Philosophical musings
Nov. 19th, 2005 23:18![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillI was waiting for a pie to cool down enough to carry it to the car today, so I was poking around a little on the 'net. And I read another article which unearthed a thought I've had many times... no matter how many times I mull it over, I still don't have any answers.
Josh Marshall was talking about the mentality of the White House, and why some people think that "lies vs. truth" isn't quite the real issue -- that the runup to the war was treated very much like building a court case is for a lawyer. Whether the client is innocent or guilty (whether the invasion was justified or not) is not the point: the point is to gather as much information as you can for the side you're trying to argue, and discard the rest. Invasion was the goal, and all information was sorted as "pro-invasion" vs. "anti-invasion" without paying attention to validity.
That made me think about a realization I had ages ago, when dealing with pathological liars. There are people in the world (quite a few, apparently) for whom "truth" is not an inherent quality. For many of us, there are qualities to information that are independent of source or presentation style, just like chemical elements have inherent qualities independent of form or quantity. Carbon always has a certain number of atoms in each gram, whether it's a gram of diamonds or a gram of soot. Information can be verifiable, scientific, factual, neutral of bias. It doesn't matter whether it's Molly Ivins or Rush Limbaugh -- if someone gives me a piece of information, I can generally determine what about it is fact, what is opinion, and what is simply untruthful, given some time to cross-check with other sources and verify it.
For a lot of people, though, "truth" is flexible. It depends on who's saying it, it depends on how it's phrased. Sometimes it doesn't matter at all whether something is factual or truthful, if it goes against the way you think the world works (or should work). Truth is what I say it is, or what the pastor says it is, or what this guy I really like says it is.
For someone like me who considers truth to be an absolute metric -- either a statement is true or it is not -- it's an alien sort of thinking. It's disturbing as well, as it paints a picture of a world that has fluid definitions for just about anything. Pi is equal to 3? okay. General relativity makes no sense, so it's got to be wrong? okay. This isn't in matters where we just don't really know yet (is saturated fat really bad for you? Beats me) but in things where the evidence is overwhelming in one direction. No one wants to look over all the evidence, because that's time consuming and boring. But that people take statements at face value and accept them as absolute truth without ever caring about what sort of evidence there might be either way bothers me.
What's worse is the implications. Moral values are based on a less scientific set of truths, but ones which are no less verifiable. When I see people making baldfaced statements like "Black people are inherently less intelligent and prone to corruption" or "Islam is all about killing your enemies" I wonder how much of that certainty comes from just willing these things to be true, or accepting that "truth" is "what the pastor says" rather than an inherent value.
Scientific advances are implemented by politicians as much as corporations, and in both cases scientific truth gets trumped by personal definitions of truth. I don't need to go into the mess that was the climate change debate. Truth can also be defined as "politically expedient"... which is how we come back to the runup to the Iraq invasion.
I don't know what to think about this state of affairs. I'm not sure whether it's a form of sociopathy (though the corollary of "right vs. wrong" might well be) or whether it's just ignorance and laziness. Or both. I don't know what, if anything, can be done about it. I just know that it drives me crazy when people redefine what is a universal constant to me, an inherent value. And that's why I guess I will always be at odds with some people.
Josh Marshall was talking about the mentality of the White House, and why some people think that "lies vs. truth" isn't quite the real issue -- that the runup to the war was treated very much like building a court case is for a lawyer. Whether the client is innocent or guilty (whether the invasion was justified or not) is not the point: the point is to gather as much information as you can for the side you're trying to argue, and discard the rest. Invasion was the goal, and all information was sorted as "pro-invasion" vs. "anti-invasion" without paying attention to validity.
That made me think about a realization I had ages ago, when dealing with pathological liars. There are people in the world (quite a few, apparently) for whom "truth" is not an inherent quality. For many of us, there are qualities to information that are independent of source or presentation style, just like chemical elements have inherent qualities independent of form or quantity. Carbon always has a certain number of atoms in each gram, whether it's a gram of diamonds or a gram of soot. Information can be verifiable, scientific, factual, neutral of bias. It doesn't matter whether it's Molly Ivins or Rush Limbaugh -- if someone gives me a piece of information, I can generally determine what about it is fact, what is opinion, and what is simply untruthful, given some time to cross-check with other sources and verify it.
For a lot of people, though, "truth" is flexible. It depends on who's saying it, it depends on how it's phrased. Sometimes it doesn't matter at all whether something is factual or truthful, if it goes against the way you think the world works (or should work). Truth is what I say it is, or what the pastor says it is, or what this guy I really like says it is.
For someone like me who considers truth to be an absolute metric -- either a statement is true or it is not -- it's an alien sort of thinking. It's disturbing as well, as it paints a picture of a world that has fluid definitions for just about anything. Pi is equal to 3? okay. General relativity makes no sense, so it's got to be wrong? okay. This isn't in matters where we just don't really know yet (is saturated fat really bad for you? Beats me) but in things where the evidence is overwhelming in one direction. No one wants to look over all the evidence, because that's time consuming and boring. But that people take statements at face value and accept them as absolute truth without ever caring about what sort of evidence there might be either way bothers me.
What's worse is the implications. Moral values are based on a less scientific set of truths, but ones which are no less verifiable. When I see people making baldfaced statements like "Black people are inherently less intelligent and prone to corruption" or "Islam is all about killing your enemies" I wonder how much of that certainty comes from just willing these things to be true, or accepting that "truth" is "what the pastor says" rather than an inherent value.
Scientific advances are implemented by politicians as much as corporations, and in both cases scientific truth gets trumped by personal definitions of truth. I don't need to go into the mess that was the climate change debate. Truth can also be defined as "politically expedient"... which is how we come back to the runup to the Iraq invasion.
I don't know what to think about this state of affairs. I'm not sure whether it's a form of sociopathy (though the corollary of "right vs. wrong" might well be) or whether it's just ignorance and laziness. Or both. I don't know what, if anything, can be done about it. I just know that it drives me crazy when people redefine what is a universal constant to me, an inherent value. And that's why I guess I will always be at odds with some people.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-20 11:20 (UTC)First of all, you define "truth" as scientific truth. Based on evidence, testing, verifying, and cross-checking. If something has more evidence in favor than against it, it's more likely to be true. But this simply isn't the context in which most people view the word. That's simply not what it means. For many, "truth" is defined by what their faith says, or what everyone around them knows to be true. This doesn't make their view inherently wrong, it just means they're using a different word than you are. This is where it becomes difficult, because who can say which definition is actually more appropriate for real life?
The other big problem is that for a large number of people, almost certainly the majority of Americans out there, "true" and "false" actually don't matter. They're academic terms. They don't apply to real life. What matters isn't "true or false", but what really matters is rather "right or wrong". The big point here is that your whole analysis is quite obviously predicated on one very big assumption, and that assumption is that "truth is right (good), and lies are wrong (bad)". Most of the world, however, knows this isn't the case. Sometimes lies are good, if they achieve a good goal. Sometimes the truth can do more harm than good.
And this, fundamentally, is why the "truth vs. lies" debate doesn't matter. Because most people don't care whether the arguments were true or not, all they really care about is whether they were right or not, and that's a much fuzzier area.