An Argument for Truth

Without truth there is only manipulation. In other words, many of our postmodern people suggest there’s a brave new world. Dismantle all these fancy claims to truth and we get down to the fundamental agendas of power. So just strip it all away and we’re in a great state. If our power game is stronger than everyone else’s, we’re in great shape. But what happens if we’re weaker than others? If there’s no truth and truth is dead, and knowledge is only power, then might makes right. The victory goes to the strong, and the weak go to the wall. That of course was what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Vaclav Havel were standing against. They did not have the powers but they had truth. Because of truth, they could not and would not be manipulated.

But that’s true not only in the grand cosmic sense, like bringing down the Soviet Union, it is also true in all sorts of other ways, for example, when people have a family member who is a tyrant emotionally. or a boss is extremely controlling, or a professor is thoroughly unfair in his manipulations. Whatever the situation is in human life, the only way to stand is on the basis of truth. Without truth, there is only manipulation.

Without truth there is no freedom. When I was at Oxford, one of the grand old men of the university was Isaiah Berlin, the great Jewish philosopher. And repeatedly I saw him teasing American graduate students. He would say, “You know, in America you come across to England with only half of your freedom,” and they would look at him. He would expound freedom with two dimensions, and said that most Americans only had one dimension (but he said the same to the British too).

In other words, most people, for example, the archetypal teenager, would say that freedom is “freedom from.” The teenager is free from parents, from professors, from the police, from any parental supervision, and thinks that’s free: freedom from. And of course that is a very vital part of freedom, whenever there are tyrants and repressive authorities, becoming free from is a big deal.

Freedom is not just freedom from, it’s freedom for. As Lord Acton, the great Catholic historian, put it, “It’s not just the permission to do what we like, it is the power to do what we ought.” Real freedom depends on knowing who we are, because we’re most free when we are ourselves. G. K. Chesterton says we can free a tiger from its cage, but we can never tree it from its stripes. Stripes are part and parcel of the tiger. We can free the camel from the zoo, but for heaven’s sake don't free it from its hump. The hump is part and parcel of being a camel.

In other words, we have to discover the truth, the character, the nature of what something is in order for it to be itself and be free. We need to know the truth of what it is, And without truth, there is literally no freedom.

I suggest that many of our fellow citizens do, sort of half-consciously, believe in truth. But in a day when it’s unpopular, and now it’s associated with religious totalitarianism and Osama bin Laden and so on,  people are ashamed to say that they believe in truth, and we need to build back in some of these fundamental arguments for the importance of truth.

Source: Os Guinness, “Time for Truth,” A Place for Truth: Leading Thinkers Explore Life's Hardest Questions, ed. Dallas Willard (2010).

Usually when someone is not being himself he is hiding an agenda that involves power. Like a sociopath. Or the gov’t punishes the person for being himself. Or he is an undercover policeman.