Thoughts about truth

Something that's been on my mind for - coincidentally, I'm sure - early 2021, or the very tail end of 2020. This is about human society generally, and that was certainly a time for thinking hard about society.

Joe Biden is elected president, but Trump and his party refuse to accept it, and it becomes clear that something's being true is not what it seems. Something clearly seems true to me, why is it so powerfully opposed or contradicted by others? Of course this is a routine situation in human life, we are always disagreeing about some things - usually matters of belief or opinion or culture or whatever, but we generally should agree on apparently objective things like what happened or what is happening.

Another thing happened earlier in 2020. I read the new book of stories by Ted Chiang, "Exhalation". Many very good stories in there, just like his first book. The title story is the best - especially if you're a neuroscientist or psychologist of any sort - but it was "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling" that really stuck with me. The themes of the story are there in the title, having to do with what we think or feel is true, and what actually is true in some objective sense, and how these different kinds of truth matter to us in different ways, and how they can conflict.

During this year we have the pandemic, the conspiracy theories, the George Floyd riots, everything. And then the election happens. I'm glad Biden won, still am, but soon after the victory I and many others had a sinking feeling: this didn't fix anything, really. The problems are deep and not going to go away. Those problems could be listed and discussed somewhere else, but what I kept thinking about was truth.

I know that, from the beginning, I was taught to value truth and honesty. You're supposed to tell the truth, you're not supposed to lie. I know that most others are also taught the same thing. It's basic moral education, our parents teach us, we learn it at school, we learn it in life lessons - we tell a lie and are caught, and we suffer the consequences, and we don't do it again. We learn to be honest.

We learn all that, but few of us ever really think about it. I never did. We simply assume that truth is a basic good, some kind of fundamental virtue that we should all value and protect. And if there are disagreements about what is true, that can be difficult, but those are disagreements over fundamental things and so they are fundamental disagreements, and they really matter in that way. Debates about what is true are core, essential debates for a society. Et cetera et cetera. It sounds good, right?

What I realized in the winter of 2020-2021 is that none of that is really true. It's a myth. I mean, of course I do believe that truth matters. And I do value it, and I do want to be an honest person, and all that. But it's not fundamental. It's not a basic good that we all strive to protect or advance or expand. No, it's a luxury, it's a relatively highly-developed value that might be socially inevitable, but it is not fundamental. 

I keep talking about 'values'. By this I mean the parts of life, personal or social, that motivate our actions, especially in that we want to protect or advance them. If you value something, you want to defend it, keep it from harm; you may also want to expand it, to multiply it, to increase its share of the world. Obviously different people have different values, but it's reasonable to suppose, too, that there are some values that are common to all of us, or to the vast majority. We all value safety and security, and health. We all value our family and our friends, and our homes. We value our own sense of self and however we are significant to the world.

I had never really thought about the world in this way before, in terms of values - it's certainly not a new way of thinking, it's the kind of thing you hear about in passing, but I'd never given it much time. I probably had a naive idea of values in the sense of "universal values", the idea that there are things that we should all value even if we don't. And if you'd asked me, I would have said, "yeah, sure - truth or honesty are universal values, everyone should agree to that".

What I realize now is how naive this way of thinking is. There are certainly practical truths that no sane person will deny. The general: we need water and air to live. The incidental: the sun is shining on the courtyard outside. Those kinds of truths are obvious because we experience them firsthand. But most of the world is beyond our immediate experience, and the truth of it is therefore always provisional. We have to take someone's word for it. We can believe what we read or hear in the news, we have to believe the readings on our instruments. We can believe our own memories of what happened earlier, yesterday, last year. We can believe those things, but we don't have to - or, we can believe different things than others. Unless there are immediate facts to resolve a difference, the vast portion of what we might believe in is simply that: provisional.

So, we might grow up believing that "the truth" about happenings in the world is something fundamental, but it's not. At almost all times, it's just something we choose to believe. Of course there is generally a state of affairs out there that, if we experienced it immediately, would tend to resolve disagreements - but we almost never actually are directly exposed to it.

And we might grow up believing that the truth is something we should all value, that what is true matters in a fundamental way - but it can't be, because - apart from our immediate experiences - it's not something we ever have access to. What we actually have are choices about what to believe. And that gets to the problem: the real values, having to do with life, family, self identity, are always fundamental, and they are what drive our choices. So while we can all give lip service to valuing "the truth", because we were all taught that it is good and right and moral to believe in and to tell the truth, that's not an accurate picture of the world.

What we believe is true, aside from that tiny slice of the world that we immediately experience, is a choice that is driven by our more fundamental values. What, if true, seems to protect and strengthen my identity, my family, my home, my health? Then I will believe that.

That's my picture now of our social situation. The problems with Trump, the election stuff, the conspiracy theories, etc etc, aren't a problem of truth and lies. The problem isn't with convincing people of the truth. The problem is in those fundamental values. Those have diverged in ways that are barely even touched on by public conversations. The divergence is probably growing larger all the time. It's probably a constant process in social evolution, but in current times I wonder if the internet, social media etc, is accelerating it, so that the divergences outrace our ability to spin stories to account for the contents of society. Those contents being all the elements of culture - things that we spend our time on, circulating inside and between our minds, this constant fascination that humans are constantly engaging in. They obscure the driving forces beneath our behaviors, at the same time they slowly, gradually change those forces, or modulate or recalibrate them. But how do you get down to those bottom levels, how do you begin to fix things? I have no ideas!

Beyond Biden and Trump, and the Chiang story, one more cultural fragment stuck in my mind for years seems very relevant. Nietzsche critiqued self-righteousness, especially those who were so focused on enforcing and dictating moral rectitude, in terms that had long confounded me but I would think about it over and over, trying to understand his meaning. I did long ago, and probably it primed me for the realizations I've just written out. I'll paraphrase him here, the critical phrase (from Beyond Good and Evil):

"... no one lies so boldly as the indignant man."

Once I realized his meaning in this passage, I've never forgotten it. You read it and think he's talking about someone else, and maybe he is - without enough self-awareness, which wouldn't be surprising. But really he's talking about all of us. Imagine that you're in an intense argument, and your personal integrity has been challenged - you must respond! You must protect yourself! Isn't this exactly the time that you might... inflate the truth? Stretch it, to prove your point? Invent some detail, to exaggerate, to hammer home your point? Doesn't the truth become soft when you are at stake?