“What is truth?” — Pontius Pilate
“Truth is such a flyaway, such a slyboots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Pilate and Emerson were prophets: truth is slipping away from us.
We’ve heard for a while about “alternative facts” and “post-truth politics.” Those who promoted those expressions, at least at first, were complaining about Donald Trump. But he seems comparatively old-fashioned, a figure out of real estate promotion, pro wrestling trash talk, and stand-up comedy. His stories are a personal performance, which seems a milder affair than the radical unreality of much of today’s public life.
Compare a Trump speech with the “Russian collusion” affair or the campaign to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop. Leading politicians, elite journalists, and once-admired federal agencies, presenting themselves as serious and ethical people, worked together—with no concern for truth or fear of consequences—to construct or suppress explosive claims about misconduct in the inner circles of two presidential campaigns.
Here we are dealing not with everyday falsehoods but with loss of a conception of truth as anything beyond a story constructed for a purpose—self-interest, self-justification, political commitment, hatred of enemies, loyalty to friends, general usefulness.
None of this is exclusive to one side of the political divide. But the left dominates journalism, academia, and most government agencies, so they’re best placed to make their stories count as real among educated and seemingly informed people. And they’re progressive, which means that following the direction of developments is for them a basic principle of life. So, if the arc of history is bending toward the disintegration of truth, that is the direction they will go. What would give them a principle that tells them otherwise?
Concrete elements of the current situation have been around for a long time. Politicians lie and politics itself, especially mass democratic politics, have always involved a great deal of mythmaking. But intelligent politicians have generally taken Mark Twain’s advice to heart: “Get your facts first, and then you can distort ’em as much as you please.”
In contrast, recent politicians have tended to take their myths literally. It’s been a long time since we had a president who could be called a sober realist with a thought-through strategy. The collapse of the Soviet Union seemed to eliminate the need. Why worry about reality when we can get our way regardless? Trump may have had a businessman’s concern for how a deal would actually work, but that’s not a strategy.
Our attempts to spread freedom and democracy through revolution and military force provide disastrous examples. After all, the thought seems to have been, America, Western values, and liberal democracy are what is good politically. But all men are equal, which means they all want the same good things we want. So why not get rid of the bad people who are keeping them from getting them by war in Afghanistan and revolution in Libya and Ukraine? What could go wrong?
It didn’t work, of course, but when was the last time a politician, journalist, or “expert” lost credit for being wrong? It seems enough to his audience and colleagues that they like the kind of story he tells. The public too has lost its connection to reality: our leaders lead us as we like to be led.
So why is this happening?
An obvious reason is national success and prosperity. It’s gone to our heads, and we think we can do anything. Another is the electronic fantasies we inhabit. People are living more and more by social media, digital pop culture, and now increasingly AI, in virtual worlds made up of transitory images and soundbites that can be assembled to make anything at all seem true. That trend had already begun with the advent of the mass press and then radio, the cinema, and TV, but recent developments have radicalized it.
As a result, people have come to believe that nothing is fixed, everything is a social construction, and propaganda and marketing backed by political power can do anything. If so, why not inhabit and support politically whatever imagined world we prefer? I can’t help but believe such a tendency is behind today’s growing social radicalism, which now insists that a man who says he is a woman is truly a woman.
Our leaders do nothing to bring us down to earth. That includes our intellectual leaders, who combine claims of authority based on objective expertise with substitution of politics for the disinterested search for truth. At the same time, the quest for grants and other forms of careerism has notoriously led to academic plagiarism, fraud, widespread failure of “scientific” studies to replicate, and research designed to tell influential people what they want to hear.
Such tendencies have further injured the usefulness of expert guidance. To make matters worse, temptations to intellectual corruption line up with theories about truth that have acquired widespread influence. These theories tell us that there is no Truth, only “regimes of truth” based on a picture of the world that serves the interests of some group, which promotes it to increase its power.
So there is my truth and your truth. There are also feminist and indigenous epistemologies that supposedly promote the interests of women and indigenous people, and epistemological racism that goes the other way. Everyone can get in on the act, so right-wingers now complain about woke epistemology, and if they are comparatively young they denounce the “boomer truth regime” set up after the Second World War that (they say) was intended to prevent a return of fascism but has ultimately made progressivism impossible to resist.
