Fight for Liberty

The Need for Truth

ROGER SCRUTON

“There are no truths,” wrote Nietzsche, “only interpretations.” True or false? If true then false, hence necessarily false—false under every interpretation. That ought to have been an end to the matter. In fact, it was only the beginning. Not long after Nietzsche made this declaration in the late nineteenth century, relativism began to gather momentum. Faced with a world in which people acknowledged rival authorities but no shared method of discussing them, many were tempted to abandon entirely the old distinction between the true and the false. What you say is true from your point of view, was the mantra, what I say is true from mine. Hence there is no disagreement, no conflict, nothing to be resolved, and no way of resolving it in any case. Truth, fact, reality—all such notions were relativized, and the search for the objective standpoint, from which the evidence could be assessed and the facts determined, was abandoned as delusory.

“Cultural relativism,” as it was called at first, looks like a positive step toward toleration. On examination, however, what seems like the acceptance of difference shows itself to be the opposite. If there are no facts, if people cannot judge or be judged save from their own point of view, then all that we say, think, or do is beyond external criticism. Nobody has grounds to protest or to argue, because to do so would be to impose a point of view that has no authority for the person being criticized. All people exist in the bubble of their own opinions and are granted the absolute permission to be who they are regardless. In which case, all people are a potential threat to their neighbors.

Human beings will continue to want those things—possessions, comfort, survival—that power alone can secure for them, and in pursuing those things they will continue to be in competition with the rest of us. If there is no truth, then we cannot accommodate and conciliate our conflicts by agreement, because the idea of agreement suggests a cooperative search for the facts. A world without truth is a world without trust, and in particular without the trust between strangers on which all societies ultimately depend. Take away trust, and you take away all that makes it possible to tolerate difference and to build together with your neighbors a shared form of government.

That a priori argument is not without empirical support. In the emerging “post-truth” culture of young people today, we find an extraordinary burgeoning of intolerance. If there is no truth but only opinion, opinions become the shaping force of social identities. People begin to define themselves in terms of them, and to create networks of conformity where they feel safe among people like themselves. Social media encourage their users to approach opinion in that way. Opinions are part of you and not to be judged. Opinions, like selfies, are things that you share.

The search for safety goes hand in hand with suspicion of the intruder. Hence social media abound in expressions of malice and belligerence toward those who challenge the opinions of the day. When young people find themselves in an academic milieu where thinking is required of them, their first instinct is to escape from all rival forms of thought. In countless universities in the Western world, we have seen students preventing the expression of unwanted opinions, at the very same time as affirming the dogma that there is no objective standard from which any opinion can be judged. Truth has gone, but power and identity remain. And the contest is fought without any possibility of compromise or conciliation, because those both depend upon the belief that there is a fact of the matter and that it is the purpose of discussion to discover it.

Before the advent of social media, the biggest boost for the flight from truth came from the universities themselves. Since the 1960s, humanities departments have surrendered to a wave of relativist scholarship, some of it originating in Paris at the time when the postwar baby boomers knocked the old scholars from their perch. Structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction had a viral effect on the French curriculum, consigning all ideas of objectivity to the trash can. And, in a similar development in America, the once respectable “pragmatism” of William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey was recycled as an attack on the very concept of truth. Pragmatism came to denote the view that truth is “what works,” where “what works” means “what works for me.”

The scholars who fostered this post-truth culture tended to come from the left. But they may have unwittingly helped create the milieu in which Donald Trump has flourished. His thoughts, attuned by their very nature to the limits of a Twitter account, make no distinction between the true and the false, and assume that no one else makes such a distinction either. Should the FBI show that Trump colluded with the Russians in manipulating the presidential election, that would not be a fact but simply “fake news,” of no greater authority than his own homegrown alternative, which will have the added advantage of being contained in a tweet, so that we can read it quickly and move on.

The president owes his election in part to the astute use of social media, themselves the most powerful instruments in the demotion of truth from its once exalted position in the human psyche. We have yet to get used to the damage done to rational argument by the Internet’s conversion into one great seething cauldron of opinions, most of them anonymous, in which every kind of malice and fantasy swamps the still, small voice of humanity. Maybe someone will create software that will worm through the system, systematically deleting all that is false and destructive. But until then we live in a post-truth culture.

