Truth
What is Truth?
Abstract
He is an absolutely honest man. He would never lie except for the good of the Church.John Courtney Murray
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 21 April 2005
Is Lying or Honesty more Natural?
Is lying or being honest the more natural for humans? Humans certainly get tense when they lie, exhibiting symptoms that are associated with stress. They betray their stress in their body language, showing discomfort, fidgetting, avoiding eye contact, blinking, covering their mouth by their hand, and so on, but they also show it in physical changes. The lie-detector machine or polygraph depends on it, by detecting changes in conductance of the skin, sweating, breathing, pulse rate, and so on, while people answer innocent and leading questions. Darwin’s predecessor, Lamarck, thought that while intellect could deceive, instinct could not. The stress was the defiance of a natural instinct by the intellect. If lying is stressful, it suggests that being honest is the norm for humanity—its instinctive response.
If lying became the norm, it would defeat its own purpose. No anthropologists have reported any society in which lying is the norm, though people will often lie to strangers. Human beings have no absolute taboo on being dishonest, but lying cannot work unless honesty is expected in society. Democracy, in particular, depends on it, for the people cannot choose the best candidates for office if politicians habitually lie. Regrettably, western societies are getting closer to that stage. Fraud implies a truth. The uncommitted observer has to decide.
Sir Francis Bacon said Nature was sincere, having no intention of fooling an enquirer, and Einstein, who habitually spoke of Nature as God, said God was not malicious. But lying is not a deviant aspect of life. Human psychology involves an ability to consider what others think and to use this intelligence to deceive. A symptom of autism is often the lack of this ability. Machiavelli thought lying was useful. Strong and healthy states were more important to the world than conventional truth. Christianity had a debilitating effect on society, the sign to him that it could not be true. Truth had to have a strengthening effect. By replacing effective deceptions by impractical truths, Savonarola had created misery.
Yet, even Nature indulges in deceit. The mechanisms of deception used by species helped Darwin arrive at the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection. Adaptation to the conditions of life in evolutionary theory can involve deception in the way animals and plants can mimic others. But lying is conscious whereas natural mimicry is not. It does not even use intelligence.
Darwin spoke of Nature as female, as if “she” were a goddess. “She” was open. “She” did not have secrets “she” had to keep hidden—archaic and useless organs remain visible in many species such as nipples in male mammals. In William Paley’s analogy of God as the watchmaker, the perfection of the design of the watch is its main feature. Nothing in it is superfluous. Everything in it has a purpose. Even though watchmaking is an art that evolved, no watchmaker leaves in his design redundant methods as a monument to earlier watchmakers.
Nature does have its redundancies and its relics of the past. Redundant organs are so common, it is difficult not to find any in a close examination of the physiology of higher animals like vertebrates. One lobe of the lungs of snakes serves no purpose. Birds have a useless “bastard” wing. All flightless birds still retain their wings, quite obviously once used for flying as they are in normal birds. It shows Nature is not designed. Evolution leaves obsolete organs unused in its designs quite unlike a watchmaker but similar to the way towns grow, evolve and decline, leaving traces of previous epoques in its old buildings and archaic street plans even when much of the town has been replaced.
The zoologist and member of the Puritanical sect of Plymouth Brethren, Philip Gosse, famously argued that God had perpetrated a fraud on the human race by deliberately creating fossils with the newly made world to make it seem as if it were millions of years old! He did it to test human faith in Genesis!
Paley thought that Nature was so intricate that it had to be designed, and assembled, like a watch, by its maker. But the intricacy puzzled him. Why would the almighty being make things so complicated when He could have made them any way He wanted by divine command. It seems instinctive to make things simple rather than complicated. Unlike the excuse of Gosse, the answer was that God did it on purpose to make it easier for humans to understand. God could have made them simple but then they would have had to be sustained by unseen and incomprehendable mechanisms. God made them complicated but open and understandable because he wanted human beings to understand them!
Nature is intelligible to us on this argument because God willed it to be so. Yet this is still a trick, just as it was for Gosse’s fossils. There is no need for it to be thus, and God is actually tricking us by making it as it is. And wonderful though natural instruments like the human eye are, they are not perfectly designed. Is it yet another of God’s lies? A perfect being ought not to be capable of imperfect creations, but then He ought not to be capable of lying either, and even most Christians have difficulty with the notion of a trickster God. What explanations do creationists have for these things that imply God is a deceiver?
One response to Darwin was the Evangelical movement, a mutation of Wesleyanism. The Evangelicals simply avoided the argument by ignoring the evidence and blindly swearing by faith. Yet God is supposed to be almighty. He is too powerful to have to lie. Why should He do it? Even Plato (The Republic) said a lie is useless to the gods.
Samuel (Erewhon) Butler, who also disliked evolution, as a denial of God, opined that consciousness pervaded the universe, and thus sought to put God back. Many Americans hated evolution and returned to Lamarck at the end of the nineteenth century, before they began to invent various creationisms to lyingly uphold what they called biblical truth.
Truth in the Bible
What is “God’s Truth” when His holy Word in Genesis tells us, “Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for on the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die”. The serpent told Eve, “Ye shall not surely die”. Adam and Eve both ate the fruit of the tree and neither of them died on that day. Indeed, the bible says Adam lived until he was 930! So, God lied. The serpent told the truth.
Considering that the bible is the Holy Word, no less, it is remarkably uninterested in honesty. It is a word that never appears with its normal meaning in the Jewish scriptures, and appears only once even in the gospels, though it appears a few times in the rest of the New Testament.
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.Exodus 20:16
The only one of the commandments that addresses dishonesty is this one. The qualification shows that bearing false witness against someone who is not your neighbour is perfectly acceptable to this scriptural author.
Dishonesty is covered elsewhere in the Mosaic code, but is not treated as too serious a sin. In Leviticus 6:1-5, those who deal falsely “with his neighbour” in various ways, including robbery, deception and extortion, have to repay the person damaged with interest, and then make a guilt offering. So, the priests certainly gain from it whether any injured party does or not. The punishment implies the crime can be valued, whereas plain libel or slander offers difficulties still in assessing damages. The scriptural aim in all this is plainly to get income for the temple priesthood. Serious crimes certainly invite death, even though murder is against God’s commandments, but many more less serious sins were paid off by suitable gifts to the temple and sacrifices, the choicest of which, of course, went to the priests.
Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely, neither lie one to another.Leviticus 19:11
This verse of Leviticus forbids stealing, lying and deception, one to another, again implying that lying was acceptable tp others outside, for otherwise why make any such specification. Otherwise, this law of Moses is not qualified in any way. So, God disapproves of lying.
The book of Proverbs, considered as Wisdom Literature and part only of the Jewish writings, also has many precepts against lying in it, so God’s disapproval is multiply emphasized. Proverbs, if not the law, is deeply concerned with order and lying, suggesting it is four square in the Persian tradition. No less than 27 verses refer to lies or lying and false witness. Thus Proverbs 6:16-19 describes things Yehouah hates including “a lying tongue”, “a heart that plots evil plans”, and “a false witness who breathes lies”. Mostly the proverbs are definitions or guides on how to recognize lies and liars, and to judge their character, not prescriptions of punishments.
