The very concept of objective truth, wrote George Orwell, is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
America has always been a much more divided country than the teachers like to talk about- whites and people of color, slaves, women, Native-Americans, immigrants, the rich and the poor, the rural and the urban, the gay and the straight, the right and the left.
But within those divisions were many universal truths about the kinds of country we wanted to be, the kinds of freedom we wished to guarantee, the kinds of people we elected to lead us, the kinds of people we invited to our country, the idea that at some point in every disagreement or conflict, we came together for the common good, we viewed the world through similar prisms.
Those ideas – liberty, prosperity – were considered to be absolute, or universal truths in that they were the common values and ethics that shaped the idea of the country, if not always the realitya. It is true that these were the universal truths of mostly white men, it is also true that there are few, if any absolute or universal truths that bind the system together now.
And the white men- and women – are rising up once more, and demanding change again.
The left and the right, the Republicans and Democrats, the old institutions of journalism, are much too small and shallow to handle all of the new truths erupting all around us. They never saw it coming, none of them. That’s how you know they’re over.
It is all much bigger than them. I have no real idea if this is all for the better or all for the worse, or some of each.
But I do know that the election is changing the way I look at the world, challenging me to think differently about what I know and believe.
Do we all share any absolute or objective truths?
Objectivity is a central philosophical concept, related to reality and truth. Generally, objective truth means the state or quality of being true even outside of a subject’s individual biases, interpretations, feelings, fantasies and imaginations. I am a seeker of Objective Truth in all of my writing.
Like absolute truth, objective truth is fading out of the world, and away from our political system.
Absolute truth is defined as an inflexible and unalterable reality: fixed, invariable, unalterable facts. The nature of truth is crucial is crucial to the Christian faith. Not only does Christianity claim there is absolute truth (truth for everyone, everywhere, at all times) but it insists that truth about the world – reality – is that which corresponds to the way things truly are.
In John 14.6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
One absolute truth is that the sun heats the earth, although nothing else about the sun and the earth are universally believed now if they ever were.
I have lived with absolute and objective truths my whole life, and they are beginning to crumble around me, many of them. The idea of absolute truth and the idea of universal truth – a truth that applies to all places and all things – were first advanced by the Greeks, who invented the notion of democracy. The journalism I cherished and practiced preached Objective Truth, not always possible or each to do.
Universal truths – Jefferson and the founders talked of liberty and equality and the rights of property for white men – were accepted in one form or another by all peoples. Many of those universal truths do not apply any longer in the post-ideology election.
It is a fixed fact that five plus five equals ten, or that there are absolutely no square circles and there are absolutely no round squares. Our politics were held together by certain truths – Abraham Lincoln had a genius for articulating them, at least to part of the country – and by a common and shared information culture. They did not include everyone, but they did include most, if not all, of the people who were governing or seeking to govern the country.
There were always quarrels and divides, some awful and bloody, but the universal truths – a peaceful transition of power, the press as check and balance, the ethos of bi-partisan co-operation – held the center together, they were the glue that held the system in place.
They are no longer universally accepted or embraced truths. Many people are arguing about whether Donald Trump did this or reflected this, and I believe the latter. These new truths were out there simmering and boiling for years, he alone saw them and spoke to them.
In recent years, new communications and information technologies – blogs like this one, social media like Facebook and Twitter – have revolutionized the idea of what an absolute truth is. People don’t need media or politicians to tell them what to believe, they can set out on their own and choose their own truth. And they are. They do not pursue facts, but their own truth.
Truth is different from facts as I understand them both. If you go on Facebook, you will see vast streams of absolute truth, and hardly any real fact. Once, facts shaped and informed truth, now they are malleable, they follow “truth,” and are bent to fit into it. Politics itself, said George Orwell, is a mass of lies, evasions, hatred and schizophrenia.
The Internet, for better or worse, is the world’ most powerful empowerment tool.
It has enabled people to define their own truth, to coalesce around others who shared their idea of what the truth was. And truth has changed because of it, the priests and prophets of truth are being driven from the Temple.
These new technologies are still in their infancy, they are just beginning to show their power and range. The future will bring more truths, not fewer, there is no reversing this tide. And truth is now personal and individual and fluid and dynamic.
