Harsh. Brutal. Ugly. Cold, hard.
All these adjectives precede the same word. Whatever can it be? What horrible, depressing thing is being described by all these words?
Oh. Truth.
The first three came to me this past week courtesy of spam on this blog. They were all purporting to tell me the harsh/brutal/ugly truth about septic/HVAC system performance and maintenance: supposedly a harsh/brutal/ugly truth that someone else had tried to keep from me, presumably for their own nefarious purposes. The closing phrase came from a news story that I’ve already forgotten. I only noticed it because I’d recently seen the others.
So, is the Truth harsh/brutal/ugly? Is it even just cold and hard? Sometimes, surely.
The world can be unforgiving of our ignorance, mistakes, or outright stupidity. It’s True that people die, skiing in out-of-bounds zones in areas susceptible to avalanches. It’s True that people die, mixing alcohol with the operation of boats or cars. It’s True that people die, mixing the untested confidence of youth with risky behaviour.
What about human interactions? It’s True that people hurt each other and themselves, even extremely. It’s True that people take advantage of others when money is involved and even when it isn’t.
And yet, Truth can be other things, too.
Truth can be cheery, with people increasing joys and reducing burdens by sharing them.
Truth can be promising, with human capabilities on an upward trend for thousands of years.
Truth can be beautiful, with the natural world and human art offering glories beyond our ability to take it all in.
And Truth can be miraculous, with lives saved through advances in human knowledge, with lives improved through new beliefs about what can be achieved through community action and cooperation, and with nature protected through growth in human understanding.
The Truth is that Truth is many things, and can be many more. If I want less harsh/brutal/ugly and more cheery/promising/beautiful/miraculous, maybe it matters how I think about it.
Especially appropriate message today, given the cold hard ugly brutal etc. news of another ICE murder in Minneapolis.
Jim T – I hope it helps.
I would argue for the essential beauty of truth, along with John Keats in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” However hard it may be to look for or to apply that beauty, it has been the major thrust of inquiry for thousands of years by uncountable numbers of individuals. And for a few more right here on your delightful blog! Alongside come joy, gratitude, community, faith, fun, and so very much more. Indeed, Isabel, it helps!
Laurna – Many thanks. (I thought about using Keats’ poem today and decided not. I find its language off-putting. Too many years as a technical editor, perhaps.)
The thing about truth is that it is. We can try to alter it or disguise it or suppress it, but it is. A foundational rock. There is so much truth, that we must choose which truths to make part of our own lives. Awareness of the hard truths is sufficient most of the time. The beautiful truths grow if we nourish them.
Judith – I like that. “Aware of” but not “obsessing over” the hard stuff, and nurturing the better parts.
Poetry may not be the best form for philosophical arguments. Wiki tells me he was trying to develop a new type of expository poetry: he created the “ode” to supersede the “sonnet.” One must be blessed with copious amounts of time to play that way with words. By hand, in ink, with graceful script. If the snow keeps falling, I may be driven to it!
Laurna – Ah, that helps. I know so little about literature in any of its forms that I don’t have a good place to stand, as it were, to appreciate it – especially its experiments. I look forward to your own output. 🙂
For authoritarian types, there is no truth but that which they espouse. Is truth absolute or relative?
Tom
Tom – 🙂 Well, in my lifetime we’ve started using phrases like “my truth”, which certainly captures something undeniable about human experience (that different people experience things differently). It also, I think, elevates the concept of relative truth in general. Maybe there is no meaningful truth outside our experience of the world.
Or, perhaps shared truth is the most meaningful. Is that why you wrote “our” experience?
Laurna – I was thinking of each person’s experience, but you make a good point about shared experience. I suspect that philosophers would have something impolite to say about using “true/truth” for things ranging from mathematical proofs to the results of scientific experiments to historical events to our feelings about our experiences. But I’m not sure what better language we have.
Follow-up on Tom’s comment….
HRH the Queen (not the current one) said of the to-do’s about Prince Harry
“Recollections may vary”
Jim R – I miss HRH.
Isabel – Notwithstanding the comments above, I will still maintain that truth is relative. Perhaps that is inherently and subconsciously recognized by the term “My truth.”
From Google. Relativism posits that truth is not absolute but dependent on context, culture, or personal perspective, meaning what is “true” can change based on the individual or situation. It contrasts with objective, universal facts, often arguing that truth is a matter of interpretation. Common arguments suggest this view fosters tolerance, while critics call it self-defeating or subjective.
Truth is unique to time and place. If I say, “It is raining”, it can be true if I’m in New York, but false if I’m in Cairo.
And that’s the truth as I see it.
John – I agree that some expressions have only relative truth: our feelings and our views on our experience, as two huge examples. That doesn’t make them less true for us. Statements about the world get into a dodgier area, limited (as you note) by time and place and by scope definitions. Understandings/beliefs about how the world works are also shaped by our knowledge and biases – but I’d argue that there is an underlying reality/truth that is not affected by what we believe to be true. Gravity does not require my belief. But these are such different categories that it likely isn’t helpful to label them all as “true or not”. In my mind, my feelings aren’t “true” but they are real.