Start a revolution: tell the truth

Renouncing the search for truth is to condemn our lives to futility, argues Joseph Evans.

The brilliant Jonathan Sacks, now deceased but formerly Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, had many interesting things to say. And one of them was this: “If you don’t aim at truth, it’s just a grab for power.”

If we don’t recognize a truth beyond us, not of our making – of our fabrication – then we seek to manipulate the situation according to our own ends.

Reality becomes not only as we see it but as we require it to be, as it suits our purpose. Some people get this off to such a fine art that they even convince themselves of their fabrications. Some lobby groups have learnt to shout so loud and so effectively as to turn their particular fiction into received truth.

The best-selling spy writer John le Carré didn’t have the best start in life. In an interview with the British Guardian newspaper, he spoke of ‘the extraordinary, the insatiable criminality’ of his conman father. He was ‘relieved of any real concept of truth’, he said. For him, ‘truth was what you got away with’. Little wonder that le Carré made a career first in espionage itself, a world of camouflage and deceit, and then from writing about it.

People try to get away with many forms of ‘truth’ these days.

That their corrupt behaviour is actually good, even a right, or that they can lie to themselves and call it a lifestyle choice. They just need the support of fashion or enough voices on social media to justify their actions. It only takes a few ‘likes’ to convince ourselves that black is white.

Individualism

We live in an age of autonomy, of extreme individualism. Each one is their own pope, each can invent their own religion (cherry-picking from existing ones should it suit them) or their non-religion, if they prefer. The individual is the judge of truth which is only ever a truth for him or herself and even this until they change their mind.

In his book The Maelstrom of Love, the Irish theologian Oliver Treanor talks of ‘the sterile closedness of individualism’ and ‘the untruth of pure subjectivity where reality is never more than a point of view’. We refuse to accept reality as it is and base everything on our own subjective impressions. But isn’t this what madmen do?

Individualism is a big lie based on a partial truth. The partial truth is that we are indeed personal subjects who can and should make our own decisions. The big lie is to make this subjectivity absolute, as if we could fulfil ourselves and grasp reality without others. But the truth is that we are necessarily part of a bigger whole and can only find fulfillment within it.

We can never invent and then seek to navigate our own totally unique path in life. Our personal life story only makes sense within a far bigger narrative of which we are only a part, though, yes, this part has real value and significance. Even death, as I wrote here, is never a uniquely personal experience.

And if there is a story beyond us, there must be a truth beyond us.

But personal choice is now seen as the ultimate value. We can go so far as to choose to be what we like, even – should we so wish – redefining our identity. Choice overrides biology. Science, until recently considered the ultimate oracle, can be discarded when it doesn’t say what we want it to. Welcome to the world of whim.

And yet we fail to see how inconsistent we are. If we accept little truths (and we do all the time, such as the truth that we should listen to and respect each other), we should accept bigger ones.

We base our lives on mini-narratives (democracy is the best system; live and let live; fraudulent financial dealings are wrong …) and somehow want to convince ourselves there can be no mega-narratives.

For example, if there’s no bigger picture, why shouldn’t we lie? Why should (and does) falsehood revolt us? Is the expectation to tell the truth merely social convention to ensure that we get along? Is it just evolution? But why do we get along better by not lying? What does this wish for truth say about us, our being and our possible creation? Why are we wired to want the truth, so much that to calm our consciences we have to persuade ourselves our lies aren’t lies but are just my subjective ‘truth’?

If truth is so important to our being – we hate to be lied to even when we lie to others – might it not suggest a greater truth, a truth beyond us, even a being who is all truth?

Truth in the dock

Truth, and the making of truth claims, is in the dock. And to be fair, its detractors have a point. Wars have been fought about the ‘truth’ of opposing doctrinal positions. One man’s truth is another’s deadly heresy. And didn’t the Soviet Union use a newspaper entitled “Pravda” (Truth) to impose its unilateral vision of the world?

And with the claim to possess the truth came intolerance and imposition. One of the many great features of our age which we must defend and promote with all our strength is a greater respect for tolerance and diversity (notwithstanding the online witch hunts which try to turn back the clock).

What’s more, truth can be hard. It can be hard to discern amidst the many voices claiming its possession and it can, on occasions, be painful to accept when you do find it. Little wonder so many feel disinclined to hunt for it or think they’ve found it when really they simply have a blurred pastiche. And so people prefer moralism – some vague, fashionable cause of indignation – to real morality which requires more thought and personal commitment.

The abandonment of the search for truth is certainly a modern problem. In the past accepted the notion of truth: they simply argued about what exactly that truth is. 

Now the very notion of truth has to defend itself and from the start the jury is prejudiced against it. A potent cocktail of philosophical relativism, Marxism and simply weak thinking has made any claim to possess truth seem at best unfounded or at worst dangerous and authoritarian. But these are merely affirming, dogmatically, as ‘truth’, as an imposed epistemological norm or praxis, the absence of truth.

