我们为何总离事实如此遥远

When I returned to live in the UK in 1984 after some years in Greece, people warned me not to get ill. Margaret Thatcher’s public spending cuts had shredded the National Health Service. I looked into it. government spending on the NHS appeared to have gone up. When I told people this, they said I was wrong. The official statistics were lies. Everyone who worked in the NHS could tell you that services had been cut to the bone.

1984年，当我在希腊居住多年后回到英国时，人们警告我千万别生病。玛格丽特?撒切尔(Margaret Thatcher)削减公共支出，撕裂了国家医疗服务体系(NHS)。我调查了一下。政府在NHS方面的支出似乎增加了。当我把这一发现告诉别人时，他们说我搞错了。官方数据是骗人的。在NHS工作的每个人都可以告诉你，NHS已经被削减得只剩骨架了。

A historical review by the King’s Fund think-tank shows that there was indeed a real-terms increase in public spending on the NHS in England in 1984-85 and in the few years before that. The government statistics were right.

智库机构英皇基金(King's Fund)的回溯性核查表明，1984-85年以及那之前几年政府在英格兰NHS上的公共支出确实出现了实际增长。政府数据是正确的。

This did not mean that health services weren’t suffering. But that may have been for reasons other than cost-cutting: an ageing population was imposing an increasing strain on the system, or advances in medical science meant a rise in costs higher than general inflation, or people’s expectations had risen beyond what the NHS could provide. These are issues that still dog the UK’s health service and it might have been better to have spoken openly about them then.

这并不意味着NHS未遭遇困难。但这或许是因为除削减成本以外的其他原因：可能是人口老龄化给该体系带来了越来越大的压力，或者医疗科学进步意味着成本上涨的幅度高于总体通胀水平，又或者是人们的预期超出了NHS的能力范围。这些问题现在仍然困扰着NHS，或许当时公开地谈论这些问题会更好。

I mention this to point out that people insisting on their own “facts” is not new; nor is it confined to the Donald Trump/Brexit-supporting camps. We all have our own versions of the truth, whether we consider ourselves liberals or conservatives, nationalists or citizens of the world. We hear what we want to hear. We suffer from confirmation bias, leaping on events that support our world view and rejecting those that do not.

我提到这件事是为了指出，人们坚信自己认为的“事实”，这并不新鲜，存在这种情况的也并非只有唐纳德?特朗普(Donald Trump)阵营或退欧派。我们都有自己所认为的真相，无论我们自认为是自由主义者还是保守派、民族主义者还是世界公民。我们听我们想听的事。我们受制于确认偏误，迅速接纳那些支持我们世界观的事、拒绝与我们的世界观相左的事。

Many argue that social media has contributed to people living in information bubbles, encountering only views like theirs. This is true, but it was true before Facebook and Twitter were invented. People listened to those who agreed with them and read newspapers that told them what they wanted to read.

很多人认为，社交媒体让人们愈发生活在信息泡沫中，只遇到与自己的类似的观点。这是事实，但这种情况在Facebook和Twitter诞生前已经存在。人们从来都是听那些与自己观点一致的人的话，看那些有他们想看的内容的报纸。

Even outright lies, such as the recent one that Hillary Clinton ran a child abuse ring out of a Washington DC pizzeria, have always been around. People used to pass them on by word of mouth.

连彻头彻尾的谎言——比如最近有关希拉里?克林顿(Hillary Clinton)以华盛顿特区一家披萨店为据点、经营一个儿童虐待集团的假新闻——也一直存在。这类谎言的传播过去靠的是人们口耳相传。

What is true is that social media has given partial facts or outright lies wider currency, and have increased the speed with which they spread. Lies and part-lies are damaging our political cultures, enforcing division and disastrously degrading the quality of public debate.

没错，社交媒体扩大了片面事实或纯谎言的传播范围，加快了其传播速度。彻头彻尾的谎言以及半真半假的谎言，正在破坏我们的政治文化、制造分歧并且严重降低了公共辩论的质量。

How can we make 2017 the year we fight for the facts?

如何让2017年成为我们为事实而战的一年？

First, we need to admit that it is not just the other side’s fault. We need to confess to our own partial truths too. Here is one of mine. In May, angry about a pamphlet that Brexit campaigners had put through my door, I tweeted: “#VoteLeave leaflet uses exaggerated ￡350m a week figure and falsely links prisoners’ voting rights to EU.”

首先，我们要承认，这并非只是对方的错误。我们要承认我们也自己说过片面的真相。我讲一个我曾犯过的错误。今年5月，退欧派活动人士把小册子塞进我家门缝里，我对此很生气，于是在Twitter上称：“#投票退欧#的传单中用了每周3.5亿英镑这个有水分的数字，并且把囚犯投票权的问题错误地与欧盟联系起来。”

The first part of my tweet was correct; the Leave campaigners claimed throughout the campaign that the UK paid ￡350m a week to the EU which could be used to fund the NHS. That was actually the gross figure, taking no account of either the UK’s rebates or the amounts the EU spent in Britain — and the Leave campaigners have since admitted that the NHS will not see all that money anyway.

这段话前半部分是正确的；在整个退欧运动中，退欧派一直声称英国每周向欧盟支付3.5亿英镑，而这笔钱本可以投入NHS。实际上这是总数，并未考虑英国收到的返款以及欧盟对英国的支出——公投结束后退欧派承认，反正NHS不会看到这笔钱。

But I was wrong to say there was no link between UK prisoners’ voting rights and the EU. It was the European Court of Human Rights, which is not an EU institution, that found that the UK’s blanket ban on prisoners voting violated their human rights — hence my tweet. But I subsequently learnt that the European Court of Justice, which is an EU institution, had ruled that a jailed French murderer could be deprived of his right to vote: the ban was proportionate because of the seriousness of his crime. This implied that those imprisoned for less serious crimes could demand the right to vote, and that UK prisoners could avail themselves of this. So the Leave campaigners were right to link prisoners’ votes to the EU.

但对于英国囚犯的投票权与欧盟无关这部分，我说错了。认定英国全面禁止囚犯的投票权侵犯了囚犯人权的欧洲人权法院(European Court of Human Rights)并非欧盟机构，因此我发了那条推文。但我后来了解到，作为欧盟机构的欧洲法院(European Court of Justice)曾裁定一名被监禁的法国杀人犯可以被剥夺投票权：由于该囚犯罪行的严重性，剥夺其投票权是适当的。这暗示，那些因较轻罪行被监禁的囚犯可以要求投票权，而英国囚犯可以利用这一点。因此退欧派把囚犯投票权与欧盟联系在一起并没错。

This leads to fact-seekers’ second task: find the truth. The wide availability of digital information means this has never been so easy. Everything is now available online if you look for it: court judgments, parliamentary research papers, official statistics, critiques of official statistics.

这便引出了寻求事实者的第二个任务：找出真相。数字信息的随时可得意味着，这个任务从未如此轻松过。现在只要你去找，什么都能在网上找到：法院判决结果、议会研究报告、官方数据以及对官方数据的评论。

The internet has facilitated the spread of lies, but it has also made it far easier to discover and disseminate the truth. Will finding the facts be enough to turn back the mendacious tide? Of course not. But every movement has to start somewhere, and each trend is the agglomeration of the efforts of determined individuals. Let’s make fact-finding the battle of 2017.

互联网为谎言的传播提供了便利，但它也使得人们更容易找到和扩散真相。找出事实足以逆转说谎的潮流吗？当然不会。但千里之行始于足下，每种趋势都汇聚了抱有坚定决心的个人的努力。2017，让我们为寻找事实而战。