Why Truth Isn’t So True Anymore

The Pain of Losing Our Values

About 15 years ago I started losing my values.  I changed political parties and voted for a democrat in a local election.  Later, I voted for Barack Obama in 2008.  Two years ago I moved to Florida and surprised myself by enrolling as a democrat as I switched my driver’s license to the new state.  I sat in the motor vehicle office as the clerk was recording my information and thought, “My parents would be astounded and disappointed if they knew that their son just registered as something other than a Republican. 

 As a Presbyterian minister, I voted to open the door for gay candidates to be ordained in my denomination.  This was after 35 years of voting to keep that door closed.  Something like that happened with my patriotism and my attitudes toward race and class,   Many of my personal attitudes and principles, though not my core Christian faith, has shifted decisively to the left.  And as far as I know neither of my parents nor my aunts, uncles, or grandparents had ever undergone a similar shift when they reached their 50’s. 

Lots of people are changing their minds about things.   Americans, are streaming out of churches, which are 20% emptier than they were in 2000.   I find myself saying, “I haven’t changed at all.  The world is getting crazier.

If I were to single out one factor that is behind my evolving outlook it would be that I’m discovering that so many of my long-held opinions aren’t supported by facts. 

As we think about Apollo 11 it’s easy to forget that the same country managed to get people to the moon and back, was also roiled by a civil rights struggle, struggling with a poverty program, and bogged down in a nasty war in Vietnam.  It’s also easy to grab the images of astronauts bouncing playfully on the moon’s surface  and assume that everything “American” merits the world’s applause. 

Facts, rather than the stories we like to tell ourselves, paint a complicated and often humbling story about our country, which today is still number one in space exploration.  But it’s also number one in cocaine consumption, incarceration, gun violence, and on and on.

One seemingly trivial instance encapsulates what I’m driving at.  My daughter and her husband are de-emphasizing Santa Claus with our granddaughter.  When I was a kid, Santa was a big deal.  There appeared to be a universal “belief” in Santa among preschoolers, which as a childhood rite of passage invariably gave way to a discovery that Santa was only a fun story that was part of the Christmas celebration.  As children figured out, or learned from their friends, that Santa was not exactly a real person, they then joined the ranks of “big kids” and grownups who perpetuated the Santa story for the sake of the little kids. 

Now, at least in my granddaughter’s house, the Santa story is in the no big deal category.

In 1897, newspaper editor Francis P. Church penned what has become the most reprinted editorial of all time in response to a child’s letter asking if Santa Claus is real.  The editorial begins famously: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus…”  Church goes on to state “skeptics” who are tied to a factual world of what can be seen and felt live a depleted existence.  It is in the, presumably non-factual, realm that, according to Church, wonders such as “love…generosity…devotion…childlike faith…poetry…romance…and the supernatural beauty and glory beyond.”    So, if Santa Claus goes a whole system of wonderful things also come crashing down leaving us in a prosaic, grey existence.

I propose that Francis Church’s words shed light on what I’m trying to lift up here.  It feels that traditions and noble ideals are being discredited and denigrated.  And with these also goes much else that enriches life and gives meaning.

We’re going through a time when grand ideals are being shattered and have lost their ability to unify people.  I remember standing in a long line at the Gledhill Elementary School in Southern California to receive a little white cup holding a sugar cube tinged with a pink drop of something that would guard me and all of my friends from polio.  I remember the festive atmosphere of our entire community that marveled at rapidly advancing scientific discoveries that were making our lives better by the day. 

Now an anti-vaccination movement has besmirched the reputations of white coated doctors and the scientists behind their work.  The narrative of medical miracles that everyone believed is damaged.

When unifying belief systems are pulled off their pedestals, there’s much less common ground on which we can talk through differences.  Cruel hoaxes are cropping up where the beautiful garden of patriotism, Christendom, masculinity, femininity, triumphant Western Civilization, science, and family once bloomed.  If you talk politics at the Thanksgiving table, you might end up being alienated from a family member.  This is because are few ideals that are expansive enough to form common ground on which everyone, or at least most people, or even an extended family, can stand.

