Truth and Terror

We have given up on truth. Why else are we so frightened by people who hold dangerously false positions? We simply do not know how to handle islamofacists or animal rights terrorists because they are wrong and we have stuck ourselves with the view that there is no such thing. Views, we have liked to think, are like ice cream preferences -- a matter of pure taste, with no room for judgement. This is dangerous nonsense: it was Nietzsche who first used the word 'values' in place of virtue, with all its implicit sweeping away of judgement and natural law. In fact, what is swept away is rational discourse at all. If all answers to all decisions are equally valid, why waste time arguing in favour of one answer? We had hoped to build a cosily inclusive society this way, but have weakened ourselves terribly in the process. Worse, we have in some sense bred the terrorism that now faces us. For all our claims to democracy, if we create a multicultural, norm-free, values society, there is no place for truth and no place for debate. Then those movements with horribly wrong-headed ideas come along and they claim to be right. Yet no one will debate with them. 'Yes, that's fine: you think that,' we tell them. And they scream back, 'No! It's not a matter of opinion: it is true!' And we turn away in embarrassment, so they scream louder and louder and eventually pick up a broken bottle and rush us, since they can find no other way to engage. This is not the way to run a society. It is decadent. As Allan Bloom says at the beginning of 'The Closing of the American Mind', the basis of Western civilisation is that there is truth, but that people must assent to it for themselves and have the right to be wrong. This is a very different position, but far more robust. We should rediscover it, so there is a way to debate points of fact without explosives. Having come so far down the line, the worry is that we cannot retrieve our former position without great upheaval. But upheaval is coming, one way or another, invited by a disdainful attitude to truth.