How do we escape the swamp of unreality? It’s evident that there are indeed “regimes of truth”—systems of required belief that have no necessary connection with reality. And in a wholly secular world, these systems will generally be justifications for rule by particular people and institutions. If there are no standards that transcend this-worldly purposes, life becomes a battle of wills, and claims about the Good, Beautiful, and True become opportunistic maneuvers.
The basic problem we all face is that truth is not inscribed on the world in a way that allows us simply to read it off. We need to observe, classify, and interpret, as well as distinguish the genuine from the spurious. These activities have a personal element and involve reliance on others, and so, inevitably, do our ideas about what is true.
It seems to follow that confidence in truth involves confidence in people and a society we can rely on. And since truth transcends us those people and that society must have a transcendent aspect. Justified confidence in truth must, therefore, involve something very much like divine revelation. And that, I suppose, is what is behind what Christ said to Pilate:
For this was I born, and for this came I into the world; that I should give testimony to the truth. Every one that is of the truth, heareth my voice. (John 18:37-38)
In the secularizing period before the Second Vatican Council, many people had the optimistic impression that man had “come of age” and attained full independence. Even if revelation was still needed our reliance on it did not have to be explicit: in a culture like ours, permeated by the spirit of the Gospel, anonymous Christians and men of good will could carry us through.
It turns out that wasn’t so. Man is a rational animal, which means that principles held explicitly have a powerful cumulative effect. If he keeps telling himself and others there is no God he will act more and more as if that were so. Pluralism and secularity, it turns out, only give us more reasons to believe our predecessors were right to hold that extra ecclesiam nulla salus. The Church gives us not only a home in this world, but reality itself. If we have sometimes thought otherwise, why not learn from our mistakes?
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Let’s not be so quick to heap coals on the heads of our politicians. Lay the blame for the state of politics in the USA on the body politic. The culture (i.e. individuals collectively in our society) is corrupted morally, intellectually, economically, socially, and aesthetically.
Our culture (again, person by person) is in need of a profound repentence and redemption. Perhaps this will only happen when the house of cards collapses, the culture goes completely bankrupt and society (i.e. individuals) turns its disintegration upon one another (signs of that are already evident). What will probably precipitate such a crisis in a materialistic culture such as ours is a deep, deep economic depression. As our currency is debased, inflation persists, politicians get re-elected by bribing the people with handouts and our government takes us deeper and deeper in debt,the future cannot be at all promising. Any family that operated by the same economic practices that our government does would collapse in a heartbeat.
I do take leadership seriously, on the other hand the piece spreads the blame around rather generously, and there’s plenty for the general public:
“The public too has lost its connection to reality: our leaders lead us as we like to be led.”
“National success and prosperity[has] gone to our heads, and we think we can do anything. Another [reason] is the electronic fantasies we inhabit. People are living more and more by social media, digital pop culture, and now increasingly AI, in virtual worlds made up of transitory images and soundbites that can be assembled to make anything at all seem true.”
The conclusion: “why not learn from our mistakes?”
“The Church gives us not only a home in this world, but reality itself. Why not learn from our mistakes”, the author asks brilliantly. In truth, only the reality of the Church Social Teachings leads us to truth. A few crucial points are worth reflection on a subject that should unify and enlighten men than to have them drawling in darkness of noisy self interested clamour.
Firstly, truth in a Johanine sense is not relative or absolute, but is of the absolute, comes for the absolute and thence leads us to all other truths. The Spirit of Truth does not speak of her own authority, but glorifies God as the source of unity and healing for our divided and fractious self. The only reason that madmen, hooligans and and psychopaths “succeed” and persist public office is because they appeal, speak to and seek to give effect to the darkness in each and everyone of our hearts and souls. Two blind self loves meet and overtime institutionalize themselves, ostracize those of uninterested light and love – if they have not succeeded in coopting them to canonize dark regimes and principalities.
Church Social Teachings should be corrective here. But the real challenge is that the Church is divided- sought for earthly ends, not really in communion with Christ and His Spirit. It is half illumuned. This accounts for the parlours state of ministries such as Justice and Peace- that should be the voice of the Church, the Family & Life Ministry that should be the life of the Church and Charismatic Ministry that should be life in the Spirit. I would venture to say their poor state and poor constitution everywhere is a result of poor contemplation, having hot heads at the helm. It is true that it is a broader problem with a longer progeny of diffidence – simple training, cowardice and going with the flow.