I’m trying to state why people seem so exasperated despite the fact that by the usual measures, these are good days.  The stock markets are soaring.  Wars aren’t taking millions of lives.  People are working.  Of course, some people reading this would give lots of reasons to be alarmed.  I know, there’s global warming, about which there appear to be two irreconcilable sides.  Masses of people are living paycheck-to-paycheck.  Washington is a mess.  So, as always, there are situations to be worried about.  But from my very sheltered point of view, the news doesn’t seem quite as scary as it has been in years past. 

Nevertheless, I detect an unsettled feeling across the land, a quiet disquiet. 

The Pain of Losing Your Values

I’d like to argue here that the loss of ideals, the values of our parents, can be just as painful and disorienting as a household financial reversal or worrying about a son or daughter at war on the other side of the world.  Losing our Santa Clauses is more disorienting than we’d like to admit. 

The recent worldwide grief at the fire which burned much of the Notre Dame Cathedral encapsulates what I’m trying to point out.  Fortunately, the flames claimed no lives.  But a timeless monument is irreversibly spoiled.  The charred cathedral, still standing but hurting, is a metaphor for the sense that maybe everything good, true, and beautiful are wobbling or on their way to ruin.

Take the idea of truth and truthfulness.  What happened to certitude?  We now have fake news.  Our “marketplace of ideas” has become like an economy that has become riddled with counterfeit currency.  Trust is gone.  Everybody holds every idea up to the light wondering if it is fake. 

As I grew up and entered adulthood,  political arguments could be resolved by looking up the facts.  In recent years we’ve had to get accustomed to blatant falsehoods that are diabolically mixed with the news of the day.  Cable television viewers can choose from among several versions of the news.  If you’re left-leaning, MSNBC ratifies your opinions and gives you encouragement.  For traditionalists, tuning in to Fox is deliciously gratifying.    If you watch both Fox News and MSNBC on the same evening you might wonder if they are reporting events on the same planet.  

Take religion.  Church attenders and their ministers are no longer the examples of moral living.  Religion has moved from a universally admired value system to the deficit side of life’s ledger.   Decent people look at the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandals, scheming presidential advisers, and denomination-wide blow-ups over gay ordination and wonder if the whole edifice of religion deserves to be abandoned.  

Take history.  One history teacher’s book title is telling: Lies My Teacher Told Me.  I’ve heard adults admit guardedly that the more they learn about American history, now being rewritten in revisionist mode, the less enthusiastically patriotic they are becoming. 

Take the rolling collapse of whole economic sectors.   Textiles, office supplies, oil production, manufacturing, shopping malls, hunting and fishing are all shrinking.  I’m recalling reading a statistic that 71% of Americans are working in disappearing industries. 

I realize that there are off-setting advances and growth in new areas.   I’m not trying to say that the world is coming to an end and that humanity is headed down a road that ends with Thomas Hobbes’ dystopian vision of human existence as: “…solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” 

What I’m lifting up is the difficulty of facing that the truths that our parents drummed into our heads, which came to be the foundations of our lives aren’t as solid or reliable as we thought they are.  And that discovery is unnerving.  For some of us it’s infuriating. 

Yuval Noah Harari’s Insight

Nowhere is the loss of truth and ideals better explained than in Yuval Noah Harari’s provocative book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.   Sapiens’ early chapters give in layperson’s language a guide to what anthropologists are currently thinking about prehistoric humans.  One insight stands out.  About 70,000 years ago there were several biologically distinct human species living on this planet.  Among them was our own species, Homo sapiens.   From 70,000 years ago until 13,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens inhabited the earth with other humanoid groups.  There were other kinds of people on hand who belonged to the genus Homo, but to different species. 

I’ve always assumed that Homo sapiens, the sole surviving strain of humans that dominates the planet earth today, were stronger and smarter than the other Homos–survival of the fittest.  We were the last ones standing because we outwitted or clubbed our inferior primate human peers into extinction.

