ALL ABOUT TRUTH

The nature of truth; police interviews; eyewitnesses; delusions; magical thinking; the ethics of theft; postmodernism; social justice; ideology and Utopianism

By Charles Pickles & Jason Frowley

Truth is fundamental. It governs not only who we are but every aspect of our relationship to the outside world. Everything relies on it. The simplest of actions – reaching out my hand to grasp a cup – turns out to rely on innumerable truths. There must, for instance, actually be a cup there, certain comprehensible physical laws must be involved in picking it up, and so on.

This basic idea underlies the concept of ‘objective truth’. This is the view that the way things are in the world is independent of us, of you, me, or our perceptions. We shall be arguing for the truth of this view.

Even ordinary everyday chit-chat bears an implicit relationship to truth. Were it otherwise, communication would be impossible.

Uncle George says that it’s five o’clock, or that it looks as if we’ll be getting rain this afternoon. Our implicit assumption is that his statements must bear some relationship to the Way Things Are – that is, to the truth about certain phenomena that exist in the world, independently of you, me, or Uncle George. Maybe he’s right: maybe it is five o’clock or maybe it does look as if it’s going to rain. This is another way of saying that his statement bears a particular, agreed relationship to the Way Things Are. Alternatively, Uncle George’s watch may have stopped or he may be a hopeless forecaster. In that case, his statement may bear a different relationship to the Way Things Are. In either case, though, we are able to specify a the nature of this relationship (they match or they don’t).

When police officers interview a witness or interrogate a suspect, they are hoping to elicit a statement that bears a specific relationship to the truth. We law-abiding, tax-paying citizens hope that they’re after true statements that will help solve the crime. Of course, if the officers in question happen to be hopelessly corrupt, they may in fact be looking to fit some poor sucker up for the job. In either case, though, the information they seek has a specific, identifiable, relationship to the truth, just as Uncle George’s did.

This common-sense view is sometimes set in opposition to ‘subjective’ truth – the view that what is true is somehow a matter of the thoughts inside one’s own mind. Something is true because one believes it to be so. ‘Subjective truth’ may even imply that anything I happen to believe is, ipso facto, the truth.

Certain truths do, of course, undeniably, have subjective qualities. The fact that I happen to like strawberries is entirely a matter of subjective taste. The truth of the statement ‘I like strawberries’ depends wholly on whether or not I actually do. Nevertheless, we argue, it remains a truth about The Way Things Are, based on subjective phenomena or otherwise.

In the contemporary world some argue that all ‘truths’ are of wholly subjective sort (these are the kinds of people who put the word ‘truths’ into scare-quotes). The truth or otherwise of any given proposition is established by whether or not a person believes it. There are many modern (or postmodern) examples of this. Think of the contentious claim that if I declare myself a woman, it becomes ‘true’ that I am one. In other words, it becomes ‘true’ to say that I am a woman despite the obvious presence of traditionally male appendages. Or consider the fashionable view that science is a ‘western construct’ and other, non-western, cultures have equally ‘true’ accounts of how the natural world works.

The rest of this discussion is precisely about the relationship between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ truths, and the implications of failing to make the distinction.

Wew human beings seem to share a conception of truth. We know that some statements have a particular relationship to that truth (they are correct) and some do not (they are false). We make distinctions like that all the time. If you’re reading this, and shaking you head and thinking, ‘Oh, no, these guys have it all bassackwards,’ you are engaged in precisely that activity. Our conception of truth is what enables us to make a further distinction: between our beliefs about the world and the way the world actually is.

All of this sounds much fancier than it really is. Let’s provide an everyday example. Imagine that you believe there’s milk in the fridge. You go to the fridge, open it, and find out you were mistaken. Your belief bore an unexpected relationship with truth. The state of the world, you find, to your disappointment, is what it is, independent of what you expected it to be. As it turns out, truth - as the popular meme has it - doesn’t care about your beliefs. That fact is fundamental to our ability to understand and move around in a world that makes any sense at all. Abandon it – assume that everything is always just the way you believe it to be – and there’s nothing to hold on to. Your world turns into a giant bouncy castle: unstable, unreliable, and unsuitable for drinking milk (if indeed there even is such a thing as milk).

