THE FUTURE OF TRUTH

A film director addresses the assault on truth.

“All my life, my work has been involved with the central issue of truth,” Herzog writes in this brief collection of essays. Like many others, he is worried about the ease with which people can be deceived into accepting falsehoods as reality, such as the seemingly real online chat between him and a Slovenian philosopher “in which our voices are mocked up very accurately, but our conversation is meaningless twaddle.” That some of these threats have their positive side, Herzog writes, makes the problem even more vexing. AI, he notes, can help with “improvements in the design of vaccines,” but it also presents “the possibility of comprehensive, mass supervision, of disinformation, of manipulation on a vast scale.” In these impassioned pieces, he offers his insights into the threats to the concept of truth. Fake news, he points out, is nothing new. One can trace the phenomenon back as far as 1275 B.C.E. and the falsehood that, at the battle of Kadesh, Ramses II was a great conqueror, when in fact “Ramses was not triumphant, [and] the battle was inconclusive at best.” Herzog presents many examples of delusion, including the flat earth theory, the “technical possibilities of producing fictive ‘truths’” with Photoshop and TikTok, deepfake porn on the internet, and more. He is especially animated over “the foolish belief that equates truth with facts,” reserving particular scorn for cinema verité, “an antiquated form of cinema that offers no profound insights.” Little is original here, but Herzog is an engaging ally, and he isn’t above cheekily harmless deceptions of his own. When he was in Panama and dressed in missionary garb for his role in Harmony Korine’s film Mr. Lonely, a local approached him and wanted to confess. Herzog listened to the man’s confession and “granted him absolution in Latin.”

An erudite plea to not give up on truth.