Evidence however suggests that Homo sapiens’ dominance over other groups was more complicated than raw biological superiority.  Harari points out that Sapiens were unexceptional in comparison with the other humans.  In fact, anthropologists teach us that when our species first came into contact with Neanderthals, the Neanderthals prevailed.  They were tougher and maybe smarter. 

But 70,000 years ago, something happened in Homo sapiens’  brains that enabled us to expand our territory, drive the other humanoids to extinction, and dominate the planet.   That cognitive innovation, possibly the result of a genetic mutation, gave sapiens an ability to think abstractly.  We could form ideas, which then could be shared with large numbers of fellow sapiens. 

Our ancestors were the first to think with generalizations like group loyalty or clan tradition.  Sapiens were able to add this new kind of thinking to their traditional thinking about the things on hand, such as the camp fire, a tree, or a bear. 

With this new abstract thinking we could invent stories about events that may never have actually happened.  We could invent the Santa Claus story.  That was the beauty of abstract thinking.  It could be a quickly developed thought-world about things that weren’t actually seen, heard, or touched.  

What’s more, these ideas could be shared with large numbers of our fellow Homo sapiens.  Suddenly, the brains of our species could hold tales of ancestors about whom there was scant evidence.  We could concoct a religion with moral demands that everyone understood even if they couldn’t see it or touch it.  Hundreds of Homo sapiens could elevate leaders who, in turn, could organize a large group of sapiens to take on a vision of themselves that went far beyond their own little family group.

What do we call such ideas?  Harari doesn’t supply a ready answer, since he calls them by several names.  Let’s simplify this discussion by simply calling them fictive constructs. 

If you’re having difficulty envisioning a fictive construct, consider the analogy of computers and the internet.  First, there were computers.  Then someone thought of wiring computers together, say in an office network, so information could be shared among co-workers in a building.  Then came the internet.  The internet was a monumental new order of data and a flow of information The internet enabled millions of people to create and share ideas. 

The development of the internet is roughly analogous to the cognitive revolution 70,000 years ago among one species of humanity.  It was this new order of thinking that gave Sapiens super powers to solve problems, devise strategies, make plans, organize large numbers of fellow sapiens to take on large projects, and pass traditions on to descendants.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong with Fictive Constructs?

 Now the fictive constructs that led to Homo sapiens’ dominance of the world, have a sneaky quality.  Abstract thinking can merge with concrete thinking.  If a primitive clan has a story about how the world came to be, the tale might seem to be as real as yesterday’s deer hunt.   But a moving story need not be rooted in actual facts.  King Arthur may not have been a real person.  He may not have actually done all of the exploits that the Arthurian Legends credit to him.  But the system of stories in which King Arthur plays a starring role continues to inspire generations of readers and story-tellers.  In fact, these stories may motivate much noble behavior and give people’s lives heroic meaning.

Examples of Fictive Constructs

Religion is a good example of a fictive construct in operation.  All ancient peoples had stories of their imagined ancestors who were bigger than life and embodied the spirit of the clan.  Primitive religion bristled with tales about how the world came to be and how the clan fit into that world.  The stories were mythic, meaning that they weren’t connected precisely with real events.  But strict historicity wasn’t as important as the fact that myths had power to give people a sense of who they were and how they should behave.   Religion can be handed down to posterity.  And it can be changed much more quickly than people can evolve physically.

Harari’s brief history of humanity raises several areas in the human story where fictive constructs play a decisive role.  Money, is an example.  Money is an invention of stunning power.  Money replaces barter as a flexible means of exchange.  Wealth is more movable because of money.  People from all over the world trust and understand how money works.  A piece of government printed paper, a piece of paper with my signature, or an electronic message has the power to bring me goods or hire workers. 

Of course currency or checks or plastic have no intrinsic value.  They are effective because people universally agree to honor money’s representation of wealth.   I learned recently that money isn’t “backed” by a hoard of gold sealed away under armed guard that is ready at any moment to be exchanged for currency.  Gold reserves fall far short in value to the sum of the money in circulation.  Banks loan out far more money than the sum of their deposits.

