Truth to tell, one of the triggers for this blog came two and a half years ago, on my other blog, in a discussion about the word "Truth." In particular, I've continued to be struck by how "truth" continues to be a quicksand for us today.
In a nutshell, truth can mean honesty (making true testimony), or faithfulness (as in a true friend or an arrow flying true). And in fact, "faithfulness" is the older common meaning of the word.
When we talk about people "telling the truth," we need to ask, what standard are they being true to. I'd argue that much of our deep misunderstanding across the secular/sacred divide is the presumption of one standard over another: that the standard of faithfulness to evidence-based reason ought clearly to trump faithfulness to God, or vice versa. Not only do we presume one should trump the other, we actively demonize those who believe otherwise, and fail to seek ways around this impasse.
This needn't be a matter of Clintonesque wishy-washy hedging and nitpicking about what "is" is. Because we all engage in—and value—both kinds of truth. No-one wants to find out their breakfast cereal contains rat poison and the manufacturer lied to us factually. An no-one wants to be betrayed by a faithless friend. The sticking point is in how we will make truth a center of our collective life.
Suggestion: take a break from invoking "truth" in public discourse and use "faithfulness" (preferably specifying who we are being faithful to), "honesty", and "accuracy."
How, interesting, Nat! You start this blog, I post a comment suggesting the word truth as a place to start, which you'd apparently already decided on, harking back to a conversation I'd been part of on your old blog 2 1/2 years ago. Our minds seem to run on some similar tracks, at least sometimes.
ReplyDeleteAs you probably know, I lean much more toward what you call the "accuracy" sense of the word truth, than the "faithfulness" sense of the word. In fact, while the adjective "true" is often used to mean faithful, I seldom if ever hear the noun form "truth" used to mean faithfulness. And there's usually a strong hint in the context when "true" is used that way. If an object is called for ("true to X") we're probably not talking about accuracy.
But there's another use of truth, often capitalized as Truth, that I find much more insidious and misleading. In religious contexts, Truth is used to mean something like ultimate reality or of ultimate value, and in the Christian tradition this "Truth" is often held to be good/great in an absolute sense that to me seems rather out of sync with the quotidian, lower-case truths we encounter in our daily lives.
It's a serious theological problem. If we hold God to be absolutely and unquestionably good, and ultimate reality to be inseparable from and maybe even identical to God, then we've either got to say that, for example, childhood cancer is good, or that it doesn't exist, or that at least some aspects of (t)ruth are in conflict with (T)ruth. It seems to me the first two are false, and there's no way the third is going to lead to anything but confusion.
It's also not uncommon, in complicated religious conversations dealing with Truth, to start out talking about (T)ruth, and silently slide into talking about (t)ruth.
If you use "Truth" to mean "of ultimate value" or "very, very good," you have to remember that at every stage of your argument, and not assume that everything which is of ultimate value, is actually true, is actually the case. The one does not follow from the other.
Yes, I was thinking about this walking the dog this morning. It made me wonder how much the forceful literalism we see in today's fundamentalist strands of religion is in fact largely a reaction to the factualism of materialistic science. That is to say: whether Jesus actually physically walked like a waterslider on the surface of Galilee, and if you had a video camera there at the time it would have recorded exactly that -- whether or not this is the case was simply not an important part of religious faith until the tenets of modern science came to the fore. And so "Truth" of scripture in, say, 1300 was less of an issue OF factuality, because really there were no tools to prove it except, and so the relationship to the story could only be strengthened by faithfulness—by being true.
ReplyDeleteYou know, I have heard that sort of historical reading a lot from liberal religious thinkers, that science marked the birth of literalistic religious thinking rather than its mortal wounding, and I don't find it convincing. I agree it's unlikely there were nearly as many discussions over whether Biblical miracles were literal or metaphorical in the 1300s as there are today. People were killed for questioning the received truths, so heretics mostly kept their mouths shut.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn’t lead me to think, however, that most 14th century believers didn’t think those miracles had actually happened. The creeds, much older than that, do not smack of nuanced metaphorical thinking to my ear, but of magical thinking and intolerance of disagreement. No, I think fundamentalism rose as a distinguishable religious movement when the magical thinking that has been central to most popular religion for millenia was threatened like never before, as science discredited one scripturally founded assertion about the world after another. The energy of fundamentalism comes, at least in part, from the fear of being wrong.
That said, I do think most eras have had outstanding religious leaders and prophets who tried to shift the thrust of religion away from magic and superstition and toward the way we live our lives. That’s part of what made them prophets--they were giving the lie to popular religion, trying to lead people back to the things that really matter. As always, their messages went mostly unheeded, though many of them were put on pedestals centuries later.