Moving on

Thoughts on truth

I promised that I would move on, and not recur to the debate on politics, and I will be as good as my word. I do find it indicative, however, that the response to a post that began with an account of an hour-long conversation between Mike Levin and myself on where forms in nature come from, and ended, entirely coincidentally, with a single paragraph recommending NS Lyons, has been completely dominated by the postscript on Lyons. This seems to me in itself a comment on our age. I hope that at least some people watched the conversation with Professor Levin: I can pretty much guarantee that it will prove itself to be more original and stimulating than any conversation about the current political situation.

And now, as they say, for something completely different. Or not so different at all, actually: the nature of truth. What follows is largely based on a lecture I gave in Oxford on 7th February last year, which took as its title the motto of Oxford University, Dominus Illuminatio Mea – ‘the Lord be my Light’.)

About a year ago I had a dream. I was at a party in what was clearly – as it is with dreams – part of the Bodleian Library: a beautiful room with huge Gothic windows opening on the street. While we were all chatting and laughing I noticed that a torrent of water was moving swiftly outside and had already reached half way up the gigantic windows. I thought ‘there is no way these flimsy window-panes can hold back this weight of water’; I saw that we and everything in the room, with its cases of fine old books, would within minutes be swept to destruction. My fellow party-goers not only seemed entirely oblivious to the water, but when I drew their attention to what was going on outside the windows, were unperturbed and insisted that everything was fine. They carried on laughing and sipping their cocktails. I however left.

What can we make of the future – not principally of this University, though by no means excluding it, but – of the university as an institution of learning today? There are many potential causes of concern arising principally in the last few decades, but my main concern is something that has been advancing across a couple of generations: the drifting away from, a neglect – even an abandonment – of, the pursuit of truth, the pursuit that is ultimately the only justification of a university. I am not speaking only of the truth intended by our forebears when they chose the motto Dominus illuminatio mea, though I do mean that as well; for, according to their way of seeing things, truth of all kinds emanated from and was illuminated by the sacred nature of its source. Truth is a searing, searching matter, not to be dismissed at convenience. The truth I see abandoned is of many different kinds. For that reason, to the casual observer each might seem unrelated to the others; but they are related, and insight into what makes them all cohere – indeed makes each of them inevitable – comes from understanding an aspect of the way in which the brain constructs the world.

I remember when I was 17 hearing the most profoundly affecting speech of my life. I can still see the radio-set in my parents’ kitchen as I listened to it enrapt: Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel acceptance speech, entitled ‘One word of truth …’ I assume it must have been voiced by an actor, as this man who had suffered every kind of evil in the attempt to break his will and destroy his humanity, was not able to deliver the speech in Stockholm in person. The effect on me, in any case, was electrifying. The title, we are told, is from a Russian saying, ‘One word of truth outweighs the whole world’, a saying which of course had ineffable weight in the context in which it was being invoked. It spoke of those who had grown up indoctrinated in a system of lies, built on lies, lies that were so blatant that the only way to maintain them was to punish severely those who in any way challenged them or even demurred at them. Of course, at the time I realised how very fortunate we were that we lived in a quite different society, where discussion was free and where there were no questions you could not ask.

But that was then.

For over two thousand years, in the Platonic, and later the Christian, tradition of Western thought, human life was seen as orientated towards three great values: goodness, beauty and truth, each of them in turn seen as a manifestation of an aspect of the sacred. During my lifetime, I have seen each of these important values, along with the sacred, repudiated and reviled. Less and less attention is given these days to the inner nature of goodness as a disposition towards the world. Too often it seems that goodness has been reduced to rule-following, and good actions determined by a form of bloodless, utilitarian accountancy. Beauty is dismissed as irrelevant, in an era that respects only one value, namely, power – so that no artist now wishes his or her art to be praised for its beauty, only for being ‘powerful’. And truth is dismissed, inevitably, as part of the rhetoric of power, supposedly decreed at whim to suit those who hold the power: everyone, it is argued, is entitled to their own truth. What are we left with?

Our only value seems to be the self-centred one of utility. But as Lessing pointed out in the eighteenth century, the utilitarian has to answer the question ‘useful – for what?’ The question points onwards to the necessity of other values beyond those of mere power to manipulate. Without such further and greater values we flounder, set adrift in a chaotic and meaningless world, where our best bet would be to make our solitary, poor, nasty and brutish lives at least as short as possible.

First to clear away a misconception. In speaking of truth I want to distance myself equally from two popular, false, alternatives: on the one hand, naïve realism – that there just is a world ‘out there’ that it is our duty to record passively, as if we were Geiger counters or photographic plates; and naïve idealism, the view that we make up reality, and are therefore free to do so in any way we wish. Each of these travesties misses the important perception that truth is an encounter. There is then no one absolute truth about the world that results from every encounter alike, but there are certainly truths: some things we believe to be truer than others.

