IVP
2000 AJM June 2000
Cogently
argued; exactly right. Truth - Christian, modern, or postmodern approaches?
Jargon-free, and it looks like a Penguin. Definitely where it’s at! Short -
134pp.
Introduction:
but not through me
1989
was a year of victory over truth - Berlin wall came down, ‘velvet’ revolution
in Prague under leadership of the Czech philosopher Havel. Characterised by
conflict between lies (Soviet regime) and truth. Charterr 77: ‘truth prevails
for those who live in truth’. Solzhenitsyn: ‘one word of truth outweighs the
entire world’ (Nobel speech).
Havel
in 1978 essay: for the crust presented by
the life of lies is made of strange stuff. As long as it seals off hermetically
the entire society, it appears to be made of stone. But the moment someone
breaks through in one place, when one person cries out, ‘The emperor is naked!’
- when a single person breaks the rules of the game, thus exposing it as a game
- everything suddenly appears n another light and the whole crust seems then to
be made of a tissue on the point of tearing and disintegrating uncontrollably.
But
now, we have postmodernism. ‘Within it, truth is dead. Truth in any objective
or absolute sense, truth that is independent of the mind of the knower, no
longer exists’ 12. At best truth is relative, at worst it is socially
constructed, a matter of human convention and a testament to the community that
believes it and the power that established it. So in a postmodern world, truth
is created not discovered. Nietzsche: ‘truths are illusions about which one has
forgotten that this is what they are’; what remains is a world of lies, hype
and spin.
So
truth is dead and knowledge is only power.
He
argues the opposite. This doesn’t usher in a brave new world of greater
enlightenment and freedom; it produces a profound crisis of cultural authority
in the W. ‘Far from being a naive and reactionary notion, truth is one of the
simples, most precious gifts without which we would not be able to handle
reality or negotiate life... Truth is a vital requirement not only for
individuals who would live a good life but for free societies that would remain
free.’ 14. Truth not dead; it is alive, well and undeniable.
Preview
This
not a comprehensive study; it comes from a practical and not theoretical
concern; it doesn’t argue for the modern view against the postmodern (both are
bad).
Postmodern
position is cynical and uncertain; but modern position is naive and too certain.
Postmodernism is the mirror image of modernism and is born of its deficiencies.
We
need a third position - the faith/community/tradition biew of truth, repd by
the Jewish and Christian faiths. Includes the strengths but not the weaknesses
of the other two.
Postmodernism
is a watershed moment, esp for US, the world’s ‘lead society’.
Issue
of truth has far deeper moral and political seriousness than it receives now.
Walter Lippmann: ‘there can be no liberty for a community that lacks the means
by which to detect lies’ 18.
Doesn’t
claim to live up to truth without fail; in fact many of insights of the book
come from consequences of not doing so.
‘If
we live in truth and become people of truth, our primary responsibility will be
evident: ourselves. Our overarching life-task will be clear: to seek the truth,
speak the truth, and live the truth. And the one effective stand that no-one
can take from us will be certain: as Solzhenitsyn declared in his Nobel
address, ‘Let the lie come into the world, even dominate the world, but not
through me’ 20.
1. Back to the
moral stone age
Ch
about the impact of the crisis of truth on ethics.
Crisis
in ethics. Value of not-judging leads to acceptance of evil, unwillingness to
stand out for good. Accompanied by resurgence of interest in applied ethics -
ethics is now about holding politically correct views on the buzz issues (eg
environment, DNA research); about social policy. Ethics isn’t about hypocrisy,
self-deception, cruelty, lust, violence. Ethics doesn’t convey moral truths, it
explores issues. So we talk about ethics, but we have emptied it of its
content.
Most
powerful philosophical source of the crisis of truth is Nietzsche. He
relativised truth (many different perspectives, hence many different kinds of
truth), and rationalised truth - truth is a mask for power, pity for
resentment, virtue for hypocrisy. For Nitezsche, power is everything.
2. We’re all
spinmeisters now
Ch
about the impact of the crisis of truth on character.
Nobel
peace prize won by sister of 16 yearold killed in Guatemala by soldiers; ghost
written account. Problem is, it isn’t true. Justified by saying it tells a
‘larger truth’ - often used as an argument. Idea of persona as propaganda.
Jesus coined the word hypocrite - normal Gk word for actor at the time. We live
in a world where we have to sell ourselves on sight; character loses
significance, face value becomes all important, and spin doctors and plastic
surgeons become the in people. The human type our time has produced is all
surface, skills and CV, and no character. Emphasis now on surface, not on
depth, possibilities not qualities, glamour, not convictions. Designer
personalities. ‘Character may be its own reward, but personality is what wins
friends, gets jobs, attracts lovers, catches the cameraman’s eye, and lands the
prize of public office’ 51. If God does not exists, any self is possible - and
the q as to which of the selves is ‘true’ becomes meaningless.
