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I don't mean by that, unfortunately,
No, of course I don't mean any of those things.
As you would expect, I'm referring to the wild and sometimes hysterical accusations of untruth fling at each other by different political and media figures, and the almost painfully embarrassing antics of "fact-checkers" who set themselves up without apparent qualifications as arbiters of the true and real.
My impression is that much of this effort has now
perished from its own contradictions and excesses, but we still find
ritual accusations of "lying" thrown in all directions in what
might, in a poor light, pass for political debate these days. (I see
that Robert F Kennedy Jr. is now a particular target.)
Politicians have always claimed the Truth for themselves, and denied it to their opponents, but for various reasons which we can only touch lightly on here, the problem has become a lot worse in recent times.
So I thought that it might be useful try to dispel some of the resulting confusion.
I take as my starting point the hope, no matter
how optimistic it may be, that there are people out there who would
appreciate a few suggestions for how to think about what "truth"
means in a political environment. (I'm not a philosopher and I
have no ambitions towards anything more ambitious than that.)
I'm going to take, as an example, a recent controversial incident (if indeed it happened.) I'm going to go on to look at different kinds of "truth" and give examples.
That's a lot to get through, so let's get
started.
Some outlets simply gave the official story and blamed the Russians reflexively, others reflexively accused VdL and the assembled West of telling lies.
There was no attempt to look at the allegations in any detail, or even describe exactly what they were.
The best I
could discover after several hours of wasted effort was that
aircraft have other navigation systems than GPS (which I knew
already) and that there has been a rash of unexplained GPS outages
over western Europe recently.
Rather, that public is divided into groups, and each group heads automatically for a news source which will tell them what they want to hear. Journalists and bloggers, as well as commenters who don't want to be savaged by their fellow contributors, will therefore cluster together around one party line.
I find this depressing, not least because, for all the drum-banging and chest-thumping about "truth" it seems that most people are simply interested in having their prejudices confirmed. Sometimes they don't even wait for these prejudices to be articulated by others.
I remember that on the occasion of the suicide
of Jeffrey Epstein, the first I knew of it was a comment on
an Internet site that must have appeared within five minutes of the
official announcement of his death, claiming he'd been murdered.
To begin with, the idea that there are unchallengeable and complete concepts such as "facts" and "truth" would make many philosophers smile.
We have to accept, with Althusser, that stories about anti-immigrant violence in the UK,
Come to that, there is also a century-old history of defining "facts" as only those things which are logically or empirically verifiable:
But even then, you don't need to be a philosopher
to recognize that "facts" and "truths" are not simple things.
I will attempt a short taxonomy, to give you an
idea of what I mean, but I would also suggest, if you're interested,
the slightly different, historical, approach taken in Julian
Baggini's useful small book.
***
It's easiest to start with Legal Truth and associated Facts, because the Law is essentially a truth-game, played with complex rules and an umpire.
It's a game like football, where technical criteria have to be met to score points and win, and where a referee rules on technical violations which could invalidate the result.
A legal case is fought according to complex
rules, which limit what can be included, which incorporate rules for
judging truth, and which produce a verdict defined as an outcome of
the interaction of the rules and the skill of the players.
Now of course this has nothing to do with the question of whether she actually killed anyone, defining "actually" here as an existential fact, theoretically verifiable.
This just a legal "truth," based on "facts," producing a verdict just as a football match produces a result. Rules in games are changed from time to time, and a goal allowed today may not have been allowed the year before, when the offside rule was different.
The Law is the same.
"Justice" - historically and conceptually different from "Law" - generally implies a result which accords with personal prejudices.
If the evidence is confused, not reliable or simply unavailable, then in most judicial systems the accused may be found not guilty, often to public fury.
(Notice that the term is "not guilty," rather than "innocent.")
Yet this often happens: unsupported identification evidence is today regarded as virtually useless, eyewitness testimony is deeply unreliable, and even technical evidence such as fingerprints and DNA cannot always be counted on.
The more complex the legal arguments for guilt, the more vulnerable they are to these problems.