It is to be expected. What good God could encourage deceit? The main enemy of the Persian god was the Lie, and the Essenes, the sect of Judaism that surely included Jesus, were thoroughly opposed to lying as a deadly sin. Yet, in the narrative parts of the bible, though God’s people are dishonest, God either doesn’t care or even approves of it. Cain famously and cockily lied to God over Abel’s whereabouts when he had killed him, but God shows no sign of concern for the lie:
And Yehouah said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother’s keeper?Genesis 4:9
All interest was on the more serious crime of fratricide, for which Cain was punished by being driven off the land and made to wander, a metaphor of the putative Jewish exile. Nevertheless Cain is a success. Perhaps Cain can be expected to lie over such a serious crime, but what of Abraham, the father of the Jews and Arabs. Abraham’s wife Sarah lied to God, saying she had not laughed when she had, but God was not bothered by it.
Then Sarah denied, saying, I laughed not, for she was afraid. And he said, Nay, but thou didst laugh.Genesis 18:12-15
It is a minor sin, no doubt, but John 8:44 tells us:
The Devil is the liar and the father of lies.
So, Sarah was under the influence of Satan when she giggled in this way then lied about it. The result is prescribed for Christians—Revelation alarmingly reveals to them that:
The fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.Revelation 21:8
So, poor Sarah is burning up in the lake of boiling sulphur experiencing the second death for her denial that she had laughed. At least she will be with her husband, unjust as it might be on these harsh criteria, though her husband deserved it much more. Abraham lied to Pharaoh (Gen 12:12-13) and to Abimelech (Gen 20:4-5), in a doubled up story, saying Sarah, his wife, was his sister in each case to avoid being killed when the king took her, a beautiful woman, into his harem. It seems Abraham, and the Holy Spirit, supposed to be the inspiration of these ignoble antics, were unconcerned that Sarah’s honour would have been sacrificed to the king to save Abraham’s cowardly life. Yet God is bothered only to punish Pharaoh, even though the Pharaoh was oblivious of the fraud and so could not have known his crime. In the second version, Genesis 20:12 is a feeble attempt to justify the lie by making Abraham and his wife half brother and half sister. Of course, it is sufficient for Christians.
In the Jerwish scriptures, Jacob secured the birthright of Esau by a downright lie. Jacob, encouraged by his mother Rebekah, lied repeatedly to his father Isaac to get his father’s blessing, intended for Esau, his elder brother.
And Jacob said unto his father, I am Esau thy firstborn.Genesis 27:19
By lying, the Jews had the land that was meant for the Edomites. They got it purely by dishonesty, and not by God’s will, if He disapproves of deceitfulness. Earlier, Jacob had forced his hungry brother to sell him his birthright for a mess of potage. Jacob and his mother were cheats and crooks, but God did not mind, but rather rewarded them for their cunning. Unless, being tricked in turn was the punishment—always the ends justifying the means. Laban, Jacob’s uncle tricked Jacob into marrying his elder daughter and thus into serving an extra seven years in bondage to get the right to marry the younger one he meant to marry in the first place (Gen 29:25-26). The bible has hardly started, but several serious deceptions have been recounted, apparently with God’s approval.
Throughout lies, deception, and treachery abound in the service of actions prompted by lust and greed, jealously and envy, fear and hatred.Evelin Sullivan, The Concise Book of Lying, on the bible
In the New Testament in Acts 5:1-10, Ananias and Sapphira are killed apparently for lying, so the Christians were taking lying much more serious than the Jews did. Yet Peter lied by denying Christ and was rewarded by becoming leader of the Church. Did he nevertheless end up in the boiling lake of sulphur? It does not bode well for those who put their faith in the Church! Matthew, Mark, and Luke are all against hypocrites, and hypocrisy is a form of lying. If the Devil is “the liar and the father of lies”, Christians must consider the Jews as the children of the Devil, and since all liars are cast into the lake of burning sulphur, it follows that all the Jews have had it, just like all of those Christians who think it is virtuous to lie for God. They had better think again, or figure out how they hope to suffer an eternity in boiling sulphur.
Truth in Greek Speculation
The ancient Greek writer, Homer, thought the world was fairly intelligible, showing it by depicting the gods as larger than life human beings. They had magical powers but thought like human beings, so the events they influenced by their powers were intelligible in terms of human motives. Chance is partly explained by there being different gods in competition. A hero protected by being patronaged by some divine could suddenly run out of luck when the trickery of some jealous god overtook him. Besides that, the gods themselves were not free to do anything, but were confined by necessity denoted by the three fates (morai). The Fates were impersonal. They had no favourites.
The Homeric explanation was inadequate for the deeper thought of the Greek intellectuals of a few centuries later. These physikoi enquired into Nature. By about 500 BC, strongly influenced by the Persian religion, the Greek philosophers were making bold guesses at the make-up and operation of the cosmos. Aristotle said philosophy began with wonder, a word that we use with two meanings, amazement and curiosity. Amazing things cannot be expected to have everyday explanations, and Bertrand Russell said in Problems of Philosphy that “the truth about physical objects must be strange”. If an explanation works, then its strangeness should not be a barrier to its acceptance. Only a better and less strange explanation should displace it.
The physikoi sought the arche or basic substance of Nature. Thales of Miletus (c 585 BC) was a student of the Babylonians, and used Babylonian astronomical data to predict a solar eclipse. He postulated that the arche was water, the earth floating on a vast lake of fresh water, the same idea the Babylonians had, their god of the watery abyss being Ea (Iah). The Persians too took the element water with fire to be divine. Thales thought the human mind was somehow attuned to the natural world, so that it could know the truth about it, an idea remarkably explained by Darwinism over 2000 years later.
A disciple of Thales, Anaximander, had a more mysterious arche. He called it to apeiron, often translated as “the Boundless”, something unknowable, undetectable and indescribable (rather like the Christian God!) but which gives rise to appearance. By about 500 BC, the top Greek thinker was Heraclitus of Ephesus, a city ruled then by the Persians. It was Heraclitus who introduced the concept he called the Logos, a word derived from the verb lego meaning to gather, used first in arithmetic as the sum of things gathered together. It took from that the meaning of correspondence and then order, presumably from counting objects, and finally became the notion of cosmic order as Heraclitus used it. It is so closely similar in concept to the Persian arta that it seems certain that Heraclitus, living under Persian hegemony, had his idea from the Persians.
Arta and the Logos are the structure of the universe, and, since the mind reflects the real world, it is the structure of the mind too—reason. That is why the human mind finds reason in the natural world. The order of the natural world has been impressed on the mind by evolution.