The same is true of ideas like democracy, socialism, morality, intelligence, race, sexuality, and on and on.  These all are ideas, which we all understand, but which don’t refer to anything or to very little that someone can see or touch.

One final example. I took an advanced biology class in the 11th grade. The teacher had dozens of film clips and photographs of various animal species and plant varieties. He would show these to the class and we were responsible to demonstrate that we could identify species and list some facts.

Among the film clips was a three minute segment showing arctic lemmings rushing toward icy waters of the arctic sea. The rodents would reach the cliffs over the water and hurl themselves down, apparently by the thousands. I’ll never forget our teacher’s comment about Lemmings: “They are good divers, but lousy swimmers.”

The film left the students with an impression that mass suicide was a periodic part of Lemming life. We were tested on the film’s content.

In my late 50’s I learned, to my astonishment, that the film was totally faked, and by the Disney studios. The film’s producers imported a few lemmings, built a large turn-table, under which cameras were mounted, and created the myth in Disney studios.

I pride myself on being able to spot cant and fraud. And I totally missed this one. The Lemming hoax is a humbling reminder that lies can be generated effortlessly and untruths can be rooted in our life outlook for decades, even for a lifetime.

By way of summary, here’s what I’m saying:  The human ability to think abstractly, representationally, with stories and myths, and with fictive constructs is not only the development that lifted Homo sapiens above their fellow humans, but is also the uniquely empowering ability that drives the entire human story.

Modern is the New Old Fashioned

Any intelligent reader would want to push back and say, “What this essay is suggesting is altogether too simple.”  Our ideas about and dedication to concepts like capitalism, the importance of love, the preciousness of each human being, the ideal of marriage and home, the social ordering of society and on and on are certainly rooted in hard evidence! 

But are they?  My answer: maybe not so much.

Consider several familiar situations.  I recently spotted in gift shop a ball cap that had these words printed on it: “World’s Greatest Grandpa.”  We can imagine the situation behind such an inscription.  There are probably hundreds of identical caps, which are worn by grandfathers who are enthusiastic about their grand kids.  It doesn’t take much evidence gathering or logical thinking to realize that the cap wearer isn’t the world’s greatest grandfather.  There probably isn’t a world’s greatest grandfather. 

As we rise on the ladder of abstraction we might consider comparisons between states within the United States, world leaders, companies, nations, periods in history, religions and of course, individual people .  Of course, some groups are more successful than others.  But when you consider conditions which have contributed to success, you won’t find essential superiority in one or another.  What you’ll find is luck, and a favorable arrangement of circumstances and resources.  Any sense that one individual or business is the best ever or profoundly unique is generally the result of a narrative or mythic self-concept that insists on the superiority of one’s own circumstances. 

It is painful to be average.  There is an inexplicable need in people to feel exceptional at least in some way.

Race and Racism

Now to a controversial example.  Geneticists, anthropologists, and historians now agree that the idea that humans fall into several biologically distinct races is misleading.  The scientific consensus at present is that race is a non-useful concept and is, to use our adopted expression, a fictive construct.  They say it this way: race is a social construct.  It is an idea that has no referent in the real world.  It’s an idea only and increasingly useless and mischievous.

What makes the deconstruction of race so jarring for so many people is that there has long existed a universal assumption that humanity is divided into several biologically, behaviorally, and culturally different groups.  The traditional consensus runs something like this: peoples are different, evidence supports this, and, the best minds agree. 

Ever since European navigators in the 15^th century began describing newly discovered tribes in faraway places like sub-Saharan Africa or Caribbean islands, we’ve attempted to categorize people.  We invented race and ranked the races.   Emmanuel Kant believed it and taught it.  So did Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln.  Today, White supremacists work to compile evidence that race is how people are divvied up. 

Jarringly, race has been decisively shown to be a social construct in the last 20 years.  Like Santa, we can say and think what we wish about race.  But the concept exists entirely in the fictive world.   But unlike Santa, race invariably is used in the service of human ranking and subjugation. 

