Objectivity is a Lie
Objectivity is a lie. Not that it doesn’t exist, or is impossible, or that there aren’t select objective facts, but the notion that human beings can be objective and without bias is a lie and a foolish doctrine to uphold. Everything in this world, all that we know, is based on perception, our personal experiences, preferences, and prejudices. There is no measurable level on which everyone’s perception is exactly objectively the same.
We may all identify the same color as being blue, but we do not know whether the hue of color that we see as blue is identical to everyone else’s. Color isn’t an inherent property of matter, it’s the way in which our brains interpret the bouncing of light on matter and through our eyes. That we identify and label it the same doesn’t mean that it objectively is.
For many, it would seem to be objective truth that sex feels good and chocolate tastes delicious. Yet there are some for whom sex is painful or disgusting, and there are those who somehow find the taste of chocolate revolting. It’s not that what they’re feeling or tasting is different from all the rest of us, but their perceptions of it. The same things are turned negative through their perceptions. Given the impossibility of reaching a consensus on the objective goodness of sex and chocolate, it’s foolish to pretend that we can with anything else.
In my mind, the best pizza in the world comes from Golden Crust, a hole in the wall place in Philly’s Mt. Airy neighborhood, followed by Lazzaro’s on South Street. I haven’t had either pizza in maybe a decade, but to this day I could get into a passionate argument about their superiority. In my mind, the best pizza in the world is made in Philadelphia, a belief which New Yorkers, Chicagoans, and certainly Italians would get damn truculent in arguing against. And I’d dismiss them all, not because I think there’s anything objectively unique and superior about a few of Philly’s best pizza spots, but because I love them. They exemplify perfection in my personal perception. I was introduced to one as a child and the other as a teenage pothead. Nothing can taste better. Nothing can beat my perceptions of them at those pivotal times. Where you come from and your sensory memories can’t be changed by argument.
Food critiquing is a mostly pointless endeavor. Unless food is garbage, if it’s unfresh or rotting, covered with a pound of salt or horribly cooked, you can’t just write it off as bad. Even then there are probably people who’d enjoy it. There are people who enjoy fermented fish guts, or fresh cow milk mixed with blood and drunk warm. People who enjoy that stuff aren’t wrong, and they aren’t tasting something different from the rest of us; their perception of the same thing is different.
Likewise with art and entertainment, particularly when it comes to “classics,” we have to stop worshiping at the altar of the “masters” and pretending their work is objectively superior. The age of the professional reviewer is on the wane. There’s no need to give War and Peace a five star review because it’s a classic and there’s a historical consensus that it’s a masterpiece if your actual opinion is that much of it is dull, poorly edited, and tedious, and you find many of the characters insipid, and fail to grasp Tolstoy’s attraction to mustached women. Rather than upholding pretensions of objective superiority, better that we accept the flawed subjectivity of humanity.
As with everything else, it is foolish to presume the possibility of objectivity in the media. There is no such thing as objective news. At every point in the reporting process, from the witnesses and interviewees to journalists and editors to the broadcasters or publishers and to the public, there are myriad subjective opinions and actions relaying, and distorting, events. Even if something is factual, that doesn’t mean it is without bias, that it is objective. When people insist on objectivity in the news, specifically in this country, what they are really insisting upon is the upholding of the status quo or reinforcement of their own biases. As with much in this country and the Euro-colonized world in general, news outlets are dominated by white people, mostly white men. When women and people of color or other marginalized groups are included, there is often a presumption of bias on their part when covering stories involving their identity class. The idea that a white man could cover a story about Black women better than a black woman, or an Asian man, or a Latinx nonbinary person is false reasoning, particularly when no one questions the white man reporting on the happenings of other white men.
That there is always bias inherent in news reporting, and all else in which opinions and personal perceptions play a role, which is virtually everything, is the nature of life and proof of the futility of objectivity. Rather than pretend otherwise, it would serve us better to glean all we can from life from as broad a variety of sources as possible. We need to expose ourselves to subjective perceptions, the biases of others, to temper our own.