“The greatest need of our time is to clean out the enormous mass of mental and emotional rubbish that clutters our minds and makes of all political and social life a mass illness. Without this housecleaning, we cannot begin to see. Unless we see, we cannot think. The purification must begin with the mass media. How?”
— Thomas Merton

Most mornings, the first thing I do is check my phone for updates on sports, social media, and my calendar app. During this, my dog, Charlie, normally battles with my phone for my attention. Instinctively, this routine is bad for my mental health, and yet I continue it. I am still surprised that the more information and noise I consume, the more anxious, unsettled, and detached I feel. Many of these feelings and effects of our information overload can be found in what philosophers call the “post-truth era.” The post-truth era refers to a cultural and political context where “objective facts” are less influential in shaping what we think, know, and believe. In this environment, the clarity of “truth” doesn’t feel as strong as it once did. Instead, what counts as truth is mixed with many different things that push and pull our attention, leaving us confused, anxious, and isolated. In seeking direction out of this state, I find it helpful to turn to friends, family, and my favourite writers and thinkers for insight.

One thinker that I have grown to really appreciate is Thomas Merton. Merton is an American writer, poet, philosopher, and monk, known for his work on contemplation, social justice, and inter-religious dialogue. Decades ago, Merton noticed Western culture’s exhaustion, linking it to the constant news and information we receive and describing it as noise in our minds.¹ Today, our modern news cycle has not differed much from when Merton was writing. Whenever we turn on the TV and watch the news, we are often bombarded with a seemingly endless stream of events, horrors, and negative messages that rarely help us understand the world. Instead, it provides us with noise, distractions, and fear.

In warning, Merton warns that this overload fuels an inner division within ourselves. Instead of a “true self” found in genuine, authentic relationships with others and ourselves, we become disoriented and uprooted, creating a division that separates us from ourselves, a division that Merton calls the “false self.”² That being said, the division has occurred throughout history; Merton hints that our particular era is uniquely disintegrated.

“I am as ready as the next man to admire the astonishing achievements of technology. Taken by themselves, they are magnificent. But taken in the context of unbalance with the other aspects of human existence in the world, the very splendour and rapidity of technological development is a factor of disintegration… What I am saying is, then, that it does us no good to make fantastic progress if we do not know how to live with it, if we cannot make good use of it, and if, in fact, our technology becomes nothing more than an expensive and complicated way of cultural [or personal] disintegration.”³

In contrast to the false self and our divided inner life, Merton describes the true self as our real, unfiltered self, found through honest reflection.⁴ He imagines the true self to be like a “jewel from the bottom of the sea,” and he suggests we should recover it from the everyday noise.⁵ Though Merton doesn’t offer a full answer, his ideas give us a starting point: that we have to learn how to slow down and quiet ourselves. However, this is easier said than done.

I find that the easiest times to quiet my head are when I’m near a body of water. To me, there is something calming and relaxing about the sound of the waves and the vision of the endless horizon. This feeling became apparent to me when a family member mentioned they felt better after taking some time away from Toronto following a vacation in Florida. Of course, I wanted to reply sarcastically, saying, “Wow, that’s shocking.” But it can be difficult to find and carve out a space where we can ground ourselves and reintegrate. Even more so, it may be hard for others to have opportunities, time, or money to do so.

For me, it’s especially difficult to slow down and quiet myself. I love technology, and I can spend hours fine-tuning my phone or laptop with the right settings and apps to improve productivity. Ironically, my constant fixation on setting up a productivity system kept me from calming down, re-centring myself, and focusing on what matters. In other words, I think my need to be productive was masking internal wounds or narratives that needed addressing. Rather than pausing to reflect, I filled my time and mind with what I felt was valuable. Unfortunately, our culture does not give us the time and space to reflect.

