Conditions for Truth

The truth, we hear, is in trouble. The world, particularly ‘social media’, the medium whereby increasing numbers of people obtain their news is becoming saturated with ‘fake news’, that is information formed mainly from the opinions and prejudices of some commentator, often with an agenda of their own, which feeds into the belief systems of an already receptive audience.

While the problem might be more widespread or less hidden than in earlier eras, it is not unique to our own. Totalitarian regimes have usually manipulated the news for their own purposes: to convince the population of the paradise they live in, or that one disgraced faction was really treasonous, and so on. George Orwell wrote a book about it, after all.

I read recently that Primo Levi, when in a concentration camp, thought about chemistry. Chemistry, he considered, was not something that the authorities could distort. Granted, they could use the results of chemistry to their own ends, but the truths of chemistry – that potassium explodes on contact with water, for example – were fixed truths. No amount of spin of fake news could alter that.

Similarly, in the investigation of the Challenger space shuttle tragedy, Richard Feynman remarked that nature could not be fooled. The launch occurred in spite of warnings about the temperature being too low because managers needed a successful launch. The cold caused the O-rings which sealed the fuel tanks to become brittle and one snapped, leading to an explosion of the fuel. The world view constructed by the managers overrode the reality of the situation as known by the engineers, and the result was a disaster.

Science, and the scientific method we have been discussing are, therefore, aimed at finding some sort of truth. While science might be complex, uncertain (in a technical sense anyway) and often unclear and unknown, it is so in a determinate way. We spend a lot of time determining exactly how uncertain our results are. Error assessment is the bane of every science undergraduate’s life, but it is necessary and essential for understanding what we know.

The alternative view is that reality is a human construct. We have certain perceptual inputs and we make of them what we will. I can, therefore, construct my world, especially my world view, and it is as good as anyone else’s world view. Therefore, I can conclude from what I see around me that immigrants come to my country and take all the jobs and that immigrants must, therefore, be a bad thing. I might only discover that the immigrants do jobs no-one else will when I have achieved their removal and discovered that no-one is willing to pick the lettuces in the local farms. My world view has run into a bit of harsh reality and come off worse, but that does not mean I will particularly change my views. I will probably invent some additional story to do with profiteering farmers or work-shy youngsters to cover my embarrassment.

It takes an awful lot to persuade someone to change a world view. The world is a complex place and we have to invent stories to get through it. The question is how closely those stories have to relate to reality to enable us to get through the day. Often, the answer is not very much, but then every once in a while, reality really does bite us.

On these occasions we need to rethink our positions. We might have thought, for example, that a famine in Ethiopia is simply a result of the normal increase and decrease in population, the cycle of life and death, of plenty and dearth. If, however, we put on different spectacles and see the suffering of ordinary people trying to live their lives and raise their children, we might think again. If we hear the stories of civil war and displacement which have disrupted food supply and the farming year, we might think about human wrongdoing and evil. Taking another look at a situation, carefully, using reliable sources not just rhetoric and spin, leads us to another view of the world.

How do we get there, however? Rethinking is hard work. Finding out something new is hard enough, but redoing our own views, changing the ones we find untenable, is not only hard but uncomfortable. We can feel that we have to question everything, that in the barrel of our thoughts every apple is bad. This is not usually the case, but we do have to find the bad ones and remove them.

The conditions of finding the truth, then, involve a willingness for hard thinking and for change. They also require sources of good information or at least information that we can assess for reliability from the world around us. Simply listening to the sources that agree with our prejudices already established will not do. We need to listen to the dissenters, the questioners and the marginalised. We need to ask why they dissent, question and are othered. And we need to assess whether they have a point, not just whether they agree with us or not.

This is really hard. No human has access to total truth, even on a limited subject. We all have our biases and our blind spots. We can all, no matter how expert, learn something new. Nature is full of surprises for the scientist open to them. So too is the human world for those who are not so blinkered as to ignore everything that does not conform to their own opinions.

In short, the conditions for truth rely on a degree of authenticity in ourselves and in the world around us. We need the results of reliable information presented in as unbiased a manner as possible. Without that, we cannot make a judgment about the world and it human activities. But we also need to be authentic within ourselves, to be prepared to listen to and engage with others, especially if we feel that we are unlikely to agree with them, at least initially. And that is hard.