“To Tell You the Truth…” 

      Back in January of this new year, a very interesting article appeared in the “Critic’s Notebook” of the New York Times (January 17, 2006), entitled “Bending the Truth in a Million Ways,” by Michiko Kakutani.  The article begins: “James Frey’s admission last week that he made up details of his life in his best-selling book A Million Little Pieces… created a furor about the decision by the book’s publishers, Doubleday, to sell the volume as a memoir instead of a novel.”  Kakutani continues, “Indeed, Mr. Frey’s contention that having 5 percent or so of his book in dispute was ‘comfortably within the realm of what’s appropriate for a memoir’ and the troubling insistence of his publishers and his cheerleader Oprah Winfrey that it really didn’t matter if he’d taken liberties with the facts of his story underscore the waning importance people these days attach to objectivity and veracity.”

      Kakutani backs up that claim by reminding us that in many areas of modern life illusion and deceit often trump truth.  He begins right where I would:  “We live in a relativistic culture where television ‘reality shows’ are staged or stage-managed,’ TV viewers on the edge of their seats watching, not fiction, but rather concocted “reality,” a caricature of verisimilitude.  The writer mentions “spin sessions” and “spin doctors” that are now an “accepted part of politics” – that is, lying and deceit have become a respectable profession within the political realm.  Like what Frey has done to his own memory, academics do to humanity’s past, nowadays openly claiming that “history depends on who is writing history.”  Not “just the facts, ma’m,” but the facts the way the “historian” wants them to be.  Kakutani quotes one of President Bush’s aides as saying something that, if you think about it, is quite frightening:  “…dismissing reporters who live in the ‘reality-based community,’ [the aide] can assert that ‘we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality’.”  That, of course, is a slightly dressed-up version of “might makes right,” a recipe for barbarism. 

      Ours has become a “relativistic culture” that finds truth and objectivity to be merely inconvenient, a society fatigued by veracity, marked by a slothfulness summed up in literary critic Stanley Fish’s observation, quoted by Kakutani, “that the death of objectivity ‘relieves me of the obligation to be right’; it ‘demands only that I be interesting’.”  Truth trumped by entertainment.  Or, truth and all meaning subverted by the need for self-protection, as was so famously signaled by President Clinton’s obfuscation during the Lewinsky scandal – “it depends on what the meaning of the word is is.”  Frey deliberately gets the facts of his own life wrong, present-day “historians” conjure up different pasts according to preferred ideologies, and a sitting President questions the meaning of the third person singular conjugation of the verb to be. 

      Well, the Academy has always had its sophists, and politics and deceit are often found in bed together, but this kind of relativism has now been enshrined in American law:  “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”  So proclaimed Justice Anthony Kennedy in the majority opinion of the Supreme Court’s decision Planned Parenthood vs. Casey.  This little “declaration of independence” from objectivity is well worth pondering.  What does it mean?  It means that people can take liberties with the truth.

      But such “liberties” do not bring freedom; rather, the idea that there is no objective reality – no truth – shoves some people into gas chambers, kills the unborn, sanctions imperialism, empties essential definitions of things (like family) of all meaning, and lands us all in a house of confusion.  One cannot find a better illustration of this chaos than the university campus, where relativism is an absolute dogma:  professors deny objective truth and then join students in some street protest against a perceived “wrong.”  “There is no moral law,” goes the cant… except what political correctness dictates.  That last word is telling:  where there is no moral law, no truth, no objectivity, there will be a dictator.  Politics are reduced to power; might really does end up making “right,” and an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” is established to make sure we all toe the line. 

      Imagine – to give an example – a witness in court taking seriously Justice Kennedy’s “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of… meaning….” and then swearing “to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.”  Like President Clinton, he could say to himself, “it depends on what the meaning of the word truth is.”  Thus the abundance of intellectual, moral and spiritual confusion that surrounds us like a flood – people, like Humpty-Dumpty, defining words to suit their fancy; determining the “meaning of human life” by a chosen life-style; and abandoning what is dismissed as “organized religion” for a “spirituality,” the tenets of which they pick for themselves as if from a menu or buffet.

      When lies are honored for their “creativity” and facts become subjective points of view and immorality is identified with “freedom,” one realizes that the edifice of our society is tottering.  In its abandonment of the pursuit of the truth, the American mind has snapped shut, argues Allan Bloom in his The Closing of the American Mind.  The fruit of relativism has not been the much touted “open mindedness,” but rather a vicious narrow mindedness that comes with being all locked up in one’s own mind, experience and “reality.”  Our house of confusion has indeed become a prison, and the only way to freedom is the pathway of truth and objective reality.