Meditatum

I grew up in cancel culture. I know cancel culture.

My childhood was spent in a fundamental Baptist subculture. Fundamental Baptists represent a small, extreme corner of evangelicalism, which in turn is a significant portion of Protestantism.

If you are not familiar with that culture, the key thing you need to know is that it is hyper-exclusive. Christianity is, as we all know, an exclusive religion anyway. Unlike other religions, only one god is allowed and heaven is only available to those that go through that god. Fundamentalism is even more exclusive in that it thinks that it has a corner on the correct way to interact with that god. Fundamental Baptists do not just disagree with non-Christians; no, they condemn/shun the practices of other Christians including evangelicals. In many cases, they do not consider them authentic Christians at all.

My childhood was happily spent listening to various preachers screeching against the pet sins of the day: women in “britches,” going to the movie theater, skipping church, rock music, and being late for choir practice. The harder and more animated the preacher got, the more we liked it. We called that kind of preaching “convicting.” We were quite entertained by such attacks on sins of which we were not guilty.

Those preachers canceled everyone, including the Southern Baptists down the street where the women did not follow the approved dress code and some of the men were known to drink an occasional glass of wine. I sincerely did not think a Southern Baptist could even be a real Christian. I felt sorry for them on Sunday mornings when I passed their large churches undoubtedly filled with bands performing “worldly” music. They were, after all, just playing church. My church was a real church.

Remarkably, after leaving college, when I had my chance to escape, I chose to go right back into the same kind of situation. I moved far away from home but found another screeching pastor that reminded me of my youth. I remember proudly sending my dad cassette tapes of that pastor’s sermons, picking out the ones where the preaching was the “hardest” (most obnoxious). It took me decades to escape that kind of thinking. I still have not fully escaped if I am being honest.

And, thanks to my music career, I also know what it is like to be on the other side of that cancel culture, at least in a fairly modest way. I performed mostly within the evangelical orbit and sometimes, I was canceled for things I publically said or wrote. I am far from a victim, but I do know the pressure of trying to walk a tightrope of producing professional music within a culture that is quite capable of canceling you as soon as you misstep.

So yes, I know all about canceling people that don’t march in lockstep with my beliefs. My credentials are airtight.

When I look at what is happening with cancel culture in broader society today, I can’t help but think of my past. There are enormous similarities. Regardless of the issue, political leaning, or ideology, the same basic things happen. A group identifies a set of pet sins for which to hold another group accountable. Judgment is swift and brutal. Hypocrisy is rampant.

No, judgmentalism is not just limited to the fundamental Baptists or even broader Christianity. It is not a religion thing; it is a people thing. If you have not figured this out yet, you will eventually. (It took me over four decades.)

There is one big difference between the church culture I just described and today’s cancel culture though, and this is where the Christian worldview shines: Christianity has a mechanism for dealing with past transgressions. Embedded within it is a simple but ingenious system of forgiveness and repentance.

Forgiveness is a concept that we take for granted today, and in fact, it is hard to see how a society can survive without it. Yet, it is a relatively new thing, at least in western culture. Just two thousand years ago, it was Jesus that introduced the concept of forgiveness to the world in the way we know it.

You won’t find much in the way of relational forgiveness in Judaism as defined by the Bible’s Old Testament. There are no significant commands to forgive in the original Jewish law; instead, you find a bizarre, revenge-oriented vigilante system.

This notable omission is consistent with all other western religions up until that time. When Jesus discussed forgiveness, it was radical and probably came across as very idealistic. Today, we understand both the idealistic and pragmatic need for forgiveness, but likely, that was not the case then.

In Christianity, forgiveness is only half of the equation. Both sides have a responsibility. Yes, the offended party has the responsibility to forgive. But just as importantly, the transgressing party has the responsibility to repent (fix their thinking and not repeat errors of the past).

The beauty of a system of repentance and forgiveness is that it allows us to move on from the past. Relationships can be restored and people can move forward in acts of service. Society can progress.

Whether this system of forgiveness/repentance actually existed in the subculture I grew up in (or even broader Christianity) is admittedly debatable. I think it sometimes did and sometimes did not. I heard hundreds of sermons directed at people that needed to repent, while sermons directed at those that needed to forgive were scant. The scales were most definitely tipped more toward justice than mercy. But at least, lip service was paid to the idea of forgiveness.

Not so in today’s cancel culture. That culture is fixated on only half that equation–the repentance side. An offending party is severely punished, forced to grovel and search for magical words to prove that he/she is really sorry in order to retain some of their former status/career. I suppose you can sort of call this process a type of repentance.

But the offended parties? They form like packs of rabid dogs on social media, establish themselves as judge and jury, and blithely destroy lives, casting aside the sincerest of apologies as insufficient, and meting out punishment that is often not even remotely proportionate to the alleged offense. They feel no compulsion to forgive, and in fact, seem to find that concept a form of weakness. Even a suggestion that a bit of forgiveness might be in order is likely to put a poor soul next on their cancel list.

Normally, these “offenses” are in the past, sometimes long ago when the culture was very different. Thinkers understand that you have to apply cultural filters before judging people for what they did/said decades ago; however, no one has ever accused cancel culture of being composed of thinkers. They are simpletons, intellectual lightweights more than ready to blindly judge anyone with their own enlightened, modern yardsticks and brand their scarlet letters on the sinner-of-the-day.

If you have not picked up on it already, I have a lot of disdain for cancel culture…

So why is this important?

Here’s why: I mentioned earlier that the words of Jesus on forgiveness came across as idealistic rather than pragmatic. But as it turns out, forgiveness is not just idealistic, at least in the kind of society in which we want to live.