We have to share the blame as the Church for lending momentum to dark principalities bereft of truth. We do not really learn from the Church. We turn her grace into something inconsistent with The Spirit of Truth, and when the outcomes of our negligence and diffidence is this big, we still lack perceptiveness.
“Look at this routine, O God of Mildness. Look upon us men, who are practically nothing else but routine. In Your loving mercy, look at my soul, a road crowded by a dense and endless column of bedraggled refugees, a bomb-pocked highway on which countless trivialities, much empty talk and pointless activity, idle curiosity and ludicrous pretensions of importance all roll forward in a never-ending stream.
When it stands before You and Your infallible Truthfulness, doesn’t my soul look just like a marketplace where the second-hand dealers from all corners of the globe have assembled to sell the shabby riches of this world? Isn’t it just like a noisy bazaar, where I and the rest of mankind display our cheap trinkets to the restless, milling crowds?”
Karl Rahner, Encounters in Silence.
Rather than truths that are self perpetuating, The Church has means to reveal truths that lead us to truth, thus freeing us for eternal freedom and communion with Christ, the alpha and omega.
I would not throw President Trump under the same bus as Biden, Obama, and a slew of others. He’s not perfect but to make him out to be a dealer in falsehoods like the current president and Trump’s predecessor is wrong and underestimates his accomplishments.
I’m not sure if the author is afflicted with TDS but it seems to be the case. The contrast between what we have now and what we had under the Trump administration is staggering. America needs Trump. We were doing well under his leadership and we can do well again. As long as we can beat the cheat.
My comments on Trump all distinguish him, to his advantage, from more respectable politician.
I wouldn’t throw PRESIDENT Biden under the Access Hollywood bus either.
You, “don’t make Trump a dealer in falsehoods like the current president”. I’ no fan of Biden, but WOW!
Trump is a monumentally prolific and a dangerous liar. I am most concerned by the serious influential impact of his sinful lies on our children. The SCOTUS immunity decision this week could make Trump, if elected, an Emperor. He hs said he “will become a dictator on day one”. His modus operandi, to mention a few, is hatred, fear, misogyny, narcissism. Add to that his treasonous attempt to overthrow the government on 1/6/21.
These two candidates make it almost impossible to vote.
God save the union.
There was no attempt to overthrow the government, not on January 6th, not in the history of the country. That’s a lie, and you sin by deliberately lying in the interests of your TDS. Shameful.
Mr. Morgan, I have a friend who went down a January 6th conspiracy theory rabbit hole and never emerged again. Please don’t do likewise.
Kalb asks “why is this happening,” and includes a comment about journalism (etc.). So, here, a diagnosis and some observations about “lying.”
FIRST, is the descent into ancient Gnosticism across all of our political culture. Meaning the construction of a dream world combined with mutual deafness toward critique: “As a consequence, types of action which in the real world would be considered as morally insane because of the real effects which they have will be considered moral in the dream world because they intended an entirely different effect” (Eric Voegelin, “Then New Science of Politics,” 1952).
More, the political winner is nothing more than an “expert surf-riding on the wave of the future.” And, nothing real can happen when the Gnostics of BOTH the Hobbesian Left and the Right, both, deny the alternative “openness of the soul” toward the real “structure of reality”—which begins not with human appetites, but with the fact that God is God, and we are not.
SECOND, some observations about “lying.” Sometimes only rhetoric and hyperbole, plus the inability to parse the near infinite demands of data dumps versus anecdotes, or even the meaning of decimal points.
Random-sample examples:
1. The denied possibility of late-term abortions and a few reported post-abortion infanticides, while it was the unrefuted Pelosi who first defended such (yes very rare) instances as “sacred ground” (2013).
2. The impressionistic proposal for an added Social Security tax (1% for incomes above the current cutoff of $170k), but then editorializing that over ten years this would solve (!) the insolvency (although the “$500 Billion over ten years” is less than 1% of the annual federal budget of $6 Trillion, fully a third of which is deficit spending, and only one-70th of the total and growing national debt).
