On Truth - dsaunders 030621 R10.01.24.rtf 10.01.

24 2:52 PM

How to handle the truth, in troubled Times

By Doug Saunders
DSaunders@globeandmail.ca
Saturday, June 21, 2003 -
The Globe and Mail Page F3 (Permission to publish this has been requested.)

For those of us in the truth-telling business, these are perilous times. Our craft
was already a quixotic impossibility, in which we tried to describe the world by
spraying a few hundred words onto a blank page in a few hours of desperate
typing every day.

That's bad enough. When I write news stories, I often wish they would put an
italic note at the bottom: "Based on a true story." Even if all the facts are
correct, reporting is like doing portraiture with a paint roller. It may be true, but it
doesn't feel right.

And now even that thin veneer of credibility has come in for a good scraping,
with news that some of the best and most carefully truth-screened reporting in
the world, the front-page stories in The New York Times, has been concocted
using fact-gathering methods that are deeply smelly.

A point that is often overlooked in this much-covered crisis is that none of the
dubious Times stories were untrue. Unlike the elegant features fabricated by
Stephen Glass for The New Republic in the 1990s, they were not wholly
invented. Small details were imagined or fabricated, but the bulk of the disgraced
material was, on the whole, factually correct.

To borrow a useful distinction from British philosopher Bernard Williams, who

died last week at the age of 73, this is not a crisis of truth, it is a crisis of
truthfulness.

The outsized reaction to The Times' lapse into laziness is, I believe, evidence of
a much broader discontent. The Times itself, a politically moderate paper with
very high standards, has spawned two magazines during the past ten years, one
from the left and one from the right, each devoted exclusively to "proving" that
the paper's contents are untrue.

The left-wing version was actually titled 'Lies of Our Times,' though neither organ

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was really in the business of finding untrue facts per se. Rather, each tried to
show that The Times was ignoring the "real" story, often involving the Middle
East – their problem was not hard truth, but the air of truthfulness. (The right-
wing one was called 'Smarter Times.') Their authors, like many people today, did
not really believe that the world around them was truthful, or (sometimes) that
truthfulness was even really possible.

It is here that Bernard Williams has left us an invaluable inheritance. If

philosophers ever became kings, they would all be like Mr. Williams. His books
were clear, funny, dramatic and readable, like great novels. He devoted himself
to real public issues: The British government stopped banning "obscene"
literature in the 1970s after he won them over with his "harm condition," which
declares that "no conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown
to harm someone."

His final book, Truth and Truthfulness, has come along at exactly the right
moment. It both describes our current crisis of truth, and offers hope for a
resolution.

In the 300 years since God's will stopped being the leading explanation for
events, Mr. Williams begins, our desire for truthfulness has led humans to
believe that we ought to question everything, and rightly so. Inevitably, though,
this has led many of us to question the value or possibility of truth itself, and
some to believe that truth is impossible or misleading.

It began in the world of higher thought, which quickly filtered down to popular
belief. The Englightenment philosophers pointed out that "reality" is experienced
only through our (not always trustworthy) senses. Nietzsche noted that there are
"no facts, only interpretations." Wittgenstein argued that truth is constructed only
of ever-shifting language. And the postmodern philosophers built on this by
repeatedly pointing out that truth is merely a "social construct" endlessly rebuilt
to serve different human societies.

All of this is quite valid, and Mr. Williams is quite happy to accept these
arguments. But, he argues, to the extent that truth is socially constructed
(usually from combinations of very real and irrefutable facts), we have even
more of an obligation to get to work constructing it. And we should do so using
our best available tools, sincerity and accuracy.

"We know that the world was not made for us, or we for the world, that our
history tells no purposive story, and that there is no position outside the world or
outside history from which we might hope to authenticate our activities," he
writes. This makes our responsibility to truthfulness even more important, for it

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is our commitment to trying to construct an accurate and sincere truth that

allows us to fend off tyranny.

"A liberal society has a definite relation to truthful history," he says, and history
here includes journalism. "A liberal society has considerable resources to
promote historical truth if it wants to, and it uniquely discourages some famous
enemies of it, such as state or religious monopoly – discouraging these things
is, after all, its specialty, part of its legacy of Enlightenment."

What is important is a shared sense of truthfulness – not any individual truth,

which is likely to be contested and provisional. "The hope can no longer be that
the truth, enough truth, the whole truth, will itself set us free," he writes. But a
belief in the sincerity of truthfulness – one that shouldn't be corrupted by the
pathological burnout of any individual reporter or newspaper – is more important.

As Mr. Williams wrote, in words that ought to be on every newspaper's

masthead: "A truthful history will remind one of what it costs in terms of quite
basic human loss if a mythical order takes over."

Response
to Doug Saunder's article
How to handle the truth, in troubled Times

June 22, 2003

by
Guy A. Duperreault
[Slightly edited January 24, 2010.]

Dear Mr. Saunders:

Good try! But your investigation into the nature of truth was, while truthful, significantly
incomplete in several ways. I was distracted enough by your arguments’ failures that I,
instead of enjoying my ferry ride through the beautiful Georgia Straights, put pen to the
margins and atop the story of the precocious Sri Lankan immigrants.

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The first strong gut reaction I had was against Mr. Williams’s cited claim that the human
“desire for truthfulness has led humans to believe that we ought question everything.”
This is empirically not true and the worst idealization of human motivation I have seen
in a long time! In fact it has been only the few that have significantly questioned
anything, let alone everything.