Whatever your circumstances, there is one important caveat worth mentioning. To achieve some silence, reintegration, or stillness in our lives, we should not rely solely on willpower. Our usual response to noise is to try harder. We see this when we use timers or a calendar app to block out our day and stay organized and on task. These tools are helpful, and intentional goal-setting is a good practice, but the same routines that organize our day cannot, by themselves, provide genuine healing and reorientation.

Simone Weil, another philosopher, offers some clarity on this. Weil distinguishes between attente (attention-as-waiting) and a wilful effort.⁶ For Weil, attention and waiting are not separate things that we choose. Instead, waiting is a characteristic of genuine attention. In trying to wilfully force silence, we inadvertently preclude attention by tightening our grip. Whereas, in attention—that patient and receptive waiting—we loosen our grip and allow ourselves and the world around us to affect us receptively. For me, my wilful effort was to ignore some of the precipitating factors that might limit my ability to be more present to others. Instead, waiting meant letting go of trying to do it all by myself and allowing someone else to help. In a world where noise and reaction pull at us, learning to wait attentively offers a re-centring that helps us engage with the world more fully.

To break through the post-truth noise clouding our direction and vision, we need to take concrete action, but not by trying harder. Instead, we can allow for quiet moments in the morning, during a mindful walk, or by turning off notifications before bed, to practice patient waiting and silence. Though this practice won’t solve our post-truth crisis, I believe it’s a helpful first step in combating all the noise. Whatever silent practice you choose, what matters is recognising that our constant input is overwhelming and that practicing silence, stillness, or contemplation will not draw us away from the world; rather, it will help us enter the post-truth era with a more grounded, authentic self.

“The first act of love is always the giving of attention.”
— Dallas Willard

Endnotes

¹ Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 72.
² Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, 38.
³ Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, 72–73.
⁴ Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, 38.
⁵ Merton, Seeds of Contemplation, 38.
⁶ Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, 1st complete English language ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 117.

Please join us in celebrating the launch of Neal DeRoo’s Material Spirituality: A Transcendental Phenomenology of Religion on Thursday, May 28, 2026, at Knox College in Toronto. The evening will include conversation, conviviality, and celebration of Neal’s newest book, which offers a fresh phenomenological account of how spirituality shapes our experience of the world. Please RSVP at icscanada.edu/deroo-launch.

I just finished reading George Orwell’s infamous novel, 1984. I wasn’t assigned this book during high school as it appears that most of my peers were. Still, I never felt the need to read it because I felt accustomed to the main arguments: the idea of “Big Brother,” the theme of thought control, and their respective roles in the broader totalitarian atmosphere. In recent years, however, as this work has become particularly popular in general discourse, I’ve noticed that my friends on either side of the cavernous political divide invoke its warnings against the other side. I can’t help but wonder: how is it that everyone thinks this book is about someone else? At some point, I became tired of not knowing whose reading I could trust, so I finally read it for myself. My philosophical ears were perked as I read each page, but it wasn’t until the very last line that the weight of the Orwellian argument crashed in on me like a mighty wave on the shore.

For his “thoughtcrimes” against Big Brother, the protagonist, Winston Smith, earned himself physical and psychological torture in the “Ministry of Love.” At first, I assumed—as most likely do—that the name “Ministry of Love” garnered its satirical force from the harsh, brutal treatment that took place there. Over the course of his torture, Winston was eventually compelled to confess “alternative facts,” such as 2+2=5. However, it wasn’t enough for Winston to confess with his mouth that 2+2=5. No, he had to believe, with his whole heart, in Big Brother. In the end, the Ministry of Love had succeeded: “He loved Big Brother.”

Before reading this classic text, I was under the impression that it would merely be about a disagreement about “facts.” Those who invoked 1984 on their side were upset—no, irate!—that the government was withholding truth while overwhelming the system with falsehood. My friends on the “left” seemed to think this about the “right” and my friends on the “right” seemed to think the same about the “left.” But if it were just about the facts, just about more or better information, then wouldn’t we eventually find a way past this divide? If we were all really, truly beholden to the bare facts like we say we are, then why are we still stuck here in what feels like an increasingly unbearable impasse? At least in an age that prides itself on data and information, you’d think there would be a path forward.