An influential proponent of this culture, Michel Foucault, argued that behind every practice, every institution, every system of belief lies power, and that the goal of the historian is to unmask that power and to liberate its victim. Foucault originally described his method as an “archaeology of knowledge” and his subject matter as truth, suggesting that truth and knowledge were the goals of his inquiry. But, in his seminal 1966 work Les mots et les choses (published in English in 1970 as The Order of Things), he made clear that “truth,” for him, would always appear in scare quotes, because “truth” is the product of “discourse,” and discourse the voice of power. Foucault’s “truth” does not exist independently of the opinions that give voice to it but is created and re-created by the prevailing discourse. Hence, there are no received truths that are not also convenient truths, and truth itself has no existence independent of the political structures that it serves.

In a series of striking books, Foucault showed—to the satisfaction of his youthful readers—that the entire understanding of the world on which French postwar society had been built was simply a mask for the power of the bourgeoisie. “Truth” has no authority outside the social structures that are propped up by it and that in turn prop it up. The whole castle of illusions will come tumbling to the ground just as soon as a rival discourse replaces the old “truth” with a new “truth” of its own.

This is not the place to explore all the ways in which the concept of truth has been marginalized by thinkers like Foucault. But one thing is sure: students who have suffered three or four years of Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Richard Rorty, and Slavoj Žižek are not likely to believe that there are real truths about the human world and certainly not that it is the business of a university to discover them. On the contrary, they will come away from their studies in the same condition as they began them, acknowledging no distinction between truth and opinion, and confident that their own opinions are the right ones because they are shared by everyone in the same “safe space” as themselves.

The fact is, however, that truth is an indispensable concept, as necessary to the advocates of a post-truth society as to its opponents. Moreover, it is a concept that is more securely founded than any other. Language itself testifies to this. There is no way of expressing an opinion without the implicit assertion of its truth; the first moves in dialogue—“yes,” “no,” “I agree,” “you are wrong”—are ways of establishing a shared commitment to truth. Those who tell lies depend on the distinction between the true and the false, and on the human capacity to engage with it. Our outrage at being lied to by politicians, misled by preachers, and corrupted by seducers is the outrage felt by truth-directed creatures when others have set a trap into which the truth seeker is likely to fall.

Scientific theories aim at truth, and it would be impossible for science to proceed except by conjecture and refutation. To refute a theory is to show it to be false, and even if there are philosophers of science like Paul Feyerabend who believe that any scientific theory can be retained in the face of the evidence, no practicing scientist takes them seriously. The scientific community is founded on debate and challenge, and you cannot debate if you think there is no truth to be aimed at.

Nor is science some isolated sphere to which old-fashioned and eccentric ideas of objectivity retreat from the surrounding intellectual disorder. In every sphere where there is genuine thought and real opinion, the laws of logic apply. All who think are obliged to stand by the implications of what they think. But one proposition implies another if the first cannot be true without the second being true. Logic tells us that every proposition p is equivalent to the proposition that p is true. We cannot reason if we deny the law of noncontradiction, which tells us that p and not p cannot both be true together. At every juncture we encounter the absolute and all-pervasive nature of the concept of truth, which guides our thinking even when it is never mentioned. It is a concept so deeply implanted in the human psyche that only sophism can have any force against it, and those who take refuge in these arguments will not stand up for long.

All this needs to be said now for two reasons. One, as mentioned, is that the relativizing of truth, which seems to its advocates to be a form of toleration, is in fact a recipe for conflict: it closes the door to the very possibility of dialogue. Failure to discuss our differences is a sure way to enhance them, and the first result of the post-truth culture has been the “no platform” and “safe spaces” habit of the modern campus. Post-truth culture is not the friend of toleration but its enemy.

The other reason is that, without the concept of an objective reality, human beings adopt a posture of retreat. In all areas where decisions are required, people lose confidence that there is either a real objective goal or a sure method of pursuing it. Everything becomes veiled in hesitation—a syndrome that can be observed in the very language of so many young people today, for whom all expressions of opinion and decision come padded with “like,” “sort of,” “basically,” and “whatever.” The outgoing, definite, and courageous person is a rare product of the post-truth culture, yet one on whose existence the future of society depends. Without such people the democratic process, in which real and urgent issues are confronted in a spirit of open-minded discussion and a preparedness to accept the facts and act on them, will be jeopardized. If so many young people today are losing the sense that the democratic process matters, it is surely in part because they are losing the capacity to take part in it, not knowing what the point of discussion might be. The first goal of a university education should be to impress on them that truth exists, that it is distinct from mere opinion, and that we discover it by arguing with those who dispute what we say.

Sir Roger Scruton is a professor in the Humanities Research Institute at Buckingham University in Britain and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC. His books include On Human Nature, Notes from Underground, and Confessions of a Heretic.