Storm Éowyn swept through the village on Friday. It had been a quiet night, but the wind picked up at dawn, and when I emerged to make the short walk to the village store, my “Berlin (Est. 1237) Down Town” cap flew off my head and disappeared 50 metres down the Loan. Fortunately I retrieved it, and struggled against the gale in the direction of the shop, to fetch the morning papers, keeping a sharp eye open for flying debris. But the delivery van had been held up by a fallen tree. I made another abortive attempt an hour later. There weren’t going to be any papers that day. I went home and switched on my digital radio, but, I suppose due to the atmospheric disturbance, there was a continuous background burpling din, and the announcer sounded like a Dalek.
Then a strange hooting noise wafted through the house. At first I thought it was the warning klaxon of a van reversing down the Loan, but it turned out to be emanating from my mobile, followed by an announcement about the red weather warning, and the imperative to stay indoors. I did as I was told.
So, in the absence of newspapers, I took the opportunity to reread Prof. Harry G. Frankfurt’s amazing tract On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005), and its equally amazing sequel On Truth (Pimlico, 2007). As the Duke said to Escalus in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, “This news is old enough, yet it is every day’s news.”
There seems to be a kind of post-modernist notion abroad i’ the world, that there is really no such thing as objective truth. Common sense would tell us that sustaining such a belief is inherently absurd. I might have made the assertion on Friday, “It’s stormy today.” Could anybody reply with a straight face, “Nonsense; there’s not a breath of wind”? It seems to me that holding the view that there is no such thing as “external” truth, is rather akin to holding the view (another post-modernistic view widely held) that there is no such thing as free will. Stephen Hawking said (at least he is purported to have said), “I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.” Similarly, even people dubious about the concept of truth, would rather that their surgeon, their airline pilot, the teachers of their children, had accumulated a reliable body of knowledge.
Yet the habit of doubt is deeply embedded in western civilisation and culture. As Anthony Quayle’s character Jack Loder says in his blunt Yorkshire accent in the 1974 film The Tamarind Seed, “In my line of business I’ve learned three things: no-one’s to be trusted, nothing’s to be believed, and anybody is capable of doing anything.” Bertrand Russell invested a lot of time in examining the validity of statements. He took a piece of paper and wrote down the sentence, “The statement on the other side of this sheet of paper is true.” Then he turned the paper over and wrote, “The statement on the other side of this sheet of paper is false.” Then he sat and stared in silence at the sheet of paper for 18 months. He came to the conclusion that the whole of epistemology is founded upon quicksand.
So you might argue that people who are cavalier, “economical” with the truth, are merely following a proud and noble intellectual tradition. You may say, since we cannot access the truth, all we can do is construct a model, and see if it stands up to scrutiny. Ergo, my version of the truth is as good as yours.” It is, arguably, a Cartesian notion. The only thing Descartes was sure of was his own existence. “Cogito ergo sum.”
But I don’t think that people who are guilty of deliberate “terminological inexactitude” can really claim that they are following in a revered philosophical tradition. There is a difference between the idea that the truth is out there, even if we can never with certainty access it, and the idea that the truth is inaccessible, therefore we may be indifferent to it; the truth, if you like, can be anything you want it to be. G. K. Chesterton once said that the trouble with ceasing to believe something is that you start to believe everything. Prof. Frankfurt makes the point that the purveyor of bullshit doesn’t really care whether what he says is true or not.
Does it matter? One of the things most of us learn very early on in life is that the truth is, indeed, out there. As we toddle around, we learn that if we are not careful we fall over. If we don’t look where we are going we crash into hard objects. We discover that there are limitations to our omnipotence. We rebel against this. This attempt to retain absolute power is what characterises that difficult phase of life, “the terrible twos”. But if we are nurtured, and guided, and loved, we learn to accept that limitations exist, whether we like them or not. Prof. Frankfurt makes the point that if we don’t accept this, then we find it hard to discern the boundary between ourselves and the outside world.
Sometimes I wonder if this is what underpins the President of the United States’ refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 Presidential election. The irresistible force meets the immovable object. This cannot be! There has to be a mistake! Therefore he allegedly called up an official and asked him to find all the uncounted votes that surely had to be there. And he allegedly blew a dog-whistle that resulted in the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. And now that he is returned to office, and apparently vindicated, he has issued virtually a blanket pardon to the imprisoned Capitol insurgents.
I’m very puzzled by this notion of pardon, just as I am by the notion of the president’s executive orders. Pardons occasionally get issued on this side of the Pond, but the word “pardon” is usually a misnomer. The recipients of the pardon have usually been shown to be innocent of the crime they allegedly committed; therefore they should not be pardoned, they should be exonerated. The innocent don’t need a pardon; they need an apology, and compensation. But if the pardoner is indifferent as to whether a conviction has been “safe”, then the distinction hardly matters. I thought that the founding fathers in 1776 were trying to escape the omnipotence of the monarchy. And I thought there was supposed to be a separation between the executive, and the law. No doubt some silken-tongued lawyer could explain the rationale behind it all, but I bet it would be bullshit. And that’s the point. Once you deny the existence of objective truth, anything, indeed everything, is possible.
jamescalumcampbell 