Thoughts While Surfing
I'm sick to death of hearing things
from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites
All I want is the truth
Just gimme some truth -- John Lennon
These days, I've had to recognize myself as a decidedly "old school" user of technology. 
(The first computer I ever owned was an XT laptop that sported 720K of RAM; this meant I could play with 120 whole K above what DOS used. Nobody cares about this, I realize, but I nevertheless take some pride in having done word processing, spreadsheets, databases and used the Internet on that old machine, which is all that most people use today's ridiculously overpowered computers to do.) I don't own a cell phone; I find them annoying, and cell service is poor in Jackson, Maine. (Our neighbors, who have an electricity-generating windmill tower on their hilltop site, could probably send their kids to college on the rent from a cell tower, but they haven't been offered one yet.) Don't get me wrong; we're not luddites. We have digital cameras and send photos via email; I just don't need to send poor-quality photos instantly through my telephone. Silly me, I thought telephones were for hearing someone's voice.
This didn't start out to be a rant about technology, but rather a meditation on the nature of 21st-century truth. This may take some explaining. This evening I happened to download the fine program Democracy Now, which offers a brand of investigative journalism not often seen in these days of exceedingly advanced Bread and Circuses. They presented a report on the influence of a popular TV series on military policies regarding torture.
Say WHAT?
Well, as I said, we're old school up here in Waldo County. We could get cable, if we wanted to equip ourselves with a satellite dish, but, frankly, we have kids, and -- no. So, I had not familiarized myself with the series 24. I had heard that this series spends, like, a whole season exploring what happens to its main character during a 24-hour period. As an old English major, I remember thinking, "Wow, popular culture has caught up to James Joyce." However: nobody told me that the title 24 always refers to the number of hours that the show's hero, played by Kiefer Sutherland, has to save Our American Way of Life from Terrorism -- and in order to do this he always has to extract crucial information from enemy combatants, by any means necessary. Yes, friends, it had escaped my notice that the Sutherland character has been torturing towelheads in primetime, serving as a role model for our Men and Women in Uniform and bringing America's TV viewers up to speed on the hard facts of life in the post-911 world.
Call me naive, but that strikes me, dare I say it -- dare I admit the degree to which I live in a comfortable bubble of rural idealism -- dare I accept my worst suspicions about the corrosive lie of how "our whole world changed after 9/11" -- dare I try to find some way to talk to my kids about the idea of democracy -- that strikes me as over the top.
As some indication, perhaps, of the extent to which this revelation rocked me, I flipped my Web browser to Google and typed in "truth". (Didn't expect much, but I was feeling a bit desperate.) The first entry was a very hip, snazzy anti-tobacco website, funded by the tobacco industry (albeit not by choice). The second was the ubiquitous entry from "Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia".
I clicked it, and was, I confess, somewhat surprised to find a brief, cogent survey of the major philosophical currents on the concept of "truth". If it was a bit sparse on religious, as opposed to philosophical, notions -- and particularly non-western conceptions -- of truth, it couldn't really be blamed, and anyway, I could add to the article if I felt the need. One thing did bother me, though. At the end of the introductory paragraph, which efficiently set the stage for the explorations to follow, someone had added the sentence, "Truth is a commodity."
Clearly, that was graffitti, so I deleted it.
Wow! How do they manage a project like this? I was allowed to just up and modify this article, on a whim. A look at the "Talk" page linked to it shows a long and thoughtful dialogue on its production and editing. (But there was no requirement that I justify my edit there.) It certainly seemed as if the "Truth is a commodity" quip had just been scrawled there on the fly, and one of the serious editors would have erased it, had I not. So, now, despite my lack of philosophical training, I've become involved in the community of scholars involved in Wikipedia's dynamic exploration of "truth".
