As we observed over the last year, a post-truth society is a pre-tyranny society. Without truth all liberal systems suffer: science, economics, democracy, and religion. Truth is strong but new technologies and siloed communities threaten to overwhelm truth with conspiracy theories and confirmation bias. Our world is facing an epistemological crisis. How do we know the truth?
READING, “‘A moment of truth’? After years of Trump’s lies, amplified by MAGA media, that proved impossible for most Republicans” By Margaret Sullivan for the Washington Post. Feb. 14, 2021.
“The words spoken on the Senate floor over the past few days were almost innumerable. But the ones that stayed with me through the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump were among the very first ones uttered.
“Democracy needs a ground to stand upon — and that ground is the truth,” lead House impeachment manager Jamie Raskin said in his opening statement, quoting his father, the political activist Marcus Raskin.
This Senate trial would not be a contest among lawyers, or between political parties, said the Maryland Democrat, who led the prosecuting team trying to make the case that the 45th president had incited the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
No, the trial would be, and should be, “a moment of truth for America.”
As it turned out, truth was perfectly well served in the trial, at least on one side. Raskin and the other House managers made an irrefutable case. It was so irrefutable that even the former president’s greatest enabler, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, admitted what the facts were: that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection.
But the truth wasn’t enough.
It should be no surprise. After all, one of the hallmarks of the Trump administration — along with a penchant for cruelty and an endless font of self-dealing — was the lying.”
SERMON
“Democracy needs a ground to stand upon — and that ground is the truth,” said House Impeachment Manager Jamie Raskin quoting his father, Marcus Raskin.
Marcus Raskin knew about the importance of truth in a democracy. After a career of government service, Marcus Raskin founded a progressive think tank in the 1960s and became a leading voice opposing the Vietnam War. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg showed the Pentagon Papers to Marcus Raskin, and it was Raskin who connected Ellsberg to the New York Times who published the papers. After a decade of lying to the American people about the course and the cost of the Vietnam War, the Pentagon Papers exposed the truth from the government’s own records. The people could read the truth for themselves. And with the truth we could make a democratic decision.
Democracy needs a ground to stand upon—and that ground is the truth.
That ground of truth is what Jamie Raskin hoped to offer the American people during Trump’s second impeachment trial. The truth about what happened, why it happened, who did it, and who encouraged them to do it. But, as we know, and as Margaret Sullivan reports in her article, in this case, the truth wasn’t enough.
After an onslaught of lies stretching throughout the Trump presidency, the truth wasn’t enough. The Washington Post fact-checker started counting Trump’s lies at the beginning of his presidency and by the end had counted 30,573 false or mis-leading statements. An avalanche of lies. A tsunami of lies.
Lies about the size of his inauguration crowd, the economy, the size of his tax cut, lies about the big, beautiful health care plan he had ready to take the place of Obamacare. Lies about who would pay for the border wall. Lies about who actually was paying for the tariffs he imposed. Deadly lies about the coronavirus, and finally, the Big Lie, about a stolen election.
We are swimming in a sea of untruths, these days. And not just from Trump. Here’s a paragraph from an article I read in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about the rise of Christian prophecy. This is by Ruth Graham. (Christian Prophets Are on the Rise. What Happens When They’re Wrong? By Ruth Graham Feb. 11, 2021)
“As denominational Christianity declines almost across the board, magnetic independent leaders have stepped into the void. “There’s this idea that you can’t trust anybody except these trusted individuals,” said Brad Christerson, a sociologist at evangelical Biola University. “It’s a symptom of our time. People don’t trust institutions, and people think that all mainstream institutions are corrupt: universities, science, government, the media. They’re searching for real sources of truth.”
The result is that many congregations are awash in misinformation. Almost half of Protestant pastors frequently hear members of their congregations repeating conspiracy theories about current events, according to a survey released last month….”
“Congregations are awash in misinformation.”
Brad Christerson says that people don’t trust institutions and that, “They’re searching for real sources of truth.” But I think, rather, people are looking for comfort. Religious people, non-religious people, all people. People are looking to ease their anxiety, to ease their fears. As we live through a global pandemic. As we face a world of new technology with capacities and dangers we haven’t mastered yet. As we face climate change, now regularly causing present-day environmental disasters: wildfires in California, that snowstorm in Texas last week. As we face a rapidly shifting cultural landscape confronting people with moral questions they’d rather not have to examine. People are unsettled and they’re looking for certainty, for order, for the familiar.
