Cast your mind back to the end of 2016. It had been quite a year: Brexit, the first Trump presidency was underway, the concept of living in a post-truth world was upon us, many well known people from the creative arts had died and there was a sense of living through a pivot point of some kind. On a personal level, I had been ordained priest in the summer, a new phase of ministry, so perhaps the sense of a new era was particularly resonant for me.
Since then, AI has added to the sense of truth being elusive. Certainly over the past 9 years we lived through a series of episodes which show my concerns at the end of 2016 about truth in public life were well founded. We had Mr Johnson in 10 Downing Street, a serial liar, bounder and chancer, whom many were seemingly happy to hold to a very low bar of accoubtability for his mistruths. The rot of 2016 had borne bitter, fatal fruit.
We have seen our national broadcaster editing footage of Mr Trump in a misleading way (when they could have perhaps made the same editorial point in other valid ways without playing fast and loose with the video editing). This also undermines trust in the truth of what people can learn via mainstream media now, let alone the wild west attitude to truth when it comes to unregaulated online sources.
And we now have AI which is in danger of ruining our ability to think, research and share truthful data online whilst promising a future where the wonder of human creativity can be done away with. I hold out a hope in the latter case that this will lead to a backlash revival in live music and other art forms, and maybe take creativity and the way it works economically offline and back to a more human and social level again, but we’ll see.
Perfect love casts out all fear. That was the punchline of my 2016 musical musing. This was not a bad song, but was not well performed due to ill health. The song tried to set out some of my hopes for 2017, and I wrote this on one of my social media posts where I shared it:
“As we head towards the last weekend of the year, I continue to hope and pray that love not fear grows, that truth trumps the normalization of political lying, that people of love find their voices and encourage one another, and that we cling to hope, come what may.”
So as 2025 ends and 2026 begins, the sentiment still resonates. Have a listen.
Vicar of Villages 