Shedding cynicism about truth
Elizabeth Jeenx
http://chronicle.com/free/v51/i03/03b00601.htm
by MICHAEL P. LYNCH -- In early 2003 President Bush claimed that Iraq
was attempting to purchase the materials necessary to build nuclear
weapons. Although White House officials subsequently admitted they
lacked adequate evidence to believe that was true, various members of
the administration dismissed the issue, noting that the important
thing was that the subsequent invasion of Iraq achieved stability of
the region and the liberation of the country.
Many Americans apparently agreed. After all, there were other reasons
to depose the Hussein regime. And the belief that Iraq was an imminent
nuclear threat had rallied us together and provided an easy
justification to doubters of the nobility of our cause. So what if it
wasn't really true? To many, it seemed naïve to worry about something
as abstract as the truth or falsity of our claims when we could
concern ourselves with the things that really mattered -- such as
protecting ourselves from terrorism and ensuring our access to oil. To
paraphrase Nietzsche, the truth may be good, but why not sometimes
take untruth if it gets you where you want to go?
These are important questions. At the end of the day, is it always
better to believe and speak the truth? Does the truth itself really
matter? While generalizing is always dangerous, the above responses to
the Iraq affair indicate that many Americans would look at such
questions with a jaundiced eye. We are rather cynical about the value
of truth.
Politics isn't the only place that one finds this sort of skepticism.
A similar attitude is commonplace among some of our most prominent
intellectuals. Indeed, under the banner of postmodernism, cynicism
about truth and related notions like objectivity and knowledge has
become the semiofficial philosophical stance of many academic
disciplines. Roughly speaking, the attitude is that objective truth is
an illusion and what we call truth is just another name for power.
Consequently, if truth is valuable at all, it is valuable -- as power
is -- merely as means.
Stanley Fish, a prominent literary critic and former dean, cranked up
the anti-truth rhetoric even further in an article last year, "Truth
but No Consequences: Why Philosophy Doesn't Matter." Not only is
objective truth an illusion, according to Fish, but even worrying
about the nature of truth in the first place is a waste of time.
Debating an abstract idea like truth is like debating whether Ted
Williams was a better pure hitter than Hank Aaron: amusing, but
irrelevant to today's game.
Sure, we may say we want to believe the truth, but what we really
desire is to believe what is useful. Good beliefs get us what we want,
whether nicer suits, bigger tax cuts, or a steady source of oil for
our SUV's. At the end of the day, the truth of what we believe and say
is beside the point. What matters are the consequences.
Such rough-and-ready pragmatism taps into one of our deepest
intellectual veins. It appeals to America's collective self-image as a
square-jawed action hero. And it may partly explain why the outcry
against the White House's deception over the war in Iraq was rather
muted. It is not just that we believe that "united we stand," it is
that, deep down, many Americans are prone to think that it is results,
not principles, that matter. Like Fish and Bush, some of us find
worrying over abstract principles like truth to be boring and
irrelevant nitpicking, best left to the nerds who watch C-Span and
worry about whether the death penalty is "fair."
Of course, many intellectuals are eager to defend the idea that truth
matters. Unfortunately, however, some of the defenses just end up
undermining the value of truth in a different way. There is a tendency
for some to believe, for example, that caring about truth means caring
about the absolutely certain truths of old. That has always been a
familiar tune on the right, whistled with fervor by writers like Allan
Bloom and Robert H. Bork, but its volume has appeared to increase
since September 11, 2001. Americans have lost their "moral compass"
and need to sharpen their vision with "moral clarity," we are told.
Liberal-inspired relativism is weakening American resolve; in order to
prevail (against terrorism, the assault on family values, and the
like) we must rediscover our God-given access to the truth. And that
truth, it seems, is that we are right, and everyone else is wrong.
William J. Bennett, for example, in his book last year, Why We Fight:
Moral Clarity and the War on Terrorism, laments the profusion of what
he calls "an easygoing" relativism. Longing for the days when children
were instructed to appreciate the "superior goodness of the American
way of life," he writes: "If the message was sometimes overdone, or
sometimes sugarcoated, it was a message backed by the record of
history and by the evidence of even a child's senses." In the halcyon
days of old, when the relativists had yet to scale the garden wall,
the truth was so clear that it could be grasped by even a child. That
is the sort of truth Bennett seems to think really matters. To care
about objective truth is to care about what is simple and
ideologically certain.