Sacks explains that “one of the aftermaths of Marxism, persisting in such movements as postmodernism and post-colonialism, is the idea that there is no such thing as truth. There is only power. The prevailing ‘discourse’ in a society represents, not the way things are, but the way the ruling power (the hegemon) wants things to be.” Of course, Marxism then in practice seeks to fill the gap it has created and become itself the ruling power.

“All reality,” Sack’s analysis continues,  is ‘socially constructed’ to advance the interests of one group or another. The result is a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, in which we no longer listen to what anyone says; we merely ask, what interest are they trying to advance. Truth, they say, is merely the mask worn to disguise the pursuit of power.” 

So keep away from truth claims or even from seeking the truth. Don’t go down there, we’re told – and many current ideological fashions survive precisely by forbidding deep thought. But why shouldn’t we ‘go down there’? Why not ask ourselves these deeper questions?

Why, for example, the persistence throughout the centuries of some basic common ethical code? Because for all the differences of nuance from time immemorial there has been agreement about certain forms of behaviour considered either good or bad. 

Why have humans always seen it as wrong to lie or steal or take innocent life? And why is man – throughout the centuries, throughout the world – so persistently a religious being? Whatever the rights or wrongs of specific forms of religion, the very tendency to be religious might just say something about how we are wired and what, or who, we are wired for.

A social good

But telling the truth isn’t only a personal need, it’s a social one. It is essential for the social fabric.

There is no authentic communication without the search for truth, Sacks explains.

Every conversation is premised on this search, as mundane as the topic might be. The comment ‘what lovely weather’ points to a climatic system beyond us which we can both recognize.

And amazingly, people do in general tell the truth. The extraordinary phenomenon of online commerce witnesses to this. Certainly, one day someone might cheat you but it’s the exception which proves the rule. Online commerce functions because by and large people keep their word: you actually get what you have paid for.

A revolutionary act

The philosopher-playwright and heroic dissident Václav Havel explained that what eventually brought down Communist tyranny in Eastern and Central Europe was when people started to have the courage to tell the truth.

He himself suffered imprisonment for his defence of truth. The Communist system, he said, was based on deceit. No-one dared speak the truth for fear of possible reprisals. But when people found the courage to speak out, suffering for it but still speaking, then little by little they started a movement which eventually brought down the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall.

As the saying goes, wrongly attributed to George Orwell, ‘in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act’. But whoever came up with it, it’s true, and I use this last word deliberately and with subversive intent.

Two key practices

We can help build a new society by greater honesty in our dealings, starting by greater honesty with ourselves. Because often the first victims of our lies are ourselves.

The Christian tradition has a practice which could be beneficial to all of us, whatever our belief system might be. It is called examination of conscience.

This is a daily practice at the end of each day – three or so minutes would suffice – in which we look at the day and how we’ve lived it, trying to be as honest with ourselves as we can.

What have I done well today? We should recognize and be grateful for this. What have I done badly? We should face this clearly and without excuses. What could I have done better? This could lead to growth, especially if we pinpoint one or two specific things to work on the next day.

And with this goes another necessary practice, fraternal correction. Instead of gossiping about others, which not only harms the one spoken about but destroys us and the social fabric, we correct them honestly, to their face and for their good. 

Such a correction is not the same as angrily telling someone off for something on the spot, which usually does more harm than good. It is something we reflect upon – a bad habit we see in them (excessive drinking, laziness, persistent dishonesty, or the like) – that we feel in conscience we should point out to them.

Out of prudence we might check first with an appropriate person, someone in authority for example, but if he or she agrees, we go ahead and say what has to be said, as much as the person in question – and we – might find this uncomfortable. 

The search for truth

There are great figures in history who had the courage and intellectual clarity genuinely to search for the truth. People like Augustine of Hippo or John Henry Newman come to mind. It led them to sacrifice and loss but ultimately to greater gains, and the whole of humanity has benefitted from their quest and insights.

And surely everyone would benefit if, instead of sterile conflict (Christians among themselves, or between Christians and Muslims or Muslims and Jews or atheists and believers) we actually worked together to seek the truth whatever it might be.

Truth exists. We touch it everyday. Renouncing the search for it is renouncing the search for meaning.

Reducing truth to a subjective opinion is condemning ourselves to search alone and – let’s be honest – what qualifications do we have to do so? Most of us are not brilliant intellectuals or particularly well-read and we haven’t received special illuminations, so how can we claim to have a special grasp of the truth?

Working with others, allowing ourselves to be guided by the wisdom of others, including the insights of faith, is a surer way forward. Truth is a journey. We never fully possess it, but it is a beautiful land into which we can travel ever more. And it’s even better if we travel in company.

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