What they’re not looking for is the truth.
Because the truth hurts. Better to turn to folks who will tell them what they want to hear: Christian prophets, Trump, your like-minded friends on the internet. Some of those voices are deliberately lying because capturing your attention is good for their wallets, or their power. Others, are simply sharing outloud the fantasies they’ve constructed to ease their own anxieties. God is in charge. There’s a plan. The scary monsters aren’t real. The true villians are easily identified and will soon be punished.
Marcus Raskin tells us, “Democracy needs a ground to stand upon—and that ground is the truth.” No wonder our democracy feels unsteady on its feet today. America is facing a truth crisis.
Back in October, I preached for you, you might remember, about the meaning of the phrase “liberal religion.” I said that we are a liberal religion not because of our politics but because we follow in our religion the principles of classical liberalism. Classical liberalism is a means of resolving conflict through free speech, open debate, and persuasion through evidence and reason. Through the liberal method we discern the truth, we gain knowledge, false ideas are put away, and we ground our social policies in reality.
I like to say that Unitarian Universalism is a reality-based religion. We know, sometimes, the truth hurts. But as a reality-based religion we accept the uncomfortable truths, because we know that ultimately abiding falsehoods hurts even more. Only if we know the truth, about Climate Change, about the Vietnam War, can we take the action necessary to ease suffering now and make a better future. Sometimes the truth hurts, but as we saw on January 6, falsehood destroys.
So what do we do, then, if our faith and our democracy depend on a ground of truth, but we find that ground so polluted with falsehoods, with unreality?
Back in October, I counseled that the antidote to false speech is free speech. I quoted John Milton, quoted in our hymnal, who said, “whoever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter.” Milton says, “though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so truth be in the field, we do injuriously to misdoubt her strength.”
But I have come, I admit, over the last few months, to feel a little doubtful about truth’s unaided strength.
When powerful voices in politics and media are willing to lie so constantly, so willfully, so shamelessly, denying real dangers and inventing imaginary threats to shift focus. And when our populace is divided into media bubbles where half of us never even see the news that the other half is seeing. How can the truth win out?
The media bubbles of the right and the left aren’t playing the same game, they aren’t even playing on the same fields. Different news for different audiences.
And while we are searching for truth, much of the media on the left and right are merely searching for clicks. It’s eyeballs on ad-buys they’re after, not truth. Rush Limbaugh, dying this last week should remind us that making outrageous statements designed to enflame emotion and flatter his listeners, not further the truth, is a long-standing, successful media strategy. And a successful political strategy, too, for some candidates. And a successful religious strategy, too, in some churches.
The environment is the same for all of us, regardless of what end of the political spectrum, or the religious pew, you happen to be sitting on. The danger of entertainment passing itself as information, biased news sources, unreliable authorities, social media echo chambers, and bubbles of our like-minded friends, presents the same danger for all of us.
We, who want the truth. We, who want to follow a reality-based faith. We, who are willing to bear the hurt of truth, because we know that eventually only truth can end the hurting. How do we know that what we think we know is actually true?
How do we know?
This is the question of epistemology. The theory of knowledge. How do we distinguish truth from falsehood? How do we know what is real?
It might seem obvious that to know something simply means that the idea in your head matches the truth of the thing in reality. I know Biden won the election because what I think about the election corresponds to what actually happened in the election. The thought in your head corresponds to the real world outside.
But those claiming election fraud also think they know what really happened. So there’s a problem with that simple theory of knowledge. Because, comparing the thought in your head to the truth in reality, requires that we have some way to directly access the truth of reality outside of our own thinking about it – and we don’t. That’s precisely the problem we’re trying to solve. We can’t access reality directly. We’re always trapped inside our own brains. Even if we could examine the ballots themselves all we would be comparing are two different mental pictures of reality both of which are constructed in our own brains.
Because of this problem, some philosophers concluded that no objective knowledge of external reality is ever possible. This is a fundamental tenet of the school of thought called Post-Modernism. All knowledge, they claim, is only subjective knowledge: a truth about yourself, perhaps, but not a truth for others.
