Episode 7: Fake News and Truth, Faith and Irony: Jay Tolson Discusses the Big Questions of our Culture

Jay Tolson says, following T.S. Eliot, that "in my beginning is my end." And what an end, one that has led him to see art's power to connect us to one another through a shared reality.

He began as an undergraduate studying cultural and intellectual history and after a long career in journalism at US News and World Report, The Wilson Quarterly, and Radio Free Europe, he was asked by the University of Virginia's Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture to serve as editor of The Hedgehog Review. Although he has returned to his origins, his work at The Hedgehog Review brings cultural study to a markedly higher (and sane) level.

Jay discusses with us his meeting Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing Is True and Everything is Possible, and This is Not Propaganda, two books that recount the author's exposure to the fabricated reality that has become the Putin regime in Russia, but which has also spread across the globe, notably in the West, and into U.S. politics.

For Tolson and Pomerantsev, the destabilizing information sector (as opposed to journalism, a discipline that strives to reveal truth), creates a culture that proclaims private or alternate "truths" and seeks to undermine the very idea that truth exists. Hence, the labeling as "fake news" organizations that once could be trusted as seeking truth in reporting. Such destabilization, exacerbated by social media monopolies and app designers, makes it impossible to create norms for what can be considered civil or hateful discourse. A pursuit of truth, then, gives way to the entertaining endorphin highs that social media creates.

“Jay Tolson’s indispensable biographical study of Walker Percy.” Ralph C. Wood, ABC Religion and Ethics.

Tolson goes on to discuss his work on Walker Percy, not only his award-winning biography, Pilgrim in the Ruins, but Percy's work as an ironist, an irreducible and mysterious human characteristic. As a man of faith and an ironist, Percy followed his philosophical mentor, Soren Kierkegaard, who joins faith and doubt, the inescapable existential predicament of any person of faith, even Mother Theresa!

But it's Percy's idea of connection through symbols that most excites Tolson, not only the everyday symbols that we share in language, but also the symbols of art, science, poetry, and novels. Art connects us to one another in an awareness that we are not alone, that we share (an often difficult and sad) reality, but a reality that exists beyond each of us and is itself capable of sharing.

In this way, artists, scientists, and, yes, journalists move toward a better approximation of truth and reality. Clearly, this endeavor is itself hopeful.

A journalist, editor, author, and critic, Jay Tolson covered religion, culture and ideas for U. S. News & World Report after working for more than decade as the literary editor and editor of the Wilson Quarterly. He served as the news director of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, Czech Republic, directed the French to Africa service of the Voice of America, and launched the Global News Network for the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors.

His interest in religion and cultural and intellectual history runs throughout his journalism and criticism and informed his prize-winning biography of novelist Walker Percy, Pilgrim in the Ruins. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Nation, National Review, Wall Street Journal, American Scholar, Times Literary Supplement (London), and other publications.

Jay Tolson’s conversation with Anna Keating, The Problem with “Western Religion” on Campus, can be viewed below.