So it can’t be just about the facts. The truth is that the truth has always been far more about affective allegiance than we’ve ever been willing to admit. This doesn’t mean that the truth is reducible to the whims of fleeting feelings. Rather, the fact that truth is affective merely suggests that we have a lot at stake in the question of truth. Our deep-seated loves and convictions shape how we see and hear, and ultimately what we hold to be true. If we hear that as too subjective to be true, then we at least have to account for the way that we desire—yes, desire!—objectivity.

It would be easy to read 1984 and assume that the main problem with totalitarianism is its manipulative ploys to shape our loves (and hates), and that the solution would be to take emotion out of the equation. We think that if we can just stick to the facts, we’ll finally have the truth. But this is impossible! If our present cultural divisiveness is not proof of this, then what is? The answer isn’t to take emotion out of the picture, but rather to be careful about, and attentive to, what’s shaping our ultimate loves and allegiances. Is it the government? Culture? The church? Social media? Philosophy? Influencers? The so-called “post-truth” era invites us, not to fight about the facts, but to take note of what we love and the powers that be that are leading us to love it for better or for worse.

Post-truth may be less about winning a battle over the facts, and more about the ethics of war. The colloquial saying that “all is fair in love and war” has been used to suggest that the rules of fairness go out the window when one is pursuing something they suppose is of the utmost importance. But what happens when the “war” is about love itself? Right now, we might just be in a “war” of loves. Do we love the security of wealth or take joy in generosity? Do we prize efficiency, or is our heart set on care? Have we lost ourselves in consumption, or do we long for contentment? Does our heart break at injustice, or are we afraid of what we might have to sacrifice when the call for justice comes? At the very least, this conflict of our loves has taught us that “all” is most certainly not “fair” in love and war.

So as we consider the question of truth, we can’t avoid the question of love. We’re not just in conflict over ideas but over loves and hates—and it might just be that the latter is the deep root from which the former grows. Perhaps, the fact that Winston still loved—albeit in a twisted and wrong way—means that he can’t be counted out quite yet. The truth isn’t totally lost on him because he still feels for it; it still matters to him. He still loves, and because he loves, he’s still in the fight for truth. And contrary to what we’ve been bred to believe, it may be apathy—not emotion—that renders truth obsolete. ◆

Please join us in celebrating the launch of Neal DeRoo’s Material Spirituality: A Transcendental Phenomenology of Religion on Thursday, May 28, 2026, at Knox College in Toronto. The evening will include conversation, conviviality, and celebration of Neal’s newest book, which offers a fresh phenomenological account of how spirituality shapes our experience of the world. Please RSVP at icscanada.edu/deroo-launch.

Critiques of public funding for academic humanities research, such as the one authored by Matthew Lau and published in the Financial Post this past January, tend to revolve around the economic justification for said research based on the criterion of utility leading to economic profit.^[1] Lau’s critique is focused on the cost-benefit ratio of SSHRC-funded research, measured according to what he construes as the public interests of Canadian taxpayers. The piece employs time-worn rhetorical strategies to ultimately argue that applied research ought to be funded by the private sector, not the government, since private sector funding “tends to be distributed more widely, allows scientists to explore new ideas and is less bureaucratic.”^[2] Lau has little time for what he calls ‘useless’ research that is of interest to no one but the researcher.

There are so many assumptions hidden in Lau’s argument that it is difficult to know where to start countering them.^[3] And the point of this post is not so much to offer a counter-argument as it is to take seriously the idea that research ought to be of interest—that is, to make sense—to others aside from the researcher. Lau’s critique demonstrates that publicly funded research can be judged by the degree to which it makes sense, of which economic profitability or utility are but two possible options. Given that public funds are at stake, this naturally raises a question: what are the criteria of sense employed by the academic leaders who evaluate SSHRC applications? Are they the product of economic rationality, or is there another set of criteria in view?