The ad hoc Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and and Rwanda tried as best they could to conduct legally-respectable trials, and thus incurred the violent hatred of the human rights industry, which regarded them simply as their own punishment arm:
Acquittals, of which there were a number, were thus regarded as a "failure" by the judges, rather than the result of inadequate evidence or careless work by the Prosecution.
***
At least in principle, science as an activity advances by hypothesis, experiment and theory, and is subject to review and modification.
And it would be churlish to deny that Science does advance, and that our knowledge of certain subjects is greater and more accurate than it was previously.
But this is not to say (and in my experience scientists don't say) that they have found The Truth
This is why scientists talk, of Theories, even in
well-established cases like Relativity and Evolution. At least in
principle, therefore, Scientific Truth is an empirical
process of moving from one position to another according to the
evidence, which is often new. This differentiates it in principle
from a closed system like Legal Truth.
Politically, though, the danger arises when scientists themselves become arrogant, or when governments make use of Scientific Truths that are beyond what those Truths can support.
There's also an unfortunate tendency for some scientists to regard "truth" as their unique preserve, and to apply disparaging labels to anything that is done outside their own narrow set of procedures.
To say that a scientist is behaving unscientifically is a fair criticism. To call some outside process or theory "unscientific" simply means it obeys different sets of criteria.
Fortunately, scientists are less prone to such
intellectual lapses these days, and so long as the essential modesty
of Science is retained, the concept of Scientific Truth is useful.
The term "scientism" (and would you be surprised to learn that there are competing definitions?) is generally taken to be an assertion by scientists that science can explain everything about life and the universe, as well as those subjects which are really the domain of philosophy and culture.
There are scientists, especially popularizers of Science, who believe that Science does indeed know The Truth about everything.
But as it finds its way into popular culture, and into the discourses and even the decision-making of the political class, this attitude no longer reflects the complexity and uncertainty of many branches of science today. (I've read quantum physicists expressing exasperation that even other physicists don't realize just how weird their field is.)
Rather, the popular understanding of Scientific Truth could have come from a century and a half ago:
The fact that,
***
The next type of truth is Religious Truth, and here I refer not to personal belief and revelation, which are discussed later, but rather to Religion as an enforced belief system, a closed system like Law, where only certain concepts are allowed, and only certain ways of manipulating them.
In monotheistic religions, there is actually a close connection with Law, both conceptually (in that they are closed systems) and functionally, in that one often supports the other. Indeed, in Islam and Judaism there is effectively little difference. Because this is a closed system, only evidence and arguments from within the system are regarded as acceptable.
Commenting on his novel The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco explained that all of the characters were limited in their understanding to what was known in the early fourteenth century, and all the debates were limited to the concepts and vocabulary known at the time.
This accounts for the stifling atmosphere that
readers sometimes experience. But it is a faithful attempt to
portray debate (including political debate) in a closed system.
But this is because monotheistic religions require belief in a set of principles to obtain salvation in the world to come.
The Christian Church persecuted heretics because their teachings were believed to threaten the souls of those who might be seduced by their doctrines. This is less of a problem today with Christianity, but is becoming a big political problem in European nations with large, and often pious, recent Muslim immigrant communities.
Increasingly, for example, pious parents are demanding that schools should not teach their children anything that is not found in the Koran or even appears to contradict it: the Theory of Evolution, for example.
The Islamic State and its franchises take the
thesis that secular knowledge is at best useless and at worst sinful
to its logical extreme, by destroying schools, killing teachers and
burning books.
That is to say, certain assumptions have to be accepted as true, and certain facts have to be accepted as real, in order to access benefits or avoid penalties. I put it like that because the problem is not just one of dictatorial states like North Korea (or so I suppose: I've never been there) but of any community, of any size, which shares a common ideology or set of principles and beliefs.
The more isolated and threatened that community feels the more it will try to enforce ideological conformity.
We think, obviously, of examples like Stalin's Russia where saying or doing the wrong thing could kill you, even if it wasn't the wrong thing at the time.