For Heraclitus, the Logos was the metaphysical stability of a world that seemed so unstable in many ways to those who have to experience it. Logos is the underlying truth of a reality that often seemed capricious, deceitful or even spiteful. It is not difficult to see why 500 years later Christians identified it with God (John 1:1)—“In the beginning was the Word (Logos)… and the Word (Logos) was God.” It was a deliberate appeal to educated Greeks. The British exegete, C H Dodd (The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel), explained that the Logos is “the meaning, plan or purpose of the universe conceived as transcendent as well as immanent”.
Heraclitus saw the Logos as the framework of the world, supporting the relationships of things in it. The Persian influence appeared again in his choice of arche as the most divine of the Persian elements—fire (arta, asha). The two concepts of the Logos and fire seem to be related in the Persian words for them. Fire is a volatile element, forever changing, darting and moving, constantly in fluxion, apparently so opposed to order and structure that some followers and critics of Heraclitus took him to mean Logos was instability. Aristotle seemed not to accept this. He said to his disciples, “what a man says does not have to be what he believes”, a saying that Leo Strauss has used to formulate a philosophy of lying to justify an elitist society. Heraclitus was probably implying that the arche of the world, though constantly in motion, was subject to a metaphysical order that brought harmony where there seemed to be nothing but chaos. This order is truth, and because it lies beneath the volatility of the material world, it was not readily seen. Logos was an unconscious intelligence that ruled the world.
Parmenides of Elea agreed with Heraclitus that truth had to imply reason, and therefore language. The Logos was literally The Word! But both were cryptic. Parmenides said:
Mortals are immortals and immortals are mortals, the one living the other’s death and dying the other’s life.
This conundrum stems from the seasonal and solar cycles. Summer succeeds winter and the summer sun succeeds the winter sun in an endless cycle, each living when the other died and dying when the other lived, suggesting different levels of existence. Mortals live a life then live an eternal life in death. Immortals live an eternal life, and mortal life is, to them, as death. The Gnostics believed humans had an immortal spark within them that sought to return to the eternal realm of the spirit. The Cathars took mortal life to be hell. Mortal life was therefore death to an immortal. The Gnostic belief was the mortals were dead immortals waiting to be reborn as immortals. Parmenides, more simply said:
Truth is reached by the renowned way of the goddess.
Conundrums are among the lying arts of the Sophists, a school of professional teachers of rhetoric, who could present convincing but false arguments for or against anything—it was sophistry. Sir Francis Bacon decried sophistry as using words as a tyranny over facts. Knowledge was not just winning arguments or composing admirable exhortations, but discovering “particulars not reached before”. Truth would throw off the tyranny of words.
Because they could prove anything at all, the Sophists claimed nothing could be false. Protagoras of Abdera (c 490-420 BC) was the best known Sophist. He wrote a book called Truth showing that anything could be shown to be true. It begins:
Man is the measure of all things, of the existence of things that are and of the non-existence of things that are not.
Essentially truth is purely subjective and so relative to each person’s experience. Each observer sees things in their way only, and that is the truth for them. Consider two people standing in a breeze. The wind could feel cold to one and not feel cold to the other. “The wind feels cold” is both true and false.
Truth is relatively observed, but it does not preclude an objective truth. To claim that truth is merely relative is to claim that very statement can be both true and false, depending on one’s point of view. Things can be measured from anyone’s viewpoint or even an ant’s, so, on this basis, Protagoras is no more of an authority about the nature of truth than is any other man, or even an ant. Moreover, if everyone’s opinion is true, then so is the opinion of anyone who says that Protagoras’s opinion is false. That truth is relative is self-refuting.
Objective reality is a real world that exists independently of our subjective perceptions, conceptions, or beliefs. A statement is true if and only if objective reality is as that statement says it is. Scientific method is to discover truths about objective reality. Men can compare their experiences and test their conclusions until they settle on a common interpretation of experience. That is the experimental method.
Sophists split culture from Nature. Indeed, educated Greeks generally split physis (Nature) from nomos (culture), two distinct magisteria of truth, the one absolute, and the other relative, the first being what is given to humanity and the second what humanity makes for itself—religion, law and tradition. Socrates turned from physis—studing Nature—to nomos—studying human social traditions or culture so Plato was more interested in the governance of the city than in the workings of Nature. Both nomos and physis were seen at first as part of the same general law, but then the two were seen as separated and nomos could contradict physis. Sophists saw no natural correlation between mind and Nature, or language and reality. Language did not have to match reality, but could be used to show there was something more important than bare truth.
Plato classified Sophists and rhetoricians with false priests, false prophets and poets, and lying spirits and enchanters. If nothing is false then all is truth, but Plato thought truth must be harder to find than that. If truth were that easy, error must be difficult, but error was all too easy, so truth must be more difficult than the Sophists thought. Plato thought truth had its own world of ideas, and consciousness was an inborn ability to discover it. Everything in the world was an inferior copy of its ideal in the world of ideas.
Truth for the Scholastics
Speech was given to man, not that man might therewith deceive one another, but that one man might make his thoughts known to another. To use speech, then for the purpose of deception, and not for its appointed end, is a sin.S Augustine, The Enchiridion
The Christians found Plato’s world of ideals agreeable, taking it to be heaven or God’s heavenly repository of perfect types. Since people were supposed to be perfect as their father in heaven was perfect, it meant a stifling of individuality—in that deviations from normal behaviour were signs of imperfection—and originality—in that no one could invent or do anything new. God had made everything already. For eight centuries creativity in Europe almost died. What remained was nothing to do with the Church but mainly grass roots practicalities. Only from about the twelfth century did the Christian tyranny of Plato’s universal truth start to break down, with the late middle ages gradually inclining towards the Renaissance.
The friend of Socrates, Antisthenes, had said it was impossible to contradict, suggesting he was a Sophist, though, unlike them, he had no desire to get rich, like Christ, holding poverty as a benefit and a virtue. He could see no ideal behind things but only the things themselves, a line that might have been more profitable for human understanding had it not been for Christian Platonic dogmatism. The reason is that it took almost 15 centuries to return to this idea when the first philosophical challenge to Platonism in Christendom came from Roscellinus, in the eleventh century, when he proclaimed “universalis sunt nomina”—universals are but names.
Roscellinus was the first “Nominalist”, a serious challenge to the dogma held by Christian “Realists”—that ideals or perfections imagined by the clerics were more real than reality. What would become of Christianity if people discovered that God, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, souls, angels and devils, and all the rest of the Christian paraphernalia were just names? In challenging the Christian dogma of ideals, the Nominalists, despite their own name, were not simply saying universals were just names, but were changing the focus of attention from the imaginery “reality” to the actual reality we all experience.
Christians dismissed reality as a fallen and imperfect place. It was their imaginery heaven that was real. Nominalism directed people towards the the things in the world of direct experience. Each named thing, each object, each creature, each colour, each quality ought to be seen and studied in its own right, not ignored as a flawed copy. By hacking at the elaborate fiction of Christian theology, it cut a way towards empiricism and modern science. Yet, philosophically it was a return to sophistry—that there is no universal truth. Everyone has their own. Truth is everywhere.
