For years I’ve argued that Pilate, the Roman governor of ancient Judea, is the prototype of contemporary thought.
During his interrogation of Jesus at trial, the prisoner declares, “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my Voice.” In response, Pilate utters these (in)famous words, “What is truth?”
Like Pilate, we tend to blanch at the word “truth.” For one thing, it betrays unwarranted confidence. It’s too definitive, too black and white. It’s not inclusive enough. It might offend. “Your” truth and “my” truth necessarily differ. Besides, to assume such a level of understanding – that objective truth might exist – seems, well, arrogant.
No, we must avoid “epistemic closure,” that intellectual cul-de-sac of closed-mindedness that prevents us from being open to new ideas and new discoveries. Ideologically, it’s like being frozen in amber.
Though this contemporary mindset is hardly new, as evidenced by Pilate, it has taken on mass appeal in our modern world, especially among the intelligentsia. It is in fact de rigueur. To question the malleability or relativity of truth has become the sole province of troglodytes, and slack-jawed, mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers.
Philosophically, this “new” approach to truth is actually a rejiggered form of ancient Gnosticism, which argues that perception trumps reality. We cannot know truth but can only approach its approximation through provisional, subjective experience.
Think of a Van Gogh painting. We can definitely make out a field of sunflowers or a church at night, but the image is distorted, re-imagined by the artist’s subjective state of mind. The image is not representational, i.e., not a depiction of the church in itself, as it actually exists, but as abstraction. And abstraction is the best we mortals can hope to “know” about any “truth.”
In broad terms, Gnosticism denies there is a real world. Creation has no definitive shape or foundational structure apart from our experience of it. Or if it does, it’s simply beyond our ability to “know.”
Take literature as a case in point. From academia we have been blessed with “deconstructionism,” which teaches that an author’s intent is beside the point. The only thing that matters is how the reader subjectively experiences and interprets the text.
That said, there is admittedly great danger in overweening self-confidence, absent sober analysis. Yet I would argue there’s a danger far worse – the idea that there is no truth. [Cue Pilate.] The opposite of “real,”after all, is “unreal.”
In the political realm, take George Soros…please. The Hungarian-born American financier and “philanthropist” has “donated” roughly $32 billion to various NGOs around the world that seek political change. Yes, that’s billions with a “B”.
His greatest influence, he says, is Karl Popper, the late academic philosopher and social observer who famously argued that totalitarianism is the result of “closed societies.”
The reason? Closed societies, individual sovereign states, feature only one version of reality. Therefore, Soros’ funding giant, the Open Society Foundation, incarnates Popper’s view that “nobody has a monopoly on truth.”
Soros explains: “We live in the real world, but our view of the world does not correspond to the real world.” Our lives are partial. We are but participants in life, and thus incapable of knowing the truth.
“There is only one objective reality,” he writes, “but there are as many views as there are thinking participants.” This constitutes what he calls the “human uncertainty principle.”
As such, he insists that the Declaration of Independence, for example, contains “not self-evident truths but arrangements necessitated by our inherently imperfect understanding.”
This is Gnosticism, straight up. It also coincides with Karl Marx’s idea that all human arrangements betray provisional, vested interests that falsely claim truth.
Soros’ Open Society Foundation, as such, seeks to “destabilize” all such “closed societies” arranged according to these false perceptions – and that means the West in general and the U.S. in particular, the latter of which he sees as the greatest threat to humanity.
Of course, the implicit assumption is that replacing these existing “closed” societies will bequeath heretofore unimaginable human flourishing. I, for one, remain skeptical. Besides, his own philosophy would seem to negate such a possibility.
Unfortunately, his take on life is hardly novel in our modern world. What is novel is his ability to buy unprecedented influence and power within countless governmental institutions worldwide..
Soros, it must be said, betrays modernity’s touchingly naive belief in “progress.” Here it is assumed that life keeps changing for the better. There’s no set of basic, God-given human facts that are fixed or immutable. Instead, human nature is malleable and forever changing. There are no fundamental or foundational limits on human behavior, much less its makeup.
Of course, Nietzsche had plumbed these depths back in the late 19th century. He lamented the loss of God even as he promoted the idea. But along with the loss of God, he asserted, was a commensurate loss of any set morality. His book, Beyond Good and Evil, argued that in the absence of any objective sense of right and wrong, the only thing that matters, the only “truth,” is the “will-to-power.”
What this means, essentially, is that “might makes right.” Since there is no right or wrong, the person who successfully forces his version of reality onto others wins. It doesn’t have to be true (which is his point), but only made necessary through force.
Here Soros is called up short. There is no reason to believe the “open society” he is pushing onto the world stage has anything to do with genuine reality (which he pretty much admits). Yet somehow we’re supposed to believe that what he’s pushing will achieve a better world.
As it is, Soros, along with his globalist fellow travelers in the World Economic Forum, and many of the richest and most powerful elites on the planet, have concluded that nationhood is bad but that one-world, global governance (directed by these same elites) is good. The sheer arrogance is breathtaking.
The merit of sovereign nation-states such as the United States is that there exists a living community that, through the centuries, has acquired, by the trials and errors and insights of history, a tradition of humane governance. Out of this has evolved a real culture based, notably, on mutual affection and a very real sense of what we might call “home.” It’s not perfect, to state the obvious, but is it less viable than the impersonal, abstract theories concocted by these arrogant know-it-alls?
So getting back to reality, I firmly believe we humans are indeed capable of knowing something about truth.
My grandfather, a pastor, once told my father that, after years in the ministry, he had concluded that the main reason people go to church is simply to be reassured.
I think there’s a lot to this. For most of what we hear in church, I would argue, is not especially new to us. Rather, it reminds us of what we already know. It strikes a chord deep within our soul, almost in spite of ourselves. And it steers us back to reality, and away from all the distortions we routinely encounter throughout the week.
Of equal importance, we need to be with others who similarly recognize these same fundamental truths. We need the assurance that comes from knowing others get it too.
With that, we can go forth morally and spiritually fortified and grounded, prepared to face the increasingly bewildering world of unreality in which we live, one that would have us believe, contrary to basic humanity, that the truths to which we hold fast simply cannot exist.
Excellent brother!!