At the risk of labouring the point, we can distinguish two separate phenomena. First, objectivity: there either is, or there is not, milk in the fridge. (The very fact that we go to check – and think this is a reasonable thing to do - proves that we implicitly understand this.) Second, subjectivity: our beliefs vis a vis the milk and the fridge.

Insanity (a word psychologists usually avoid) may loosely be defined as the collapsing of those two categories. Insane people are precisely those who do not distinguish between subjectivity and objectivity: that is, between the content of their own minds and the actual state of the world. Think of auditory or visual illusions, for instance. They represent a confusion between what there is and what one thinks there is. Alternatively, think of clinical anxiety, characterised by an inability to recognise that the objective world is less threatening than one’s perception of it. And have you heard of magical thinking? It’s essentially the belief that our thoughts, wishes, or even ordinary actions can affect phenomena that are clearly beyond our influence. ‘As long as I clap my hands three times before the roundabout, my boyfriend won’t break up with me,’ a scooter-riding undergraduate friend of ours used to claim, much to the terror of her passengers. Think of fantasies, or the very fact that we have, and use, the word.

Broadly, there are two kinds of objective fact about the world. The first are easy to discern. Examples abound: the clothes you are wearing; whether the carpet is blue or red; where you are. The eyewitness to a crime might know (without having to expend any cognitive effort at all) who committed it, and when, and who the victim was.

Other facts are trickier to discern (they may require investigation). How do whales give birth? What’s the structure of DNA? Was there a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy and did it involve the Mafia? Some facts are plain impossible to discern, or at least seem to be. It is a risky endeavour to try to provide examples, since the state of knowledge is always changing. The classic example is ‘knowing what the stars are made of’. Our great grandparents assumed we could never know. Now we just have to Google it.

Easy facts and difficult facts lie on a plane, in so far as they are indisputably facts about the world. They are the phenomena to which we give the name ‘truth’. Easy to discern or difficult to discern – either way, it might be a truth.

One more, vital, example: ethics. Philosophers enjoy arguing about whether ethics (those mind-spinningly complex phenomena) are actually objective or subjective. The difficulty arises because, if they are objective truths about the world, they are damn difficult ones – so difficult, in fact, that some claim they surely exist nowhere at all except inside our own minds.

The two views are very different. The first goes by the name ‘ethical realism’. It’s the view that ethical statements (‘Thou shalt not steal’; ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live’) can be true or false in exactly the same way as statements about milk and fridges. The second view is unimaginatively called ethical anti-realism. It’s the view that ethical truths do not exist independent of the people who come up with them. They’re just a matter of social norms.

To see what we mean by this, let’s take as an example a statement that seems, on the face of it, pretty straightforward: ‘Thou shalt not steal’. Pretty much everyone you know would agree, right? If anything is wrong, taking things that belong to other people surely is.

Even so, there are knots to unpick (that’s why Moral Philosophy is so complicated). Is it wrong – is it really? - to steal a little cash from a very rich miser who refuses to help fund a poor child’s life-saving operation? Surely the child’s life counts for more than the miser’s bank balance. Perhaps the amount matters, too. Whatever the circumstances, perhaps it’s more defensible to steal $1 than $1 million. Is it permissible to steal if you can absolutely guarantee that the owner will never find out or care, and you yourself badly need the money? Some have argued that it’s always permissible to do so.

Now, you may well respond that theft is wrong under any circumstances whatever and we must not commit the crime. That’s a perfectly valid position. But note the difficulty you run into if you try to defend it. You run the risk of stamping your foot on the floor and saying, ‘It is, it is, it is!’ The point, of course, is not to establish the rights and wrong of theft.[i] It’s that we are able to debate it. If the Eighth Commandment were like the milk-bottle in the fridge, there would be no room for debate at all.

It's not just ethics either. The same argument bears on such subjects as social policy, economics, jurisprudence, various other tricky areas of human endeavour. In every one it is difficult to know not just what the truths are, but whether there are any at all.

In these early decades of our twenty-first century, any truth we uncover is likely to be of that difficult-to-discern sort. After all, we’ve had plenty of time to uncover the easy type. Under such circumstances, the postmodern view that ‘there are no truths at all’ starts to look persuasive. Most closely associated at first with the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, it spread to various French bigwigs whose influence continues to outstrip their readership. Yet arguments about the nature of the truth become difficult to follow when they can no longer appeal to truth! No one’s incomprehensibilities have been more influential than those of the French-Algerian, Jacques Derrida, whose books no one has ever been able to finish.[ii] Michel Foucault wrote, among other things, about prisons and the legal system, which means that author Frowley had to struggle on to the end of at least one of his books, but may be the only person in history to have done so.

