We'll Miss the Truth When it is Gone
Or Maybe We Do Already
Welcome to The Embassy!
We hope to be an Island of Faith, Humanity and Grace For Understanding Our Strange World. Here are this week’s ‘dispatches’:
Links
The Journalist and the Holodomor - pursuing a painful and hidden truth against those who lie to control the narrative
The Perils of 180ism - positions and pronouncements without a basis in my own life, based only on the opposition of my enemies …
Take
As a culture, I don’t think we especially love the truth … below are some excerpts from my opinion piece - For the Love of the Truth (I think it is paywalled) in the St. Louis Post Dispatch.
I think we don’t love the truth anymore. We live out a functional postmodernism where each of us gets to have our own truth. We want to construct a narrative that explains the world, that makes it exciting, safe, meaningful - and then we filter or pursue our facts to reinforce that narrative. I think if we all loved the truth, not perfectly but well enough, we wouldn’t be here.
We don’t love the truth because we love our narrative more. Our narrative gives us identity, purpose, and meaning. So once we are settled into it, questioning it or pursuing truth that disconfirms it is not something we think of. The cost is existential - we are not willing to consider it.
…
To love the truth means I must be able to look at what would disconfirm my narrative, what would disprove it, upset it, overturn it … and pursue that - to make sure it can’t. And if it can, I need to adjust my narrative. I can tell how much I prefer my narrative to the truth by how difficult and foreign this process is. And if I won’t engage in this process, my narrative has become an idol.
View
Tell the Truth (to Yourself)
“Tell the truth to yourself and the rest will fall in place” -
The Avett Brothers (Tell The Truth)
…
Lex Fridman is a computer scientist with an interest in Artificial Intelligence. I sometimes listen to his interviews of physicists and mathematicians. He is a smart guy, curious about the world, and he is having trouble knowing what is true and what isn’t. In our world, in our culture, knowing what is true gets harder and harder and finding the truth takes work. Which is the opposite of what keeps you in a disinformation mindset. We tend to stick to what we already think without some sort of action. In the words of The Avett Brothers, we need to do a little work - we need to tell the truth to ourselves.
…
We are surrounded by conspiracy theories, disinformation, misinformation, biased information, and whatever else kind of bad information there is. We could talk about any of these related to politics, the election, the pandemic, and many other topics. In fact, I likely will do a whole dispatch just on conspiracy theories and why we might be surrounded by them. But for now, I want to take a slightly different angle and use for an illustration just one conspiracy theory that isn’t related to current events - the belief that the earth is flat.
If you want a great look at the current flat earth movement and a reflection on conspiracy theories in general, I recommend Behind the Curve, a well done Netflix documentary. That community sees themselves as the ultimate truth-seekers in the face of mass denial and lies from almost everyone else. But that often leads them to looking only for data that confirms their belief. In the words of a (non flat-earth) physicist …
The difference between being skeptical (looking for the truth) and denial (not) is subtle but important. … you are trying to look for all the data that proves you right
And that is what we can do - it is easy to stay locked in a belief if you only look to reinforce it. At the same time, the flat-earth community does see themselves as a community. And once joined, the potential loss of community shows itself to be a powerful disincentive to changing one’s mind.
All of us want to connect with things that make us unique … I couldn’t leave if I wanted to
It is easy to ask, “How does someone get to this place?” But it is only a version of what most of us do, at least sometimes.
We live in a culture that makes knowing and living in the truth increasingly difficult. Our culture can deny that there is a truth when it needs to … and we can find a strange mix of certainty that leads us away from curiosity and searching for the truth when it suits us. So, it gets harder and harder to know what it is true, and we, as a culture, seem to value it less and less. We want to have our own truth, or a truth that is shared by my community. But, and we’ll get to this in a minute, this is not how truth works. We don’t get our own private or communal truth.
All of this can apply to our own lives and relationships. What do I believe to be true about myself? How does that impact my life and relationships?
“I was the coward
I strangled your heart
I wanna make amends, but where do I start?
Tell the truth to yourself and the rest will fall in place” -
The Avett Brothers (Tell The Truth)
But we often don’t tell the truth to ourselves - we have an everyday rejection of or managing of the truth. Have you ever been surprised at how you look in a picture or a mirror - in other words, surprised by what everyone else sees all the time? What do those close to you know to be true about you that you don’t want to believe?