In the humanities we should be used to the idea that truth is of this nature: we speak of a musical performance as truer to its subject than another, a critical interpretation of a work giving a truer account than another; and we expect at least a degree of consensus on the matter among those who know enough to recognise a good interpretation when they hear one. There are, very clearly, better and worse interpretations. As a critic of Hamlet, though no one account is exclusively ‘correct’, I could get it indisputably wrong, for example, by claiming the play is really an account of peasant life in Azerbaijan in the tenth century. There being no single, fixed truth absolutely does not mean there is no truth. Without truth we would have no reason to do or say anything at all. Even the statement that there is no truth is a truth statement.

Because the left hemisphere is concerned with power, its narrative is always about power. You will notice this all around you nowadays. It was perhaps inevitably in the humanities that things started to go wrong. Marxist theory, popular in universities in the 60s and 70s, held that truth was merely whatever version of things the ruling class found to suit its own interests.

Soon this allied itself to ‘deconstructionism’. The insight into the partial truth that for us truth must always remain partial quickly morphed into the dogma that, since the experiencer inevitably enters into the experience, the experience is simply made up – a complete non sequitur.

These beliefs were much in the air when I was an undergraduate reading English in Oxford in the early 70s, and I found them not only simplistic but grim. Great literature, it seemed to me, was an awe-inspiring gift that, if treated with respect, and approached in a generous spirit, offered to open to us hitherto unknown realms. What was valuable in the poems and books we read – of whatever age and from whichever culture – was precisely their unforeseen nature, their characteristic uniqueness, and the nuances that could not be translated into prose without loss, subtleties that could so easily be crowded out by the crude assumptions of the critic.

The fashionable ‘-isms’, I believe, move in exactly the opposite direction: toward the Procrustean bed of the explicit and theoretical; to the sameness of our foregone conclusions, to our self-righteousness, and to the self-importance of the critic. Since those days Marxism and deconstruction may have become less strident, but there has come into being something on a far greater scale, an array of politically motivated factions each with its own way of avoiding reading literature and riding roughshod over it. These factions instrumentalise art for their own purposes. With astonishing hubris and abundant pettiness, we sit in judgment on our ancestors, as though we were by definition wiser than they; we measure them against a check-list we have drawn up representing the parochial outlook of the last few decades. That list has no historical antecedent and is in opposition to most wisdom traditions around the world: we imagine we are superior because we are blind to many things that they could see. Education is about enlarging, not narrowing, the mind. As is well-known, the Greek word for truth, aletheia, means an ‘unconcealing’. This process, however, is a concealing.

I am not a historian, but clearly the same considerations apply to the study of history. There can be no one history, of course; but historians are not thereby excused from the obligation to be as true to all the known facts as they can. Without this in place across the humanities, there would seem very little point in having university courses devoted to them: once every view is thought equally defensible, none is valuable any longer. It goes without saying that the only thing worse than every view being thought equally valuable is when all views are deemed wrong apart from one: a position to which we are growing ever nearer, if we have not reached it already. I believe this must play a part in the decline in application for university places across the humanities: not the only part, of course, since future employment prospects play their part, too.

But the mention of employment prospects raises a question. Why has a degree in the humanities, much favoured by employers in the past, lost its prestige? I suggest two reasons.

One is that our culture, if it is still a culture, has turned its back on the humanities in general, part of what I see as the exclusive elevation of a kind of procedural learning devoted to technical processes over a more imaginative, but certainly no less important, intellectual engagement with the realm of ideas. Once such a process is underway it creates a positive feedback loop which threatens to see the humanities wither away altogether. Where that would leave universities, or indeed the civilisation of which they form a pillar, is not something it is possible to contemplate with equanimity. Education is obviously not the force-feeding of information, but the drawing out, and the enlargement, of the powers of intelligent and creative imagination; along with the ability to reason clearly, express oneself clearly, and know where clarity meets its necessary boundaries. Imagination is essential to the proper use, and the successful use, of science and reason: without it they are dwarves of themselves. Imagination is the opposite of fantasy: it does not take us away from reality, but is our only chance of entering into reality.

The other reason is that there has undeniably been a lowering of standards, with students coming less well prepared from school, so that much work formerly undertaken at school has to be done at university, coupled with grade inflation, an easing of demands for rigour, thoroughness and careful scholarship, and the abandonment of scholarship altogether in the face of a demand for ‘relevance’, issuing in the rash of ‘studies’ courses of various kinds that are little more than indoctrination, their conclusions being foregone. Understandably, fewer and fewer intelligent people want to take part in this parody of education.

