JEAN·FRAN~OIS
REVEL
The Flight from Truth
The foremost of all the forces that drive the world is falsehood. More
than any before it, twentieth-century civilization has depended on infor–
mation, teaching, science, culture - in short, on knowledge, as well as
on a system of government which, by its very definition, seeks to make
knowledge available to all: democracy. Clearly, freedom of information,
like democracy itself, has known enormous variations in its practical ap–
plication from one country to the next. Few are the countries in which
both have managed to get through the century without an interruption,
or indeed without an outright suppression, lasting several generations.
But no matter how intermittent the part information plays in influencing
the persons who determine the course of events (for example, political
leaders) and those who react to those events, it is today unquestionably
more important, more constant, and more widely diffused than in earlier
times. Those who act have better data on which to base their actions,
and those on the receiving end are much better informed about what
those who act are doing.
It is therefore interesting to inquire whether this preponderance of
available knowledge - with its detail, its abundance, its ever broader and
swifter dissemination - has enabled humanity to guide itself more judi–
ciously than in the past. The question is all the more important since the
perfecting and accelerating of the techniques of transmission and the
steady increase in the number of individuals who benefit from them will
make the twenty-first century an age in which, even more than in the
twentieth, information will be a central element of civilization.
Our century has witnessed a notable increase of knowledge along
with a similar increase in the number of human beings who have access
to that knowledge. In other words, knowledge - and in particular sci–
entific knowledge - has increased, and it has been accompanied by an
enormous expansion in the volume of information making it available to
the general public. To begin with, the educational process is being pro-
Editor's Note: From the forthcoming book
The Flight from Truth: The R eign of
Deceit in the Age of Information
by Jean-Franc;:ois Revel. Copyright © 1992 by
Jean-Franc;:ois Revel. Translation copyright © 1991 by Curtis Cate. To be
published by Random House , Inc. Printed with the permission of R andom
House, Inc.