By the fourteenth century, William of Ockham, a Franciscan, was stressing the importance of the individual over society—even if it was a Christian society—and urging democracy as a way of expressing it in the Church and principalities. As a Franciscan, Ockham believed in the spiritual value of poverty as taught by Christ himself and practised by the apostles. God had not given Adam and Eve any property in the Garden of Eden, and so property must be a symptom of the fall from grace. But while Ockham was lecturing at Oxford, pope John XXII had issued a bull declaring the biblical teaching of Christ a false doctrine! Ockham had opposed the papal decree, and had been summoned to Avignon where six theologians declared his teachings “heretical and pestilential”. Ockham wisely did a runner.
He is still known for his “razor”, the principle of parsimony used in science to keep hypotheses from getting like the Scholasticism Ockham was criticising or Moslem Sufism—a morass of superfluous entities that explained nothing. He also concluded that metaphysical entities and arguments were irrelevant to the study of Nature. Being a devout believer, he did not deny God was the prime mover in spirit, so he was not challenging the teachings of Christianity, but simply decided it was impossible and futile for the human mind to comprehend metaphysics. Nature could be studied without reference to it. Effectively, Ockham disassociated theology from Nature study. Ockham was an admirer of Duns Scotus who had declared that God was unknowable. God was irrelevant to the study of the real world of experience. God would not, therefore, be wiggling His finger in experiments when people came to do them.
William Langland wrote Piers Plowman, a poetic allegory of the search for truth in which the fool who thinks he can interpret important statements is called Will. Chaucer uses a similar character as a device in The House of Fame to expose claims of universal knowledge as a means of personal gain.
Siger of Brabant was a follower of the Arab philosopher, Averoës, (Ibn Rushd). Averoës thought that, although truth existed, there were different approaches to it. He is said to have held that the truth of Nature might differ from the truth of theology. Christian critics promptly accused him of dualism, an implication of the heretical in the thirteenth century, and followers of Siger at the university of Paris were accused by Thomas Aquinas of teaching the doctrine of “double truth”, defending themselves by saying they were merely teaching Aristotle not what they themselves believed. It led to a general consideration of the difference between what people had to believe as true as a matter of faith, and what they experienced as being true—another step towards empiricism. Reason and faith were different magisteria and need not agree—the double truth. A believer like Ockham was in no way fazed by this. Faith might seem unreasonable but it was so separated from Nature that natural discoveries were irrelevant to it. The doctrines taught at Paris were condemned after Aquinas had died.
Aquinas himself had thought natural order existed in God’s mind, and from God’s idea had appeared in His creation. However, if truth and justice were ideas of a perfect God, the problem arises of how He could create a world in which there were lies and injustice. Zoroastrianism had the answer to this in the wicked creation meant to interfere with the original good one—dualism, but heresy for Christians. By postulating a single perfectly good God, the existence of evil was a problem—theodicy—for Christians. The doctors in Paris taught that even God could not do the impossible, something Christians could not allow as true. Christians would not be restricted. The Christian backlash began, and we are still in it. Even so, the Platonism of the middle ages was seriously wounded in the Nominalist challenge. Nominalism had shown that ideas should not be taken to be reality, and limited God’s will to revelation excluding enquiry, helping to bring about the Reformation, democracy, the Enlightenment and empirical method.
The Church did not object excessively to Galileo presenting the Copernican system as long as he said it was only a hypothesis. Then he wrote Dialogue on the Two Main World Systems and was called to face the Inquisition which banned and burned the book in 1633. Galileo was tried and sentenced to imprisonment but it was commuted to house arrest, having to recite the seven penitential psalms every week for three years, and to abjure the Copernican system. Descartes looked on all this in dismay. The Church wanted to assert its authority irrespective of truth. Truthfulness is not a “theological virtue” for the Church. Those are faith, hope and charity. Bearing false witness was merely a venial (slight) sin and so excusable, unlike adultery, for example, which was a mortal sin.
By taking up the cause of extreme skepticism, doubting everything, Descartes could argue a neutrality about everything that showed he did not take sides. He had a demonstrable answer for potential accusers in the Church. He also would argue that from his position of doubt emerged the truth that the world was a machine and not something with a life and personality like God that might seem a rival to Him. Nature could have no powers of its own as a machine. The sacraments and prayer, long thought by certain heretics to have been of no purely psychological benefit, if any at all, could have no natural substitute if Nature was just a machine, for no machine could operate itself. God operated the natural machine. He remained in charge. The hypothesis of Nature as a machine was devised purely to please the Christians.
Kant on Reason and Truth
Truth is found by eliminating possibilities, and reason is one of the factors that limit possibilities. Reason rules out everything that is unreasonable. Descartes considered that God could not deceive because He was perfect. He declared in the Discourse on Method that his desire was to distinguish the true from the false. The method was to rule out all desires and outlooks and begin from scratch. Kant, in Critique of Pure Reason, listed three types of truths:
- Definitions are necessarily true.
- Synthetical truths are those in which something additional to a definition refines a statement but has to be established in reality.
- The synthetical a priori are factors additional to definitions but independent of experience that are given by mental processes. The mental processes have yielded additional information that is not sense information and so is independent of experience of the world but is not simply personal. This type of truth shows that truth depends on the structure of the mind. Philosophy has the job of investigating this information that transcends experience.
The mind is arranged in a structure that arranges the information it handles so that the world is intelligible because of it, Kant says. The arrangememt of the mind is into “categories”. If any experience falls outside the categories, the mind cannot handle it properly. It is precisely the underlying nature of reality—the reality beyond experience—that the mind is not equipped to handle, on this view. What can be experienced and so handled adequately are phenomena. What cannot be experienced directly are noumena or things in themselves. Categories provide limits to knowledge but also make phenomena knowable. Without them the world would seem chaotic and we would know nothing. People are able to know phenomena but not noumena, and it leaves humans feeling intensely dissatisfied because they have evolved treating everything as phenomena. The noumena are strange and mysterious and leave us wondering.
Now, plainly, if there is anything in all this untested speculation, the categories have evolved according to human experience. Evolving animals experience the real world, and those that have the better ability to handle it reproduce to yield a generation better equipped to handle experience as a whole then the previous generation, not so many of which were successful in reproducing. Repetition of this over countless generations leaves the species which emerges with a mind structured such that it can generally handle experiences it is likely to have in the real world. Its categories match reality. They do not match whatever underlies reality and causes it because it is never directly experienced. Evolution can explain the Kantian scheme.
It is when people try to philosophize outside of direct experience—outside of phenomena and into noumena—that errors and fallacies arise, infinity, God, eternity, and immortality among them. The home of truth is an island surrounded by a sometimes squally and sometimes foggy sea. Adventurers offshore are misled by fog banks, storms, icebergs, whales and white horses into seeing illusions of shores that do not exist. It is the world of metaphysics.
