Types of truth

When we give up on truth, what do we replace it with? Well, one possibility is 'truthiness', which seems to be ahead of the pack right now. That is to say, what must the case is determined by what ought to be the case, with that'ought' determined by reference to one's feelings at any particular moment. This is simply to retreat from rationality, logic, careful observation and the rules of evidence in favour of gut intuition and Romantic authenticity. It cannot carry us far, because it will run into the brute facts of the world sooner rather than later. 'That two and two make four/ And never five nor three/ The heart of man has long been sore/ And long is like to be.' The problem is that its self-satisfied inwardness may take a very long time to appreciate the difference between the world as it is and the world as it must be, by which time it may be dangerously late.

But there are other forms of 'truth-substitute' as well. One is the post-modern notion that there is no truth at all. This goes down well in the universities and Michael Frayn's new book seems to pick up on a similar worldview. Yet make no mistake: this relativism is actually nihilism. If nothing is true, there is ultimately no right or wrong, no natural law and no scientific law either. Yet professors always seem happy to travel on the aeroplanes built by the western-hegemonic-mindset-exclusionary-of-other-forms-of-knowing to the conferences where they denounce its achievements as delusions. You don't want to choose this option: it requires a very sophisticated double-thinker to carry it off.

Some people think there is a middle position between truth and outright nihilism, which might be called 'taste imperialism', in which the traditional remit of taste makes considerable incursions in to the realm usually ascribed to judgement. That is to say, we used to imagine that Homer and Michelangelo and Shakespeare could be considered as objectively great. The truth of their aesthetic superiority was evident, could be demonstrated through rational argument and was therefore a matter of judgement not of taste-- true and false, not strawberry or chocolate ice cream. And taste imperialism also reaches out into areas of sexual conduct, personal behaviour and social norms: what is classed under 'lifestyle' these days. There are two immediate problems here. One is that it is not clear how you stop the slide to nihilism. If we are saying that there are truths, but, conveniently, just not where our judgement has always placed them, to what can we refer? If our judgement is suspect here, where is it not? Some fall back on science, and say, "you must prove scientifically that this makes a difference". Fine. That argument worked twenty years ago, but not now. The evidence is in, especially on the importance of marriage for bringing up a child. People just rely on ignoring the evidence in favour of the truthy version they are wedded to. So they skip from the decline to nihilism by declining into truthiness. The second problem is the vision of man behind taste imperialism. This holds that our nature is truly plural, open to many forms of fulfilment and there could never be one true human answer. Again, the science on this is pretty conclusive now, and it finds that this is not true. We are more alike than not. In any case, it is not clear that just because two options can in some sense both be 'made to work', there is therefore no difference between them. One can still be better than the other. When there is a spectrum of success, those who are interested in the truth are interested in what works best.

But this leads neatly to by far the most popular truth-theory today. This is truth by accretion, or multi-faceted truth. It might also be called polytheism, or paganism, for at its heart is the idea that we get closer to truth (or 'the whole truth') by seeing it from many different angles or by compiling many different approaches to it, and this seems to bear a very close relation to pagan ideas of the gods. It is because people want to believe this truth-theory that they believe that all lifestyles must work. If there are many ways to truth, some can't be better than others. Again the trouble is that it just ain't so. What does it mean to say there are many ways of looking at the truth when the truth is E=MCC? This is the most popular, and also the least convincing alternative to truth on the market. Why would people accept what makes no sense? Well, I suspect because they do not trust themselves. If there is real truth, if the traditional zones of judgement in art and life do apply and there are 'best' ways or even sole-valid ways to act, what will stop them from imposing them on everyone? The answer is of course freedom. Freedom, which from the deepest roots of the Judaeo-Christian tradition has meant the right to be wrong (and to bear the consequences). But those who run from truth run from this religious tradition also and find that they have run from the very rule they need. The right to be wrong. Today we prefer to say 'everybody is right', which is a lie, and leads either to the despair and cynical passivity of nihilism or the deluded condition of truthiness in which we drift ever further from a clear vision of how things are. I agree with their fear: truth is fearsome. But truth is wedded to liberty and together they give birth to our civilisation.