Post-Modernism is a disaster for liberalism including our liberal religion and our liberal democracy because Post-Modernism denies the possibility of objective truth. As Marcus Raskin says, “Democracy needs a ground to stand upon — and that ground is the truth.” But Post-Modernism can’t give us the truth. Post-Modernism won’t let us consider objective evidence. Instead, we only have personal feelings and stories. So what I feel about the election is just as “true” as what you feel. I have my story, you have yours, with no way to judge the truth.
Is there a way out of Post-Modernist nihilism? Yes there is.
Another way to define knowledge is to say we “know” something about external reality, when each piece of knowledge we have fits comfortably within a comprehensive system where all the parts agree with and support each other. I “know” that Biden won the election because that idea fits with all the other ideas I have about voting, and elections, and news reporting, and human behavior, and so on and so on and so on. To “know,” means I don’t have to hold ideas simultaneously that contradict each other, or ignore the facts that don’t fit.
This is the standard of evidence in a courtroom. This is also the standard of proof for scientific theories. When all of the different parts of the subject fit together and support each other, then we have knowledge, we have the truth.
Individuals are still welcome to share their unique stories, but the goal is to shape all these perspectives into a comprehensive whole: the truth. And that brings us back to Milton, and classical liberalism: folks meeting on a playing field to discuss, debate, defend, and determine, together, the truth.
But that also brings us back to the question I began with.
In an environment so rife with deliberate lying and unreality, how do we lift up the truth? How do we create a coherent system we can trust as knowledge? And what about the people who aren’t interested in the truth or those who deny even that there is an objective truth we could look for?
The song that we played right before the sermon began with this line:
“As for me, and my house, you will find us serving truth.”
I think that’s where we have to begin. Me. And my house. Let’s be sure that we are following truth-seeking best practices for ourselves first, and then maybe we can start to help others.
So.
Truth-seeking best practice: distinguish news from entertainment.
You can listen to their radio show if you like, or read their click-bait articles if you want. But understand that a story’s value as entertainment does not equal its value as information. Some people are actively lying to you because it increases their power or their wealth or both. Be savvy. Usually, the truth is complicated and morally ambiguous. If a story is presented as simple or as simply good vs. evil it’s probably designed to excite your passion rather than enlighten your understanding.
Truth-seeking best practice: distinguish facts from opinions.
Editorial columns can help us understand complicated stories but editorials are personal statements not shared truth. I read the New York Times and the Washington Post whose editorial pages lean to the left and sometimes that bias creeps into their news articles also. So I try to create balance for myself. How are other news outlets reporting the story? What does a right-leaning columnist have to say about this story? Are they presenting evidence for their argument or only personal testimony?
Truth-seeking best practice: be your own authority.
The Buddha said in his farewell sermon, “Be ye lamps unto yourselves; be your own confidence; hold to the truth within yourselves as to the only lamp.” The first principle of our UU faith is “direct experience.” We get much of our information from trusted authorities. That’s good and necessary. But getting as close to the facts as possible is a truth-seeking best practice. What does the poll actually say? What are the actual statistics? Look it up for yourself. Check it out.
One last truth-seeking best practice: distinguish friends from facts.
On social media and in person, too, we tend to hang out with people like us, people who look like us, think like us, are about our same age and economic class, and live in the same neighborhoods that we do. Our friends support us and affirm us. We need friends for social reasons. But for truth reasons we also need people who aren’t like us, who can offer different experiences and broader perspectives. It’s a truth-seeking best practice to seek out people who you can respect but don’t always agree with. Maybe you’ll never think of them as friends but might come to rely on them as valuable partners in your truth-seeking.
The line, “As for me, and my house, you will find us serving truth.” is taken from the Bible, slightly adapted.
It’s in the book of Joshua at the end of the Exodus story. The Israelites have come out of Egypt. They have walked through the desert. They have suffered and starved. Moses has died and left Joshua in charge. But still the people haven’t arrived at the land promised to them and now many are thinking that if the God Yahweh can’t bring them to the goal maybe they should find another god who can.
So Joshua says this:
“But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” (Joshua 24:15, NIV)
Serving the truth is hard work. The truth hurts. The truth challenges and aggravates. The truth complicates and sometimes delays. Maybe better to go back to the Egypt of comfort.
But Egypt is also slavery. And it is the truth, eventually, that will set you free.