The Truthiness Abyss

Truth? part 3

I’m feeling more need to respect convergence than I did 20 years ago. Then I thought of truth as rather an empty notion, but I never imagined that it would be replaced by truthiness, which Stephen Colbert introduced. Truthiness is “truth that comes from the gut, not books” or: “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.” Colbert the character extolled going with your gut, ignoring facts, evidence, serious inquiry, and published authority.

When Colbert stepped out of character for a moment, in an interview, he explained:

“truthiness is tearing apart our country, . . It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty.”

Celebrating diverse perspectives is important – but we also need respect for facts – for the convergence of thoughtful people, carefully examining the evidence and coming to consensus on what it means.

Truth and trust have a similar etymology – both deriving from a root that means “be firm, solid, steadfast.” What’s true is what’s worthy of trusting. In our divided times, we’ve lost truth – it’s been replaced by truthiness – and we’ve lost truth because we lost trust. We don’t trust normal professional journalists, so we turn to sources even less trustworthy who spin tales about a deep state at work. We don’t trust scientists, so we turn to websites and social media who tell us what we’d rather believe about climate change. We’ve lost respect for facts because we’ve lost trust in other people – the people whose considered consensus gave us, at least, provisional facts.

But – good people – despair not. This view of our ills is – well – a part of the elephant. It’s the part that our hands are on when we take in the national political scene. The bleak trench warfare of national politics, however, obscures what else is going on. At more local levels, good work is happening.

“Only 36 percent of Americans thought the country as a whole was headed in the right direction. But in the same poll, two-thirds of Americans said they were satisfied with their own financial situation, and 85 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with their general position in life and their ability to pursue the American dream. Other polls in the past half-dozen years have found that most Americans believe the country to be on the wrong course—but that their own communities are improving.” (James Fallows, Atlantic Magazine

And apparently, they aren’t just fooling themselves. James Fallows, writing an extensive piece this week for Atlantic, finds that local progress is real and widespread. He finds that America is remaking itself, for the better, except at the national level.
Trust in civic governance at the local level is high. Immigration – so despised in national politics – is really fairly calmly absorbed in the placed where immigrants actually show up.

This makes sense. Truth depends on trust, and we trust people when we see them face to face and have the chance to get to know them. It’s in gatherings – like this one, as I’ve said before – where we get out of our house and meet some other people – that are our salvation.

If you seek the truth, you are sitting in its midst. It’s not "somewhere over the rainbow." It is, as Dorothy realized: right here in this home.

“If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there I never really lost it to begin with.”

This is part 3 of 3 of "Truth?"
See also
Part 1: Elephant Truth
Part 2: The Convergence Theory of Truth

The Convergence Theory of Truth

Truth? part 2

Twenty years ago, in 1998, before I was a minister, and was still mostly the philosophy professor I had been, I gave a sermon on truth to a small fellowship in Clarksville, Tennessee. The gist of that sermon went like this:

When conservative temperaments talk about the Truth – as if with a capital T – it just makes me shrug. I want to say, look, if we have different beliefs about something, and we're having a dispute, let’s look at the best evidence we can find. That’s all we have to guide us – all we ever could have. But even the best evidence is never perfect, and is always incomplete, so calling any conclusion “true” is just a sort of rhetorical flourish.

The Commendatory Use

“Truth” is just this word we use to commend a belief, like when we say, “Oh, yes, that’s true.” The notion of “true” is rather empty. It doesn’t add anything – it’s merely a general way to say, “Oh, yeah, I agree with that.”

The Cautionary Use

The other way we use the word “true,” – less common than the commendatory use – is in a cautionary way. When we remind ourselves (as we probably don’t do often enough) that even though a certain belief is well-justified and fits all the evidence we have, it might not be true – then we are using “true” in this cautionary way. It’s a helpful caution to remember that no matter how strong the evidence seems today, it’s always possible that we, or our children, will grow to have incompatible beliefs instead.

So “true” and “truth” are merely these rhetorical devices for blandly commending, or sometimes cautioning. Not really much there. Certainly nothing that warrants a capital T. If there’s a claim at stake, let’s examine the evidence. "Truth" is merely a grandiose abstraction that is no help at all in the real work of finding of interpreting evidence.

