Santiago Zabala and Claudio Gallo at Aljazeera:
The question that defined 2021 was perhaps the one Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea, famously posed to Jesus in the Gospel of John: what is truth? Indeed, all the most debated issues of this dire year from vaccines to fake news were in the end about “verity”. Far beyond postmodernity, we appeared to have lost the shared set of values that constituted the mainframe of our societies in the past. This is not necessarily wrong. Philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger pointed out how traditional values systems are undermined by too-rigid structures for history. These structures, whether scientific or economical, are always shaped by epochs and societies that determine their outcomes. So as we enter a new year, the question about truth becomes: who can we trust in 2022?
We must put aside any pretence of immutability and search for an answer inside history. But in this effort, we cannot leave our lives in the hands of experts only, even though languages of techno-science do require in-depth knowledge of a hyper-specialised curriculum.
More here.