But Kant knew that nothing could stop metaphysical speculation. He likened it to a man being choked by foul air being told to stop breathing. Metaphysical speculation could never satisfy a critical mind, but nothing could stop it. It is a human neurosis, an incorrigible fault, but it is not a need, any more than any other obsession. Many people are not troubled by it at all. It is called a need by those who do because they realize it is the source of religion or “spirituality”. They want to define religion as a human need even though, like any obsessive behaviour, we would be better off without it.
Common sense is those mental categories that let us handle experience directly. To study the source of the material world—whatever causes the world as it appears to us—needs uncommon sense. That is why scientific hypotheses get strange. Kant thought metaphysics should not be investigated speculatively but must rest on the practical. That is what science attempts to do, but Kant did not mean it that way. No facts however numerous could demonstrate God, the after life, the soul or free will, he thought. Concepts such as these had to have some sort of use value. They served as a practical guide to morals, and by being useful in this sense then they were justified. By living more moral lives by living as if God existed then the assumption is justified. To live in the certainty of a retributive or rewarding God must have an effect on the lives of those who do it, was Kant’s idea, because it gave life meaning and purpose and people a fear of wrong doing. Those who supposed such things were merely fictions would be expected to live differently.
If this is so, there seems no evidence for it in Christian history generally, certainly among the higher ranks of Christians. Christianity is not based on historical truth. It offers a narrative that claims to be historical, and commands, “Now believe!” The supposed historical proof is irrelevant. For many, perhaps most believers, the history could be shown to be false but they would continue to believe.
While a genuine belief in these noumena might be supposed to make people better, the history of Christianity cannot be taken as much evidence for the hypothesis. Either it is untrue or the higher ranks of Christians cynically used the beliefs of their flocks for their own ends rather than believing the same things themselves. They seemed to have no compunction over their murderous and exploitative deeds, such as they should have had if Kant were right. Kant believed in good will conditioned by conscience, so he was predisposed to see value in his assumptions. We have a dual nature. Good will was not natural, yet humanity is a natural species. Nature is independent of free will, but people were subject to their sense of duty, and had a “categorical imperative” to do it. We had to do it ultimately by an act of will.
Here again is the double truth. Kant’s mental categories are intrinsic not learned but he considered them arbitrary. In fact, they are “learned”, in the sense that evolution is a learning process. Species learn how to cope with their environment. But Kant thought quite different rules would do just as well as the categories we have. They are not true but arbitrary. Yet, if the rules in the mind had not coincided with the rules of reality, we should never have arrived here to be considering the matter. We should have walked into a river or into the jaws of a hungry raptor millions of years ago.
Thinking evolved to allow one certain animal, at least, but probably most higher animals, to have a better chance of survival by responding more actively to local situations. In humans, however, the brain has grown disproportionately to its needs leaving unused surplus capacity. It is this that seems to be used by some people of a philosophical bent to wonder about unanswerable questions.
Hans Vahinger thought that the idea of free will was nonsensical. If will were truly free and so uninfluenced by any impact of the senses, it must be random and worthless. An act caused by nothing has no purpose, whereas an act necessitated by the world is not free but has value. So will cannot be free. All willed acts are a response to something and are therefore caused. The real point about human will is that human thought or reason is part of the input. It is synthetic in Kant’s meaning of it, but it is still a factor influencing the outcome. Will is, therefore, partially a feedback system, nonlinear and therefore unpredictable. Human will is not free. It just seems to be.
Kant has separated the two truths in his critiques of pure and practical reason. Pure reason yields truths about Nature, but practical reason is concerned with human rights and duties. To imagine that the two can be treated in the same way is the error humans have made throughout history. A truth of physis is not a truth of nomos, and the truths of nomos can seem only a truth of physis by human intention.
Darwinian Truth
Philosophers have inclined to think that the structure of the world we live in and the human mind somehow match, so that sincere questions about the world will receive truthful answers when tested. It has given rise to three hypotheses about truth;
- The pragmatic one. The pragmatic theory of truth was first enunciated by C S Peirce, and most famously advocated by William James and John Dewey.
That which guides us truly is true.
Truth was what proved useful. Taken literally, it is false. What is pragmatic might be quite untrue, such as when one says cheerfully to someone terminally ill that they are looking better today, meaning to divert them from dwelling on their dying state. A proposition is true or false independently of its utility or our belief in it, but, for James, the utility must be in the widest sense, and in the longest run. Then, pragmatic theory is practically the same as correspondence theory.John Dewey
The idea can be explained by evolution. The mind is a practical faculty which evolved to allow animals to adjust continually to their immediate environment. It allowed the animal to react suitably to what it perceived. The truth, then, is measured by the success of the responses to it, by testing and noting the outcome—by empirical method not by gash prescriptions. It applies to physis and to nomos justifying all religions to the believer because all believers believe their belief guides them truly, or they would not believe it.
- The coherence one. The coherence theory of truth says that a proposition’s truth consists in its fitting into a coherent system of propositions. In mathematics, what is the “mathematical reality” that a proposition about imaginary numbers (such as i2 = -1 ) has to correspond with to be true? This truth might be better justified as true from its coherent relationship with the arithmetic of complex numbers. True propositions are coherent with those already accepted as being true. Any true system cannot be incoherent. The world seems as if it is coherent, and it is a central assumption of science that has been proven to be true in practice. If science assumes coherence, and it works with that assumption, then the assumption must be true. A problem is Gödel’s theorem that says no set of beliefs can be coherent without reference to some rule outside the set.
- The correspondence one. Instead of thinking of the abstract noun “truth”, think about the adjective “true”. What does it mean to say that a statement is true? Aristotle explained:
To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true, while to say of that which is that it is not, or of that which is not that it is, is false.
A statement is true if things are as it says they are, otherwise it is false. Propositions are true when they correspond with the outcome of tests applied in the real world. It is true that the sky is blue if and only if the sky is blue, and so on, for all the statements:“p” is true if p.
Truth is the correspondence of a pictorial or symbolic representation and what it represents, the state that obtains when something is satisfactorily represented or mapped by another thing. It is a function of what the world is like. If function f maps the set of English language sentences, L, into the set of states of affairs in reality, A:f(L) - > A
Then f is true. Whether f or L is simple or terribly complicated, if f(L) satisfactorily maps A, then it is true. That which is represented is often whatever obtains in the real world, so the representation is considered true when the mapping of reality is satisfactory. The truth or falsity of a statement is an “objective” matter. Truth does not lie in the eye of the beholder. Nor does it lie in the beliefs of a believer, or in whether or not we know what the facts are. Believing something to be true does not make it true, for beliefs themselves can be false as well as true.