The most extreme postmodern ethos leads us to ditch the concept of objective truth in its entirety: what we believe to be truth, they sometimes argue, is really no more than a set of accepted beliefs. (We say that they ‘sometimes argue’ that on the grounds that, in our experience, postmodernists get just as irritated as anyone else if you’re late for a meeting or owe them money. Try telling them ‘That’s just a set of accepted beliefs’ and see how far it gets you.)

A certain confusion is inevitable. Let’s imagine we’re interested in the unusual but more-or-less straightforward question of whether or not Voodoo works. A scientist might create an experiment to find out, say, whether, when you prick a certain doll with a pin, a victim in a far-away location feels a pain in the side. A Voodoo practitioner, on the other hand, might claim that the outcome of such an experiment is meaningless, since they already know Voodoo works. Their ‘lived experience’ proves it. The sciency ‘way of knowing’ is just one of many. There is no objective criterion for preferring it to, say, the Voodoo ‘way of knowing’.

Postmodernists have abandoned their ability to choose between the scientist’s position and the Voodoo practitioner’s. They cannot even say that one is ‘better’ than the other, since such an evaluation has been rendered free-floating – it no longer means anything. There is nothing to root the claim in. What is ‘better’ for the scientist may be ‘worse’ for the Voodoo doctor and that’s the end of it. (Sadly, these scare-quotes spring up like knotweed every time one starts writing about this topic.)

What is Voodoo?: Nothing but what we feel it to be. That’s the end of it.

And so we are left with what satirists like to call ‘feels’. Now we know why postmodernists insist on ‘prioritising’ (there’s a postmodern word!) such ‘feels’ over facts. There are no facts, and to claim that there are, is to be trapped inside one’s own culture-bound Weltanschauung.

If you feel even remotely seduced by the postmodern view, we invite you to imagine yourself in an aeroplane, approaching the landing strip. Would you rather be guided by the scientific ‘way of knowing how to land’, or the Voodoo one?

One more point: it is common to claim that, in view of the fact that there are no facts, (because it’s true that there is no truth) nothing remains but competing narratives. The stronger narrative wins, or the one that’s imposed with most force. That’s why we hear so much these days about ‘oppression’, ‘marginalisation’ and so on. Such words are the orphans of postmodernism. After a few years of a postmodern education, it becomes impossible to think in any terms other than these. The fact that the position is incoherent – ‘The truth is that your insistence on truth is socially constructed!’ – disappears amid the hubbub.

An illustrative anecdote: author Frowley once attended a class in which the lecturer actually said the words, ‘Remember, there is no such thing as truth’. I thought quickly enough to raise my hand and ask, ‘Is that true?’, to which the lecturer replied ‘Yes,’ and simply got on with lecturing, apparently oblivious to the hole she’d just dug and fallen into.

Once we deny the possibility of anything being objectively true, well, we’re left with a free-for-all. Value systems evaporate. Anything can be anything. Anyone can be anything. Nothing is good but thinking makes it so; nothing is bad, either. It’s all a matter of choice (fact is, you can’t even speak of ‘choice’, since the word can have no referent – it’s not true that there exists such a thing as ‘choice’). Any unethical, immoral, horrific crime can be condoned because everything’s equally acceptable and all things, up to and including murder, are relative (doubtless you’ve heard of the Modern History class that refused to condemn the Holocaust). Perpetrators can be victims (anyone can). Grooming gangs can be culturally-specific constructs that we must learn to live with. Axel Rudakubana can be a lovely man. Nothing can be intolerable except intolerance. Regressive ideologies are good for their adherents and who are we to say otherwise?

One philosopher tells this awful tale: In 2006, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Taliban militants broke into the home of one Malim Abdul Habib. They forced his wife and children to watch as they stabbed and decapitated him. His crime had been to educate girls. ‘My point is simply this’, the philosopher writes. ‘If you can gather a man’s family at gunpoint and force them to watch as you cut off his head, you are a monster. You don’t merely seem to be one, you are one’.[iii] We might add that if you can condone such an action, the same point applies. There is no room for social constructs in such a view, nor should there be.