3. The seismic and yet very plausible worldview (a lie?) that Putin was emboldened to cross the line into Ukraine because of our inept departure from Afghanistan, thinking that incompetent leadership in the West would surely fold and believing (a belief!) that the deed would be done within two weeks.
4. Anecdotal references to violent crime by some immigrants, but then failure to clarify the almost 100k fentanyl deaths each year while, instead, inventing millions and millions of criminals.
5. Across the board, a weak shot at solving (really?) poverty—by either the provider state or cornucopia abundance—but no connection of poverty data with single-parent households and destruction of the family (the intergenerational debacle of the Great Society dream world).
SUMMARY: Twiddledee and Twiddledum….multiple “lies,” or the Big Lie: “The corrosion of Western civilization through gnosticism is a slow process extending over a thousand years,” so says Voegelin.
This is, overall, a good piece, but Saul Alinsky certainly deserves to be acknowledged for his efforts in laying the foundation for today.
And what, pray tell, is behind this drive to create false truth? The real question is, “Who is behind this torrent of lies and vile practices?”
James 3:14-16 (ESV) 14 But if you have bitter jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the truth. 15 This is not the wisdom that comes down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. 16 For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there will be disorder and every vile practice.
“When God is denied, Human Dignity disappears.”- Pope Benedict XVI Christmas Address 2012
The end goal of atheistic materialism is the objectification of the human person.
Man is not an end in himself, nor is man a means to an end; man was Created for communion with God, Who Willed us worthy of Redemption.
“Hail The Cross, our only Hope.”
To quote Saint Ambrose from the movie Restless Hearts, “The Truth is a person and that person is Jesus Christ”.
When a society rejects our Blessed Lord Jesus Christ, Truth is ultimately rejected as well. It is simple as that.
So many long winded articles on many sites about the reasons why we are where we are. Let’s keep it simple. We, as a society, have rejected God, period. All that we are experiencing is the inevitable outcome of that fact.
Trump’s normalization of non-adherence to factual accuracy and frequent dissemination of falsehoods, showcased notably in the recent presidential debate, and his idolaters’ inability to discern these lies and only see them in the opponents’ camp is demonstrated here in James Kalb’s easy dismissal and toleration of Trump’s alternative facts to be “comparatively old-fashioned, a figure out of real estate promotion, pro wrestling trash talk, and stand-up comedy.” Like most Trumpists’, Kalb’s inadequate understanding of truth delimits and blinds him from seeing the rape of truth promoted and perpetrated in the GOP and by the rapist Trump. Saint Thomas Aquinas defines truth as the correspondence between the intellect and reality, “adaequatio intellectus et rei” (Summa Theologiae, I,q.16,a.1). For the Angelic Doctor, truth is objective and grounded in reality, not subjective or relative (“my truth and your truth”). There is wide chasm between subjective perceptions and objective reality, yet sadly today truth is often mistaken to consist more in subjective perceptions. Truth is determined by how thoughts and statements correspond to reality. It is not influenced by personal beliefs and societal consensus. Political polarization today is fueled by the fragmentation of the unity of truth. Normally, all truthful statements are consistent with one another and with the divine order as all truths are in grounded in the ultimate truth who is God. The politics without truth that Kalb laments about can be traced to the ignorance and neglect of the sources of truth. We all have the capacity to know the truth through human reason and divine revelation. This knowledge is a participation in the divine truth as God is the source of all truth. Seeking and adhering to the truth is not only an intellectual virtue but a moral obligation because it reflects the divine nature and order. This moral imperative to truthfulness is best summed up in Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Man tends by nature toward the truth. He is obliged to honor and bear witness to it: “It is in accordance with their dignity that all men, because they are persons . . . are both impelled by their nature and bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth once they come to know it and direct their whole lives in accordance with the demands of truth” (CCC 2467).
A ridiculous comment, but putting it through so all can enjoy the arrogant nonsense of it. And what a massive mansion Trump has built inside your head.
The piece is not an apologia for Trump, as any reasonable and fair reader can see. But I know it’s pointless to argue with you about this, as Trump, for you, is far more evil than Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined.
Let’s just take this statement: “Trump’s normalization of non-adherence to factual accuracy and frequent dissemination of falsehoods…”
Joe Biden had normalized lying and the complete rejection of truth/facts back in the 1980s. He was mocked by the MSM in during his presidential bid precisely because he was caught lying and plagiarizing so much. And anyone who followed the Bork Trial—er, Hearings—knows that Biden was a menacing, slandering bully, as even the WaPo was embarrassed for him. The term “Borking” was created because of Joe Biden—decades before Trump got into politics.