They are not entirely exclusive of each other. Evolution is an explanation of truth on each of these definitions, and, indeed, it is what would be expected, after millions of generations of evolution, of the organ that interprets perception. It would be going too far to say the fit between mind and the external world is perfect. Optical illusions show it is not. Evolution does not require perfect adaptation. The individual flourishes that is better adapted than others. In periods of constant environmental change such as slowly changing climate, no individuals might be perfectly adapted. But as a consequence of evolution, we can accept that a correspondence between mind and reality is not merely a contrivance of human intellect.
Animals have it too in varying degrees. The fox has evolved like us to know truth by correspondence. Coming to a frozen river, it puts its ear to the ice, listening to the flow of the water. And to what purpose? To judge the thickness of the ice to know whether it will bear its weight.
The creature that has the better perception of its environment will enjoy an advantage over its rival. It will not run into trees, rivers or burning grass, or fall through ice. It will not eat poisonous roots and berries or eat tainted meat. The perception of these things must be true or perception would be valueless. Notionally, a false perception that gave an advantage would be selected for in evolution. Perhaps it is, our perceptions being idealized by the brain to be clearer and get a more immediate response. The illusion, particularly optical illusions, is evidence of this. The brain attempts to make sense of what the eye sees, effectively lying, up to a point, to make a fuzz clearer to the interpreting brain. It is doing what forensic technicians do when they enhance an image. The animal has to make sense of what it perceives, but the sense it makes of its perceptions must fit the environment, if it is not to be quickly eliminated from the process of life by walking over cliffs or into the gape of a waiting predator.
Pyrrho of Elis (365-270 BC) was so skeptical he believed nothing from his own senses. He took his skepticism so far, according to Dionysius Laertius, that he did not even bother to look where he was going. Consequently, he always needed to be saved by his friends from “carts, precipices, dogs and such”. Pyrrho’s need of friendly protection is a direct and practical refutation of the belief that the senses lie or that they give arbitrary information about the world, or that the world itself is somehow unreal. The senses allow the organism to avoid danger in the world and to pursue whatever is advantageous to it because they have evolved along with analytical thought for precisely those reasons. Evolution necessitates a correspondence between physical truth and its perception.
Hume, who also referred to Nature as “She”, questioned cause and effect, claiming that what we understood as effects are not necessities but just our own bad habits. But our long experience is that certain causes produce certain effects, and that must impress itself onto us more than some philosophical denial of it that contradicts all experience. It is true, though, that explanations of the connexion of cause and effect might be very strange. Explanations might fly in the face of common sense, but the common sense is experience whereas the explanations are below the levels of our senses.
Instruments like microscopes that extended the range of the senses, showed apparently smooth surfaces were not at all smooth. Truth in Nature depended on the resolution of the instrument used to observe it. What is true at a low resolution is not true at a higher one. So truth had its ranges, and they had to be specified for the proposition to be true.
Bertrand Russell and G E Moore at Cambridge began by analysing the world into bits, each bit being big enough to know. They took the existence of logic as evidence that Nature had an underlying truth, and then, by determining the truth of bits of the real world, logic led to the truth about nature. Each of the bits or atoms of truth could be established by the corrspondence theory of truth—in other words, by empirical science. Truth could be tried and tested.
Science uses parsimony and elegance as sub-criteria of its hypotheses. Parsimony is a practical principle. Why begin to try to find a complicated explanation? An explanation with as many variables as data points will certainly explain the data, but will be spuriously precise because it will be treating the errors in the data as bona fide. We can reduce the number of variables but will not get such a good fit, though the looseness of it will now take in some of the inaccuracy in the data. More important, it will be simpler!
Elegance is taken to indicate the correctness of a solution on the grounds that Nature is beautiful as well as simple, and beauty with simplicity is elegance. Simple mechanisms take fewer steps and need less energy to accomplish, making them more likely, but such modern discoveries as chaos theory show that simplicity can generate astonishingly complicated—unpredictable—behaviour. It is the convolutions of the human brain that have to be complicated to work out a good explanation. There is no guarantee, and much reason to think it unlikely, that the explanation, though simple, is familiar or common-sensical. When we are making explanations out of the reach of our senses, the explanations can be expected to seem strange.
Additional important criteria are also that science is public, impersonal and shared. It is open. Science cannot be secret. As soon as the results of it are kept secret, no one can check them, and no one can follow them up, except the cognoscenti who have access to the previous results. Patenting is for inventions and gadgets not for science such as biology. Patenting DNA sequences ought not to be legal. It is not patenting an invention but patenting the truth!
Mathematics can be used with amazing results in physis but it is almost useless in nomos where only basic operations yield results and even then not reliable ones. It is suggestive of two truths.
Natural and Cultural Truth
In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche demolished the Platonic and scholastic hypothesis of the “real” world that was beyond experience. It was a mummy world—a perfectly preserved world of the one we live in. Any thought of a truer world than our own disparages our actual existence. It murders reality for not being perfect enough.
Nietzsche asked why we needed truth rather than untruth, uncertainty or ignorance. His answer was that truth’s role was to promote life. In physis, truth is, according to evolutionary theory, whatever promotes reproduction. Usually, it is what actually pertains in the world, but need not be. The evolution of the brain along with the organism has taught it tricks to help it discern things, but we now know, by constructing false and unreal situations that the brain can be fooled by illusions. Nietzsche concluded it showed the brain was an organ of falsehood.
Karl Popper clarified the differences between natural and cultural truth when he distinguished three worlds of knowledge:
- Nature, the real world which exists. The power of truth is in describing the real world as it is.
- Thoughts and psychological states as they occur in any single knower’s mind, directly experiencing real sense data or cogitating alone.
- Thoughts and ideas communicated, recorded and otherwise shared with anyone else in the community, so that they enter the public domain. It is these ideas held in common that believers think actually live and so they make them into spirits and gods. They are not physis but they are nomos.
Leo Strauss decided the bulk of people were physically and mentally unable to cope with truth. Their masters, the ruling elite of the world he called “philosophers”, were entitled to feed their subjects lies he called myths to keep them satisfied and to impel them into any actions the philosophers deemed desirable. Plato, in The Republic, extolled the usefulness of myths to control the disenfranchised masses. In it, Socrates proposed that the class the citizens found themselves in, in the ideal republic, could be explained by a myth in which god made the people out of gold, silver and base metals, and thus their place in society was determined. He wondered whether it would work. These “myths” were just lies. They were propaganda for mass consumption, to keep the mob happy. Glaucon said it would not—at first—but it would be accepted after a generation! The setting up of the Jewish temple state by the Persians is an almost contemporary instance. The local Canaanites would not at first believe the myths the Persians had offered to the colonists, but a generation or two later, after people had been brought up with these myths, they were accepted so well the people refused to believe anything else! Now they constitute the Christian bible! John Rock, a convert from Catholicism, said:
Heaven and hell, Rome, all the Church stuff—it’s for the solace of the multitude.