What I am not saying is that we need more ‘fixed’ truths, but quite the opposite: we need fewer. The humanist approach, while it holds to truth, is thoroughly opposed to indoctrination with dogma. The fashionable ‘–isms’, however, move towards, not away from, dogma. What is happening here is that a way of breaking out of the prison of our own preconceptions is being traded for ever more pervasive incarceration, since all ways of questioning the approved narrative become not just off-limits – a calamity in itself – but so far off-limits that anyone who attempts to question any part of the narrative is inviting reputational annihilation and personal vilification.

I note, en passant, the emotional timbre of the left hemisphere – anger, disgust, narcissism: ‘In our world’, wrote Orwell in 1984, ‘there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement …. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy.’ Yet this is, of course, the antithesis of education. No educated person should be unwilling to engage in civil, respectful discussion. To quote Solzhenitsyn’s words at Harvard in 1978: ‘It’s a universal law — intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.’

Moreover, it seems to me obvious that the weaker the case, and the more unbelievable the position, the greater the vehemence, and the greater the threats which need to be brought to bear in an attempt at enforcement. Solzhenitsyn again: ‘Violence can only be concealed by the lie, and the lie can be maintained only by violence … violence does not always necessarily take you physically by the throat and strangle you: more often it merely demands of its subjects that they declare allegiance to the lie, become accomplices in the lie. And the simple step of a simple, courageous man is not to take part in the lie, not to support deceit. Let the lie come into the world, but not through me.’

Science might appear less open to the belief that truth is what we choose to make it. But sadly this is no longer the case. Without freedom to collect evidence and evaluate it patiently and carefully we can’t be sure of the full extent of censorship in science: but for those who want to read an even-handed account of the part played by censorship of all kinds, I recommend a paper published in PNAS in November 2023 by Cory Clark and colleagues. They consider three kinds of censorship: first, overt censorship – double standards, the branding of unimpeachable findings that would cause us to cast an intelligently sceptical eye on sacred cows as poor science or ‘pseudo-science’, blocking their publication; second, covert censorship – ostracism of, denunciation of, denial of promotion to, those that are dissident, meanwhile failing to challenge misleading research as long as it honours the sacred cows; and third, perhaps the most important, self-censorship in science. The authors of this paper report that ‘nearly all US scientists report self-censoring their empirical beliefs somewhat’ to fit in with a socially ‘correct’ agenda.

To me this is to undermine the very strength of science, and the justification for research, which is to promulgate what is empirically found to be the case regardless of whether it confirms our prejudices. Censorship has no place in science. In the end it will defeat its own purpose by undermining the credibility of science. And without that important touchstone, of unbiased empirical evidence, we have cut away one of the supports on which a humane society is based. Uncomfortable facts, or realities that do not corroborate whatever theory is currently enjoined, are particularly important if we are to make any progress in our understanding of the world. If nothing is allowed to correct a theory, we are doomed to live by lies.

What at first glance may seem paradoxical is that science is threatened both by inappropriate subjectivity, on the one hand, and by an unsustainable belief in a kind of objectivity that modern physics has long discredited, on the other – the kind that assumes that the knower plays no part whatever in knowledge. Truth is never objective in this artificially limited sense. But, important as it is to recognise that fact, it is every bit as important to validate science’s attempt to respond fairly and fully to the reality with which it engages. That is where true objectivity lies. And along with this I should mention the model of the machine, which still, alas, dominates in the life sciences, though abandoned long ago by the science of the inanimate, physics. There are signs, thank goodness, that this is at last giving way in the face of fascinating, revolutionary observations, which reinforce an already unassailable body of evidence, at least a century old, that organisms are nothing like machines. For those who are interested, this is something I have written about at some length in Chapter 12 of The Matter with Things. [I propose to make some of this material public on Substack shortly.]

The ‘paradox’ of being too swayed by inappropriate subjectivity, on the one hand, and by an inappropriately rigid model on the other, is only apparent. It emerges out of a polarised position, one which neglects the understanding of truth as a relationship, a relationship in which we are not at liberty to make up the terms any way we want, but which imposes on us the sacred demand that we be at all times honest about, and honourable to, the world we are seeking to know better. Dominus illuminatio nostra.

Up till now I have been talking about the adverse consequences of the politicisation of the humanities and science. In relation to the divine, the problem of a left hemisphere-dominated approach obscuring the truth is less political, and more to do with the way in which we misunderstand all that cannot be readily reduced to laws and language. If you can recall some of the main differences between the kinds of world sustained by the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere, I think you will see what I mean.