It's not that the statement "truth is a commodity" was inappropriate to the discussion at hand; the problem was its assertive tone -- that it was in the wrong place. The introductory paragraph (which, according to the accompanying discussion, had undergone careful and contentious editing) was not making value-loaded statements; it was merely introducing the various directions from which the subject of "truth" could be approached. The philosophical current along which truth might be considered as "a commodity" is known as the "constructivist" theory of truth. This theory broadly holds (quoting Wikipedia):
that truth is constructed by social processes, is historically and culturally specific, and that it is in part shaped through the power struggles within a community. ...perceptions of truth are viewed as contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience.
This could be seen as a slippery slope; it is contrapuntal, in any case, to a "correspondence" theory of truth, in which it is deemed possible for statements to correspond to the actual state of affairs, as demonstrated by objective facts. Whether or not truth can truly conform to objective reality, it is abundantly clear that most people really, really want it to. When the president says, "We do not torture," we want there not to actually be torture going on in our name; we are not reassured by triangulations about what constitutes torture in a legal sense. If US personnel are torturing detainees, we want it to matter, to register with people, even if the president says we're not doing it, and evidence of our doing it is kept far enough from the limelight, and it has been denounced by the leading candidate, and most people are too busy or too lazy to find out about it. It seems to me that people are happiest, most secure and free, when they can hear true statements that correspond to the actual state of affairs. We tend to think that is the reason why there is such a thing as journalism, and why it's important.
Ah, but if only things were that simple. Are people really happy and free when they are told the truth -- or are they happy and free when they believe they are being told the truth? This question has become all the more important, it seems to me, in today's flowering of new media. Today's blogosphere makes it possible to get a tolerably complete roundup of current events, delivered with just the right spin to land in your particular comfort zone. Maybe, for instance, the question of whether "we" are engaging in torture is "simply not the question". Does anyone actually think we shouldn't defend ourselves, when we're under attack? When someone is pointing a loaded gun, or aiming a hijacked airliner, at your loved ones, you do what's necessary to defend them and you don't wait around for "due process" to do it!
Serious consideration of a constructivist theory of truth, or epistemology, casts the age-old problem of political "lying" in a new light.
Of course it possible for someone to simply lie, for self-serving reasons. But is it possible to tell a "constructivist truth", for good reasons, which is (nonetheless) contrary to the actual state of affairs? Wishing may not make it so, but -- does lying?
In his book, The Unconquerable World, Jonathan Schell recounts how the actions taken by Kennedy and Kruschev during the Cuban Missile crisis were pretty far from what we all, for many years, have known them to be. The event showed that the paramount consideration in Cold War politics was never the actual destructive threat, but rather the threat's credibility. During the missile crisis, both Kruschev and Kennedy had side conversations with advisors -- published decades later in memoirs -- revealing that each believed the use of thermonuclear weapons to be unthinkable and insane. Yet each had to credibly threaten to use them. The entire Cuban Missile Crisis turned out to be about perception. The Soviets declared they would only remove their missiles if the US pledged not to invade Cuba. The US, which had not intended to invade Cuba, agreed. The Soviets demanded that the US remove nuclear missiles from Turkey, but the US refused to do so, only to comply in a secret, back-channel deal that the Soviets privately agreed to keep quiet about. Thus the USSR appeared to be able to force a concession from the US, while the US appeared not to have backed down.
That was, perhaps, an understandable "white lie," serving to defuse a very tense situation. But: can an ideological lie be true? Is it possible that if a "constructivist truth" is told long and well enough, and is believed enough, then it will have been true all along?
It seems to me that something like that underlies the rhetoric of Dialectical Materialism, providing what seems to be the bedrock of absolute certainty with which many Marxists are able to make statements which seem -- to the unschooled, at least -- quite controversial. It is maintained that a sufficiently rigorous and correct reading of Marxist theory will yield unerring political analysis -- a sort of philosophical infallibility, to counteract, perhaps, the spiritual one claimed by the Catholic Pope. This leads to great factionalism among Marxist thinkers, of course, for the pursuit of rigorously correct analysis is fraught with nuance.
