我們爲何總離事實如此遙遠

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，當我在希臘居住多年後回到英國時，人們警告我千萬別生病。瑪格麗特?撒切爾(Margaret Thatcher)削減公共支出，撕裂了國家醫療服務體系(NHS)。我調查了一下。政府在NHS方面的支出似乎增加了。當我把這一發現告訴別人時，他們說我搞錯了。官方數據是騙人的。在NHS工作的每個人都可以告訴你，NHS已經被削減得只剩骨架了。

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.

智庫機構英皇基金(King's Fund)的回溯性覈查表明，1984-85年以及那之前幾年政府在英格蘭NHS上的公共支出確實出現了實際增長。政府數據是正確的。

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.

這並不意味着NHS未遭遇困難。但這或許是因爲除削減成本以外的其他原因：可能是人口老齡化給該體系帶來了越來越大的壓力，或者醫療科學進步意味着成本上漲的幅度高於總體通脹水平，又或者是人們的預期超出了NHS的能力範圍。這些問題現在仍然困擾着NHS，或許當時公開地談論這些問題會更好。

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.

我提到這件事是爲了指出，人們堅信自己認爲的“事實”，這並不新鮮，存在這種情況的也並非只有唐納德?特朗普(Donald Trump)陣營或退歐派。我們都有自己所認爲的真相，無論我們自認爲是自由主義者還是保守派、民族主義者還是世界公民。我們聽我們想聽的事。我們受制於確認偏誤，迅速接納那些支持我們世界觀的事、拒絕與我們的世界觀相左的事。

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.

很多人認爲，社交媒體讓人們愈發生活在信息泡沫中，只遇到與自己的類似的觀點。這是事實，但這種情況在Facebook和Twitter誕生前已經存在。人們從來都是聽那些與自己觀點一致的人的話，看那些有他們想看的內容的報紙。

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.

連徹頭徹尾的謊言——比如最近有關希拉里?克林頓(Hillary Clinton)以華盛頓特區一家披薩店爲據點、經營一個兒童虐待集團的假新聞——也一直存在。這類謊言的傳播過去靠的是人們口耳相傳。

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.

沒錯，社交媒體擴大了片面事實或純謊言的傳播範圍，加快了其傳播速度。徹頭徹尾的謊言以及半真半假的謊言，正在破壞我們的政治文化、製造分歧並且嚴重降低了公共辯論的質量。

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

如何讓2017年成爲我們爲事實而戰的一年？

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，我們要承認，這並非只是對方的錯誤。我們要承認我們也自己說過片面的真相。我講一個我曾犯過的錯誤。今年5月，退歐派活動人士把小冊子塞進我家門縫裏，我對此很生氣，於是在Twitter上稱：“#投票退歐#的傳單中用了每週3.5億英鎊這個有水分的數字，並且把囚犯投票權的問題錯誤地與歐盟聯繫起來。”

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.

這段話前半部分是正確的；在整個退歐運動中，退歐派一直聲稱英國每週向歐盟支付3.5億英鎊，而這筆錢本可以投入NHS。實際上這是總數，並未考慮英國收到的返款以及歐盟對英國的支出——公投結束後退歐派承認，反正NHS不會看到這筆錢。

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.

但對於英國囚犯的投票權與歐盟無關這部分，我說錯了。認定英國全面禁止囚犯的投票權侵犯了囚犯人權的歐洲人權法院(European Court of Human Rights)並非歐盟機構，因此我發了那條推文。但我後來瞭解到，作爲歐盟機構的歐洲法院(European Court of Justice)曾裁定一名被監禁的法國殺人犯可以被剝奪投票權：由於該囚犯罪行的嚴重性，剝奪其投票權是適當的。這暗示，那些因較輕罪行被監禁的囚犯可以要求投票權，而英國囚犯可以利用這一點。因此退歐派把囚犯投票權與歐盟聯繫在一起並沒錯。

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.

這便引出了尋求事實者的第二個任務：找出真相。數字信息的隨時可得意味着，這個任務從未如此輕鬆過。現在只要你去找，什麼都能在網上找到：法院判決結果、議會研究報告、官方數據以及對官方數據的評論。

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.

互聯網爲謊言的傳播提供了便利，但它也使得人們更容易找到和擴散真相。找出事實足以逆轉說謊的潮流嗎？當然不會。但千里之行始於足下，每種趨勢都匯聚了抱有堅定決心的個人的努力。2017，讓我們爲尋找事實而戰。