That strange relationship between power and truth
I have a question for readers and a request for guidance.
My gut feeling is that political power has nothing to do with truth. It doesn’t matter that someone is encouraging me or threatening me to believe that 2 + 2 =5. The truth is that 2 +2 is always 4. Even if someone enacts tax incentives for me to say otherwise. Even if police officers put guns to my head. Even if every other person in my country ostracizes me and calls me immoral.
It seems, though, that there are what seem to be (to many people) strange but unrelenting version of truth that are guided by the exercise of power. This occurs most often in closed systems. For instance, one would be scolded if one stood up and announced that Mary wasn’t a virgin while in a Christian church. If you take a megaphone at a Fourth of July picnic in middle-America, you’d better damn well say that the United States is the world’s greatest democracy, even though our voting rates are pathetically low and even though our political system is thoroughly corrupted thanks to legalized bribes termed “campaign contributions” (see this telling comment, which SHOULD shock us into starting a massive revolution).
Within a closed social system, then, it seems as though political or social power can be used to make many people mouth many blatant untruths. After mouthing them for long periods, many of these people start believing these untruths. For instance, did we invade Iraq to confiscate known weapons of mass destruction? That idea served as truth to many people during the run up to the invasion (some people still cling to that falsehood). Now, with a new power order in place in Washington DC, the prevailing truth is that the Bush Administration intentionally conjured up fake evidence regarding WMD.
This inter-relationship between truth and power reminds me of Thomas Kuhn’s suggestion that scientific fields undergo periodic revolutions (”paradigm shifts”), in which the nature of scientific inquiry within a particular field is abruptly transformed. I’m also somewhat acquainted with various “post-modernist” writings that seem to address this general issue. For instance, consider this definition of postmodernism by Josh McDowell & Bob Hostetler, which I pulled from Wikipedia:
A worldview characterized by the belief that truth doesn’t exist in any objective sense but is created rather than discovered.”… Truth is “created by the specific culture and exists only in that culture. Therefore, any system or statement that tries to communicate truth is a power play, an effort to dominate other cultures.
I see this power/truth formula at work all the time in at the courthouse. Prior to 1954, if I were advocating to keep black children out of my white school, I would cite to the legal “truth” of Plessy v. Ferguson. After 1954, my opponents would cite to the legal “truth” of Brown v. Board of Education. I’m aware that the Critical Legal Scholars movement also picks up on this power/truth issue.
I’m wondering if any readers or co-authors can direct me to other writers who I should consider in my explorations.
What is driving my questions is this. I would certainly be tempted to “create” truth using the barrel of a gun (or the power to threaten another with hell) whenever one has that power. It would be ever so tempting for someone who was not self-critical to cut off discussion whenever it threatened one’s own sacred cows. Governments and religions excel at this technique, and it seems to be the source of some of the fruitless conversations I see at this site and elsewhere.
Here at DI, of course, we don’t have any power to threaten anyone with anything. If you don’t like what we’re saying, you can quickly go elsewhere on the Internet. But many institutions can threaten people to “Believe X or else,” and it seems to me that, at least on a local level, that technique is quite often successful. I suspect that it drives most of the DI comments where many of our authors and a few readers seem to be eternally condemned to be ships passing in the night, intellectually speaking
That’s my question, then. I’m looking suggestions for a reading list to further explore this relationship between truth and power.
Steve H: I would love for you to live a parallel life where you are born into poverty and to compare how the two Steve H’s turn out. The poor Steve H would most likely struggle for a lifetime while the current Steve H lectured him on what a loser he is and how it’s all a necessary part of life that losers keep losing and that it would upset the natural order if we, as a country, tried to remedy abject poverty. BTW, interesting Washington Post article today documents why many poor people stay poor (link).
I’m not denying that many poor people are poor because they make terrible choices. But many these bad choosers were born into a situations that guaranteed that they would become the kinds of people to make bad choices. We can either scoff at them and their families or we can try to do something about it.
So sit back and tell me about what poor Steve H would think about you lecturing him and condemning him to the status quo instead of offering a helping hand by voting for political leaders who show some empathy.
