Penetrating the haze of truth

'What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.' Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen is keen on quotes from British authors, so I commend to him these first lines of Francis Bacon's essay on Truth. The 17th century writer was an early exponent of scientific inquiry and experiment as the path to truth.

So how should one deal with those who deny what is obvious or what is regarded as common knowledge as a result of constant repetition?

Here, in Hong Kong, we have a chief executive implicitly denying the connection between public health and the haze of particles that so often sits over the city. Is this bone-headed ignorance? Or is it a politically convenient posture to avoid what Al Gore's film calls 'an inconvenient truth'?

Does the chief executive only care about the smog if it keeps away tourists and foreign businesses? Does he not care for the health of those who live here? Does he really believe that it is only our view, not our health, that is at stake? Or is it just a way of sidestepping the risk of offending the vested interests who support him politically - and give cosy jobs to ex-civil servants?

Either way, it is sad, but the one thing we do not want to do is put him in jail, let alone execute him, for denying 'the truth'. That is something of which the Catholic Church and the Communist Party have had plenty of experience. Even they may have learned lessons that fear is only effective in the short term in spreading a gospel.

Let the facts speak for themselves, and they will if they are repeated often enough by a sufficiently large proportion of society in general, as well as the scientific community.

Letting facts speak for themselves seems rather difficult at present for two great nations - France and Turkey - who ought to know better. Even more remarkable is that they have become embroiled in a dispute not over what they did to each other but an issue of marginal interest to France: the massacre of Armenians in Turkey in 1915. This is no China-Japan dispute over the Nanking Massacre or the Yasukuni Shrine.