On The Myth of Man's Truth-Seeking Nature

8/14/2019 On The Myth of Man's Truth-Seeking Nature

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On Truth - dsaunders 030621 R10.01.24.rtf 10.01.24 2:5

was really in the business of finding untrue facts per se. Rather, each tried toshow that The Times was ignoring the "real" story, often involving the MiddleEast their problem was not hard truth, but the air of truthfulness. (The right-wing one was called 'Smarter Times.') Their authors, like many people today, didnot really believe that the world around them was truthful, or (sometimes) that

truthfulness was even really possible.

It is here that Bernard Williams has left us an invaluable inheritance. Ifphilosophers ever became kings, they would all be like Mr. Williams. His bookswere clear, funny, dramatic and readable, like great novels. He devoted himselfto real public issues: The British government stopped banning "obscene"literature in the 1970s after he won them over with his "harm condition," whichdeclares that "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shownto harm someone."

His final book, Truth and Truthfulness, has come along at exactly the rightmoment. It both describes our current crisis of truth, and offers hope for aresolution.

In the 300 years since God's will stopped being the leading explanation forevents, Mr. Williams begins, our desire for truthfulness has led humans tobelieve that we ought to question everything, and rightly so. Inevitably, though,this has led many of us to question the value or possibility of truth itself, andsome to believe that truth is impossible or misleading.

It began in the world of higher thought, which quickly filtered down to popularbelief. The Englightenment philosophers pointed out that "reality" is experiencedonly through our (not always trustworthy) senses. Nietzsche noted that there are"no facts, only interpretations." Wittgenstein argued that truth is constructed onlyof ever-shifting language. And the postmodern philosophers built on this byrepeatedly pointing out that truth is merely a "social construct" endlessly rebuiltto serve different human societies.

All of this is quite valid, and Mr. Williams is quite happy to accept thesearguments. But, he argues, to the extent that truth is socially constructed

(usually from combinations of very real and irrefutable facts), we have evenmore of an obligation to get to work constructing it. And we should do so usingour best available tools, sincerity and accuracy.

"We know that the world was not made for us, or we for the world, that ourhistory tells no purposive story, and that there is no position outside the world oroutside history from which we might hope to authenticate our activities," hewrites. This makes our responsibility to truthfulness even more important, for it


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is our commitment to trying to construct an accurate and sincere truth thatallows us to fend off tyranny.

"A liberal society has a definite relation to truthful history," he says, and historyhere includes journalism. "A liberal society has considerable resources to

promote historical truth if it wants to, and it uniquely discourages some famousenemies of it, such as state or religious monopoly discouraging these thingsis, after all, its specialty, part of its legacy of Enlightenment."

What is important is a shared sense of truthfulness not any individual truth,which is likely to be contested and provisional. "The hope can no longer be thatthe truth, enough truth, the whole truth, will itself set us free," he writes. But abelief in the sincerity of truthfulness one that shouldn't be corrupted by thepathological burnout of any individual reporter or newspaper is more important.

As Mr. Williams wrote, in words that ought to be on every newspaper'smasthead: "A truthful history will remind one of what it costs in terms of quitebasic human loss if a mythical order takes over."

Response

to Doug Saunder's article

How to handle the truth, in troubled Times

June 22, 2003byGuy A. Duperreault

[Slightly edited January 24, 2010.]

Dear Mr. Saunders:Good try! But your investigation into the nature of truth was, while truthful, significantlyincomplete in several ways. I was distracted enough by your arguments failures that I,instead of enjoying my ferry ride through the beautiful Georgia Straights, put pen to themargins and atop the story of the precocious Sri Lankan immigrants.


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The first strong gut reaction I had was against Mr. Williamss cited claim that the humandesire for truthfulness has led humans to believe that we ought question everything.This is empirically not true and the worst idealization of human motivation I have seenin a long time! In fact it has been only the fewthat have significantly questionedanything, let alone everything.