In politics, it is hard to find a universal truth – not about the poor, the environment, foreign policy, criminal reform, government spending, women’s rights, the nature of marriage, the role of faith in public life, gay and transgender rights, race, policing, taxation, health care. We will either find ways of talking to one another and working with one another, or we will all perish together.
I am curiously drawn to this challenge, it is an opportunity to see the world anew, to build something better, to defend truths that are sacred to me.
That rarely happens in a lifetime. There is nothing more creative than change, there is nothing healthier for entrenched ideologues and elites to get thrown into the dryer and twirled around. That is how democracy either reinvents itself or falls apart, and I feel I am witness to a rebirth, not an end. For me, Standing Rock is a window into the future, as significant a happening as the election.
For me, the work is clear. For most of my life, political parties and ideologue have been shaping my ideas, my mind, my beliefs. Not it is my turn to think for myself. No one will put a label on me, not the left, not the right, and I will not put one on myself. I hope I can never think that small.
We can flee the country or jump into the pool. I’m in.
In some ways, I have been doing this since the election, which has changed my mind. I have talked with at least a score or more people who voted differently than I did, the conversations were interesting and civil and revealing. I never felt as if I was talking to an enemy, I never felt threatened or endangered.
We can definitely talk to one another, we can even listen sometimes. It is absolutely possible, if we can stop talking to the mirror sometimes. A friend of mine said he would never sit down and talk with “racists, sexists, and idiots.” He suggested I was a faithless and weak-minded traitor for trying. He is free to do as he wishes.
If there are few absolute truths left in politics, there are many on a different and more personal level. I believe people are committed to community, and value community for themselves and their children. I believe people are committed to family. People seek personal connection and are eager and willing to help one another. I believe people wish to do good, given the chance. I believe people will hear Jesus’s plea and give hope to the poor.
We can argue all we want about entitlement programs for the elderly, but when I ask for help and support for the elderly people living in the Mansion Assisted Care Facility, an absolute truth quickly emerges: People of all ages, and different political truths, the left and the right and many others, send cards and messages, food and clothing, love and support.
From rural and urban areas, from all kinds of people hearts open and reach out. We all have mothers and fathers who get old, we all know what it means for people to care for them.
There are absolute truths beyond political parties and political labels, they are personal and very human. But I think now they live below our broken system, and apart from it. They are not connected to it. There is no humanity or inspiration in our politics. We are deserving of more choices than this.
People exist in a post-argument, post-ideological world. I see it every day in my work.
Many people fear and oppose immigration, but when we asked for donations to give 200 refugee children Welcome Bags, people from many different places and ideologies sent more than $3,000 in donations in 48 hours. There was no argument, no division, no raging on Facebook. Immigrant support organizations are being flooded with volunteers.
When I tried to help support the New York Carriage horses, I found myself in the company of conservatives and liberals, Jews and Catholics and Muslims, rich and poor people, lawyers and artists, immigrants and socialites, people on the left and people on the right, white people and black people.
We had no trouble working together.
Our political parties are morally bankrupt and broken, even corrupt.
They stand for nothing.
They make promises they can’t keep, they need too much money and take too much money, embittering the people they are supposed to serve. Our media has lost its soul and purpose, thus its credibility and trust, choking in the grip of corporate masters seeking only profit. They have made our country’s kind of ethical journalism, once the envy of the world, valueless and without honor.
Are we really living in a populist revolution? I’ll believe it when as many out-of-work steelworkers and coal miners join the cabinet as billionaires and generals.
The Greeks, who invented the idea of absolute truth, believed it to be a logical necessity for governing and for democracy.
It’s never going back to the old way, not for journalism, for politics, for ideologues, for people who love to stick labels on their words and the ideas of other people. Some people call this a revolution. They might be right. We are called to find new ways to talk to one another.
The information revolution has re-defined what truth means for almost everyone who uses it, and the Information Revolution is just a baby in terms of human history.
For me, there is a lot of good news. If I can reach across many of these divides with my blog, others can. And are.
For me, a new time, a new way to think about the world and my own humble part in it.
Beyond argument. Beyond ideology. Beyond the idea that there are absolute truths and no one but us knows what they are.