There are softer versions, still based on ideology, like Iran, there are countries like Rwanda and Algeria where there is an official version of history, and questioning it will get you arrested, and just imprisoned if you're lucky.
But any structure that prizes ideological
conformity will designate Political Truths that have to be accepted
as reality, and will have, indeed, the ontological quality of truth
in practice.
Take for example the British Communist Party from the 1930s to the 1970s.
***
The last of the classic types of truth I want to discuss is Revealed Truth.
Originally, this was related to divine revelation of some kind, but it can also mean a Truth grasped by contemplation and meditation, a huge mystical tradition running from the Gnostics and the neoplatonists, through Christian mystics like Eckhardt, to the Enlightenment of various Buddhist traditions, which there is, unfortunately no time to discuss here. (Happily others have.)
The tradition of mysticism is generally quietist, but there is a parallel history of inspired religious fanaticism and apocalyptic cults, usually based on a revelation of the Truth about the end of the world, and another, but more conventional, tradition of individuals who believe they have received a divine, or at least extremely special, call to greatness, frequently as the savior of their country:
In more recent times, Revealed Truth has tended to manifest itself through cults and extreme political movements, often following charismatic leaders.
(The Nazi Party can be seen as an apocalyptic death cult that got seriously out of control.)
Such groups go beyond merely having strong convictions: they incorporate a sense of absolute certainty that no amount of contrary evidence can affect. Interviews with returned Islamic State fighters revealed that many had left for Syria as a result of what would traditionally be called religious conversion.
They were (and in many cases still are)
unreachable by any logical argument, or any appeal to ethics, of
even religion, outside their own personal concept of Truth..
After all, asked to choose between someone who says "look, it's all very complicated," and someone who says "no, in fact it's very simple,"
Demagogues and cultists have always worked this way, but the habit has been spreading in recent years throughout the Internet, and many pundits have acquired influence and made good careers from it.
You can usually tell them by their sweeping claims, and frequent use of words such as "always" and "obvious," combined in some cases with a poorly-hidden implication that if you disagree, you must be stupid, or in the pay of some foreign intelligence service.
Be specially wary of statements like "country X is always responsible for..." or "Institution Y lies all the time," which, quite obviously cannot be pragmatically verified, and which serve as normative intellectual intimidation. In the past you could avoid such people in the pub or at a social gathering.
Now it's less easy...
Whether it's the "obvious" fact that,
...or that this or that dark and hidden force was behind the latest government change in this or that country, there is an implicit bargain:
This approach enables people who don't actually know anything about anything to nonetheless pundit on a whole range of subjects from first principles.
Troubles here are always because of this or that country, things are never what they appear to be on the surface, everyone is in the pay of someone else, the involvement of this or that intelligence service is always to be assumed, because Revelation.
Again, such statements are not vulnerable to rational analysis, because they are based essentially on faith.
Professionally, though, this business model has
the disadvantage that much of its product will be reproducible with
the use of AI: indeed, I wonder if some of it isn't already.
We make use of our personal experience and the experience of those we trust.
Politically, a widespread reliance on empirical truth poses enormous problems for any ruling class, and especially today. Indeed, to a large extent the current alienation of the people from governments is the result of the difference between personal experience and managerial theory.
When government tells you that inflation is steady, but you see prices in the shops rising all the time, you will start to disbelieve the government. When it is condescendingly explained that "inflation" in this sense excludes those things which you have to buy every week just to live, you probably just stop listening.
Of course, empirical truth is limited by its very nature to personal experience and the experiences of those you can trust, and it is always incomplete and can be deceptive.
But it remains the only Truth that many of us can
count on.
What's absolutely clear is that it's not possible to have a dialogue involving different conceptions of Truth.
But because the custodians of Political Truth believe it dictates what the world should be like, pragmatic experience can be disregarded, because it cannot be true.
Likewise, you can't convince a pious Muslim parent that Evolution is a scientific fact, because for such people arguments from science can never tell the Truth anyway.
***
This doesn't have to be positive, either.
