The Truth

I have always believed in the truth: that one should try to understand it, to know and speak it whenever possible, and to accept it, even if the implications and consequences work against one’s own prior assumptions, beliefs, advantages, and one’s personal situation. I would rather know and follow the truth than be happy and whole in the shadow of ignorance or a lie.

It was this basic adherence to the concept of truth that kept me from following my grandfather’s career path—although he was a great believer in truth, too—into the law, which everyone in the family thought would be my future, because I was so verbal as a child. But as I grew older, I realized that a lawyer deals mainly in argument, precedent, and the intricacies of the law as a giant logical puzzle weighing rights and advantages. I knew or suspected that a lawyer must sometimes decline to know or search for the truth—the facts of what actually happened, which he or she is required to bring into court, if known—while working toward an argument or an interpretation of the known facts that will best serve the client’s purpose. By putting some gain above the human obligation to know and speak the truth, I knew the law was something in which I feared to and dared not dabble.

So I studied English literature and became a devotee of storytelling. Fiction, a made-up tale about made-up people, is not necessarily a violation of the truth. It is not exactly telling lies. An author telling a story is like a blacksmith forging an iron blade. The smith hammers away the surface scale, and with it the impurities that cloud the pure metal underneath. And so the author hammers away the alternate interpretations and contradictions of a life situation in order to reveal a pure fact, or sequence of events, or understanding of the human condition that the author recognizes as true.

When I write about “the truth” here, I am not referring to biblical truth, or revealed truth, or a studied construct made of equal parts belief and hope. I am talking about a summation of observations, of experienced cause and effect, of facts that have been seen and where possible tested and annotated, of things we know to apply in the real world. It’s an elusive thing, this truth, but something that I believe can be observed by one person, formulated into a statement or story, communicated to another person, and received by that second person as something that is apparently if not obviously real and congruent with known facts.

It is therefore an article of faith with me as a fiction storyteller and a nonfiction communicator that language can have adequate if not exact meanings, in terms of the denotation and connotation of words. That one person can share an idea, a realization, a piece of truth with another person through verbal means and not be completely misunderstood. Some misunderstanding may take place. Sometimes one person does not have the same meaning—denotation or connotation—for a word that the original speaker does. Sometimes the recipient of the thought has different ideas or beliefs that get in the way of examining the story or statement and perceiving it in the same way that the original formulator meant or intended. Accidents of language and intention do happen. But, on the whole, between people of fair mind and unbiased perception, communication of the truth is possible.

It is also an article of faith with me that truth exists outside of our personal, subjective perceptions. That is, truth is an object waiting to be discovered, analyzed, and discussed. It is not merely a personal belief that is particular to each person and changes with his or her perceptions based on personal needs and desires. Two people can point to the results of a scientific experiment, or an art form or artifact that was carved, painted, written, or created by a third person, or to an event common to their experience, and reach agreement as to its nature, purpose, and quality.¹

Of course, I am not a fool. I do not believe that every truth can be discovered and stated. I understand that some things are the product of chance or probability and so can fall out one way or another. I understand the quantum physicist’s dilemma when dealing with very small, intimate systems, that the act of observing a particle in flight—usually by bouncing a photon or some other particle off it—changes the direction of flight immediately. So the physicist can know where a particle was but not where it is now or where it’s going.

And I do understand that humans, their perceptions and interpretations, and the things they hold to be important are constantly changing: that we do not live in the same world of values and feelings that was inhabited by the ancient Greeks and Romans, the Medieval or Renaissance Europeans, the ancient or modern Chinese, or the Australian Aborigines. Humans are exciting and varied creatures, constantly evolving and reacting to the products of their own minds, and this is not a cause for concern. But I hold it as a postulate that, given good will and a common language, they learn from each other, share ideas, and can arrive at an objective truth about any particular situation or experience. However, I also understand that this level of understanding may require one or more human lifetimes and leave little room for other explorations and understandings. That’s why we have books and can read.

At the same time, I do not believe that human nature changes very much. What people believe and hold to be real may be influenced by great thinkers, prophets, and teachers. Otherwise, the Islamic world would not have taken such a turn away from the Judeo-Christian tradition that was in part its heritage. But people still have basic needs, basic perceptions of fairness and reciprocity, and a basic sense of both the limitations and the possibilities of the human condition. Until we become incorporeal creatures of energy or immortal cyborg constructs, issues of life and death, family and responsibility, need and want, will be for each of us what they were in the time of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

And yet there are also things we cannot know about each other. I cannot know what is really going on inside your head. Even if I know you well enough to trust your nature and sense your honesty, even if you use words well enough to express your deepest feelings accurately, there are still secrets people keep to themselves and never tell even their nearest and dearest. There are still secrets people hide away from their own conscious mind and, like the movements of great fish in the deep waters, can only be discerned by the effects that these deep secrets have on their lives, their loves, and their mistakes and missed opportunities.

That is a lot of unknowing and things unknowable for someone who believes in the truth. But as I said, to be completely knowledgeable would take a library of great books and several lifetimes to read them. All any of us can do is try to start.

1. When I was studying English literature, back in the mid to late 1960s, we were taught what was then called the New Criticism. This was the belief that the work of a writer or poet—or a painter, sculptor, or musician—stood on its own and could safely be analyzed by any person with sense, feeling, and a knowledge of the language. This displaced the author’s own expertise with the object. The author’s claims about “what I meant” or “what I intended” might be interesting but did not define the work. Sometimes an author intends one thing but manages—through accidents of carelessness or vagaries of the subconscious—to achieve something else and sometimes something greater than intended.
    This is opposed to the literary criticism called “Deconstruction,” which has been taught more recently in English departments but is something I never studied. Deconstruction apparently teaches—at least as I understand it—that words, their usage, and their underlying reality are fluid rather than fixed. That they are so dependent on a particular time, place, and culture that trying to understand the author’s intended meaning, from the viewpoint of another time or place, is practically impossible. And therefore it is useless to discuss “great books” and their enduring value. That nothing is happening in any universally objective now, and everything is subject to current reinterpretation. This is, of course, anathema to me. It is a denial of any kind of perceivable truth.