I am just a poor boy
Though my story's seldom told
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest -
Paul Simon (The Boxer)
What we want to hear is our own truth. But there is another way we can go wrong with respect to truth.
“What is truth?” is a question Pilate asked Jesus. Jesus had just responded to Pilate accusation that he claimed to be a king.
Jesus: “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
“What is truth?” retorted Pilate.
John 18:37-38
This reflects a transition from my truth to no truth. But a ‘no truth’ position is really just a version of a ‘my truth’ position. Jesus was claiming to be a linchpin in reality - the big story we are all in. Pilate isn’t sure such a thing exists. His private truth is that you can’t know truth.
Here is a social media exchange from a few years ago that illustrates this ‘no truth’ position.
Person 1 -
Here’s what I’ve been saying recently, and I may have said it you when I was visiting a few weeks ago …
There’s only two things I’m completely sure of:
I’m not completely sure of anything, and
No matter what, I’m going to get it wrong.
Super humbling, Inclusive. Necessary. At the end of my life, I’ll either have loved too much or too little - it’s impossible to arrive comfortably at “just right” according to Divine measure. So I’d rather just chill out, aim my days towards being found guilty of the former, and get on with it.
Person 2 -
Wouldn’t “getting it wrong” mean there is a “right”? I think that’s dualistic thinking and not necessarily true. Why can’t there be right and also right?
Person 1 -
BINGO.
Person 2 -
I am positive that I am never right equals a negative. I am never right but I am wrong equals a positive. Who knows?
Who knows? I’m not so sure. These people want to live in a world where they can’t be wrong, where they can’t consider being wrong - because nobody is wrong, because nobody can be wrong. Because there is no right. Obviously, this doesn’t work.
This ‘no truth’ position confuses knowledge with truth. We can fail to understand something, but that doesn’t mean there is no underlying truth. But I think there is more to say about this ‘no truth’ position. It is really a moral truth that is in view here, but certainly they are sure of some moral truths. Would these people not condemn a pedophile? I think they would, rightly - they would be sure of that … what are they really saying? I think they are saying we want the freedom to believe any position on a certain, limited set of issues. Well, we probably all do. But that doesn’t change reality.
If I am right - if we are all in a big story that is real - then we can’t escape truth and morality. And so the ‘no truth’ position can’t really last. Cancel culture has taken us from the ‘no truth’ to the ‘my truth’ or ‘our truth’ to the ‘we, the good people, have the truth and we will enforce it”. And we are back to the community defining truth. We are so sure of our side that we can condemn the other side without pause. We have to be so sure of our side in order to not have to examine it.
What is truth? Let’s answer Pilate’s question.
Truth is an accurate description of reality. Truth shows us what is real. Truth accurately describes what is the reality about me, about us, about you, about them, about where we are in the story. We may not know it, we may be unsure of it, but it is there. And to find it will be work, because we often won’t want to find it.
Do we love it? Or do we subtly manipulate it in order to believe what we want to believe about ourselves and others and the world. Do we only look for what allows us to believe what we are already comfortable believing? Do we find endless distractions to keep us from the question?
To quote myself from the opinion piece linked above:
I think we don’t love the truth anymore. We live out a functional postmodernism where each of us gets to have our own truth. We want to construct a narrative that explains the world, that makes it exciting, safe, meaningful - and then we filter or pursue our facts to reinforce that narrative. I think if we all loved the truth, not perfectly but well enough, we wouldn’t be here.
We don’t love the truth because we love our narrative more. Our narrative gives us identity, purpose, and meaning. So once we are settled into it, questioning it or pursuing truth that disconfirms it is not something we think of. The cost is existential - we are not willing to consider it.
…
To love the truth means I must be able to look at what would disconfirm my narrative, what would disprove it, upset it, overturn it … and pursue that - to make sure it can’t. And if it can, I need to adjust my narrative. I can tell how much I prefer my narrative to the truth by how difficult and foreign this process is. And if I won’t engage in this process, my narrative has become an idol.
Do I tell the truth to myself? And what is the avoidance of it costing me? Do I love it? Do we? The truth can be painful - without loving it I may thoughtlessly cast it aside. But we will miss it when it is gone. We miss it already.
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