Indeed, if you really dislike a political leader, an institution or a country, then you want to hear the worst news possible, even if on reflection it's completely implausible.
And if it turns out that in the end the massacre didn't happen, the scandal was manufactured or the death was from natural causes, you can always mutter about no smoke without fire, well, that doesn't mean they didn't do other bad things, or the good old standby,
Which is pretty dispiriting, but does illustrate
the way in which Truth in a political context is increasingly
determined by which football team you support.
Maybe, as often, the frenetic pace of the Internet is partly responsible; maybe also the modern worship of feeling as opposed to logic, maybe there's just no demand for such skills.
After all, there are no rewards today for thinking and expressing yourself clearly and logically or subjecting propositions to rational analysis. Indeed, it can be dangerous, because once you start on a logical chain of thought, you can never be quite sure where you will wind up.
Far better to start from an
emotionally-satisfying conclusion, and work backwards.
Now suspicion of "experts" has always been part of political arguments (unless they are giving advice you agree with, of course) but in the past it was mostly confined to certain types and classes of person (the bloke on the train who'd attended the University of Life and knew it all) or media predominantly serving the lower middle-class.
What has developed in the last generation or so is a political assault on the concept of expertise (and thus knowledge) itself from other quarters.
The ingredients are well-enough known: the
narcissistic promotion of the ego, the primacy of emotion over
intellect, the preference for "lived experience" over acquired
knowledge, and of course the attack on the very possibility of
objective knowledge itself.
But they are often ambiguous:
Nonetheless, the increasing perception of experts
serving private commercial interests, of widespread fraud and
plagiarism, and the Reproducibility Crisis in Science have
not done the concept of expertise any favors.
What is striking about them is that they overwhelmingly adopt a populist, even conspiratorial, approach: independent researchers have found, suppressed results from scientific experiments have shown, your doctor is lying to you, electronics manufacturers are trying to suppress this product, food manufacturers are hiding the dangers of this chemical.
And so on. Oh, and buy our product...
***
Not being a stuffy, elitist traditional expert has always had a certain romantic appeal in some quarters but now, ironically, it's becoming the norm, to the point where you wonder if there are any traditional experts left.
No wonder people are confused.
(Does a degree in Computer Science, make you an "expert" on anything much...?)
And I've run into US students with Master's degrees in International Relations on their way to work in a Think Tank, who don't speak a word of a foreign language and who, until that point, have never been abroad.
What useful expertise could they possibly have? There's been a huge move in western countries recently towards degrees that promise lucrative careers rather than useful knowledge, and, frankly, to degrees that are easier and less challenging.
The idea, after all, is to be credentialed, not
educated, which is fine until somebody actually needs some
authoritative advice. And credentials are only half of it: actually
having relevant experience is often distrusted, because it might
lead you to the wrong conclusions.
But just consider, for example,
Thirty-five years ago you would have been hard-pressed to find more than a few dozen academic or diplomatic experts on Yugoslavia in the whole of Europe.
It just wasn't a fashionable subject. I sat in rooms full of people earnestly debating what to do about a region that hardly any of us could find on a map.
With the end of the Cold War, Soviet studies essentially folded up, with consequences that are painfully visible today.
Well, if they did, they were mere "experts," and
so not consulted.
Degree (at least) in Modern
Standard Arabic, familiarity with several dialects, possibly other
languages (certainly French), familiarity with Islamic texts,
especially the marginal ones, years of experience on the ground in
dangerous places meeting dubious people, familiarity with the
ever-changing movements of groups and groupuscules and leaders who
change their names frequently and sometimes die bloodily... or
you can just sit at home typing, and turn out crud blaming it all on
the manipulations of X, Y or Z and getting paid for it.
So the very concept of expertise is put in jeopardy, because today there is no "expertise" in the absolute sense, only expertise we agree with, and only experts we think are right.
(And if that seems backwards, well it is.)
Imagine somebody recommends a new Substack site by "an expert on Russia."
