Institutions of Truth

Society is built up around institutions, which come in several varieties.

We gather together to do more than we can possibly so alone, into families, tribes, and nations. As human capabilities increased through time, and our populations increased, ever-more diverse and specialized groups assembled to deal with the incredibly complex opportunities at the technological and social frontier. Putting astronauts on the moon required a vast organization with all sorts of skills, but especially technical skills. Such an institution runs on truth. Managers need to get truthful statements from the financial bean counters, the astronauts need to have confidence in the testing and engineering operations, the engineers need to count on the vendors and technicians for quality products and work. 

As a scientist, I often think of my own community as the epitome of truth-seeking and moral righteousness. But all human communities are truthful in their own way, though rarely so explicitly and doggedly. The legal system, for example, is predicated on a search for truth. Granted, it uses an adversarial system that relies on each side bending the truth to its interests, which is an ethic and practice that can easily get out of hand. Even politics is a sort of truth-finding system, not in its speechifying and rhetoric, but in gauging the feelings of an electorate- how it views its problems and who it thinks might solve them, assuming that voting is truly secret and civically engaged. It has been fascinating to see the lies of our current president, so meaningful to his base, functioning as permission to be their worst selves- racist, greedy, incontinent, misogynist, hateful, ignorant.

The news media is an explicitly truth-seeking and publishing enterprise, but can be compromised, both by its market incentives and by political pressures and interests. Markets and business are likewise truth-seeking, not in that they always tell the truth, but that they are predicated on finding a ground truth of what makes money- what is the most efficient and useful thing to be done at this moment. And connected with this is advertising, apparently one of the best ways to make money, and the financial foundation of the news media. Advertising is a curious phenomenon. Its practitioners are paid to tell lies, but only little lies, that skirt the boundaries of fraud. Their art is more typically to insinuate their lies rather than state them outright. That pretty women will flock to the owner of this watch or that car, or that betting at this casino will make you both handsome and rich. 

The arts dispense with explicit truths entirely, and tell human truths though imagined stories. The mark of great art is that it cuts to the heart of the human condition using all its artifice and archetypes. The Matrix is a great example of a wildly creative and frankly insane story that poses the central moral dilemma- can we take the truth, and can we- do we even want to- overcome pleasant illusions to get there?

At the bottom of it all is religion, which offers spiritual purpose and community, founded on pure fantasy. It used to be, in pagan times, that religions were not taken so literally and seriously. Each cult coexisted with the others, and none claimed to be more than an art of the archetypes whereby people could get in touch with a sense of binding social and philosophical purpose. A civic pleasure and ceremonial. But then came Christianity, child of the collision between Judaism and Egyptian and Greek philosophies. Christianity claimed a true historical story, even though it was fabricated more or less out of whole cloth. It claimed absolute truth, certain life after death, and salvation for something... apparently, the human condition was not good enough and had to be redeemed, by blood and death. It certainly was dramatic, but truth? Only on some campy (and masochistic) emotional level.

This institution has had incredibly pervasive effects on our view of truth, and it has taken hundreds of years to extricate ourselves from its presumptions and bizarre claims. Even now there is a rump movement of biblical literalists who are wreaking evil on our politics and society. All in the name of a hot mess of fabrications and primitive morals. We need to take a closer look at the role that truth plays in our day-to-day lives and society, in our moral lives and imaginations. 

• Progress on post-viral syndromes.