Like Art

Sentences – the ones we commend to each other, and about which we caution each other – are human creative products, just as art and music are. We produce beliefs to meet our own needs, and we will always be re-creating belief and knowledge as our purposes guide our inquiry and what we learn in turn leads us to redefine our purposes.

According to the elephant model of truth, our problem is that we all have only partial perspectives, only part of the truth, and we have a lot more to learn. On this model, more inquiry and learning will lead our beliefs to gradually converge closer and closer to reality. Certainly, more inquiry is a good thing, but the problem goes much deeper than the elephant model supposes. There is no elephant. The truth -- to contradict the tagline of "The X-Files" TV show -- is not out there, waiting for us to get our hands around it. Someone might say that for billions of years up until 1822 Beethoven's 9th symphony was "out there" waiting for Beethoven to discover it, but this would be an odd theory. Most of us would rather say that Beethoven invented or created his 9th symphony rather than discovering it. In the same way, the sentences that we commend as true are invented/created, not discovered (or rather not simply discovered). In fact, inquiry produces at least as much divergence as convergence.

Like Evolution

Think of inquiry like evolution. It’s our beliefs evolving. We don’t think of there being a gap between a species’ genes and its environment and of that gap as gradually narrowing as the species evolves. Rather, we say that genes are either successful at perpetuating themselves or they are not. Likewise, we may say that beliefs either succeed at perpetuating themselves or do not. And if a belief does persist, that doesn’t mean that it’s “close” to reality any more than a genetic tendency that persists through generations is “close to” its environment.

Both beliefs and genes survive by virtue of helping us cope, not by mirroring objective reality. While many beliefs fail this test and die away, the number of possible beliefs that could survive and reproduce is as infinite as the number of possible species that could.

For instance: what, after all, is an elephant exactly?

In India elephants have long been construction equipment – good for knocking over trees and carrying large loads. For some Hindus, elephants are gods, or represent the god Ganesh. For biologists, an elephant is a species occupying such-and-such a spot in a taxonomic system. We know the elephant as the symbol of the Republican Party, and also as a symbol of good memory. For poachers in Africa, an elephant is a source of ivory, and thus income. For others, an elephant is a living creature with a rich emotional life of its own and is therefore worthy of our concern and protection against poachers.

As we learn more and more of these perspectives on elephants, the picture doesn't look like a convergence, a gradual closing of the gap, between our beliefs and the reality of elephants. The picture looks more like an expanding diversity of possible points of view we become able to take.

Moreover, we are always inventing new meanings. Groucho Marx gave elephants a comic meaning when he said: "One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.” Ask 100 poets to write a poem each about what an elephant is, and you’ll get 100 very different descriptions. Some of them will be startling insights, and we will learn from those poems new truths about what elephants are.

Inquiry does not converge slowly toward the one truth. Rather, inquiry accumulates more and more divergent perspectives. Learning expands rather than narrows the repertoire of responses available to us.

As John Keats said: Truth is beauty. And just as the beauty of art and music do not converge toward the one true painting or the one true sonata – just as species evolution does not converge toward the one true species -- human learning does not converge toward the one truth.

That’s what I thought was important to say about truth 20 years ago. I wanted, as I’ve wanted throughout my adult life, to celebrate the human capacity for diversity, for creativity, for spinning out new and different perspectives. That’s still important -- in some ways, more important now than ever.

What I took for granted 20 years ago was that learning and creating diverse viewpoints would be done in a conscientious way – with a certain integrity – that the motivation was to make beauty in a context that honored the different arts, different perspectives. I wanted to go beyond the elephant story to say, “let’s not be limited by the idea that there’s just one true elephant out there.” Acknowledging the worthwhile moral of the elephant parable, I wanted to go the next step.

Instead, we’ve seen public discourse go the opposite direction. A little humble recognition that one could be wrong, that one’s view is partial, that other people’s views, while also partial, have as much connection to reality as one’s own – would now come as a great breath of fresh air.

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This is part 2 of 3 of "Truth?"
See also
Part 1: Elephant Truth

Elephant Truth

Truth? part 1

An Elephant Joke

In another church in another place, a visiting minister began a children’s story. He invited the children down front, and asked them, “What’s big and gray?” But in this Christian and more conservative church, the children were not used to speaking up. The minister tried again: what’s big and gray and has big floppy ears? No answer. And tusks? And a long, long nose called a trunk? Finally, a boy in the back shyly ventured to raise a hand.
“Yes, yes,” said the minister.
The boy said, “I know the answer is supposed to be Jesus, but it sure sounds like an elephant to me.”