It appears to lead to something else, too. A belief in "constructivist truth" can lead to (what I will generously call) honest confusion, in the minds of certain intellectuals, between venal self-promotion and valid insight. Cooked evidence, evasion and bald-faced lying start to seem not so bad, if they are employed in the service of exposing, say, the contradictions inherent in the capitalist system. As it would for one of the Puritan Elect, a lucrative book deal merely serves to validate the power of the author's revolutionary insight.
Of course, Marxists aren't the only ones who sometimes come to believe in their own lies; writers across the political spectrum succumb to that temptation. A constructivist theory of truth yields techniques that can be employed with profit by the grinders of many different axes. Freed from the demand of actually describing the state of affairs as it is -- indeed, suspecting the very impossibility of doing so -- a rousing approximation of reality becomes quite good enough. Powerfully told, "truth" can be quite a valuable commodity.
Yet, we can't avoid the question: Is it possible to describe the actual state of affairs in a way that is clearly and definitely true?
Who the hell knows? But I want to ask a more immediate question: How sure does one have to be? I think that one of the most profoundly true statements ever made in public policy was the famous judgement of Justice John Paul Stevens on how to decide whether something is pornographic: "I know it when I see it." It would seem, at first glance, that his statement could be assailed on many levels -- Who are you? What's your background? Have you thought about evolving cultural norms? Have you extensive experience in the genre? -- yet, although his statement has has been carefully parsed by lawyers, every layperson I've ever talked to knows what Stevens meant. Even devotees of pornography know what it is that they're enjoying. Yes, gray areas exist that are, in fact, debatable, but: I know it when I see it.
I propose to coin a term to help us cut this philosophical knot. When we seek to evaluate the Capital T truth of a statement, one crucial aspect of the statement is how asymptotic it is. In other words, is it up high on the curve, where it gets vanishingly close to the straight line, the distance is imperceptible, and things are ambiguous? Or is it right down there in the curvy part where you can plainly see it? Physicists have an analogous discussion. They ask whether a physical phenomenon occurs in the "normal" realm, where our senses can be trusted and Newtonian mechanics make valid predictions -- or in the teeny-tiny quantum realm (or the giant cosmological realm), where exotic laws hold sway. If the phenomenon we're observing is on earth, and perceptible to our senses, then Newtonian mechanics are just ducky for describing it; we can proceed from there, and we needn't concern ourselves with notions of quanta or relativity.
I submit that in politics, also, many phenomena are far enough inside our realm of perception and understanding that they can be shown to be objectively true, within normal limits of language and shared knowledge (without which no community is possible). I think that statements such as "Clinton fooled around with Lewinsky" and "Bush lied about Iraqi WMD" are right down there in the curvy part where you can see them. These statements are not the least bit asymptotic. Statements that deny them lie within the range that we can confidently label as "false".
Political education, then, amounts to enlarging the range of perception and understanding within which one can view political events clearly, leaving fewer up in the rarefied zone of nuanced ambiguity. Many people think this is too much of a challenge in today's complex, blogofied world. I doubt that it is. Certainly the potential for "making an impact" still exists. In the United States, Constitutional Democracy has taken some strong hits in recent years, but I think it still functions on the federal level. On local and state levels it clearly does still function, despite the corruptive influences of Big Money and weird fundamentalism (another take, I recognize, on the issue of "truth"). Just look at the very real power of state referenda (however misguided), and the scores of US cities which have, without any possibility of local benefit or advantage, adopted resolutions calling for the president's impeachment.
OK, so maybe we can influence the political process, but -- what shall we try to do? What makes sense? How can we know? (Shouldn't we just let the experts decide?)
Political education is good for everyone, and it behooves us all to expand our zones of perception and understanding to enable us to fathom subtle policy issues -- but we need not, indeed we must not, wait for that. There is plenty that is foully, egregiously wrong -- right there in the curvy part where we can see it. If there weren't, there wouldn't be such an urgent need to keep us distracted.
