I had a fascinating conversation with a scientist yesterday. In the course of the conversation, I shared my paradigm:
The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, wherever it may lead.
She voiced a friendly objection in the form of a question:
“But do you really think there is such a thing as absolute truth?”
The fact of the matter is that I cannot think of any truth that is not absolute. I was born on a Friday, and that has never changed in all my years. December 25 is the day after December 24, and it has always been thus. Triangles, by definition, have 3 sides–and there has never been an exception. Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President under our current Constitution; this was so when I was a kid, and it hasn’t changed yet. And so on.
For the benefit of the scientist, I redefined “truth” as “the set of all facts or any subset thereof”. From there forward, she seemed to understand exactly what I was talking about.
As I reflected on that conversation in the hours that followed, I began to wonder: What happened to the definition of “truth” such that some people no longer can no longer use it as a simple word with a simple and plain meaning?
Here’s what Dictionary.com says about it, for the record:
Indeed, nothing here seems out of character with the way I use the word, so what’s the problem? How is it that some people get nebulous and ethereal when the T word is mentioned? And who was it that came up with the ridiculous assertion “What is true for you may not be true for me”?
The suggestion, of course, is that for me, December 25 just might not be the day after the 24th, as it is for the rest of the world….or perhaps, that Abraham Lincoln might just have been, for you, the 23rd President. Needless to say, this is absurd.
Recently, an old friend raised a similar objection to the same paradigm. When I explained that by “truth”, I meant the set of facts, she also seemed relieved of some previous mental stressor and was then able to carry on with the conversation normally.
It appears that the term, truth, has been co-opted by those who wish it to have, of all things, an imprecise definition. It has become quite like religion or political partisanship, in which nobody seems to be able to render an exact definition of what it means to be a member, nor of the faith/paradigm itself. At least one person even goes so far as to make truth wholly dependent upon belief:
“The truth is what you believe.”
Shall I assume, therefore, that all those times I accidentally believed 6×7 to equal 49 instead of 42, I was, by virtue of my belief, changing the FACTS of multiplication? (NOTE: If any of you were trying 6×7 on your calculators and kept coming up with 49, I’m really sorry! I’m glad to report that I’ve since got it straight!)
If it is the case that is predicated upon belief, then we can reason that not only did the world used to be flat, but that it must have been really flat, for all the millions of people believing it was so! I hope that the absurdity of this notion is obvious.
In a brief Google search of terms such as “The truth is”, I discovered several interesting one-liners. I won’t attempt to address each one, other than to note that they have been dumped in the mix of publicly-available ideas for the general consumption of the society:
- “The truth is what you believe.”
- “The truth is a lie.”
- “The truth is wrong.”
- “The truth is murky.”
- “The truth is a waste of time.”
- “What’s true for you isn’t necessarily true for me.”
I suppose that if phrases like these are repeated often enough, they will gain some real credibility in our hearsay culture….even though they disregard the very definition of the word (truth) upon which they are centered. Indeed, the incorrigible misappropriation of terms is perhaps one of the most obvious signals that a person is not very interested in the exact facts of an issue. (I’ve witnessed this quite often, for some reason, amongst anarchists. It’s as if it is a tactic aimed at importing the negative connotations of some established terms into a topic where no such negative flavor is already generally associated. For example, many of them insist that “taxation is stealing”. Even though the differences between taxation and stealing are obvious to any rational person with a dictionary, it seems that they seek to foment within the taxation topic all the public disgust that accompanies theft.)
Is that what is being done, somehow, with “truth”? Has it been so abused as to have lost, for a great portion of our society, it’s original and simple meaning? Have we become so conditioned that we now doubt whether truth (fact) even exists? Or would we, as did Pontius Pilate in his immortal words, question even the nature of truth?:
“What is truth?” ~Pontius Pilate
Some will argue that “the truth is under attack” by sinister forces who’d rather have a society without any functional paradigm for plain, old-fashioned truth. That may well be, but if there’s danger from such evil wizards behind the curtain, I’d say that an equal or greater danger exists by virtue of mere carelessness in our American culture. When so much carelessness abounds, the truth will naturally be endangered.
In America, we call people “Indians” who were never in India. We call it a “two-party system” when no such “system” is created in the Constitution and when more than two parties are present. We call it a “democracy” when the design is that of a constitutional republic. Is it any wonder, then, when we call belief, opinions, philosophies, or wishes, the “truth”? Is it any wonder when that we have come to imagine and to accept the self-contradicting notion that two separate truths (facts) can be at odds with each other? I see some irony when a people who are so careless about simple matters of conventional definitions arguing about whether truth is absolute. It’s so reminiscent of the typical person who has never once considered the merits of home schooling, but yet has a deep conviction that home school kids miss out on the essential “socialization” that occurs in the public schools. Such an opinion did not come from careful investigation of the facts, but merely from hearsay. Yet the individual is as driven to voice the concern as if they had actually vetted the idea themselves.
When people question the existence of “absolute truth”, therefore, I tend not to take the question very seriously, for the most part. Indeed, most of them are simply repeating something they heard and considered erudite. They’ve likely not considered the question for more than a total of ten minutes in their whole lives, else they might have consulted a dictionary somewhere along the way!
If this is open mindedness, someone needs to shut the door! Or if it high mindedness, someone needs to come back down from the ether. Even the simplest of humans seems to learn and to function quite well with concrete truths. Having dropped an iron on his foot once, even the fool has a good grasp on the truth of irons and gravity. No high mindedness or open mindedness is necessary here!
So when I write of “truth”, I hope my audience will understand that I’m not off in the philosophical weeds someplace, but am merely referring to fact.
Jack
