Seeking Truth
A recent lunch conversation turned to philosophy and the search for truth. My friend’s essay will appear shortly in a national magazine, but his interactions with a young fact checker who seemed to know little of history gave him pause.
“And he has a masters in journalism from a fine school,” he noted. Indicating, apparently, that the fact checker knew little.
This led us to discuss Christoper Hitchens book “Why Orwell Matters.” Hitchens recounts how Orwell bemoaned the impossibility of an accurate accounting of the fighting in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, to which he was an eyewitness. Orwell wrote, “Future historians will have nothing to go on except a mass of accusations and party propaganda. I myself have little data beyond what I saw with my own eyes.”
This kind of thing is frightening to me because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. After all, the chances are that those lies, or similar ones, will pass into history. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which The Leader controls not only the future, but the past. If the Leader says ‘it never happened,’ well, it never happened. If he says two and two are five – well, two and two are five. “Homage to Catalonia”, 1938"
It is unlikely Martin Luther King Jr. had read Orwell’s memoir when he wrote, in his junior year that, “Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.” This was critical if students were to be saved “from the morass of propaganda,” King said.
Seven decades on, these concerns are ever more pressing.
Nearly a decade ago, Donald Trump was a failed real estate developer. I was thinking about opening a school. Speaking to Pitzer College grads in 2013, former Presidential speech writer Jon Lovett adumbrated a looming challenge
One of the greatest threats we face is, simply put, bullshit. We are drowning in it. We are drowning in partisan rhetoric that is just true enough not to be a lie; in industry-sponsored research; in social media's imitation of human connection; …. It infects every facet of public life, corrupting our discourse, … lowering our standards for the truth.
I’ve tried to ensure my school focused on a coherent, sequenced curriculum that builds children’s background knowledge so they grow into critical thinkers. Able to marshal facts, and advocate for themselves – but also detect BS and call it when they see it.
But outside my school walls, the winds of bullshit howl, loudly. Amplified via legacy newspapers fearing death and fighting for clicks. Metastasized by malicious state-sponsored propaganda from China and Russia, further weaponized on Twitter and Facebook.
Academic research – ably summarized by UVA professor Dan Willingham – shows that “factual knowledge enhances cognitive processes like problem solving and reasoning. The richer the knowledge base, the more smoothly and effectively these cognitive processes operate.” But knowledge is not useful in and of itself. We’re not training kids for a trivia bowl. Life is rarely so neatly divisible into true and false. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote:
the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
That ability is found rarely. Making our society much poorer, mentally, and far more tense. And prone to fracture and violence.
Schools that build background knowledge develop their students’ sense of discernment. If they’re taught how to calculate the average rate of satisfaction with a product, we can hope students will also grasp that this means half of the people had a better experience, and half suffered a worse one. We should hope they read enough history and literature to compare authors’ points of view and see how they influence the various accounts of the past. Above all, schools must insure that they can detect bullshit.
Graphic artist Barbara Kruger summarized my feelings concisely. Would that we inculcated this more properly, but as Orwell’s life and experience teaches, living in truth is hard, and often lonely.