Well, what do you know. Have I been out of it, or what: 24 is now in its sixth season. It debuted in -- well, now, of course, it would have, wouldn't it? -- the fall of 2001. Here is another example of what I was saying about the "comfort zone" of today's media. I mean, I tend not to tune in to Fox, either on TV or the Net. If I had, I couldn't have missed the fact that 24 is a smash hit; people across this great land of ours (including Karl Rove and Dick Cheney) have been following Jack Bauer's every hiccup, all this time. There are fanzines and discussion boards; there are posters and spinoffs, hints and allegations. A recent cover story in Rolling Stone follows Keifer Sutherland through a day of his appealingly boyish lifestyle; he lives rather fastidiously in a corner of a huge space, in an abandoned steel factory, with a collection of guitars. He has an 18-year old daughter from a failed early marriage, he drinks a fair amount and is a fairly good-natured drunk, he expresses concern that he ought to try, at some point, to "move ahead" with his life -- but he has made a really lot of money on 24; it revived a flagging career, and "moving ahead" seems not to be an urgent concern. The Rolling Stone article doesn't give us word one on what Sutherland might think about the meaning of the Jack Bauer saga. Other interviews reveal that his politics lean leftward, that "it's just a TV show", and that Sutherland is even aware of the view, generally held in the trade, that torture tends to be useless, seldom yielding any valuable information. I'll have to check out the show (seasons 1-5 are available on DVD) to test my theory that Sutherland's ambiguity about the meaning of what he does in this show lends a sort of troubled verisimilitude to his characterization that renders the show all the more compelling to ordinary viewers. Kiefer strikes me as a whole lot hipper and more worldly than, say, Lynndie England. I mean, he'd have to be pretty dense not to a little bit disturbed by the implications of what he does for a living. But, he makes something like a million dollars per episode, and sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.
It might be thought remarkable that someone as sophisticated as Amy Goodman -- a deeply-respected beacon for the sizable community of people who are sick at heart over the Iraq war and the US's thuggish foreign policy -- would have taken so long to notice 24 and its implications -- especially since her show has worked assiduously to keep the issues of torture and "extraordinary rendition" in the spotlight, where few other media outlets have bothered. Apparently Goodman and her staff don't tune in to Fox TV, either. (I've been living in a bubble, yes -- but I can plead the excuse that my wife and kids live there with me; we have a pretty good time there and the world is quite real enough, thank you very much; we'd be crazy to think we could really hide from it.) Yet it seems a pretty important story to have escaped notice in the progressive press for five years.
Should we worry about that? The Democracy Now report suggested, in effect, that a kind of "constructivist truth" has been forged around US torture policy, aided by the pop-culture propaganda of 24. I really hope that isn't so -- to me, at least, the tale of Jack Bauer does nothing to make US torture policy any more ambiguous, or its defenses any more true. 24 pulls people into the "global war on terror" mindset, making it hip and edgy, creating new hype and markets, and isn't that just TV doing what TV does best? But -- I haven't watched the show. The phenomenon of 24 has achieved its prominence without the help of Amy Goodman, or me -- and whether we like it or not, a lot more people pay attention to Jack Bauer's take on geopolitical affairs than to Amy's, or mine. It may be that Dick Cheney and his gang are counting on that -- but more likely, I suspect they're amused by it; they see it as a kind of "poetic justice".
Ah, but you see, TV might be insidious, TV might be dangerous, but people know -- don't they? -- that TV isn't real. So the story of Jack Bauer can only have so much power. Wow, I hope that's true. For what it's worth, I believe that there are such things, in the world, as true statements about the actual state of affairs. And I believe that it is easier to discern the truth than we are most often led to believe. As of today, "Truth is a commodity" has not reappeared in Wikipedia's entry on "truth". Help me out with that, if you get a chance, won't you?
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Lindy Davies is Program Director of the Henry George Institute.
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Also see: Bush, Rumsfeld, Gonzales -- Dishonest, Immoral, or What?
Even in 2005, More Citizens Ready to See Bush Impeached Than Wanted Clinton Impeached
Lies, Torture and More Against U.S. Prisoners |
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