I’ve applied for SSHRC doctoral funding, and the burden of proof on applicants to demonstrate the impact of their project is high. SSHRC evaluators are fundamentally assessing whether applicants are able to use the funds that are disbursed to establish a research career. Applying to SSHRC is like applying for a job: a CV, references, and a proposal are all necessary. If the applicant gets the ‘job,’ they receive funding to carry out the project they have proposed under the guidance of a supervisor and doctoral committee. From the perspective of stewardship and fiscal prudence, the system is characterised by integrity and sound management principles. Funds are disbursed competitively, and it is by no means a sure thing that a doctoral candidate will receive the funds they applied for, since much rests on the quality of their proposal and their promise as researchers. In cases other than doctoral grants, the integrity of the SSHRC application and vetting system is just as high.

One can be excused for thinking, however, that the target of Lau’s argument is the credibility of SSHRC’s application and vetting system. The force of his rhetoric is felt precisely in the selection of his examples: amongst research with ‘unpromising prospects for benefitting taxpayers’ includes studies on queer food, new approaches to German opera, Asian women on Canadian variety circuits, and many other examples.^[4] Again, I think it is fruitless to argue for the merit of these studies or attempt to justify them on Lau’s terms, since it’s obvious that Lau would like his readers to draw the same conclusions that he has: namely, that these studies—and presumably others like them—lack sense. On this basis, it becomes clear that Lau would like to be the one who evaluates the merit and value of these research projects, not the academic leaders who have been entrusted with SSHRC funds and the task of disbursing them.

Now, sense is not to be trifled with, since many different things make sense for many different people at many different times. Sense is not necessary to justify this or any research. What sense does reveal is interest, and a general principle of good governance is that the disbursement of public funds ought to be in the public interest. The difficulty, it seems, is defining the nature of the public under consideration. For example, it can be argued that Lau’s interest—utility leading to economic prosperity—is a matter of public interest. However, most people would agree that profit – capital – is a matter of private interest. Indeed, businesses and public companies are established through an association of private interests, by which they may earn a profit. The question shifts considerably when institutions rather than just individuals are factored into definitions of the public interest. How do and/or should universities serve the public interest? In Lau’s case, the answer to this question has a lot to do with the idea that taxes should benefit the people who pay them.

What should be kept in mind in the case of SSHRC funding is that there is a defined pool of funds, and the decision to award funding to one researcher may mean that other proposals are denied funding. In his reading of Herman Dooyeweerd’s theory of civil society, Jonathan Chaplin refers to this as the frugality of the state in the discernment of public interests.^[5] One researcher may benefit, while another may not. According to Chaplin, this balance of frugality and reward is the responsibility of the state, and in the case of SSHRC funding, this responsibility has been entrusted to academic leaders who decide which proposals do and do not receive funding. Yet Chaplin takes it a step further by arguing that in the capacity to decide between interests, attaching economic value to those judgments is a function of justice.

I expect that many economists and academics alike would take exception to this conclusion. By invoking justice, interest—whether economic or academic—is neither accidental nor innocent. Rather, since interest carries freight, it generates meaning and critique. Within the academy, interest frequently refers to matters of power, language, or identity. Within the capitalist economy, interest frequently refers to matters of money and sexuality—the ‘libidinal economy.’ Becoming an academic does not mean that one withdraws from the capitalist economy. Conversely, interests that are relevant in one context, such as a business, may be of negligible interest in another. But discerning that there is interest and what that interest consists of is at the foundation of civil democratic participation.

