The Struggle for Truth in America 8/18
There is something alarming going on today: a growing distrust of the truth and a lack of confidence in the “facts”.
The President and his circle of lawyers and spokespersons are not helping. Kellyanne Conway: There are “alternate facts”. Rudy Guiliani: “truth is relative”. Jay Sekulow: “facts evolve”. Recently the President said: “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what is happening”.
No, as John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things”, truth is constant and Reality is unrelenting. It catches up with us all.
Having a healthy mind is coming to terms with Reality as it is, not as what we want it or need it to be. It is the same for a healthy society.
Why did the Framers of the Constitution and Bill of Rights move first to protect the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press and the freedom of religion? Because they had seen how tyrants sought to manipulate the facts and the truth to buttress their hold on power.
In Alice in Wonderland we read this conversation: “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is, said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is”, said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be the master—that’s all.”
In a totalitarian society those in power seek to control the facts, suppress the truth and determine the meaning of words.
Sowing seeds of distrust, President Trump tells us news is fake, attacks the personal character of journalists with the vilest terms and calls the press the “enemy of the people”. The belief that there are facts and there is truth form the foundation of our legal and judicial institutions. When we take the stand in court, we “swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God”.
To be sure no one has a perfect grasp of the truth. As the apostle Paul said in Christian scripture, “Now we see through a glass darkly…now I know in part”. These words have the right measure of humility—and are needful for politicians, preachers and people who write opinion pieces for newspapers.
But we need to struggle to approximate the truth as best we humanly can. The best remedy for these tremulous times is the free flow of facts and information and the dogged exploration of the truth wherever it leads. So let us be vigilant in the face of those who erode our confidence in the facts and in truth itself. As John Adams said of those “stubborn facts”:
“ Whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”