Truth and mystery

Consider the difference between Christianity and science in their attitudes to truth. Christianity says there is an absolute Truth, but we cannot wholly know it, only see through a glass darkly. Science is right behind Truth, but says it can be known through the scientific method. The trouble with that claim is that, lacking a completed science, what we really have are highly predictive theories, which will nevertheless be overturned or at least replaced by the next paradigm shift. That means that science gives itself a sense of confidence that it cannot live up to. Just as the Wars of Religion in Europe came out of a retreat from the Christian doctrine of mystery, the horrors of the Twentieth century are precisely the horrors of absolute certainty as permitted by rationalism: in racial science and Marxist economics. Clever people may not be able to reconcile their rationalism with Christianity any more, but they need to find a sense of humility akin to the Christian notion of mystery in their approach to Truth. Otherwise dogma and inhuman horror will haunt us while reason is wide awake. For my money, the savage logic of Peter Singer being the main example right now.

Byers and Liars

Funny things lies. Read 'As You Like It', where the clown, Touchstone, makes a whole routine about how courtiers know the many forms of the lie. Stephen Byers seems to be hoping he has got away with the 'lie indirect'. The judge has shown he didn't tell the truth, but can't prove he meant to, so can't say he lied. At least the House of Commons are still investigating. The trouble is, we never know what someone thought as they said something untrue. The bar is set at an impossible height if that defines a lie. We might ask whether the speaker could be reasonably be expected to have known the truth and whether it would have been in their interest to have told a lie instead. Both seem to get a yes for Byers. Since he admits to telling the truth, we ought to call it a lie. That sort of robustness is the only route back to trust in politics. You can't 'build trust'; you can only tell the truth and punish liars. Saying you've 'no explanation' for why you told an untruth is no excuse, just the sound of a weasel in a suit.

Meanwhile, when there's triumph not disaster no one reports it :: FREEDOM FOR IRAQ by Ben Johnson

FrontPage magazine.com :: FREEDOM FOR IRAQ by Ben Johnson

We're always doomed: get busy

We're just Waiting for the Lights to Go Out according to the Sunday Times. But then, we often are, as The Cooling World on Brain Terminal will remind you. For those who missed the Seventies, it was the decade of global cooling and the return of the Ice Age, which politicians weren't doing enough to prepare for. And all over Britain, people are anxiously rescinding their canaries' privileges in the face of bird flu, confining them to solitary and changing their water in washing up gloves. Disaster porn is a circular diversion: one of those pleasures that keep us from thinking about the failures in our lives without actually solving anything. Failure on a civilisational scale makes personal weaknesses so heartwarmingly trivial. Not that all doomsaying is nonsense. Of course it is true that asterioids fall and flu pandemics strike (but Spanish flu only killed more than WWI because it happened in its aftermath, hitting the weakened immune systems in vulnerable groups) -- but this knowledge is nothing new. Religions have always assumed cataclysmic scenarios: which is why there are so many versions of the flood myth. What is new is the pride of the scientific version, that thinks it invented Armageddon and argues the only answer is paranoid despondency, a condition in which you scrutinise every scarepiece in the paper and do nothing about it. Maybe empires do always fall, but who thinks Greece and Rome have really gone? Their legacy is the foundation of our civilisation: in law and science, art and religion, liberty and government. So even (perhaps when) the West falls, it will leave Michelangelo's David, Newton's Principia, Darwin's Descent of Man, Shakespeare's Hamlet, the American constitution, English common law... and on and on. The saddest thing now is how we remember our mortality but not the value of making things that last. Montaigne says that eternity is in love with the productions of time and we can still read his Essays because he understood that a sense of mortality drives us to reach for eternity. Today we say doom is close, and hence prefer the fly-by-night, the flimsy and the ephemeral. That is like the rabbit hypnotised by the knife held over it. Art in particular needs to discover not events and happenings and self-destructing cobwebs of whimsy, but solid, made things. Masterpieces are a gift across the line into the dark future. The threat of doomday, as religion has always understood, allows us to focus on eternity and live as if our acts and our creations were forever. The truth is "death, but not yet". Wisdom is driven to get busy and build against the inevitable.

