Post-truth Belfast: is truth even useful in a conflict so deep?

Socrates is well-known for knowing he didn’t know anything. It was obviously odd for a man famed for his education and deep understanding to say such a thing, but quite comforting too. If the fellow depicted in Plato’s dialogues as winning every debate humbly and seemingly by accident is aware of the infinite quantity of information he can never possess or understand, then it’s probably fine that you don’t know how to connect your TV to your wifi. It’s probably not too damning that I don’t know the average annual rainfall in Venezuela, or how much food a cow eats in a year, or where a mind is located, if anywhere.

I became uncomfortably conscious of my own ignorance on a recent trip to Belfast. Rather shamefully, I’d never visited before, and being there gave me a fresh awareness of how hard it can be to understand some things. I don’t mean that in the hand-wringing, lamenting way that people talk about conflict as senseless violence – though there is that side of it. I mean that our trip to Belfast reminded me of how difficult it can sometimes be to possess and grasp a straightforward narrative, one that takes account of all the facts and doesn’t get its feet sucked into a spiralling quagmire of emotion. Even saying that seems insensitive to the terrible suffering of people who lived and died through the Troubles. But how can anyone – particularly a person such as me, who didn’t suffer and persist through that situation, and hasn’t spent years studying it – to look back and grasp it in any real way?

Dictionary corner

It is grindingly depressing that this year’s Oxford Dictionaries word of the year is “post-truth”, an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’’. Being in Belfast made this term feel eerily resonant. The truth doesn’t matter to a lot of people, and it is arguable that, in retrospect, it might be impossible to find anyway.

Belfast is a beautiful city. It sparkled in the November sun as though it hadn’t been scarred by the carnage of terror and war, but the tension could still be felt there, floating in the air like the fading thrum of a pulled guitar string. We took a black taxi tour around the city, and our Republican driver attempted to tell both sides while acknowledging the impossibility of that endeavour. I respected his admission that he couldn’t escape his own bias – danger lies in thinking that any of us can. He took a shine to my southern accent, and kept referring to facts “as you know”. I was ashamed of how basic my knowledge was, and how complacent and often apathetic I was about the history of the North, when there were people there who clung to it still as though it truly defined who they are.

Taunted by a unionist

Later, at our hotel, a young unionist (the poppy gave it away) taunted my accent. I felt ashamed again, not of my accent, but of how his comments surprised me. Being a complacent, relatively pampered southerner, I’m unused to being judged by such superficial trappings. It made me feel small, and perhaps a little sorry for myself. That made me ashamed again. What was one piffling little insult to what people on both sides of that conflict experienced and still live with?

That concept of post-truth struck me time and again as we explored the beauty of Belfast. Is truth even useful in a conflict so deep, so wide, so entrenched, where those who initiated it or lived through its genus (if anyone can agree when that was) aren’t even around to help us interpret the conflict?

On our tour, our driver took our picture at a unionist and then a republican mural. It felt a bit disrespectful to stand stiffly in front of these huge images, each painted with pride and fury and hurt, each one in neighbourhoods separated by massive walls. They called them “peace walls”. That sounded like post-truth in action, but what would I know? I accepted my own ignorance, felt unsettled by it and let Belfast seep warmly under my skin.