Your first question will be,
So you start reading and find that X is a former diplomat who served twice in Moscow, the second time as Deputy Head of Mission, and served in the delegation to the EU and at Embassies in Washington and Paris.
Perhaps you read on and it says that on retirement they became an adviser to a defense company and a board member of the Atlantic Council.
And it stays there.
One of the most curious features of our culture is the continued influence of out-of-date books, whose main virtue is that they tell simple stories in bright colors with a clear moral. I find intellectual complexity interesting: many people find it threatening.
So there's a whole raft of subjects where popular understanding was fixed anything up to a hundred years ago now, and nothing new will shift it. There's no point in saying, as I often do, "have you read..." because there is no cause to do so.
People already have their Truth.
I'm not aware of any case where modern historical research has made explanations any simpler, but many where it has made them more complex.
Who wants that?
In such cases, expertise, experience and study have no place and no value.
Likewise, the first time you hear somebody tell you,
But you get used to it.
One of the first things you learn is that with a little ingenuity, and some attention to nuance, it's always possible for a government to justify what it has said or done.
Conversely, most accusations of governments "telling lies" just mean that critics want to interpret the same set of facts in a different way. For any sufficiently complicated set of facts, many allowable interpretations exist.
Demands for "the truth" usually amount to no more than confirmation of the prejudices of critics, and this is an inevitable function of complexity.
Imagine, for example, that a varied group of
experts with different opinions was asked to list all the "facts"
that were relevant to the Kennedy Assassination, without
"concealing" anything: the task is self-evidently impossible; where
would you stop?
We could nod a little in the direction of formal logic and say,
Such an argument frightens people these days because logical, or even structured, argument is no longer valued, or even taught.
When the emotional conclusion comes first, then
either there is evidence for it, or that evidence is being hidden
and must be "revealed," or, if there is no evidence, that evidence
must obviously have been destroyed.
That's why Intelligence agencies use words like "assess," "judge," or "believe," rather than making firm pronouncements about the Truth, for example.
But curiously there is some fairly heavy-duty
intellectual support to help us live without the neurotic search for
absolute certainty the it is not available.
Now whatever advantages this has for formal logic, it clearly doesn't correspond very well to everyday life, still less to politics, where the middle ground is often all you have. (Even Aristotle admitted that you couldn't make definite statements about the future.)
But we take this way of thinking completely for
granted as we beat each other around the head with our rival
conceptions of truth.
The case I want to cite goes back to Aristotle's time, but in India,
The Buddha referred frequently to this system, and the greatest work of Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, Nagarjuna's Mulamadhyamakakarika, is written around it.
And before we dismiss this as an Eastern
curiosity, we should recognize that developments in modern
non-Aristotelian logic over the last century have led in very much
the same direction, as Graham Priest has shown.
Politics is messy and provisional, and deals often with ambiguities and half-truths.
Yet in practice, some things asserted about this incident may be true, some may be false, some may contain elements of both and for some there may be no evidence either way.
"Russia is winning the war" contains an enormous
number of explicit and implied propositions, and cannot in fact be
reduced to a True/False dichotomy.
Mystics have always said this, and philosophers have sometimes followed them.
Wittgenstein, a mystic of sorts, made this the last thesis of his Tractatus, which I like to translate, somewhat idiosyncratically as,
As this is written, France has lost another government, and the airwaves and the Internet are full of little else but pointless speculation about the future, perhaps one per cent of which actually adds anything.
Silence is a lot to ask of modern civilization: imagine a blogger asking,
Imagine a serial commenter on the same blog asking,
Yet periods of modesty and silence would perhaps
be welcome, not to say useful.
We seek truths that comfort us in our beliefs, confirm our opinions of institutions and people, and most of all do not require us to think too much.
When criticized for changing his mind on a question, John Maynard Keynes famously replied,
The implied ego-damage involved would be unacceptable today.
Rather than changing our minds, we search and search until we find someone who will tell us that what we believe is still true, in return for money. Assertions of truth and falsehood are used as weapons, and as ways of safeguarding our own egos.
In such a situation, the crud rises to the top.
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