An Elephant Parable

An elephant, in the well-known parable that originated in ancient India, represents the truth. A group of people who have never seen, read about, or heard of such a thing as an elephant are gathered. They are blindfolded and then brought to an elephant. They are led up to the elephant and have the chance to run their hands over a portion of its body. Each person feels a different part of the elephant body, and they then describe the elephant based on their partial experience. When they hear each other’s different descriptions, they are incredulous, suspect dishonesty, and fall to fighting.

The moral is that we each have a part of the truth, and we must be wary of the human proclivity for projecting our partial experiences as the whole truth, and ignoring other people's partial experiences, which have as much connection to reality as our own. It’s a wonderful story, a story that every child should hear, and that a lot of adults still need to hear. The story teaches that my perspective is largely determined by that to which I happened to have been exposed. If I think an elephant is like a tree trunk, it’s because I encountered the leg. If I think of God the way I do, it's because I was raised that way -- and if I’ve deviated from the beliefs with which I was raised, I have done so because some other influence happened to come along.

My beliefs seem to me to make so much sense – to be so eminently reasonable. How could other people be so foolish and pigheaded as not to agree with me? How could they not understand? They must be deluded by the devil, or they have deliberately chosen to become agents of evil. Or perhaps they have some congenital defect which obscures from them the truths that are so obvious to us right-thinking folk. Or maybe they have been biased by the way they were raised.

A lot of us are prepared to attribute other people’s disagreeable beliefs to culture or psychology, while we regard our own beliefs as having nothing to do with culture or psychology but only with seeing plainly what is there. The elephant story, though, tells us we all have the beliefs we have because we've had the experiences we've had. That’s a moral that helps us be more tolerant – and that helps us be more open to new learning.

A related moral of the elephant story – rather more implicit -- is this: More inquiry is a good thing. Hearing the story, we’re likely to find ourselves wishing each person could have the chance to feel more different parts of the Elephant. Get back in there and learn some more.

When I was a boy, I was sure the answer wasn’t supposed to be Jesus. But I did want to know about that elephant out there, truth.

Truth

Truth! Rather than being the elephant in the room that everybody can see but nobody will talk about, truth is the elephant in the room that nobody can see, but everybody constantly talks about.

We ask witnesses, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” Is it even possible to tell the whole truth?

We speak of true diamonds, true friends. Someone particularly suited to her field – say, medicine, is said to be a true doctor. We speak of the arrow flying straight and true to its target. If the billiard table cloth is true, then it is flat and level. When I take my bicycle in for a tune up, they “true” the wheels – make them straight.

“Truth is beauty,” says John Keats. And “beauty truth. That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know.” Lord Tennyson says “love of truth” is necessary to make a human life worthy. Plato says that true philosophers are “lovers of the vision of the truth.”

It used to be, once upon a time, that truth was a concept more often invoked by the more conservative, evangelical temperaments. It seemed to me that their idea of truth was a device for imposing uniformity of agreement and demonizing anyone who didn't see things the way they did. I still remember my indignant reaction years ago when I heard a Baptist leader, interviewed on the radio, say, “Diversity is all well and good, but let’s not forget that there is such a thing as the truth.”

Keats and Tennyson and Plato spoke of truth that stirred our souls to strive and soar, yet this guy was using “the truth” – his notion of it -- as a tool for exclusion, for meanness, for justifying injustice.

These days, though, we don’t hear evangelicals invoke “truth” much anymore. They have cast their lot with a leader who manifestly has no concern for what is true. He's not interested in hearing it -- he declines briefings -- and he's not interested in speaking it either, as his long and growing list of documented falsehoods (see HERE and HERE) shows. One may approve of the policy directions emerging from the current administration, and you might like his judicial appointments, but even his most ardent supporters who love his swagger and attitude know better than to actually believe the literal meaning of everything he says. (Daniel Effron HERE suggests that supporters are so delighted by thinking of how Trump's claims could have been true that they don't care if they actually are.)

In response, I find I’m feeling more need to protect the truth – and this is a bit of a switch.

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This is part 1 of 3 of "Truth?"
See also
Part 2: The Convergence Theory of Truth