the facts is the teacher. It is he who will decide and say what the facts are. These facts are presented as objective and external to the presence, but in reality, they are quite subjective, because they depend on the teacher’s judgment. Another teacher with another sensibility could have established other “objective” facts. Thus, from the start in this situation, students may disagree on the facts. But there are “official facts.” In order to establish truly external facts, perhaps there should have been a camera filming and recording. But perhaps it would not have recorded the whisper that actually set off the powder keg of this conflict, which, viewed externally under the camera, seems to come from one person, when in reality, it came from another that we do not see in the image. So, from the outset, the process that aims to establish objective facts is a process that absents from this objectivity a part of the stakeholders. The establishment of facts is from the outset done by a power. And eventually, we could try to have the establishment of facts done by a democratic power via an assembly with the sharing of points of view of one another. But how does this democratic body decide? Perhaps by voting, which means that the facts will be established by the power of the vote, by the majority.

Facts and Perception

Of course, one could object to me that, for example, the death of someone is an indisputable fact, or that the Holocaust is also a fact, or that 2 and 2 equals 4 is a fact. Yes, there is a degree of absence in facts. It is true that 2 and 2 equal 4. They seem to me relatively absent from our perception, and I think it’s objective. But in reality, if we go further, it is linked to a common perception which is that it allows us to count correctly. Philosophically, what makes it a fact, insofar as we perceive the world only via our perception, is not so much an objectivity of the thing, because objectivity necessarily escapes us, but the perception of what we will commonly call a fact. What founds the fact is not its objective reality, but its effect in our perceptions and especially its effectiveness. For example, the dead person, we will never meet them again. So what makes it a fact is not that they are objectively dead outside of us, but that we ourselves can no longer touch them, interact with them directly; it is therefore our perception that makes it a fact. Because there are indeed cultures, not least the Catholic culture, that have a much more complex vision of death than the one I have just described. There are people who think that the soul is a fact, because they observe it in their life experiences. There are scientists who believe in God, which is the least factual thing there is. So, if I take this example, it is to specify the awareness that rational and objective facts undoubtedly exist (I do believe in this because of my culture and education), but in my opinion, there is only a small part of what we call facts that are really independent of our perceptions.

To return to the classroom debate, it is not about discussing whether two and two make four, but about resolving a conflict based on established facts. In media education, we are not dealing with mathematical facts. We are not in the case of truly objective facts, which would have nothing to do with human presence. I want to indicate here that there are many more facts linked to presence than what the holders of power want us to believe. If I go back to the classroom experience, the problem with this false presence vis-à-vis supposedly objective facts is that the students understand it immediately. They clearly see that the teacher takes power over the facts by presenting them as objective facts in order to move forward, to have something in common, consensus. In doing so, we immediately understand that facts are above all a tool of power over truth, what George Orwell called the “Ministry of Truth” in his novel 1984. Power defines truth.

Taking Power Over Truth

But sometimes it can go further, because indeed, we know that other human beings can perceive traces left for example and establish facts from them. This is what happened during the enterprise of destroying Jews during the Holocaust (World War II). At the beginning of the war, thousands of Jews were shot and their bodies buried in pits. But later, the Nazi power realized that these pits could one day be discovered and thus allow to establish the fact that a very large number of Jews had been murdered. They therefore worked to reopen the pits to destroy the bodies and thus erase perceptible traces that would have allowed facts to be established from this perception. And finally, they built extermination camps, equipped with crematoriums, which allowed them in an industrial way to definitively erase the very trace of the existence of people. It is from a number of these strategies that some can still claim today that there was no genocide of Jews during World War II, because by going to look for a certain number of facts, that is to say, places of their perception, and perception is always partial, ubiquitous perception does not exist, as its name indicates, well from another partial vision, they seek to prove another fact. So facts are always linked to a power and to a certain number of more or less legitimate proofs brandished by power.

Back to the classroom, the young participants immediately learn that the subject is not so much about sharing the link to real facts, but that the subject is power and that “objective facts” are linked to the presence of a power, that they do not exist without power that benefits from them (in this case defending the other teacher in the case of the discussed conflict).

We Can Discuss Everything Except Numbers

If we take the Covid period, for example, the death counts were presented each day in the major media in the form of an addition: we were not given the number of deaths daily, which was in fact an extrapolation made by statisticians with their subjectivity, but we were given the addition of the number of deaths since the beginning of the epidemic, in absolute value. However, we could have quite relied on the same numerical information to construct another fact, and present it as a proportion in terms of population, saying for example: “today there has been 0.000001% of the population died from Covid.” It would not have been at all the same fact as saying: “today we are at 16,000 deaths.” During this period, we were bombarded with “we can discuss everything except numbers.” But the fact that numbers become facts depends entirely on how these numbers are presented, on the reference frame in which they are inscribed: the proportion, the number in absolute value, the perspective with the number of deaths usually at the same period of the year, during flu periods for example, etc. From exactly the same numbers, we could have produced quite different facts. What were called fact-checkers were people who cross-referenced several sources, that is to say, who indicated that to validate a fact, several people had to make the same observation. This may seem more objective, but it is not in reality. A long time ago, I was in the intimacy of a major mobile phone operator, which was being undermined by scientific studies on the danger of microwaves, increasingly present and powerful as networks evolve. So there began to be facts verified by the scientific community whose cross-referenced sources seemed to prove a real and significant danger of relay antennas. The approach of the operators, who had as a priority the development of their economy with very strong market expectations, and we see to what extent the current use of mobile phones has changed the world, there were therefore converging interests in modifying these facts which would have had the capacity to slow down the development. It was enough for them to commission a very large number of scientific studies themselves, by financing them, on the subject, which means that quite rapidly, there were only a few scientific studies that showed the danger of waves, among a very large number of scientific studies, most of which questioned or even proved the low danger of mobile phone network waves. Thus, by majority effect, and because of the way of measuring, of looking differently, because how to measure the danger of microwaves, of mobile phones, at what distance, with what type of public, how to assume long-term effects on the human body? All this is based on projections, supported by observations, but it is eminently subjective. Thus, the facts have been transformed, and the objective facts seemed to be, precisely, absent from subjectivities, while the manipulation of facts seems obviously proven, to serve vile economic interests.

It is therefore absolutely not enough to cite several converging sources that are duly chosen, because one could choose others. Three sources are in no way sufficient to prove that this fact is indisputable and is absent from our perceptions.

The Concept of the Mille-Feuille

A fact is therefore something that is shared, but not something that is objective. I think it is important to know this. I don’t mean by this that we shouldn’t try to make common ground, that we shouldn’t work towards compromise, that we shouldn’t dialogue. But it seems to me much more constructive, rather than lying and taking power by establishing pseudo-objective facts, to consider the value of mutual presences and to enrich the common perception of reality with the rich contributions of individual perceptions. Reality will thus no longer be emptied of its substance as if it were only a “fact,” but on the contrary, it will be shared in its complexity and thus full of potentialities, richness, learning, enrichment, beauty, respect, dignity, and democracy. And thus, what we will share is the fact that the world is excessively complex and that, for the most part, it escapes us, and that wanting to reduce it is to be in an approach of domination, in the end.

Thus, trying to establish facts is domination. And domination is, in my opinion, to be deconstructed, whether it be for the establishment of facts, in hierarchy, in sexism, in violence. The “facts” are a masked system of domination. Instead of facts, I propose the concept of mille-feuille, the mille-feuille of reality. And so, we can, I believe, better touch its truth, its power, and our capacities for its transformation.