Truth and Consequences: or whatever happened to post-modernism? Reflections on and Responses to the essays by Professors Elkins, Norris and Zerilli

For, dear me, why abandon belief Merely because it ceases to be true. Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt It will turn true again, for so it goes. Most of the change we think we see in life Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

- Robert Frost, “The Black Cottage”

All three of these excellent papers respond to developments in the American polity, especially those of the last five years. They are all distressed (an overly mild term) that “truth is quickly becoming a casualty” (Zerilli) not so much of an obviously totalitarian 1984-type regime but of the American regime as it presently practices. All three raise questions about the extent to which one should support a more or less purely “agonal” (whether “respectful” or less so) politics. All three want to bring truth back in – that is re-establish (albeit in different ways for each author) — truth as a kind of touchstone against which a policy should be measured.

What though is Bush’s administration attitude towards “truth”? There are three possibilities and they need to be distinguished. First would be that that they simply do not need care for truth when it is a matter of power and conflict. This is the stuff of empires. “Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can,” say the Athenians to the Melians, and they go on to indicate that such has always been and always will be the law for those with power.

Second, is the attitude that actions should appear as founded in and on truth. Here it is politically useful that people at least believe that the government is telling the truth when it gives reasons for its actions. This raises the question of the relation between truth and the appearance of truth. This is a kind of debased Platonism.

Third, there is the question of what the actors themselves believe. It is conceivable (and I indeed think it the case) that Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld actually believe that they are bringing or trying to bring democracy and social justice to a realm in which it had notably been lacking under the previous regime. Here the problem is not so much a contempt for the truth such as that which Norris adduces, but the fact that claims to truth are not necessarily checked by the world. I should note here that a lot of people who complained about the apparently non-moral Realpolitik of Henry Kissinger now find themselves complaining about the apparently moral aims of this present administration. (“I respond to a higher Father,” answered Bush when queried about what his father thought of his policies).

My first question to all three is thus: Which of these understandings do they think correct and what are the implications?

Before proceeding to an analysis of each paper, I need to make one more preliminary point. With the partial exception of Zerilli, none of these authors spend much time placing “truth” in a larger context. For Norris and Elkins, truth is that against which one cannot argue: it merely needs to be valued appropriately.

Yet it is not clear that the context should not shape our judgment. Take however the following case.

In 1925, Tennessee passed the Butler Act forbidding the teaching of evolution in the state and providing for a fine of between $100 and $500 for each offence. Williams Jennings Bryan, several times presidential candidate, Secretary of State under the first Wilson administration, had been an important force behind the bill. Among his other accomplishments had been the strong support for the direct election of Senators (1913), the progressive federal income tax (1913), female suffrage (1920), and Prohibition (1920).

The state also required the teaching of a text book by George W. Hunter called Civil Biology, which clearly, if briefly, set out what it understood as a Darwinian theory of evolution. On page 196, the text concluded its discussion of evolution by indicating that there had evolved five races of humans, to wit, the Ethiopian, Malay...