Terry Glavin: When narrative replaces facts (2024)

The furor over my 'The year of graves' feature illustrated perfectly what the piece was about

Author of the article:

Terry Glavin

Published Jun 01, 20224 minute read

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Terry Glavin: When narrative replaces facts (1)

I should say straight off that I didn’t set out to write something with “I” in it today. But it’s unavoidable because of an amazing strangeness that has taken over my working life in the past few days that’s directly related to and perfectly illustrates the disturbing phenomenon that this column was supposed to be about.

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I didn’t want to write about my personal entanglement in it, but that’s what’s happened, so I need to deal with that right off the top and get it out of the way. It’s because of a furor that’s erupted over something I wrote to mark the anniversary of the kick-off of what has been described as a long-overdue reckoning with the legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools.

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Terry Glavin: When narrative replaces facts (2)

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It was a 5,500-word reconstruction for the National Post of the sequence of media events and non-events that ran in tandem with and lit the fuses for last summer’s succession of statue topplings, national mourning ceremonies, opinion-page histrionics, riots, flag-lowerings, marches and church burnings.

It all started with a shocking report out of Kamloops to the effect that the Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc had discovered a mass grave adjacent to the old Kamloops Indian Residential School — which the Tk’emlúps people did not find and did not claim to have found. It was like a shot heard round the world, and was followed by several globe-encircling front-page shockers involving “discoveries” of graves that were not in fact discovered, arising from claims the Indigenous leaders directly involved did not make, and announcements they did not announce.

An amazing strangeness has taken over my working life

The ghoulish frenzy eventually added up to 1,300 variously-described graves in reports that pretty well entirely ignored what the local Indigenous people were saying. For paying attention to what those Indigenous chiefs and archeologists actually did say last summer, and contrasting that with the way the “discoveries” were reported, I have been widely denounced as a “residential schools denialist.” I’ve also been traduced as a racist who supports and defends child rapists.

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But hey, that’s just the usual cranks on social media, right? That would be amazingly strange enough, but it went so far that Jesse Wente, the chairman of the board of the Canada Council for the Arts, publicly urged the host of a fashionable national podcast I’d reluctantly agreed to be “challenged” by, to drop me from his show. “I wish you’d consider what harm reduction might look like in these situations from a media perspective,” Wente wrote on Twitter.

Oh well, no more council book-research grants, no more invitations to sit on council juries for me.

The amazing part: the National Post piece wasn’t even about the federal residential schools legacy, which, for whatever good it will do to point out, I’ve described as arising from policy that amounted to cultural genocide. And this wasn’t supposed to be about me. What I wanted to make plain in this column is that there is a weird phenomenon that is eating away at the disciplines that we’ve relied on for centuries to establish broad societal agreement about what constitutes the truth.

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We’re living at a time of deep epistemic crisis — the collapse of consensus about how to go about the work of determining what’s true and what isn’t. This is directly related to an increasing tendency across journalism, academia and government policy to conflate knowledge with belief. It’s a tendency that’s fatal to the functioning of liberal democracy.

If you want to understand all the apparent derangement out there, if you want to fully understand, say, the rise of Trumpism in the United States, you’ll want to get your head around this thing. The sinister influences of journalism-simulacra operations like Beijing-directed English language “news” programming, the toxic pandemonium of social media, the substitution of “narrative” for fact-finding and the consequent rise in the public’s distrust of conventional news media — it’s all the same story.

It’s not for nothing that there’s a great deal of skepticism about the Trudeau government’s Online Streaming Act, its enthusiasm for regulating speech on digital platforms, and its $595 million bailout of Canadian news organizations, of which this newspaper is a beneficiary.

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Epistemology isn’t something that journalists or any publicly-engaged citizens would ordinarily concern themselves with. Nobody wants to be clanging around with five-dollar words and metaphysics in the effort to sort out what’s real in the public “discourse” from what’s concocted.

We’re living at a time of deep epistemic crisis

The best advice I can give at the moment: go out and get a copy of a book titled The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth, by The Atlantic magazine fixture Jonathan Rauch. It’s mainly focused on the United States, but it’s just as relevant to Canada, and it’s accessible and smartly written.

The principle that incendiary or blasphemous ideas need to be tolerated and protected is “the single most counterintuitive social principle in all of human history,” Rauch writes, but even so, it’s also history’s most successful social principle. And it is under threat from all sides right now. It’s later than you think. It’s going to take a lot of work to defend the principle, to build it back up, and fight for it in the years to come.

“Those of us who favour it, and also our children, and also their children and their children, will need to get up every morning and explain and defend our counterintuitive social principle from scratch,” Rauch writes, “and so we might as well embrace the task and perform it cheerfully.”

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