Truth and Reality
(Kind of a continued musing from the ‘conspiracy theory’ one below.) I wonder what responsibility those of us who, somewhat uncomfortably, wear the label of ‘postmodernists’1 bear for the current ‘reality-challenged’ mode of politics in the West? I know that my own postmodern ‘skepticism of grand narratives that claim to explain everything’ (my twist on Lyotard) makes me very reluctant to ever use the words ‘truth’ and ‘reality’ without the ‘scare quotes’ that tip a wink to the audience to let them know that I know truth and reality are constructed and contingent and situated in history and culture, and that I’m not taking these words at face value…
I think that approach really does have some value – for one thing, it allows me to see that those who claim to see the world differently from the way I see it aren’t lying or faking: their different positions in history and culture mean that, in some sense at least, they do live in a different reality from me. It allows me to challenge my own taken-for-granted beliefs and assumptions, and see whether they are serving my values, and in turn to challenge my values in terms of their effects in the world.
Dr Phil and Don Polkinghorne have this in common (if almost nothing else!) – they define the standards for judging a theory in terms of its results in the world, rather than in terms of its ‘rightness’ in any absolute sense. Dr Phil asks ‘so you’re right? how’s that working for you?’ – and often people realise they’ve broken their relationships and ruined their lives insisting on their rightness. (Douglas Coupland does a magical job exploring this in Hey Nostradamus!) My personal visual metaphor for this is a guy standing in the middle of a marked crosswalk, pointing at the stripes on the road, as an 18-wheeler ploughs into him: he’s right, but it’s not working that well for him2. Polkinghorne says:
The criterion for the acceptability of a knowledge claim is the fruitfulness of its implementation.The critical terminology of the epistemology of practice has shifted from metaphors of correctness to those of utility.(Polkinghorne,1992,p.162)
At the same time, I worry that this approach to thinking about life and the world leaves us completely at the mercy of those who are certain what is true and what is real. Some because ‘God told me’, some because they are constitutionally immune to complexity and ambiguity (this is by no means the same as being stupid) and some because they have recognised that with power and persuasion, they can decide and establish their own truth and reality.
- Or rather, at least in my case, see postmodern theory as one useful toy within a toybox (/me resists the urge to footnote a footnote, and simply notes that he prefers this metaphor to the more common ‘tools/toolbox’ and ‘lenses’ metaphors) of theoretical approaches to trying to understand our world in order to make it better.
- There’s a whole other argument there about what ‘works’ means in this context. I don’t mean in a purely selfish sense, so that ‘what works for me’ is a standard that allows me to use and abuse other people to get my way. ‘What works’ is what makes the world a better place for me and for other people, both around me and in my country and in other countries – if my ‘good life’ costs someone else theirs, it doesn’t really count as good. There’s an ethics tradition dating back to at least Plato for use in thinking about this stuff.
Polkinghorne, D.E. (1992). Postmodern epistemology of practice. In Steinar Kvale (Ed.), Psychology and Postmodernism. London: Sage.