3. The West vs
itself
Ch
about influence of postmodernism on national and global levels in US
Postmodernism
is a movt and a mood as much as a clear set of ideas, so it often feels as if
it is eveywhere and nowhere.
Political
correctness is direct result of postmodernism, for when truth dies and power
becomes the operative principle of speech, the result is conformity, the
tyranny of consensus.
It
can be argued that the story of the West is a movt with three phases:
- Christendom, to C18
- European civilisation, to end WW1;
secularisation
- American leadership of the W
All
over, under force of postmodernism - Christian faith, Enlightenment and idea of
the W are all repudiated. We are not only post-modern, we are post-West.
Indirect
influence. Health care - rise of alternative medicine, inc Eastern. Politics -
Clinton as the rep of postmodern politics, with his ‘fluid conception of what’s
real’, his ‘situational veracity’.
Seven
habits of postmodern lying, all characteristic of Clinton:
- pride of mind; if truth is
created, not discovered, anyone can crack any problem
- compartmentalising
- people pleasing
- posturing; doing things for effect
- prevarication
- powerplays; everything else
irrelevant but who gets the power
- personalising; stress on story
over propositional truth; people resign/support because of
personal factors, not ones
of principle
4. Differences
make a difference
Arguments
for impce of truth.
Primo
Levi on Auschwitz: places not only of unchallengable, arbitrary authority but
of absolute evil that defied all explanation. In the face of such wickedness,
explanations born of psychology, sociology and economics were pathetic in their
inadequacy. 73. Primo Levi: mission to witness. But no faith, no truth to stand
on; eventually committed suicide like other survivors. There is an alternative
to despair. ‘It is that truth, like meaning as a whole, is not for us to create
but for us to discover. Each of us may be small, our lives short, and our
influence puny. But if truth is there - objective, absolute, independent of
minds that know it - then we may count on is and find it a source of strength.’
79.
Contrast
Solzhenitsyn, who stood on truth.
Guinness
not raising purely theoretica arguments against the postmodern view of truth,
for few people outside universities follow the complexities of the higher academic
debates. Rather, he is delib underscoring the practical difficulties that grow
out of the theoretical deficiencies of the new radical relativism. We can
easily be cowed into submission by the force or fashionability of new ideas
without realising their disastrous practical consequences for ordinary life.
a)
Argument for impce of high view of truth for those who hold to trad
Jewish/Christian assumptions about truth but have grown careless/hesitant in
defending it: without truth we cannot defend our faith from the charge that we
believe because we are afraid not to believe (bad faith) or that we believe
because it works, because it is true for us, etc (poor faith).
‘What is truth’, someone
will immediately ask. Let me answer straightforwardly. In the biblical view,
truth is that which is ultimately, finally, and absolutely real, or the ‘way it
is’, and therefore is utterly trustworthy and dependable, being grounded and
anchored in God’s own reality and truthfulness.
b)
truth matters for Jews and Christians because it is a question of the
trustworthiness of God himself. In contrast, for western secularists final
reality is only matter, a product of time plus chance, and truth to them has a
corresponding status on that level. It is therefore always open to doubt,
always uncertain. In the biblical view, on the other hand, we can think freely
and pursue the full range of human enquiry, knowing that our intellectual
powers and our disposition as truth-seekers are underwritten by the
truthfulness of the Creator of the universe.
‘In
the beginning was the Word, John’s gospel beings - which means that in the end
meaning itself has meaning, guaranteed by God himself and now spoken forth as
an effective, liberating Word.’ 86.
Without
truth we are all vulnerable to manipulation. Without truth there is no genuine
freedom and fulfilment. Freedom is both negative and positive: freedom from
(parents, teachers, authority) and freedom for. Those who set out to do what
they like usually end up not liking what they’ve done.
‘Truth
without freedom is a manacle, but freedom without truth is a mirage. If freedom
is not to be vacuous and stunted, it requires truth - lived truth.’ 93. John
Paul II when still a Polish cardinal: ‘there is no freedom without truth’ 93.
5. Turning the
tables
Strategies
for responding to those who insist on rejecting truth.
First
effective strategy for countering relativism is to expose the fallacy -
demonstrate negative consequences of the beliefs held. Do they really live by
their philosophy, or when it comes to the crunch do they want something else?
Relativism is inconsistent, selective in its application of principles - to
others but not to self. Press relativism to its consistent conclusion and you
debunk it. Eg Elijah vs prophets of Baal. Eg students who insist everything is
relative yet want absolute standards applied to their scripts. All people at
some point behave true to their beliefs; sooner or later they will act on the
assumptions they truly hold and reap the consequences. We often say people
don’t live up to their beliefs; but it would be more accurate to say that when
it comes to the crunch they switch to other beliefs and live up to those
instead. We do live by our beliefs - q is, which ones?