No wonder identitarian variables like race and gender dominate today’s current affairs in ways that would have seemed inconceivable, say, twenty years ago. They are especially popular among so-called Social Justice Warriors (SJWs). Such variables have the great advantage, to postmodernists, that they are not measurable. In the absence of measurement, you can never claim that a problem is fixed: you can never say the work has been done. Imagine trying to retile a kitchen floor when the kitchen is whatever size the owner says it is and your tiles don’t exist. Compared to a person’s socio-economic status at birth, both race and gender have relatively small effects on their opportunities in life. Even so, you see a few Socio-economic Status Warriors on campus (to be fair, it’s a lot to print on a T-shirt).

Have you noticed the somewhat-shrill tone occasionally adopted by SJWs? Of course you have. At their most basic, identitarian issues cut the ground from beneath the postmodernist’s feet. The claim that there are different cultures and different points of view and that some people are women and not men…all rest on appeals to objective criteria. Before someone can belong to, say Race A or Race B, there have to be such objective phenomena as Races A and B. The races have to exist out there in the world, which is the very thing the postmodernist denies. Lacking objective criteria, the postmodernist too often has to revert to insisting, as we mentioned above, ‘It is, it is, it is!’

We are back to the matter of ethics. The SJW may be defined as the postmodernist who (commendably enough) wants to ‘do the right thing’. Sadly, postmodernism leaves no room for ‘right things’. ‘Social justice’ cannot exist if there’s no such thing as justice. What can this ‘justice’ be that one fights for so hard, but which stands outside one’s own view and opinions? By the very lights of the postmodern ethos, ‘justice’ can only be a fantasy. How to choose between the preferences of SJWs and those of their opponents? It is a matter of exactly that – preference.

This, incidentally, explains certain recent phenomena: ‘cancel culture’; ‘no-platforming’; the slogan ‘no debate’. Naturally, no pacifist is more opposed to battle than the one who has recently and systematically disarmed. With evidence dismissed as a chimera and logic smeared as tool of oppression, there are no weapons left with which to fight.

‘No debate’ is a strange position to take if one believes that there is ‘no such thing as truth’, for it implies that we already know what the truth is (we believe it and assert it stridently) and the space for disagreement is equal to zero. Disagreement, in fact, is routinely dismissed as ‘fascist’.

In arguing such an ethical position, the postmodernist reverts to ‘feels’, plus that modern bugbear, ‘lived experience’. But what help can that be? Both rely on the implicit claim that ‘feels’ and ‘experience’ themselves are real phenomena that exist objectively in the world and have meaningful influence upon a person. The reversion to ‘feels’, then, is still an appeal to objective criteria: just different objective criteria from those the rest of us use.

There is one more implicit assertion, one so subtle that we may not see it at first glance. It is the claim that one ought to pay attention to ethics; that one’s actions or beliefs ought to be guided by them. Where does this claim come from? It seems magically to have conjured itself out of the postmodern air. It has no footing beyond, perhaps, some kind of vague appeal to intuition. Yet even this, as we have seen, is as substantial as a cobweb. Does intuition really ‘exist’? Is it true?

Visible here are the pernicious effects of ideology. We see its corrupting influence all across the political spectrum from left to right, SJW to ‘fascist’. Ideology can almost be summarised in a single sentence: ‘We want to make it this way’; ‘We envision this sort of Utopia’. It reliably blinds its adherents to the obstacles that may lie between here and there. Postmodern ideology is merely an ideology that takes an extra step. It demands that one deny the existence of the obstacles. They aren’t really there, because nothing is. Utopia is attainable because there are no obstacles. There isn’t even a there. It might be nice to believe but it is not true.

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[i] For the record, both authors are generally against it.

[ii] ‘[…] the difference between Being and beings, the forgotten of metaphysics, has disappeared without leaving a trace. The very trace of difference has been submerged. If we maintain that difference (is) (itself) other than absence and presence, if it traces, then when it is a matter of forgetting the difference (between Being and beings), we would have to speak of the disappearance of the trace of the trace.’ Or not.

[iii] Asma, Stephen T: On Monsters – An unnatural history of our worst fears, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, pp252-3