As a defense of the value of truth, that is self-defeating. An
unswerving allegiance to what you believe isn't a sign that you care
about truth. It is a sign of dogmatism. Caring about truth does not
mean never having to admit you are wrong. On the contrary, caring
about truth means that you have to be open to the possibility that
your own beliefs are mistaken. It is a consequence of the very idea of
objective truth. True beliefs are those that portray the world as it
is and not as we hope, fear, or wish it to be. If truth is objective,
believing doesn't make it so; and even our most deeply felt opinions
could turn out to be wrong. That is something that Bennett -- and the
current administration, for that matter -- would do well to remember.
It is not a virtue to hold fast to one's views in face of the facts.
Thus some writers, like Fish, say that since faith in the absolute
certainties of old is naïve, truth is without value. Others, like
Bennett, argue that since truth has value, we had better get busy
rememorizing its ancient dogmas. But the implicit assumption of both
views is that the only truth worth valuing is Absolute Certain Truth.
That is a mistake. We needn't dress truth up with capital letters to
make it worth wanting; plain unadorned truth is valuable enough.
Like most left-leaning intellectuals who attended graduate school in
the '90s, I have certainly had my own fling with cynicism about truth.
I've played the postmodern; I've sympathized -- at length in my
previous work -- with relativism. Disgusted by the right's lust for
absolutes, many of us retreated from talk of objective truth and
embraced the philosopher Richard Rorty's call for an "ironic" stance
toward our own liberal sympathies. We stopped caring about whether we
were "right" and thought more about what makes the world go round.
That made us feel at once more hip and less naïve.
The events of the last three years have put the lie to that strategy.
The fact that our government has deceived us, misled the nation into
war, and passed legislation that threatens to infringe upon our basic
human rights doesn't call for ironic detachment. It calls for outrage.
But it is hard to justify outrage if your basic intellectual
commitments suggest that everything is "just text" -- merely a story
that could be retold in myriad ways. It is hard to stand up and fight
for a political position that refuses to see itself as any better than
any other.
So Stanley Fish couldn't be more wrong. Cynicism about truth is
confused. And philosophical debates over truth matter because truth
and its pursuit are politically important.
There are three simple reasons to think that truth is politically
valuable. The first concerns the very point of even having the
concept. At root, we distinguish truth from falsity because we need a
way of distinguishing right answers from wrong ones. In particular,
and as the debacle over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq clearly
illustrates, we need a way of distinguishing between beliefs for which
we have some partial evidence, or that are widely accepted by the
community, or that fit our political ambitions, and those that
actually end up being right.
It is not that we can't evaluate beliefs in all those other ways -- of
course we can. But the other sorts of evaluation depend for their
force on the distinction between truth and falsity. We think it is
good to have some evidence for our views because we think that beliefs
that are based on evidence are more likely to be true. We criticize
people who engage in wishful thinking because wishful thinking often
leads to believing falsehoods. In short, the primary point of having a
concept of truth is that we need a basic norm for appraising and
evaluating our beliefs and claims about the world. We need a way of
sorting beliefs and assertions into those that are correct (or at
least heading in that direction) and those that are incorrect.
Now imagine a society in which everyone believes that what makes an
opinion true is whether it is held by those in power. So if the
authorities say that black people are inferior to white people, or
love is hate, or war is peace, then the citizens sincerely believe
that is true. Such a society lacks something, to say the least. In
particular, its people misunderstand truth, and the nature of their
misunderstanding undermines the very point of even having the concept.
Social criticism often involves expressing disagreement with those in
power --saying that their views on some matter are mistaken. But a
member of our little society doesn't believe that the authorities can
be mistaken. In order to believe that, they would have to be able to
think that what the authorities say is incorrect. But their
understanding of what correctness is rules out such a possibility. So
criticism --disagreement with those in power-- is, practically
speaking, impossible.
Recently there has been a revival of interest in George Orwell's 1984.
But discussions of the book often miss the point. The most terrifying
aspect of Orwell's Ministry of Truth isn't its ability to get people
to keep people from speaking their minds, or even to believe lies; it
is its success at getting them to give up on the idea of truth
altogether. When, at the end of the novel, O'Brien, the sinister
representative of Big Brother, tortures the hapless Winston into
believing that two and two make five, his point, as he makes brutally
clear, is that Winston must "relearn" that whatever the party says is
the truth. O'Brien doesn't really care about Winston's views on
addition. What he cares about is getting rid of Winston's idea of
truth. He is well aware of the point I've just been making. Eliminate
the very idea of right and wrong independent of what the government
says, and you eliminate not just dissent --you eliminate the very
possibility of dissent.