Beliefs
drive behaviour; behaviour follows beliefs as surely as thunder follows
lightning.
So
the goal is to look for the contradtictions between logic and life
.
Second
effective strategy is to point out the signals of transcendence - draw
attention to the yearings and contradiction in people’s beliefs which point
beyond those beliefs towards entirely different possibilities. More positive
appproach.
Postmodernism
cannot look evil in the eye. We reject it, and cry out for judgment. There is
one.
6. On record
against ourselves
Choices
which the discipline of living in truth confronts us with.
Either
we conform the truth to our desires or we conform our desires to the truth.
This is the central challenge of living free.
Aristotle:
the person who loves truth for the very sake of truth when nothing is at stake
will be still the more truthful when someday everything is at stake.
Paul
Johnson, Intellectuals, examines the
people of ideas who have arisen to replace the guardians of traditional society
and who on the basis of their unaided intellects now prescribe our remedies and
direct our future. In practice they are no wiser than witch doctors. ‘Such
accounts of western intellectuals leave the myth of the dispassionate
Enlightenment truth-seeker in tatters. The real situation is almost the
opposite: the cleverer the mind, the slipperier the heat, or (expressed more
carefully), the more sophisticated the education, the subtler the
rationalization’ 121.
Unbelief in the biblical
view is not passive, an innocent but innacurate view of the world that has
unfortunately ‘got it wrong’ at a few points. Rather, unbelief is active,
driven by a dark dynamism. In fact, the Bible says, behind unbeleif lies the
most radical relativism of all: a relativity born not of culture, race, gender,
class, or generation but of sin, the claim to the ‘right to myself’. 125.
Unless
this relativity is addressed and the standard of absolute truth brought back
into the picture, our love can never escape being self-love. And our
self-knowledge can never rise above self-deception.
Disbelief
has many faces - suppression, exploitation, subversion, delusion. But truth
always remains truth.
Budziszewski
(philosopher) identifies 7 degrees of descent on the downward path of
dishonesty:
1.
Sin. We lie because we have done wrong.
2.
Self-protection. Each ring of lies breeds another.
3.
Habituation. Lies repeated become habits, habit becomes character. We become a
liar.
4.
Self-deception. We lose hold of truth.
5.
Rationalisation. We believe our lies and give other explanations for all we do.
6.
Technique. We get good at lying.
7.
Morality turns upside down. The moment lying is accepted instead of condemned,
it becomes required.
Living
in the light (John) is living in truth. Challenge of practising the truth. ‘For
truth does not offer itself as convenient and user-friendly; nor does it come
to us from someone else’s mind ready-made with ‘no assembly required’.. Knowing
always entails more than knowing will ever know, so the deepest knowing comes
only in doing. The task of living the truth requires that we stake on it our
very existence.’ 130. We also face the challenge of practising the truth before
God. ‘To become true we must live bathed in the ful floodlight of One who is
true. Only when we realize that all our pretences, evasions, and fig leaves are
useless can we achieve the honesty and humility needed for change.’
Those
who seek to conform the truth to their desires compartmentalise.
Those
who seek to conform their desires to the truth confess.
None
dare call it cliche
Three
points made.
1.
The gravity of the present crisis of truth in the western world
2.
The wisdom of lifting the debate out of its rut as a controversy between the
modern and the postmodern world views
3.
The richness and strength of the positive biblical vision of living in truth.
‘For
people of faith whose book is the Bible, truth can never be mere theory, let
alone one that is sterile and contentious. Truth is the direct representation
of reality - that which throbs with created life, and that which is given and
guaranteed by the Creator who is himself the final reality. God is truth just
as God is love. He speaks truly and he acts truly.’ 133.
Kierkegaard:
‘the truth consists not of knowing the truth but in being the truth’ 133. That
is the sort of truth that sets free.
The dawn of the third
millennium finds the western world in a quandary over one of its most vital
foundation - truth. Caught between a tarnished modernism and a dangerous
postmodernism, between a view of truth (part arrogant and part naive) that is
no longer credible and a view of ‘truth’ (part sceptical and part gullible)
that every day grows less desirable, the West is at odds with itself, its past,
and its future.
At such a moment the view of
truth that originally inspired the West shines clearer than ever. Anchored in
the very meaning of the universe, capable of simple application as well as
sophisticated analysis, a spiritual and moral requirement with vast
implications for the whole of life, the biblical.. view of truth has the
strengths of the modern and postmodern views, the weakness of neither, and just
one snag: the cost of its unsparing moral challenge.
Which brings us back to
where we began. The West (and its lead society) are at a crossroads. In a world
of lies, hype and sin, there is an urgent need for people of truth at all
levels of society. There is quite simply no other way to live free. The choice
is ours. So also will be the consequences. 133-4