The practical experience of life is that the human social animal would rather not
question anything that might seriously upset his or her sense of equilibrium and/or
rightness (if not righteousness) about the world s/he experiences. Hence the easy
denial of a spouse’s blatant infidelities or the failure of the WTO to bring financial
stability to the “third” world economies. In fact, a pesky questioner will be frequently
shut away, shut down or otherwise shut up. And this has been true from at least the
time of the city states, when allegiance to the truth of the ruling mythos was often
mandated with death. Socrates, the Christians under Roman rule and Galileo under
Christian-based rule are examples. And that “reality” is easily extended to the seeming
human need to be “right”, if not righteous, in how the nature of their beliefs are
mirrored in the world. The ability of people to deny the validity of the Holocaust in the
face of ample evidence, is testament to that. The ability of our media to ignore the
genocide of the East Timorese is testament to a belief in the benevolence of Western
support of other worldly dictators, and eerily mirrors the Second World War German’s
their ignorance of the reality of ovens and gas chambers in their world. The
gatekeeper function is an example of that filtering of truth and truthfulness, and is the
reason why the right and left felt the need to form their own papers: the truths they
were seeing were being filtered from The Times.

Now to the problem of Williams’s use of the word “harm”, at least in your citation. “[N]o
conduct should be suppressed by law unless it can be shown to harm someone.” I will
change the context of “harm” from one of obscenity to one of economics. If I posit that
that which creates economic activity is good for a society’s economy, which by today’s
media standards is a de facto equivalent to being good for society, then to encourage
economic activity is to promote the good of that society. Thus, it is that our current
society has found it healthy to sanction gambling: gambling creates economic activity,
especially if it bankrupts certain members of that society because bankruptcy engages
the economic activity of an engaged judiciary while trying to clean up the mess.
However, by limiting our scope of vision to the economic health, members of the
society can ignore the harm done to the individual unable to control his or her
addiction to gambling. And by ignoring the consequences to the society of the social
and familial failures such behaviours can generate, then we can safely say that
gambling is healthy for the society, or at least the benefits out weigh the maleficence.
This example is easily extended into the many peculiar economic “truths” proselytized
ad nauseum from our media, whom seem to not fully understand that one man’s meat
is another’s poison – except as it pertains to a high priced dollar.

“A truthful history will remind one of what it costs in terms of quite basic human loss if a
mythical order takes over.” But that question misses the critical truth that to those living
it, their myth is the truth. Quite likely one of the reasons The Times writers were able to

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embellish the truth with the acceptance of the editor was because the embellishments
corresponded with the myth being propagated as truth by the editor(s) and/or
owner(s). John Ralston Saul, Linda McQuaig, Naomi Klein, and Noam Chomsky, for
example, point out the many failures of today’s economic truths, but they are
marginalized except by few. Why? Because their “truth” lies outside the corporate
myth, and is easily dismissed by the simperings of the Fraser Institute as fictions,
distortions, myth. But our current economic truths allow us to accept blithely the
inability for the richest country in the world, richer than it has ever been, to afford
having band classes in its high schools. And that same economic myth has made it
okay, albeit in a sad sort of way, for people to die of freezing while we lock away the
protesters who rant against such deaths.

A “true” measure of how enrapt a society is to its truth-myth is in its ability to let die or
have killed those who fail to live the dream. The Jews of Germany were killed, in effect,
by a society enrapt by its myth, by a society living its dream. Where our myths sanction
harm in our society is a far more honest tell of where we are living a lie than in
Williams’s idealistic notions of “a truthful history.” (That in itself overrates the power of
history to teach us anything, as CP Snow points out. But that is another topic.)

Guy Duperreault, BGS AScT.

Addendum Sent Jun 29, 2003

Dear Mr. Saunders:
Subsequent to my sending you my argument that truth seeking is NOT, despite
Bernard Williams's assertion, the mark of man since God fell from the throne of
explication, I was given an article from the NY Times on the effects of brain function of
electromagnetic interference. ("Savant for a Day", by Lawrence Osborne. I'm not sure
of the date, as the article was e-mailed to me indirectly from The Times.) The article,
which is itself interesting, contains a tell of the how the God of Science has replaced
the God of Genesis as the arbitrator of "truth." Allan Snyder is well acquainted with the
nature of the human animal, even in scientists, to hang on to old truths in the face of
new ones: his research is largely dismissed, despite it being capable of controlled
replication. "Of those who dismiss Snyder's theories out of hand, [Snyder] shrugs:
'People are often blind to new ideas. Especially scientists.'"
[See http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/22/magazine/savant-for-a-day.html?
pagewanted=1.]

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.guy

❦
Saunders’ Response
From: "Saunders, Douglas" <DSaunders@globeandmail.ca>
Date: Mon Jun 30, 2003 06:51:29 AM America/Vancouver
To: 'Guy Duperreault' [e.mail@address]
Subject: RE: On Truth - Addendum

I do tend to agree that science – and more specifically rationalism – can be just as
much a misleading faith as spiritualism. One needs something to account for the
irrational in life; cold rationalism is not the answer, nor is spiritualism. I think our society
is still muddling out a solution somewhere between those poles.

Regards,
Doug Saunders

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