And, no, I’m providing cover for Trump, who really is just a symptom, in so many ways, of the callous disregard for truth employed so successfully by Biden (and, of course, Clinton, et al). I’ve seen that for years, but apparently it’s news to many people—the same people who were, for whatever reason, surprised by the recent Biden-Trump debate, which went just about as I figured it would.
Thanks, Carl, for this reply, which, as you say, is very appropriately not “providing cover for Trump.”
Your writings are extraordinarily consistent in their cogency and trustworthiness.
Trump made the bigger or biggest falsehood, the BIG LIE, that he won the 2020 presidential election. With the way he lies today it looks like he’s going to repeat it soon.
Great response to Deacon Dom Mr. Olson. No point in trying to add anything to it.
When you deny The Truth Of Love from Genesis, anything can become permissible, including the destruction of the life of a beloved son or daughter residing in their mother’s womb and thus the denial of the fact that human persons can only conceive a human person and thus we can know through both Faith and reason, that every son or daughter of a human person, can only be, in essence, a human person.
Truth begets Truth while Evil, which denies God’s Truth, begets Evil.
Woe to us, for accommodating this occasion of sin, making it appear as if an act of evil can be called Good🙏💕🌹
http://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2012/december/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20121221_auguri-curia.html
Regardless of the actors or the actor’s desires, any act , including any sexual act, that denies the inherent Dignity of the human person as a beloved son or daughter, is not and can never be an act of Love. The desire to engage in a demeaning act of any nature, does not change the nature of the demeaning act.
https://www.thecatholicthing.org/
It is worth reading in this context David Brooks’ recent interview with Steve Bannon in the New York Times. While some of what Bannon says is hard to square with his professed Catholicism (but contrast that with Biden’s waving his rosary in support of abortion) there are some fascinating things to Bannon’s analysis of the current cultural/political situation, including about Marshall McLuhan, whom I have long wished were around to have seen the internet age.
We need to be careful as Christians not to think that one lie can save us from another, or one liar from another, but Bannon’s distinguishing of “noise” and “signal” coming from Trump is worth noticing, and the absurdity of complaints about Trump’s lies coming from people who say some girls are really boys and some boys are really girls, etc. makes it easy to choose Trump as the lesser evil.
I suggest that both these men, Trump, and Bannon in his prison cell, are worthy of our prayers. They are very imperfect men, but considering the alternatives, they are by far the lesser evil, and God’s grace can work miracles.
Mark, you have given one of the more level-headed responses to this piece and to our current political landscape. I sometimes wonder how many current Catholics would have behaved if this were 16th c. England. How many would have left the Catholic Church and swore an allegiance to a king as head of their new Church.
The root of the problem is the widespread belief that there are no eternal consequences for how we live, what say, and the belief that there is no God. As Dostoyevsky has said, “if there is not God all things are permissible.” In my view the reason why many Catholics act just like everyone else is the failure of Church since Vatican II to teach about that the primary purpose of Our Lords sacrifice upon the Cross was to break the power of Satan. When Tom Paine told Benjamin Franklin that religious should be banished from the new republic, Franklin said, ‘my God Tom, men are bad enough with religion, image how bad the would be if there was no religion.’ We have now found out.
An observation on a perceptive, well articulated essay as well as critical comments.
We can be so refined in our well argued analyses of persons and trends, truthful, yes, exhaustive of interpretation perhaps not. Truth as Kalb says is relative to the individual or system as seen fit. That truth should not confine us to a distant place as critical onlookers with no compulsion, no reason to engage. Even megalo narcissist Trump retains a marked degree of humanness. As do most of the social radicals. Grace is always at work. When human minds appear locked into unreality, that human intellect we call the mind has the unanticipated capacity for enlightenment. Our work as faithful Catholics is to be dogged, not in pursuit of truth rather in display.
It’s true, as Ilya Ehrenburg said, that “you can cover the whole world with asphalt, but a few blades of green grass will always break through.” All I’d claim is that it’s important to think about the asphalt and how and why it’s become such a problem. Also about preventatives and remedies.