The left hemisphere world is characterised by what is familiar and fully expressible in language; the right hemisphere is more open to and attentive towards whatever is ‘other’, and can be only indirectly expressed. The left hemisphere is less capable of Keats’s ‘negative capability’ – ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’: it is thus relatively incapable of the tentative, ‘care-ful’ (as Heidegger would say, fürsorgend), reaching out towards what lies beyond what we think we already know.

Where the left hemisphere sees things in isolation, the right hemisphere sees processes that are relational. Indeed its disposition towards the world helps us see that relations are, as I argue, prior to relata. It sees relations in which both parties are inevitably changed. It is alert to what I call ‘betweenness’, the importance of context, exemplified by the nature of music in which the individual notes only become what they are by their being in relation to all the others. It sees that decontextualisation and explicitness destroy the nature of whatever lies in a web of interconnectedness.

It sees that our understanding has to be participatory, and that the soul and body are not opposed but discernibly different aspects of one reality. It is better at holding together apparently conflicting positions – whereas according to the left hemisphere, nothing can be separate and connected, precisely measurable and intrinsically imprecise, immanent and transcendent at the same time. Indeed the right hemisphere is less likely to ignore – simply not see – whatever does not fit the paradigm it already holds.

Further, the right hemisphere’s understanding of knowledge and belief is experiential, not a simple matter of information in the abstract or acquiescing in dogma. It helps us see that ‘belief’ – the root of the word is ‘love’ – is a matter of dispositions, not propositions, and of unconcealing, not correctness. The word ‘truth’ is cognate with ‘trust’. The right hemisphere understands metaphor, myth, narrative, drama, music and poetry, all of which are commonly hard to understand once there is right hemisphere damage. The richness of these implicit paths to knowledge, which also include ritual, is intrinsic to a spiritual understanding.

Finally, the right hemisphere is less ‘will-ful’ than the left hemisphere, and therefore more open to relinquishing control. It can understand the value of what in Buddhism is called emptiness, and the part played by negation in creativity: the power of silence and stillness, of not-knowing and not-doing, of withdrawing in order to permit something truly other to manifest itself. It is the substrate of the mature self as opposed to the immature ego. It can understand that suffering can be generative. And it can understand the valour in vulnerability, and the dark side to what we think is merely good. None of this makes sense to the reductive materialist. And this is another sense in which the left hemisphere leads us away from the truth: the truth of the divine.

But there are still other paths to the abandonment of truth – darker than those we have discussed. In a world dominated by left hemisphere modes of being, two important developments could be predicted to proliferate: administrative control – evident in the decline of every civilisation – and machine learning. Both depend on algorithmic paths that are linear and sequential, the kind of thinking that neglects context and the existence of Gestalten, wholes that cannot be reduced to their parts; and substitutes group characteristics for individual uniqueness. It also doesn’t understand attachment to place and tradition (literally ‘the handing down’ of hard-earned wisdom), indeed it can have nothing to do with wisdom at all. Or the body and its emotions, or the realm of the soul. A kind of thinking, in other words, that is biased towards machines and against human life.

After the war, Theodor Adorno saw developing around him what he called die verwaltete Welt – the administered world, in which everything was controlled, proceduralised, and devitalised: one where a new form of total control had taken root in the form of a self-legitimising bureaucracy. He quoted the Austrian writer Ferdinand Kürnberger: ‘life no longer lives’. Who does not recognise with a chill this diagnosis of the modern human predicament? And he points out that it is not even the triumph of the logical – since administration serves to rationalise the irrational: which explains why its workings and outcomes are often deeply unreasonable.

I believe we are witnessing nothing less than a war on nature, and a war on life. This, my friends, is the reality we face. Why? Partly hubris, the short-sighted view that we can do anything we want, and remake the world to suit our demands. So Nature – apparently – stands in our way. But there is more to it than this, and it has to do with the goals and values of the left hemisphere. As Whitehead said, Descartes assumed ‘the mind can only know that which it has itself produced and retains in some sense within itself’.

Of course Whitehead didn’t know about hemisphere differences, but here he describes precisely a key characteristic of the left hemisphere. It knows only what it itself has made: representations, not real presences. It wages active war on the living world not created by it, seeing it as a rebuff to its mastery. Hannah Arendt wrote of what she called ‘the future man’ that he seemed possessed by ‘a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself’. The German-American artist George Grosz produced a shockingly vivid expression of this power-hungry mindset as he contemplated Europe before the Second World War, entitled “I shall exterminate everything around me that prevents me from being the Master”.

To be continued …

S