In conclusion, I believe Lau would do well to be reminded that public interest is necessarily diverse and that economic sense is determined by the market. If there is an audience for SSHRC-funded projects, those projects will be awarded funding. For this reason, it is in every researcher’s interest to discern what the public interest may be and to consider how their project may or may not respond to it. This does not mean that the generation of private interest (in the form of capital/profit) is the goal of public research, nor that private interest is the only justification for funding. This ought to lessen the credibility of Lau’s critique at the same time it represents an opportunity for doctoral students—and the academic leaders who award them SSHRC funds—to increase public respect for academic humanities research. ◆

1. Lau, Matthew. We’re funding lots of useless research. “Financial Post,” January 7, 2026. Accessed Feb. 20, 2026: https://financialpost.com/opinion/matthew-lau-were-funding-lots-of-useless-research.↩︎

2. Lau, Matthew. We’re funding lots of useless research.↩︎

3. Matthew Lau distinguishes between three types of research: basic or fundamental scientific research which cannot easily be commercialized, applied research for creating or discovering marketable technologies or products, and useless research which “has no use to anyone except that it is interesting to the people doing it.” According to Lau, the case for government funding even of useful research is ‘shaky,’ since “the private sector can do it better.” Under Lau’s classification, all academic humanities research is ‘useless,’ and therefore undeserving of any funding, either private or public.↩︎

4. Lau, Matthew. We’re funding lots of useless research.↩︎

5. Chaplin, Jonathan. “’Public Justice’ as a Critical Political Norm.” Philosophia Reformata 72 (2007): 130–150.↩︎

Please join us in celebrating the launch of Neal DeRoo’s Material Spirituality: A Transcendental Phenomenology of Religion on Thursday, May 28, 2026, at Knox College in Toronto. The evening will include conversation, conviviality, and celebration of Neal’s newest book, which offers a fresh phenomenological account of how spirituality shapes our experience of the world. Please RSVP at icscanada.edu/deroo-launch.

Neal DeRoo is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto and Interim Director of the MA-PhD Program. His latest book, Material Spirituality: A Transcendental Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomsbury, 2025), argues that spirituality is not an otherworldly add-on to experience but a material force that shapes how we live, worship, and relate to one another.

In our current era, we simply cannot agree, even on the facts. My social media feed is full of people taking the absolutely opposite view of things that should not be contestable, like whether Alex Pretti was holding a gun and threatening ICE officers when he was shot or whether Renée Good’s vehicle was aimed at an ICE officer or whether she was driving away from him at the time of the shooting. In both cases, there was video evidence, and yet people could not agree on what we were watching.

This phenomenon of not being able to agree, even on the facts, is often called the “post-truth” era of journalism. It is popularly dated back to 2016, when Trump and his associates adamantly maintained that there were more people at his inauguration than had been at Obama’s, despite much video and photographic evidence to the contrary. This led to Kellyanne Conway’s now-famous invocation of “alternative facts,” and the post-truth era was born.

Of course, like with most such social phenomena, the reality is a bit more complicated. The roots of our post-truth era date back philosophically into the early parts of the 20th century, as people began critiquing the picture of objectivity rooted in naïve empiricism that had taken root in the natural sciences. By at least the 1960s, this critique of objectivism had led to a burgeoning appreciation for different perspectival approaches to the truth, a shift that paved the way for the mainstreaming of feminism, the sexual revolution, and multiculturalism. By the 1980s, this perspectival approach to knowledge migrated to the religious right, in the language of ‘irreconcilable worldviews’. This language was used to justify increased spending in the Cold War against the USSR—yet without removing one’s ability to talk unironically about “evil empires” that needed to be stopped.

Now, in a strange twist of fate from how things emerged in the 1960s, it seems that it is largely the left that is looking to revive the notion of objectivity and facts, while the right seems quite content to let truth go the way of the dinosaur. And those of us who are simply trying to figure out how now should we live are left to wonder: “how do we know what to believe, when no one seems concerned with telling the truth?”

Jeffrey Dudiak, in his beautiful little book Post-Truth?: Facts and Faithfulness, shows how the contemporary problems with truth stem in a very real way from abandoning the relationship between truth and troth. By letting truth be pulled out of the context of relational commitments and loyalty and instead be thought only in terms of universal “objectivity,” we lost the sense that truth is more than just “how things are” because it should also involve a significant element of “how we want things to be”.

