Crimes against reality?

In a memo to Tony Blair, Richard Dawkins mentioned this concept briefly, in the form of an ethical argument.

In short its a question of why purveyors of falsehoods are only prosecuted if there is a victim (human usually) and not for the supply of incorrect information itself that may be damaging to "truth".

Example: someone prints a book claiming that Tony Blair is a child rapist, and the author would quite rightly be sued and destroyed publicly. If a book is released claiming that politicians are more likely than any other section of society to become child rapists (a contention which is wholly untrue) who is going to prosecute the authors?

Actually, I'm sure politicians would find a way to get the authors done in, but substitute any group you like for politicians, say school teachers or priests, and you can see the problem. There's no racial slurs, no individuals being attacked, merely truth itself is being eroded by the production of this tripe.

Can reality be damaged in such ways? Well, newspapers and coverage does this all the time - The truth is often presented in ways that help you to reach conclusions - usually that you want to buy the paper and find out what the story is that the headline relates to. For years on Mondays one paper almost always ran a story about the "Diana conspiracy" - that idea that the British royal family had a hand in the death of Diana Spencer - something that there is ABSOLUTELY no evidence for! And yet the coverage itself has led to a significant number of people believing in such nonsense despite all evidence to the contrary - if every paper covered the tragic accident as just that then it is a no brainer that nowhere near as many people would be of the opinion that this was some sort of outrageously inefficient murder method.

This is an interesting question for me in that it raises the issue of damage to something in all of our interests - that of reality itself. The difficulty of this approach is easy to see though.

Who chooses what is real, in the legal sense?

As a scientifically minded person it would be those things that can be tested and proven insofar as anything can - things like the cause/effect relationship of dropping something and its falling downwards, or that humans are simply animals like every other creature on the planet.

In a legal sense its subject to witness and testimony like everything else is.

This sort of law would never be passed for both political and religious reasons - politicians deal in the grey areas, and every manifesto contains half truths and occasional lies of expediency if nothing else - the religious brainwashers would all be prosecuted under such laws, and all faith healers, fortune tellers, astrologers, phone psychics and such would be arrested. It is the religious folk also who double the politicians concern about such things - way to lose votes Algo!

The real problem is that such law would be open to almost ridiculous abuse and misuse for personal crusades, so it will remain a pipe dream until truth and reality can be accepted by the majority consciously as more fundamental than gut feeling or their own opinions and parental influence (religious or otherwise; no one is born more racist than anyone else).

For such examples we need only look at Zimbabwe at the moment, where truth has been subservient to the wishes of Robert Mugabe for years. I do sort of admire, in a perverse way, the sheer balls required to lock up your presidential rivals for treason - a very literal taking of such treason laws indeed. What a bastard he is.

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