Believing in Truth

-- By Tom Phillips 

Rudy Giuliani: "Truth isn't truth"

It’s happening more and more these days – people saying things that just a few years ago would have been considered insane.  At a recent party, a young female stranger – a graduate student – asked me, “What do you think about the post-truth moment?”  My flustered answer: “I’m against it.” 

On the street and even in church, on hearing that I used to write for CBS News, people have cheerfully piped up: “Oh, fake news!”  Absolutely not, I tell them.  I never knowingly wrote a word of fake news.  Oh, they reply, but you’re retired.  How about the people writing now?   

I am a member of two establishments -- the press and the church -- that depend for their existence on the idea of truth.  Both are under siege by a new wave of old politics that values visions over facts, slogans over reason, personality over truthfulness.  The press is in danger of being discredited, the church of being co-opted.  And so far, the press is holding up better, more resistant and resilient.

Professional journalists have no problem with the idea of truth.  A news story has two essential elements – a core of verifiable facts, and a narrative that makes sense of them.   Any reporter who doubts the first is incapable of the second.  If one considers truth purely relative or subjective, the only reportable facts are opinions, and a story consists of no more than commentary – he said, she said.  This is what has happened to much of TV News. But reporting still exists. In a true news story, opinions are secondary; to say there are “two sides to every story” simply means there is more than one way of analyzing, interpreting, or evaluating the facts.  And the value of any interpretation depends first on its agreement with the facts.

When I taught at a graduate school of journalism, I would occasionally be stuck with overeducated students who wandered in a world of pure relativism, with no way to evaluate one point of view over another. Divorced from the simple idea of truth, their stories went nowhere, and most of them soon dropped out.  The best students were untroubled by epistemology; they were devoted to facts, figures, and common values.  Many of them are reporting and writing today, their faith in the truth unshaken.  A good journalist is the salt of the earth.

Church people, on the other hand, have multiple problems with the fundamental idea of truth. Conservatives are susceptible to visions that have nothing to do with reality.  Not long ago, in the large and diverse church I attend, a young man asked for prayers that "Donald Trump will lead us into the promised land,” something even the president has never come close to promising. 

Liberals are hamstrung by their commitment to religious tolerance, which they confuse with relativism.  Discussions often founder on the standard disclaimer, imported from the secular world, that there is not one truth but many truths, and we should take care not to value one over another.  This despite a Nicene Creed that begins “We believe in one God … maker of heaven and earth, and all that is, seen and unseen." 

Many liberal Christians believe that by stating a belief in one God, we risk offending other faith communities.  But Jews and Muslims also believe in one God, maker of heaven and earth.  So do Hindus – any taxi driver in Mumbai will tell you that Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and all their manifestations and consorts are really aspects of one ultimate reality.  And Buddhists believe in a universal Buddha nature.  All monotheistic religions agree there is one ultimate truth, though none of us has seen it whole.  Many atheists agree -- they just don't call it God.  As for the rest, we can tolerate nihilists, neo-pagans, cults and superstitions without agreeing with them.  

“Believe in truth,” advises Yale historian Timothy Snyder, in his essential 2017 handbook for resistance, “On Tyranny.”  “If nothing is true, no one can criticize power, because there is no basis on which to do it. If nothing is true, all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding light.” 

“Investigate,” he goes on.  Use your own light to find out the truth, write it and publish it yourself.  There has never been, and will never be, a “post-truth moment,” unless we let it happen by devaluing the truth in own minds.  Power doesn't like truth, because truth has its own power.   

As John Milton wrote in 1644, in defense of unlicensed publishing:  "Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injuriously... to misdoubt her strength.  Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?" 

--  Copyright 2018 by Tom Phillips 

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