SteveH writes:—”Your friend had the same choices in her search for a mortgage. I would find it hard to believe that she did not have more than one choice in mortgage firms. I would find it harder to believe that ALL mortgage companies would refuse her a loan without jumping through hoops. It may be harder for her to find a mortgage, but she had choices. No one can manage those choices but her.”
Man, I hear echoes. Brings back memories.
You did not read Mindy’s post. When the system in which you must work makes larger choices than you can counter (i.e. this person is high risk based on our perceived metrics—black, young, wanting to purchase in a high risk neighborhood) your choices become quickly smaller, through no fault of your own. This is reality. This is how it works. This is what all the bitching and complaining of the last 50 years is all about. It is not simply accounting. Humans are in charge of these institutions and humans are often jerks. Period. And when the jerks have the money, they call the shots.
Except, theoretically, here, in a democracy. All the things you wail about here (”I will not wail, gnash my teeth and protest in the streets.”) are part of the methods by which large scale change happens. (My dad used to complain about the anti-war movement, saying that marching in the streets was not the proper way to change the system—but it turned out that without those marches, the system is more tenacious than anyone understood, the marches were necessary.)
You say:— “But in the end, if the electorate decides that Obama and his programs are correct, I will have to make a decision for myself - stay and watch things get worse or withdraw my consent and leave.”
To which I say one word: coward. If you really believe in something, you stay and fight for it. Picking up your marbles and leaving is the response of someone who at bottom just doesn’t want to be bothered. (Again, an anecdote from my dad. We argued once over the morality of the draft dodgers during Vietnam and he told me that if I had gone to Canada—which I wouldn’t have, but that’s another matter—he would have hunted me down and killed me. I told him that was counterproductive, that if I really thought the system was wrong, what should I do? He said—and it stunned me—”You stay and fight. You go to jail and I will hire the lawyers. If you believe in something, you never run away.” I consider my dad an exemplar of what it means to be an American—pardon me if that sounds a bit hokey.)
That is at the heart of Rand’s entire aesthetic—that if you don’t like something, rather than engage to change it, you ought to just leave. That’s the message of “Atlas Shrugged” and it is a heinous message. It presumes you have such absolute knowledge, by virtue of being a good Objectivist, that you can decide to let something collapse rather than try to make it work. It might collapse anyway, but if you have such superior abilities, and it’s your home, you engage, you work.
Of course, the problem for the Objectivist (as with any absolutist philosophy) is that engaging risks the possibility that you might learn that you’re wrong. Safer to leave, content in the comfort of your own preconceptions and mollifying ideals. Leave before you are touched by something that might contradict those perceptions, before possibly finding out that the world and its variety are worth more than cataloguing them into neat philosophical packages.
Right around 18 or 19 I was fully in thrall to Rand’s ideas. It was the perfect adolescent fantasy, that I could be so important that if I left the human enterprise then the world would suffer, that I was one with others who were so valuable that their absence would cause everything to stop. That my way of seeing the world was so correct that no one of similar talent and ability could possibly disagree with my point of view.
And I didn’t have to get messy working with others. I didn’t have to risk having my head turned by a reality that didn’t conform to John Galt’s polemics.
If that’s how you feel, SteveH, go ahead and leave, and don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. Sorry to get so incensed, but that kind of attitude is the most counterproductive waste of human potential.
You know what you should do—take a turn in Habitat For Humanity for a season or two and find out. People get born into situations that others—bankers and their ilk—prefer they remain in. That is a reality that raw, unformed ability and talent cannot overcome. At some point, everyone has to rely on a community to get somewhere else, somewhere better. We do not do so alone.
Apologies to others for the screed.
Mark: I was also enthralled by Ayn Rand’s work when I was a teenager, but I also became highly disillusioned for many of the reasons you have written in your well-articulated comments.
It also became clear to me that Rand and her close followers offered a one-way conversation. I signed up for the Objectivist Newsletter (offered in all of her paperback books) and I was stunned by how Rand’s followers railed at anyone who dared veer from their sacred text, and all of these people being yelled at had subscribed to the Newsletter because they found some merit in Rand’s arguments. This was a terrible approach to building a movement. Yes, you want control of the message, but all messages that succeed are living messages–the followers need to become ever new leaders for any movement to take off. It also seemed to me that Rand’s approach was essentially top down–real world evidence contrary to her writings were totally ignored.