A very similar process of deconstructing the fictive constructs has been underway since about the middle of the 20^th century.  Modern philosophers made a decisive shift in what they wrote and talked about.  Simply put, traditional philosophers like the ancient Greeks explored principles that the whole Universe was governed by.  Philosophers talked about love and universal morality and so on.  Traditional philosophy merged with the natural sciences. 

With the arrival of the 20^th century, philosophers realized that the natural sciences had developed tools to understand the natural world.  Philosophers moved to exploring logic, language, mathematics, grammar, and what it means to know something.  The division between the natural sciences and philosophical investigations was sharpened.  Accordingly, the kind of philosophy taught and studied in most universities is called analytical philosophy. 

To summarize the import of the last two paragraphs.  We are becoming more aware of the fictive abstract world that we’re discussing here. 

More recently, since the mid 1970’s, another intellectual movement, namely, postmodernism, has disrupted academic disciplines and traditional social order.  Postmodernism is a complicated and vague development that few thinkers attempt to define.  Basically, it is about knowing.  Postmodernism questions the veracity of the very constructs that enabled Homo sapiens to rise to dominate in the first place. 

One prominent postmodern concept is deconstruction.  Deconstruction notices how language, when examined carefully, has multiple meanings or contradicts itself.  This same deconstructing approach explores how ideals came to be ideals in the first place.  It looks at the human role in inventing religion and morality and authority. 

Deconstruction is the dog, Toto, in the “Wizard of Oz”, pulling back the curtain to reveal the little man pulling the strings behind the “great and terrible wizard.”  Suddenly, the wizard isn’t scary or deserving of awe.

Notice that we’ve looped back around to the questions I posed at the top of this essay.  What news is reliable?  Is Christianity true?   Are some peoples inferior?  What is moral behavior? 

The Challenge of Living in 2019

What is happening is that the certitude that our values are good, true, and beautiful is under fresh examination.  We look around and notice that our friends are leaving their churches, no longer feeling patriotic, discovering new sexual preferences, and showing up at protests.  What our parents, pastors, and teachers handed down to us feels under review.  A question mark hovers over every value and precious principle.  How can we be sure that that is correct?

The Hall of Ideals

I carry a mental image that helps me envision what it is like to live in 2019.  I imagine a museum room filled with an array of pedestals that look like small Greek architectural columns.  On each pedestal is a value or principle on which I have constructed my life.  Christian faith sits atop one pedestal.  Morality sits on another.  The power of free markets has its pedestal.  The intellectual tradition of the West with its canon of great books is there.  Hard work has a pedestal. 

Now I imagine that every time I visit my pedestal room, a couple of the values have been knocked to the ground and broken.  I work mightily to hoist my values back onto their pedestals.  Sadly that value has been chipped or cracked.  With time, my museum of everything that I’ve held to be good and true and beautiful feels ruined. 

How does it feel to have one’s precious principles of living thrown down?  It is terrifying.  And it is infuriating. 

Everywhere around us our ideals—our faith, patriotism, morality, sexuality, social class, and sense of truth itself—are being exposed as fictive constructs.  Our ideals are losing their alleged rootedness in the tangible world. 

What’s more, the sense that we all have the same Hall of Values is turning out to be untrue. 

As I write this, I’m reading about how the United Methodist Church is worried about fragmenting over entrenched disagreement over the ordination of avowed practicing homosexuals.  Parents of grown children are often mystified by the way their children are rearing their grandchildren.  Family arguments over politics at the Thanksgiving table has now joined turkey and football as an integral part of the holiday.

A World with Overturned Values

At the beginning of this essay I said that Homo sapiens’ ability to share myths and abstract principles enabled us to organize large numbers of our kind in grand projects.  It is quite possible that other primitive human groups were smarter, stronger, and better adapted to a local situation than we were.  But no family grouping of Neanderthals, no matter how strong they were, could be a match for a thousand Sapiens acting in a coordinated way under a unifying narrative. 

