Ghost of a flea: The enemies of truth

November 01, 2005

The enemies of truth

Two years ago I was confronted by an undergraduate student who wanted to enter a course part way into the term. What readings and other assignments had she missed? What had been covered in lectures? I did my best to do justice to twelve hours of lecture material in the half hour remaining before my next class. Not to worry, offered the student, "it's all relative anyway". You see, the particular course content could not possibly stand for generations of scholarship struggling to make sense of the world. This poor soul had been taught the only important thing to know is that all knowledge is strictly contingent and reliance on any particular facts, or assertions that declare the superior rigour of a particular mode of analysis, is no longer necessary. Ignorance is a real time saver.

To argue for the truth, that is to say for the existence of the truth, in contemporary arts or social science departments is most often to be treated with sneering derision. There is precious little truth to be found; only an etiquette about all the opinions upon which we are meant to agree. We are meant to believe that only people lacking in the suburban knowingness which now passes for an education can be so naive as to believe in the truth. So much for the Enlightenment.

For several decades the philosophical ground has been softened up by the relativism and political correctness of the secular left, which succeeded in undermining the very idea of objective reality and of calling a spade a spade � so now, in the resulting marsh, fantasies like intelligent design (or Scientology or feng shui or 9/11 as a CIA plot) take root and spread like weeds. Liberals pioneered squishy-minded indulgence of their key constituencies� unfortunate new ideas, like reparations and criminalized hate speech; now it�s the right�s turn.

The ID people, I�m afraid, remind me of Holocaust deniers. They�re not evil, but they are distorting and ignoring a century and a half of overwhelming empirical evidence to make it easier for people to believe in a historical miracle, just as Holocaust deniers distort and ignore half a century of overwhelming empirical evidence to make it easier for people to disbelieve a historical crime. Both are enemies of truth.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at November 1, 2005 08:01 AM

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Comments

It is interesting that the fact of truth and the layerings of truth have become so confused and denegrated but more so that the sources of this erosion of reality have come equally from the conservatives who support intellegent design as well as the neo-Babbitt techno-pirates Boing-Boingian. The first says their faith trumps all while the second says whatever you believe trumps all. Each is an attack on enlightenment and the community and each would deny it for themselves but see it in the other. Blake wrote a brace of poems on this in 1778, did he not?

Posted by: Alan McLeod at November 1, 2005 11:39 AM

Personally I can't fathom the near-hysteria that ID seems to engender. "Theocratization"? Nazi allusions? Get ahold of yourself, Andersen! Keep it out of public high schools, sure, but get some perspective on it too. Science types were panicking in the 1970s over Velikovsky -- where's the "damage" from him today?

I shouldn't complain too much though -- seeing supposed hard-headed rationalists wilting like flighty schoolgirls with the vapors is comedy gold!

Posted by: Varenius at November 1, 2005 04:20 PM

The Velikovsky Defense... a Flea first!

Posted by: Ghost of a flea at November 1, 2005 05:40 PM