The practical experience of life is that the human social animal would rathernotquestion anything that might seriously upset his or her sense of equilibrium and/orrightness (if not righteousness) about the world s/he experiences. Hence the easydenial of a spouses blatant infidelities or the failure of the WTO to bring financialstability to the third world economies. In fact, a pesky questioner will be frequentlyshut away, shut down or otherwise shut up. And this has been true from at least thetime of the city states, when allegiance to the truth of the ruling mythos was oftenmandated with death. Socrates, the Christians under Roman rule and Galileo underChristian-based rule are examples. And that reality is easily extended to the seeminghuman need to be right, if not righteous, in how the nature of their beliefs are

mirrored in the world. The ability of people to deny the validity of the Holocaust in theface of ample evidence, is testament to that. The ability of our media to ignore thegenocide of the East Timorese is testament to a belief in the benevolence of Westernsupport of other worldly dictators, and eerily mirrors the Second World War Germanstheir ignorance of the reality of ovens and gas chambers in their world. Thegatekeeper function is an example of that filtering of truth and truthfulness, and is thereason why the right and left felt the need to form their own papers: the truths theywere seeing were being filtered from The Times.

Now to the problem of Williamss use of the word harm, at least in your citation. [N]oconduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone. I will

change the context of harm from one of obscenity to one of economics. If I posit thatthat which creates economic activity is good for a societys economy, which by todaysmedia standards is a de facto equivalent to being good for society, then to encourageeconomic activity is to promote the good of that society. Thus, it is that our currentsociety has found it healthy to sanction gambling: gambling creates economic activity,especially if it bankrupts certain members of that society because bankruptcy engagesthe economic activity of an engaged judiciary while trying to clean up the mess.However, by limiting our scope of vision to the economic health, members of thesociety can ignore the harm done to the individual unable to control his or heraddiction to gambling. And by ignoring the consequences to the society of the socialand familial failures such behaviours can generate, then we can safely say that

gambling is healthy for the society, or at least the benefits out weigh the maleficence.This example is easily extended into the many peculiar economic truths proselytizedad nauseum from our media, whom seem to not fully understand that one mans meatis anothers poison except as it pertains to a high priced dollar.

A truthful history will remind one of what it costs in terms of quite basic human loss if amythical order takes over. But that question misses the critical truth that to those livingit, their myth is the truth. Quite likely one of the reasons The Times writers were able to


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embellish the truth with the acceptance of the editor was because the embellishmentscorresponded with the myth being propagated as truth by the editor(s) and/orowner(s). John Ralston Saul, Linda McQuaig, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky, forexample, point out the many failures of todays economic truths, but they aremarginalized except by few. Why? Because their truth lies outside the corporate

myth, and is easily dismissed by the simperings of the Fraser Institute as fictions,distortions, myth. But our current economic truths allow us to accept blithely theinability for the richest country in the world, richer than it has ever been, to affordhaving band classes in its high schools. And that same economic myth has made itokay, albeit in a sad sort of way, for people to die of freezing while we lock away theprotesters who rant against such deaths.

A true measure of how enrapt a society is to its truth-myth is in its ability to let die orhave killed those who fail to live the dream. The Jews of Germany were killed, in effect,by a society enrapt by its myth, by a society living its dream. Where our myths sanctionharm in our society is a far more honest tell of where we are living a lie than in

Williamss idealistic notions of a truthful history. (That in itself overrates the power ofhistory to teach us anything, as CP Snow points out. But that is another topic.)

Guy Duperreault, BGS AScT.

Addendum Sent Jun 29, 2003

Dear Mr. Saunders:Subsequent to my sending you my argument that truth seeking is NOT, despiteBernard Williams's assertion, the mark of man since God fell from the throne ofexplication, I was given an article from the NY Times on the effects of brain function ofelectromagnetic interference. ("Savant for a Day", by Lawrence Osborne. I'm not sureof the date, as the article was e-mailed to me indirectly from The Times.) The article,which is itself interesting, contains a tell of the how the God of Science has replaced

the God of Genesis as the arbitrator of "truth." Allan Snyder is well acquainted with thenature of the human animal, even in scientists, to hang on to old truths in the face ofnew ones: his research is largely dismissed, despite it being capable of controlledreplication. "Of those who dismiss Snyder's theories out of hand, [Snyder] shrugs:'People are often blind to new ideas. Especially scientists.'"[See http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/savant-for-a-day.html?pagewanted=1.]


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.guy

Saunders Response

From: "Saunders, Douglas" Date: Mon Jun 30, 2003 06:51:29 AM America/VancouverTo: 'Guy Duperreault' [e.mail@address]Subject: RE: On Truth - Addendum

I do tend to agree that science and more specifically rationalism can be just as

much a misleading faith as spiritualism. One needs something to account for theirrational in life; cold rationalism is not the answer, nor is spiritualism. I think our societyis still muddling out a solution somewhere between those poles.Regards,Doug Saunders

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