Uninformed or misinformed?

By Fr. ROY CIMAGALA, roycimagala@gmail.com
February 7, 2017

APPARENTLY an American actor expressed the view recently that if he does not read the newspapers, he obviously would be uninformed of developments around. But if he reads them, he most likely would also get misinformed, considering the way the papers are now, he said. He found himself in a dilemma.

This is the challenge we all face at present. The truth is that we have to get informed, but informed properly. We simply have to find ways of how to get out of the state of being uninformed and misinformed.

This will require some skills, of course. But the basic and relevant virtue to live here is that of prudence. That’s what would enable us to judge whether we should read the papers or not, now or later, or to “smell” whether a piece of information is good or not, useful or useless, relevant or irrelevant, true or false.

Nowadays, the need to be most discerning is getting urgent precisely because of the proliferation of useless information, not to mention, misleading and deceptive ones and fake news that are laced with all sorts of biases and prejudices of those who make them. It’s not only political partisanship that occasions this phenomenon. It’s deeper than that. It’s now ideological partisanship.

This virtue of prudence, of course, presumes some criteria to guide our judgments. In this regard, it has to be made clear that we have to start with God’s moral law. We just cannot set aside this indispensable requirement and plunge immediately to merely earthly and temporal values like practicality, profitability, popularity, etc., to guide us. That would be like sailing a boat without the North Star, or the GPS.

Prudence, of course, presumes a certain hierarchy of values that we should respect, uphold and defend. It should be vitally connected with wisdom that in the end connects us with God and all others, as well as all things in the world, through love and truth.

We have to make sure that our prudence is not only motivated by secondary criteria, like efficiency, effectiveness, practicality, profitability, convenience, etc. If these criteria do not lead us to a closer relation with God, with others and the rest of the world, but would rather reinforce our self-absorption, then it would not be true prudence.

We might enjoy some perks that these secondary standards may give us, but it would not be true prudence when it fails to lead us to our proper relationship with God, others and the rest of the world.

Of course, true prudence springs first of all from our intimate personal relation with God, the source of all good things, of all truth, of all love. Without that foundation, our prudence would be limited to mere appearances of prudence that would be nothing other than the prudence of the world and the prudence of the flesh, if not the prudence of the devil.