Never Mind the Facts -- Aaronovitch on a truth trumped by headlines

David Aaronovitch The Times Times Online

A beautiful truth

Too easy to criticise how the pursuit of truth has lost its lustre. Here is something absolutely astounding we have found is true: M=E/C.C Don't tell me truth doesn't accomplish anything. One equation changed the world. The hard task of winnowing out truth is worth every scrap of effort.

Steyn on the media misrepresentation of post-Katrina mayhem

Media deserve blame for New Orleans debacle

Watch the method, not the money

So 'The Constant Gardener' is coming out in Britain, with fulsome praise already oiling its path. Never mind that it is paranoid and delusional, encouraging a fundamental misunderstanding of the power of capitalist free enterprise to achieve great good. Megan Basham gives it an intelligent roasting, but expect much kowtowing before something that indulges people's worst suspicions. How horrible, to devote so much aesthetic skill (the cast is stellar and the cinematography looks fabulous) to peddling paranoid lies. A sign of a civilisation in fundamental confusion. I am reminded, however, of a wider and more dangerous trend than a rather silly conspiracy theory about Big Pharma. Like most of us, you have probably picked up the cynical reflex of looking at the funders behind a piece of scientific research and then decrying it on that basis. "The Salt Council! No wonder they found it killed slugs!" True, there is a tremendous capacity in human action for subtle biases to creep in and lead us in the direction of our self-interest. What is so dangerous in this trend is that it fundamentally misunderstands, and effectively discards, the scientific project. Science is based on the idea of an objective and replicable method. If a paper has found a result your preconceived ideas can't cope with, you must try and replicate it under ruthlessly strict and double-blind conditions. If that fails, you can rest easy. If not, you need some new ideas. So who funds the research shouldn't matter, because the method stays the same. Now it may be true that an initial paper is wrong in its claims, even when peer-reviewed, because of methodological errors. A recent analysis suggested as many as half of all papers may make unintentionally false claims. But subsequent attempts at replication or disproof by a new experiment that tests the original hypothesis in more rigorous ways will settle this one way or the other. A finding that survives peer-review, replication and a variety of experimental tests for its predictions can be considered robust, although always open to correction if a paradigm-shift provides a fresh and more complete explanation of the phenomena. But to say that the scientific findings of someone who disagrees with you can't be counted is to take the same corner as paranormal 'reseachers' who say there is a paranormal effect that prevents paranormal effects manifesting themselves under laboratory conditions. Not only can we not agree on the truth as a consequence, we can't even argue about it. Trapping the world in bubbles of false consciousness is just giving up on truth and science out of a refusal to hear results that may challenge our dearly-held assumptions. The cynics who hold this view would normally want to save that piece of derision for the religious right, but they suffer the same flaw if they will rule out truth on the basis of who funds a scientific study. After all, the only criticism you can really make in such cases is, "how dare they investigate that hypothesis!" To which the only reply is, because it might be true. Which goes to show which side is open to truth and which is trapped by dogma. The value of special interest groups funding research using universally-accepted objective methods is that questions that common prejudice thinks it can answer on instinct are forced to prove themselves. Naturally, all sides of a question should be addressed, but if funding is free and open, that should happen in a healthy marketplace. Defending ourselves against groupthink is hard work. Only asking questions when we are sure of comfortable answers won't do the trick.

Get Your Facts Straight About Israel

The Big Arab Lie (Read this before shooting your mouth off against Israel)

Facts aren't news

So now there has actually been time to discover what happened in the aftermath of Katrina and it turns out to have been mostly nonsense. A scandal-hungry press being fed gobbets of scandal they were all too willing got believe as anecdotal evidence for a larger trend produced accounts of events in the Superdome and on the streets of the forsaken city that simply did not happen. But where are the apologies? Where are the journalists being held to account as politicians would be for such a failure. Of course, there lies the problem: who will interview the interviewers. Meanwhile, proof, if it were needed, that 24-hour news has nothing to do with the truth, which requires time to ascertain.