That is the first reason truth has political value. Just having the
concept of objective truth opens up a certain possibility: It allows
us to think that something might be correct even if those in power
disagree. Without it, we wouldn't be able to distinguish between what
those in power say is the case and what is the case.
The second reason truth is politically important is that one of our
society's most basic political concepts --that of a fundamental
right-- presupposes the idea of objective truth. A fundamental right
is different from a right that is granted merely as a matter of social
policy. Policy rights --such as the right of a police officer to carry
a concealed weapon-- are justified because they are means to a
worthwhile social goal, like public safety.
Fundamental rights, on the other hand, are a matter of principle, as
the philosopher Ronald Dworkin has famously put it in a book by that
title. They aren't justified because they are a means to valuable
social goals; fundamental rights are justified because they are a
necessary component of basic respect due to all people. Fundamental
rights, therefore, override other political concerns. You can't
justifiably lose your right to privacy, for example, just because the
attorney general suddenly decides we would all be less vulnerable to
terrorism if the government knew what everyone was reading, buying,
and saying. The whole point of having a fundamental or, as it is often
put, "human right," is that it can't justifiably be taken away just
because a government suddenly decides it would be in our interest to
do so.
It follows that a necessary condition for fundamental rights is a
distinction between what the government -- in the wide sense of the
term -- says is so and what is true. That is, in order for me to
understand that I have fundamental rights, it must be possible for me
to have the following thought: that even though everyone else in my
community thinks that, for example, same-sex marriages should be
outlawed, people of the same sex still have a right to be married. But
I couldn't have that thought unless I was able to entertain the idea
that believing doesn't make things so, that there is something that my
thoughts can respond to other than the views of my fellow citizens,
powerful or not. The very concept of a fundamental right presupposes
the concept of truth. Take-home lesson: If you care about your rights,
you had better care about truth.
The conceptual connection between truth and rights reveals the third
and most obvious reason truth has political value. It is vital that a
government tell its citizens the truth -- whether it be about Iraq's
capacities for producing weapons of mass destruction or high-ranking
officials' ties to corporate interests. That is because governmental
transparency and freedom of information are the first defenses against
tyranny. The less a government feels the need to be truthful, the more
prone it is to try and get away with doing what wouldn't be approved
by its citizens in the light of day, whether that means breaking into
the Watergate Hotel, bombing Cambodia, or authorizing the use of
torture on prisoners. Even when they don't affect us directly, secret
actions like those indirectly damage the integrity of our democracy.
What you don't know can hurt you.
The late British philosopher Bernard Williams thought that point was
too obvious to be of much use: "Tyrants will not be impressed by the
argument and their victims do not need to be impressed," he wrote in
2002. But whether or not every Oxford don knows why governmental
transparency is important, not everyone in Tupelo, Miss., or
Greenwich, Conn., has heard the news. By only supplying two possible
choices, tyrants and their victims, Williams artificially limited the
options. For while the anti-tyranny argument may not be important for
everyone -- no argument ever is -- it is important for anyone worried
about the integrity of liberal democracy.
In particular, it is important for anyone who is looking for a
rational platform on which to criticize a democratic government's lack
of truthfulness on a particular issue. As Williams pointed out, such a
rational platform won't be of interest to tyrants. And those already
suffering under tyranny need more than rational platforms. But the
anti-tyranny argument will be of interest to those whose government is
not yet tyrannical, but who fear it is heading in that direction. In
brief, the anti-tyranny argument is precisely the sort of argument
that is of interest to concerned citizens of a liberal democracy like
our own. Unless the government strives to tell the truth, liberal
democracies are no longer liberal or democratic.
Perhaps that is a truism. But not all truisms are mere words mouthed
in empty ritual. In the political arena, it is all too easy to choose
expediency over principle. Thus sometimes truisms, while acting as
rational platforms on which to criticize our government, also act as
reminders. They warn us of what we have to lose. As the philosopher
and social critic Michel Foucault aptly noted in an interview in 1984,
unless it would impose "the silence of slavery," no government can
afford to ignore its obligation to the truth.
Neither can intellectuals. By abandoning notions like truth and
objectivity, many of us in the academy have forgotten the political
value of those concepts. In part, that is because we've fallen into
the simple-minded confusions I've discussed here. It is ironic that,
in capitulating to many of the assumptions and labels of our
conservative critics, we have conflated the pursuit of truth with the
pursuit of dogma, pluralism with nihilism, openness to new ideas with
detachment toward our own. We need to think our own way past such
confusions and shed the cynicism about truth to which they give rise.
If we don't, we risk imposing enslaving silence on ourselves. We risk
losing our ability to speak truth to power.
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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