CBNO Blog, February 2020
One of the most famous passages from the Christian bible has the Roman governor Pontius Pilate asking Jesus, “What is truth?”
The 1970s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, by Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice, elaborated on this, having Pilate sing, “But what is truth? Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths, are mine the same as yours?”
As a persecutor of Jesus, the portrait of Pilate in the bible is not exactly flattering, and the implication of his question is that he is challenging the teachings of Jesus and, by extension, the word of God. But I have always found the thoughtful expansion of the question in Superstar to be very much worth considering.
And in today’s world of public discourse, I think examining the question is necessary.
I do not think that truth is unchanging law, and I do think that different people can have different truths, without twisting reality and distorting obvious facts. To linger with the religious component for a moment longer, the existence of God is an immutable truth for some people and a wishful fantasy for others.
In the absence of clear, provable facts, there is plenty of room for interpretation and for different perspectives on what is true. What people believe, perceive and individually experience is a reasonable basis for their truths.
An entirely different matter when people state something as a truth when there is incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. When a politician denies having said something, and there is video of that politician having said exactly that, it is a flat-out lie. Given that almost every thing we do, word we say, action we take is documented these days – from paper trails to cell phone data to the omnipresent video cameras – why anyone would tell a lie knowing that there is clear evidence to the contrary is seriously baffling.
I think the problem is that, like storm surge rolling over the wetlands, the tide of lies is so massive, so constant, so overwhelming that we are rapidly losing the ability or even the inclination to hold people accountable for their lies. When media fact-checkers state that President Trump made more than 16,000 false or misleading statements in his first three years in office – even if you want to cut that figure in half on the grounds of media bias – it is an astonishing onslaught on the truth. As a result, people become numb, dispirited and disconnected, and accountability goes out the window.
And the president is by no means alone in saying what ain’t so and not paying a price for it in terms of popularity and standing with the public.
Indeed, I am beginning to wonder if we are approaching some sort of tipping point, where telling the truth will make one less popular. Speaking from personal experience, I have a nasty habit of speaking the truth as I see it in any number of settings, and many times I pay a definite price in terms of negative consequences for doing so. Somehow, we have reached a point where the truth often is, to borrow Al Gore’s term, inconvenient. The truth challenges people, forces them to think, makes them uncomfortable, interferes with taking the easy way out.
On a really bad day, I joke that I have abandoned the search for truth and am merely seeking plausibility.
Needless to say, I consider all this to be deeply problematic. Our civilization is based on the existence of consensus reality and shared truths. If truth doesn’t matter, neither does science. Or law. There is no point to education. History is fiction. There is no accountability; from there it is a short path to chaos and anarchy.
I’m not suggesting that society is tottering on the brink of collapse. But I am wondering just how far on the horizon that brink is. If we do not start demanding the truth, from our leaders, from our institutions and from each other, that path becomes an increasingly slippery slope.
There is another passage from the bible where Jesus tells his followers, “The truth will set you free.” It is time to question the truth, and it is time to tell the truth.