But this ‘how we want things to be’ is not simply wishful thinking, even if it does remain importantly connected to hope. Rather, truth as ‘how we want things to be’ is rooted in relationships of mutual trust—covenantal, troth-full relationships. And it is these trusting, troth-full relationships, it seems to me, that we have largely lost in our contemporary post-truth age. We let ourselves be pushed hither and yon by the whims and vagaries of mega-national corporate algorithms, our feeds (and so our lives) filled with insights from people we hardly know and certainly don’t trust.

Facebook, it seems, has become particularly bad for this. For every one actual friend whose content I see in my feed, I have eight or more ads, sponsored posts, randomly assigned reels, suggested likes, etc. I realize that the ratio might be better on Threads, Bluesky, or other platforms”, where one can curate one’s feed more purposefully. But even there, I wonder about the type of relationship that can be built by following someone. I can, of course, come to trust the wise words of people whom I’ve never met. But this is not a relationship of mutual trust, because the person I am following neither knows me nor trusts me, and we do not have a shared history upon which we are building towards a shared future.

A church I recently visited has a lovely practice of a time of communal sharing in response to the sermon. That morning, the sermon (inspired by Richard Rohr’s The Tears of Things) had been on the prophetic church. The responses from the congregation included someone mentioning several modern-day “prophets” that we should follow on social media in order to hear also the good that was going on in places like Minneapolis, and not just the images of anger and hate that fill our feeds. Someone else talked about our own complicity in the systems that enable ICE, and challenged us to sacrifice some of our own comforts, rather than just talking about how awful what “they” are doing is. Someone else encouraged us to think of how we can make change locally, and pivoted to talking about some local organizations in need of support, and the good work they do.

All of these struck me as very welcome responses to the message, and I’ve been thinking a lot especially about the turn to the local since then. For it is in local contexts that we are able to better engage in relationships of mutual trust-building and trust-making. We can know the people we are engaging, and we can work with them in committed ways. Our voice—even when it is critical—has a chance to be heard in these relationships, and someone might actually change their mind or change their actions in light of our voice and the relationship that empowers and enables it. Including ourselves.

Maybe, then, being truthful is less about saying the ‘right’ things, and more about living a life of committed, troth-full, trusting relationships with a variety of people we know and encounter in our lives. I imagine most of us know someone who lives truthfully in this way. Someone who seems to know everybody, is involved with a number of local organizations, and seems to always be helping, whether it’s making ice cream for the kids at the church potluck, or helping the new immigrant family from Ukraine find jobs and a place to live, or collecting a container full of computer materials from various local businesses to send to Honduras to support an educational ministry there.

All of those examples come from the life of my friend Harold. Harold is the guy you call when you need something—almost anything—and he will always know a guy who can get it for you (and likely at a pretty good deal!). Harold and I probably don’t vote the same way (though I’ve never really asked him who he voted for in the last election). But we shared life together, church together, a friendship together. Harold passed away February 6, 2026 due to medical complications after a long fight against cancer. He was not on social media and did not bang a big drum for any side. But he was a man of convictions, and a man committed to living out the gospel of Jesus with those he encountered every day, whether that was in the hardware store picking up parts for his tractor or in the cancer ward, sharing his story with other patients and their families.

The way past our post-truth partisanship is not, it seems to me, in finding more fact-checkers. It’s in finding, and cultivating, more Harolds—Harolds of the truth. This week, may we all spend a little more time in trusting, troth-filled relationships, doing the truth in the local communities where we are planted. ◆

Please join us in celebrating the launch of Neal DeRoo’s Material Spirituality: A Transcendental Phenomenology of Religion on Thursday, May 28, 2026, at Knox College in Toronto. The evening will include conversation, conviviality, and celebration of Neal’s newest book, which offers a fresh phenomenological account of how spirituality shapes our experience of the world. Please RSVP at icscanada.edu/deroo-launch.