Or,
Just Kill Me Now
“Trust,
but verify.”—Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the United States
Because:
“People
are morons”—Phil Connors, Groundhog Day
Nobody knew how to turn a phrase
like Gilbert Keith Chesterton. The man
is endlessly quotable. Unfortunately—at
least for someone trying to find a specific quote—he was also vastly
prolific. And so that’s how I found
myself recently forced to use the internet in an attempt to at least narrow
down my search for a quote I knew I had read in one of Chesterton’s many
writings.
At first, it seemed, all was
well. I punched in the basic quote, as
well as I could remember it—which was quite well—and up popped several sources telling
me where to find the quote. Among the
sources I found was a presentation of the quote on Facebook and one on
Goodreads. They all seemed to concur
that the source of the quote was a book from 1930 called The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic.
So far, so good.
I, of course, owned a copy of the
book (after all, I was only trying to locate a quote I had already read, so it
was logical that the relevant book should be somewhere on my shelves), so I
retrieved my copy of Chesterton’s Collected
Works volume III, which contains The Thing. Now it was just a matter of finding a single
short sentence in a 205-page book comprising 35 essays. I doubted the internet could help me here.
So I turned to my hardcopy of The Thing, ready to tackle the task of
locating that quote somewhere therein.
As I began, I noted that this hardcopy gave the date of this book as
1929, not 1930—that was my first clue.
If these people could not get something so simple as this detail right,
why trust them? So, when a good bit of
searching for the relevant quote—or at least a sufficiently familiar
passage—turned up nothing, I returned to the web to try again.
With a little effort, I finally
located the quote on Google Books, or some similar service. I paged back, hoping to find the beginning of
the essay. But lo, the language looks
very familiar—I’m sure I’ve read this before—then I notice the title at the top
of the page is “Why I Am a Catholic.”
Yet, in my copy of The Thing,
the title on each page is of the essay I’m reading, not the book. Then it hits me: just before The Thing in volume III is a short,
six-page essay called simply “Why I Am a Catholic,” and the words I recognize
online are—I recall it clearly now—the opening lines of that essay.
Which brings me to my point: I
cannot work like this! No one cares
about precision anymore. The online
sources I had consulted had all quoted Chesterton accurately, but they had all
confused a short, six-page essay with an essay collection of a similar—but not
identical—name. Yet, not one of them had
sought to be more specific, to specify which essay they were quoting, much less
what page. Most likely, none even knew
the book was an anthology at all.
And why should it matter to them, anyway? Who cares if they were slightly off about
which book Chesterton said something in?
Well, I care. When you send
someone to the wrong book, it is like sending them to the wrong house. I would rather that you just admit that you
don’t know where a certain person—or a certain quote—lives than send me to the
wrong place. It is a matter of respect:
respect for the source; respect for one’s audience; respect for the truth. And let us not forget self-respect. Remember that, folks? Remember when people with college degrees had
too much pride in their hard-earned education to let themselves say something
in public that made them look like idiots?
Remember when people were not afraid to call someone on such error? Even here in America, it was once so. And as a college teacher, I do what I can to
revive that sort of serious attitude about truth and accuracy.
Personally, I want to be able to
back up the claims I make when writing with evidence, such as the proper
reference for a source; that way, if my readers wish to verify what I claim, or
explore such ideas further, they can do so, and they should be able to trust me
to both tell them the truth, and be accurate about what I say. If I can’t do that, how can I expect my students
to take me seriously when I try to teach them how to properly source their
papers?
But this whole experience simply
serves to once more illustrate my point: if you want anything remotely
resembling the truth, you cannot just Google stuff. People today are sloppy and imprecise, caring
nothing for accuracy. Now me, I enjoy
the mildly philological challenge of figuring out the truth behind someone’s
asinine misquotation (although I was disappointed to see such an error on
Goodreads). But I weep for the others;
for my students and those too young to have ever had to do research using a
hardcopy encyclopedia. Those poor souls,
unless someone should explain to them the way of the Lord more perfectly, will
go on trusting Google, and the internet in general, as if they were a magic
mirror they can simply inquire of in order to get information as trustworthy
and accurate as that coming from the computer of the Enterprise-D (and yet,
even that computer was notorious for not volunteering information, as even its
own chief engineer testified); they don’t know that much of the more popular
parts of the web (the parts that top a Google search list) is a cesspool of
foolishness, misnomer, rumor, and misinformation. And what they do not know will hurt them,
because of all the things the internet will tell them that are not so.
So remember, children: you can’t
just Google stuff. Do not trust; always
verify. Because, people are idiots.