If, in The Republic, Plato had thought that rulers might have to lie for the public good, it is hard to see how it can be true in a modern democracy in which the masses themselves are entitled to participate. How can a society of equals be built on lies? All contracts and arrangements could not be believed, so could not be signed. There could be no co-operation. Everyone would be alone. Truth must be necessary within a society, but no one need be truthful to those outside it who might be enemies.
Gustave Le Bon used the phrase “collective hallucinations” that could motivate people for good or ill. Gottlieb Frege thought concepts like “the will of the people” were dangerous untruths which sounded convincing because language allowed their expression as if they were true. The people as a mass have no will, but language personifies the mass to make it seem as if they have a mass will. Such false myths are then used by demagogues.
People will die for these dreams or delusions. Collective fictions attracted the attention of Mussolini and his friends, and the Nazis beguiled the German race with them. Marx thought he was writing treatises on scientific political economics, but socialists and communists were not driven by the economics as much as the myth of the communist utopia. From long before these, and until this day, Christians have been drawn by the myth of a Christian utopia, called the kingdom of God, brought about by the second coming of Christ. Meanwhile, they are motivated by the hallucination of eternal life after death. All such dreams can be utter lies but still provide motivation to the dreamers who see them as Platonic ideals realised sometimes soon in the future.
Since such dreams are not hypotheses, they cannot be gainsaid like the elaborated utopias of the political theorists. Even failure cannot dispel belief in them, because all failures are excused as some peculiarity of the time or circumstances. Look at Christianity. Look at the previous beliefs of the Essenes. Look at the later Christian heresy of Marxism. Nothing can refute them for the believers. The dreams are the aspirations of the dreamers and setbacks are part of the myth of their struggle against misunderstanding and rejection. It is a struggle against the odds or it would not be worth it. Action is needed, but, above all, sacrifice! They would “go to the stake for their beliefs with the hoots of society ringing in their ears” (Leslie Stephen, brother of Virginia). Part of the hallucination is that the belief itself is virtuous, even though it is unsound, flimsy or even made up, because the alternative—to have no convictions at all—is worse.
Social psychology is such that many people will believe anything given the social pressure to conform, and cynical leaders use it. Fr Pierre Charron is one of them. He is talking about nomos not physis, and his belief illustrates quite frankly the workings of the Church, for the Church’s pressure was the social pressure to conform for over a millennium. Most religions are not intellectually defendable, but even some intelligent people take them as true because they see in them a moral value. They are pragmatists. John Stuart Mill accepted it but the Victorian skeptic, John Morley, disdained it. Freud was also frank about it. He called it an illusion driven by wish-fulfilment. Men were so primitive they could not face too much truth, preferring instead to believe self-deceptions which they then rationalize. Reasons are found for the belief already held for no reason, then presented as reasons that gave rise to the belief.
Social norms are not physical truths. They are often habits, and not necessarily good ones, imposed at a certain stage of social development, arbitrary and too recent to have evolved any structural adaptations in the brain. Society adopts laws and customs that it finds compatible with its preferred mode of civilization, or rather that of its ruling class. They are true only for the time being, and could soon change with a change of ruler, his change of wife, a conqueror, a revolution, or a fad. The norm of one society need not apply in another or at another time. Such norms are not universal or even general in any sense.
Truth is the measure of everything, according to Hegel, including falsehoods, and so there must be truth. Since lies and error depend on truth, they cannot be an alternative to it.
Truth in Language
The use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive the information of facts. Now, if anyone said the thing which was not, these ends were defeated, because I cannot properly be said to understand him, and I am so far from receiving information that he leaves me worse than in ignorance, for I am led to believe a thing black when it is white and short when it is long.Dean Jonathon Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Language did not evolve primarily to convey meaning but as a social cement, the equivalent in humans of grooming in monkeys and sex in Bonobo chimps. It began with the laughing and crying of infants, and the meaningless baby language burbled at them to assure them of a caring presence. It was initiated by adult women because they had responsibility for the children while they were gathering roots and seeds, and the men were enjoying themselves, perhaps hunting. Out of this babble which served as the social bond of the group, and which had elements of emotional meaning from the beginning, began to come symbolic meaning, growing just as we can see in our children as they develop.
An excited child in the primitive group finds a patch of nutritious roots, and so babbles and giggles its excitement, drawing attention to it. Mummy and the other women give it smiles and coos and burbles to show their appreciation and love. The notion of truth came directly from this sort of sharing of experience. Though it did not arise to convey truth, it took that function early in its development. Thereafter, language developed as both social bond and medium of communication, which is why we are such gabby creatures that love to gather in groups to babble to each other.
As a bond it has meaning, even though it is not symbolic. Perhaps it accounts for such apparently absurd statements as Roland Barthes’ that literature does not need to be intelligible. Poetry and song obviously do not have to be intelligible, their rhythms and sounds serving as a sufficient comfort. Babies can even be comforted by white noise like the sound of a vacuum cleaner—the ultimate in meaningless babble. Not that all writing is necessarily meaningless, as some seem to think today, but language is mutable, though over periods of generations not from moment to moment. It is a silly exaggeration to say language is meaningless because it changes noticeably over periods approaching the average lifetime.
Jurgen Habermas spoke of “the co-operative search for truth”. The evolution of language from bonding babble to indicating clear meaning was always a co-operative, a social, action. It permitted the creation of Popper’s third world of ideas. It was in the commonly held world of ideas that the co-operative search for truth could be held. Language and then writing allowed it. Truth has to be the norm of a society. A society based entirely on lying could function because all that had happened was that the form of the truth had been changed into its negative, and mutatis mutandis the truth is restored, like wearing inverting spectacles. Society cannot function when lies reach a certain proportion of all statements, for then no one has any idea how to react to anything. It is the boy who cried wolf. No society based on lying as an extensive habit seems to have evolved. The liars in any society have to try to maintain the truth as the norm because then they keep their advantage. That is why Christians advocate honesty for everyone except themselves. That way, they remain in control. And societies will often lie to their enemies, just as Bantu parents taught their children, but did not encourage them to lie to others within the tribe.
Postmodernists point to the adoption of odd names by scientists for the properties of subatomic particles in the theory of chromodynamics. Up, down, spin, strangeness, flavour, charm, colour are all names of these properties but have nothing to do with the conventional meanings of these words except that they are characteristics. Whatever these properties are, they are out of the range of our sense, but can be detected by certain instruments according to the conditions. It does not alter the meanings usually associated with these words, and the new meanings in context can hardly be confused with the old ones, so there is no ambiguity about their use, let alone meaninglessness. The use of this strange language is perfectly meaningful once the concepts themselves are understood.
Postmodernists love to confuse, it being their substitute for profoundness, and they confuse the issue of meaning in language by claiming to democratize it. Authors do not own their text once a postmodernist has it. It belongs to the reader, and despite authors’ objecting, the reader will tell them what they meant! Used car dealers become philosophers, asserting the rights previously held by professional clergymen and political spin doctors. All of them can “deconstruct” a text however they like, and Lo! it is the truth.