We’re now in a position to see one final aspect of abstract, mythic thinking.  It is value free.  A fictive construct is behind money.  It’s behind democracy and socialism.   There’s also some kind of myth system behind every royal dynasty. 

Shortly after Gaius Octavius Thurinus united the Roman Empire and became Rome’s most famous emperor, Augustus Caesar, he went to work constructing a narrative about himself.  The narrative basically told a story about how he was divine because his great uncle, Julius and had himself declared a god.  Octavius felt entitled to designate himself the “Son of God.”  All of this was without warrant from history or achievement beyond winning a big battle.  Octavius’ successors—the Caesars—all continued the tradition of allowing themselves to be worshipped as gods.  They weren’t divine.  But there was a story in place that said they were.

 Harari makes this provocative statement:

The current mood of exposing myths as warrantless and thus overturning the value gods has at least one glorious benefit.  It pulls the legitimacy rug out from under the bosses and dictators who sit at the top of any hierarchy.  

Look around.  The Me-Too movement is exposing and upending any myth that powerful men are entitled to sexual favors from underlings.  There are support groups composed of people who have left—by the millions–evangelicalism.  Anti-vaxxers defy medical wisdom and the authority of science in their refusal to have their children inoculated.  Everyday citizens fearlessly insult and defy their elected officials.  In thousands of variations, the developed world is tearing down the edifice of legitimacy that supports all people and ideology that would rise above its peers.

As I’ve gotten accustomed to the idea that fictive constructs form much of my personal value system I find myself reexamining many of my cherished assumptions on which I’ve built my personal philosophy of life.  Here is a short collection of some of the “basic truths” that I’ve long thought were beyond revision.

• That America is a land of opportunity is being modified by the fact that the United States enjoys the least social mobility of most of our peer “developed” nations.
• That the mainstream news media leans slightly to the left and regularly challenges authority and ferrets out truth is being modified by the fact that it is a corporate enterprise and reports what will draw the largest audience.
• That Marxism is a failed economic philosophy because it was tried in the former Soviet Union, which collapsed is being modified by the fact that business schools and universities have suppressed its study because donors have objected.
•  That education and hard work are key to prosperity is being modified by the fact that American Blacks and Latinos with jobs and education don’t have neither the wealth nor income that their White peers enjoy.
• That democracy flourishes in the United States is being modified by studies which show that across a range of issues, public policy does not reflect the preferences of the majority of Americans.

How Then Shall We Live?

The reader may wonder why I—a long-time Presbyterian minister–haven’t mentioned any religious convictions that are being deconstructed.  The answer that comes to mind is that my denominational tradition has been laboring at the deconstructive process for at least the last century.  This work is most noticeable in the way that scientific insights into the Bible’s origins have been incorporated into mainstream Protestant and Catholic thinking. 

If what I’ve written here is close to the truth about the role that narrative or fictive constructs play in the human experience, then it follows that people of integrity—certainly Christians—must devote a lot more courage and energy to the task of unlearning.  The easy path of accepting what one’s parents, church, or society believes is no longer available.   Neither is it acceptable to simply persist in our own value system for the sake of consistency.  From the time that Socrates said that “the un-examined life is not worth living,” to the moment when Emerson offered that “…a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines, ” to the point when someone slapped on the bumper sticker: question authority, the task of working out our highest ideals with zeal has never been more important.

Living in a world where truth and knowing are under intense scrutiny isn’t an evil plot by social engineers who want to manipulate humanity.  It is like many of the preceding milestones in human history where a new development upended the old order and people were forced to look at life freshly and differently.  Certainly,  the Enlightenment in the 17^th and 18^th centuries and later modernism convulsed the  western world and upset established order, especially the political establishment and the Christian Church. 

Such changes are like being ejected from the Garden of Eden.  The comforts and innocence of paradise are past and gone.  The new situation holds fresh adventure and requires greater maturity.   Like it or not, our gods are being knocked off their pedestals.  For many this disruption will bring emancipation and fresh life.  For all of us, there is much work to do and a marvelous new vista opening to us.

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[1] Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens (p. 169). Harper. Kindle Edition