Michael: Truthiness

Solitary steer
Lowers its head and wonders
What the hell is that?

Friday, November 11, 2016

Boy, did Colbert hit the nail on the head when he introduced ‘truthiness’ into our lexicon.

And because that concept seems to be gaining strength with each passing year, it’s hard to see how the cultural divide that just slapped us in the face will heal in the near future. I mean if someone as supposedly as intelligent as Newt Gingrich can flat out deny that the homicide rate has been in decline for years because it doesn’t feel like the truth, what hope do we have finding a common core of accepted information from which to assess our disagreements and by what objective standard do we use to substantiate the progress or shortcomings of our policies and institutions?

When I was a philosophy major some 40 years ago before the net took over the world, there was an ongoing debate between those who believed that there is objective truth in the world and those that subscribed to a philosophy of relativism - basically, that truth has changed and will change depending on the philosophical constructs that pertains to the era we are living through.

My sympathies, more so now than ever, is to believe that truth exists and  we should work to discover it. That way we can at least work from a common starting point. We may not all agree on where the truth should take us. But we can agree on certain core truths and objective measures.

But now I’m beginning to believe that we’re all falling into our own realms of reality, and the net, that vast engine of information, only seems to be exacerbating the space between our spheres.

What does that mean or how do we tackle this dilemma? Damned, I wish I was smart enough to at least begin to frame an answer to that.