For postmodernists, all writing is whatever the reader wants to make of it. Aristotle thought language was subservient to Nature, but Jacques Derrida thinks the opposite, whatever it can be construed to be. Writing is a collection of effects. It is not true in any sense, or rather, it is true in any sense the reader wants to make of it. Under this theory, it is a puzzle why an author should should take the time to compose a large number of sentences in a particular order. They might as well tear up their work into individual words and fish them from a large pot with sticky fingers. They can have no less meaning. Writing does not aim to say anything, says Derrida, and he practices what he preaches. Only his dedicated disciples can be bothered attemting to plough through his abstruse and unreadable works. But they do, and they say they find meaning in it. It cannot be Derrida’s, so whose is it? It must be their own!
Central to postmodern thought is that truth is made not discovered. It is true to the extent that rulers can say what they like in respect of nomos, and philosophers of the type of Leo Strauss, a totalitarian elitist, recommend it. Michel de Montaigne said that, though there are an infinite number of falsehoods, there is only one truth, a thought echoed by Simone de Beauvoir:
The truth is one. Only error is multiplied. It is no accident that the right professes pluralism.Le Temps Modernes
Of course, any ideology could use lies as a tool of power, but only elites would want to. Lying is no part, or should be no part, of left wing, revoutionary or even liberal ideologies, but it falls naturally out of Greek tyrannies and the medieval princely states that Machiavelli admired into the hands of the Republican right—the neo-cons—and the British New Labour party, more conservative than Margaret Thatcher, its hero’s heroine.
The student revolutions of 1968 were subverted before they were a night old. Marx was anything but irrational, believing that his hypotheses of social change were scientific, but the students of 1968 were already conditioned to disbelieve the meaning of writing, so Marx was never going to get anywhere in that company. Jeremy Campbell (The Liar’s Tale) tells us that the slogans they immediately offered were such as “there are no facts”, and “it is forbidden to forbid”—collective hallucinations but not the stuff of successful revolutions.
Marx wrote some complicated works like Capital but was also a pamphleteer, and wrote in a perfectly clear and readable style such works as The Communist Manifesto. The postmodernists claimed to be on the left wing and to be liberating creativity from its chains, when they were really exploding smoke bombs into the melée to confuse the sans culottes.
The masses were always duped, Marx thought, beguiled into false beliefs whatever the truth. As a science, Marxism accepts that truth exists, but those who deny meaning must also deny truth, for truth can only be communicated if language means something. The Sorbonne students, in denying facts, and decrying the discipline of study were denying the basis of their supposed revolution. “Deconstruction is demolition”, is the slogan they should have had. It demolishes truth.
The postmodern style is deliberately opaque and obscure, meant to be unreadable and incomprehensible to allow the author to claim any critique of it is wrong, and every admirer, whatever their reading of it, is right. It has every meaning and none. Especially none! It is meant to “strangle understanding in the cradle”, to use Jeremy Campbell’s words.
As for the masses, it is meant to lift them into their apathy. Like Orwell’s “newspeak” in 1984, it is meant to expunge the very idea of truth. Nor is any Straussian or neo-con excuse for lies as a necessity of war (on terrorism, or any other) justified, because, even if the reason and excuse were worthy, the use of it justifies less worthy cases, leaving everyone unsure of quite what is true and what false. Society would find lying becoming a habit, a situation that must lead to social disorder.
Newspeak, on the face of it, is a continuous and insidious erosion of language, but in both cases, the text becomes devoid of meaning, divorced from the author’s intention and from actuality. Suppression of meaning and the inflation of possible interpretations both sum up to loss of meaning through uncertainty. Postmodernism unites opposites by denying they exist not by resolving the differences between them, and so can be dragooned into serving the status quo far easier than its challengers. When everything is meaningless and nothing is true, the status quo cannot be challenged. And when the status quo is an elite with no compunction about lying to the people, we will be led willingly into fascism. Today, even editors of scholarly journals think nonsense is worth printing. The journal Social Text printed Alan Sokal’s jargon ridden postmodern spoof, taking it to be serious postmodern commentary. No doubt it was. More recently some MIT students submitted to a conference on informatics(!) a computer generated paper of grammatical sentences assembled from random jargon. It too was accepted.
It is nomos, culture, that cannot be pinned down as truth because it is too arbitrary. It fulfils immediate human needs and so changes according to them. There can be nothing true in it except in limited places and times. Religion was the culture of earlier societies. It too, therefore, simply fulfils temporary needs and cannot be universally true, as it claims. Religious truths change like the hems of women’s skirts. They are fashions, and Christianity can be seen changing its clothes throughout its history. Its longest period of continuous success was the Dark Ages when the totalitarian Church prescribed what truth was and proscribed anything else but its definition of truth. Those times, they are returning! It must bode ill for civilisation.
Lying Personalities
Evelin Sullivan has summarised the psychological characteristics of lying disorders. Sociopaths happily lie, manipulate and disregard the lives of others, but seem intelligent and charming. They are often fickle in their relationships, attention seeking, and exploitative. Though they habitually lie and cheat, any problems that ensue are blamed on to others. They are not bothered by their lying, and seem hardly aware they are doing it, but gladly pretend to be contrite, if it gets them out of a corner or earns them sympathy. It is mostly an urban phenomenon which is four times more common in men than in women. Life as it is seems to the sociopath to be superficial, so they cannot imagine that their lies matter. They cannot properly engage emotionally in the consequences of their lies, or perhaps at all. The sociopath merges into another personality type named as borderline personality disorder, in which lying is again characteristic, but in a more malicious and calculated way. It manifests as deliberate spreading of false rumours meant to cause damage quite deliberately. It is closely similar to the modern notion of spin-doctoring.
Both of these personality disorders might lead to pseudologia fantastica in which the person builds up a total false history for themselves, and attempt to live a lie—an utterly fabricated life. When anyone expresses surprise or incredulity, a new lie is added in explanation, and on it goes.
These lying types are often narcissistical, narcissism being another personaility disorder. The narcissist experiences reality in so far as it reflects themselves, but at its core is low self-esteem making them especially sensitive to failures and slights, and therefore ready to explain them away or distract from them with lies. So, lying is essential to the narcissistical personality to preserve its illusions. Thery are often pseudologues who invent a glorious personal history to deceive others and especially themselves. They believe their own propaganda, and even enjoy lying to get a thrill out of duping people. Thus they evolve into manipulators and control freaks, moving quite naturally into politics, business and show business, encouraged by the fad for “reality”, a return to the utterly unreal in entertainment.
These types can be seen pretty clearly in Bush and particularly Blair. The Straussist neo-cons, however, see them as perfect politicians. Expert dispersers of the lies that the neo-cons believe are necessary for them to retain their elite power position in society. Such men should be avoided, or preferably institutionalized, but simple people fall for their charm and persuasiveness, only learning at huge cost the danger of sociopathic delusions.
