truth v. Truth

Back in my senior year of high school (in the olden days of the early 90s), I had a class that was, roughly, a background in philosophy and debate. A handful of us very wise 17 and 18-year-olds got together and debated ideas presented before us. Looking back, it was a pretty careful history of philosophy they got us involved in, but at the time I just enjoyed arguing with my peers. However, every single debate came down to what we started calling “my truth” versus “capital-T truth”. I found this annoying, because every single argument essentially devolved into the same one, given time, and I and one or two other people were always on the side of Truth while all the others were on the side of personal “truth”. There was an extended metaphor about a child touching a hot stove and that being their basis for the understanding of truth, but I don’t remember it–but we got to the point where someone would say “hot stove!” and we’d all groan and change the subject.

Come to think of it, I was always the “Truth” side and there was one guy who was the “truth” side, and mostly no one else would say anything, absorbed as they were in their typical high-schoolish apathy. (A very stylish thing, in the days of grunge.) I think our perpetual argument mostly just irritated the others.

At the time, I thought that the notion of denying that there is any objective reality apart from our perceptions of it was nonsense. Of COURSE there’s something greater than human understanding of what we’re experiencing; else, how could we be experiencing it? However, I’d been raised in a conservative Christian subculture where the idea of objective truth was something you didn’t question.

A year or two later, in my little Christian college, I was introduced formally to the notion of postmodernism as a worldview, in a series of core curriculum classes. Of course I knew all the postmodern tenets–it would be hard to grow up in this society and not absorb them–but I’d never really had it laid out before me. And as I read and researched and absorbed knowledge since then, I’ve seen it in action. But what it essentially seems to boil down to is that silly argument: truth v. Truth.

The thing that’s so frustrating is that, when you get down to these political arguments, what you’re often running up against is that “Truth” people and “truth” people (I’d call them “Truthers” but that’s something else entirely…) aren’t operating in the same universe. Reality is… well… real to a person who believes in objective reality, whereas reality is perception to someone who believes that everything is subjective.

Our society has really gone the way to being a postmodern society that believes in reality as perception only, and that the only truth that counts is the truth that each person experiences. And thus appeals to reason or critical thought can’t be made–how can you think critically without any foundation in reality, without any basis for criticism or comparisons? And those of us who grew up with Truth as an unquestioned reality look around us in befuddlement as everyone seems to deny even the nose on their face… and it doesn’t matter what the facts are, because facts are just another subjective “truth”.

Well, I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but it’s something that I’ve been thinking about lately, as the whole Ahmadinejad-at-Columbia drama played out. Do you think we’ll ever return to a belief in objective reality? Can we survive as a society if we believe in nothing real? I don’t know the answers to these questions.