"The Truth"

Lately I've really come to believe that media figures fixed on providing 'The Truth' are ultimately pretty dangerous. Not that I think that the actual, literal truth is at all dangerous - or anything for that matter (besides the truth). More what the words imply than what the words really mean.

I think when dealing with complex issues, no one person can ever know all of the truth by themselves. There is always differing viewpoints, and always some gray area.

For example, I've seen countless Youtube clips of charmers like Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck talking about everything from the economy to healthcare to human rights, and they both inevitably boil things down to 'I know the truth and you don't'. I'm not naive. I expect Beck and O'Reilly to talk about how they're right and others are wrong, but it's this appropriation of 'The Truth' that's new and scary to me. I mean, not too long ago I had a discussion with my dad about how important is was to establish truth in debates or arguments. I was writing some papers at the time, and was disgusted with a lot of articles i'd seen masquerading as scholarly that didn't cite sources or evidence. The Truth, I said, was the first thing that should be established in any discourse

It's not that I think any less of getting facts straight now, but rather that talk shows are ostensibly opinion shows. If these heavy issues that are discussed on them were all a matter of facts, than as soon as studies and evidence came out, they would have no relevance. As we know this is not the case. Admittedly TV debates often devolve into 'who can talk the loudest' nonsense, but I'm not cynical enough to say that this is the extent of these shows.

I said before that the truth is nothing more than the truth and I meant it. There is no inherent position or value in a fact. It's just a fact. Rarely are we interested in what the facts ARE, we're almost always concerned with what the facts MEAN to our society and culture, and this is subjective. Furthermore, people often say 'Fact' or 'Truth' when they mean 'Study' or 'Research'. Even the most credible, peer-reviewed source is not to be confused with the truth in entirety.

Talkshow hosts will often say something like this:

"Studies have PROVEN that abortion laws don't effect the number of abortions performed, just how safe they are for women. That's a FACT"

Now this is not to be discredited. There is a quite compelling study from the Guttmacher institute that showed that throughout their research, it was found that abortion laws didn't effect the number of abortions performed. This is a similar statement to the hypothetical one above, but acknowledges the limitations of human knowledge. The Guttmacher Institute, for the limited time I've explored and researched them seem like a credible, well-founded source. However, any findings from them are based on research, using samples of people, from which statistical inferring can be done.

This is not the Truth.

It's good research (from what i've seen), and research like that is all we have to go on when making policy judgements, but it is not the same as absolute truth.

It may seem like semantics to argue about people's usage of the word truth, but I think it can have really dire implications, especially in the sound-byte world of talkshow television. Once one party declares something as 'The Truth', the implication is that any other viewpoint is somehow untruthful. This kind of thinking makes both mistakes that i've talked about during this ranty article:

1) That 'The Truth' is ever, or can be ever a viewpoint in-and-of itself
2) That the statistics, facts, or data that people quote are ever the same as truth

Saying that your argument is the truth is a bullying tactic, and it can be used to shut down and discredit others without having solid foundation to stand upon yourself. Worse yet, it's completely black-and-white thinking. It tries to force value-based debate topics with a whole range of reasonable answers into a right-or-wrong mold. It stops people from discussing important matters, and paints perspectives as either 'true' or 'untrue', when they by nature cannot be this way.