A modern society without forgiveness gums up. Nothing can get done because everyone has past transgressions, and without a mechanism to move beyond past transgressions, no one is qualified to act in a way that moves society forward. No one, no matter how worthy of contribution, can act, because he/she is paralyzed by the past.

Many decades ago, perhaps in anticipation of what she saw coming, Hannah Arendt said it this way:

Without being forgiven – released from the consequences of what we have done – our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to a single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.

Arendt always seemed to be writing for the future, but I wonder if she could have imagined today’s world where a reputation could be permanently destroyed because of a Civil War costume party back in college or a few words spoken decades ago to a friend. She may not have imagined how bad it would get, but her words definitely hit the mark in 2021.*

And that is the danger of cancel culture. A culture without forgiveness is not a good culture; in the long run, it probably will not be a culture at all.

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*As an aside, Arendt herself had a brief affair with German philosopher Martin Heidegger. While the facts are controversial, it appears that Heidegger was at least somewhat sympathetic to Nazism and was even a member of the Nazi party for a while. By today’s standards, Arendt should be canceled. If, however, you dismiss her writing because of that, it is your loss. Read The Origins of Totalitarianism to learn what she thought of Nazism.

I was in high school when I first heard Descartes’ famous axiom I think, therefore I am. I remember laughing at the absurdity of it.

Of course, the reason I thought it was absurd was because I did not understand it. If I had understood it, I would not have laughed. I might not have agreed (I still don’t agree with it), but I would have appreciated it.

Descartes represented the very beginning of modern philosophy, and he was trying to do something novel for that time. He was intent on finding a way to determine truth solely deduced from absolutes or so-called universals.

“I think, therefore I am” was the anchoring statement that Descartes considered absolute and a launching point for proving many other things, including the existence of God. While he ultimately failed in that quest, he ended up helping to launch the modernist era, which was marked by a long-running war between faith and reason.

Let us do a bit of historical setup. Descartes, a devout Catholic, was heavily influenced by Catholic Scholasticism. Scholasticism was a rigorous coherence-based theological and philosophical system that looked to past writings (primarily the Christian Bible and Aristotle) and ancient traditions for truth propositions and then attempted to deduce further truth propositions from them.

In the 16th century, the Reformation began, partly as a reaction against Scholasticism, as early Protestants pushed for a return to more Augustinian theology. Soon after, Descartes would come on the scene, and while he was not a Reformer, he most certainly was also reacting to Scholasticism in his writing. Like the Reformers and key scientists/mathematicians of the time, he would help drastically change the world by helping to topple Scholasticism, and with it, Catholicism’s chokehold on society and culture. (This was a most welcome development for which we should all be grateful.)

The actual philosophy of Descartes was soon rejected. In fact, many philosophers have since pointed out the problem with Descartes’ anchoring statement. As it turns out, “I think, therefore I am” fails to achieve what Descartes hoped for because it erroneously assumes (rather than proves) a relationship between thinking and existence. This error would lead to a whole system of dubious conclusions about this unproven relationship.

In spite of some significant problems, there is much to appreciate about Descartes, and while his arguments are largely discarded today as invalid, he made a big contribution to modern thought. To explain one reason why that is true, I want to go back to the topic of the last post: coherence.

As you recall, coherence is a way of discerning truth in which statements are compared to an existing body of statements accepted as true. If the new statement is compatible with this body of statements, it is accepted as true. If not, it is discarded as untrue.

Coherence is fatally flawed in that it simply cannot be used to prove any truth. No truth. Ever.

At best, it can provide pragmatic frameworks to live by, and also can be used to predict the future with reasonable certainty. But you cannot get absolute truth from coherence.

In fact, let me go a step further. When you stop to think about it, coherence is nothing more than circular reasoning. One accepts things as true only because of something else that they believe to be true. There is never a connection to something solid outside of what one believes.

If you reduce coherence toward its lowest level, you would come up with this: I believe in X because I believe in Y which agrees with X. If you do a bit of algebra reduction, coherence gets even worse: I believe in X because I believe in X.

Now, let me return to Descartes and Catholic Scholasticism for a moment. Premodernism in general and Scholasticism in particular were dominated by Christian-faith-based coherence. Descartes was going to war against this thinking. Consequently, to this day, he is considered an enemy of Christianity even though he would not have seen himself that way at all.

His approach involved trying to deduce truth solely from absolute proven facts, or as we called it in the last post, CTF (correspondence to fact). His general strategy was to try to prove statements based solely on previously proven statements with the long-term goal of identifying a significant body of proven truth.

That Descartes failed in that task is sobering. That no one since has done any better is even more sobering. As it turns out, real CTF is hard. Quite possibly, it is just impossible in a lot of cases. Maybe all cases…

I am not giving excuses for the rampant coherence thinking we see today. As I am going to get into soon, premodern coherence was vastly superior to today’s wasteland of conspiracy theories and other incredibly undisciplined thinking. I have very little patience for the sloppiness I often hear that passes for thinking.

But I do get what is happening. The more you try to dig into what you believe, the more doubt tends to creep in. Today’s truth crisis is simply the postmodern realization that what is generally accepted as modernist truth is based on presuppositions that cannot be proven true themselves. It was not just Descartes, a key founder of modernism, who would end up failing in this regard. Modernism as a whole was simply not able to ever completely fix the same nagging problems.

At present, CTF and coherence are the only two ways to determine truth that we have. Unfortunately, as we have now seen, both have problems. CTF is concrete but virtually impossible, while coherence is much easier but does not prove anything.

That is the uncomfortable reality that we all face whether we understand it or not. If that sounds bleak, it is because it is bleak.

That is why I am not a dogmatist by nature and why I tend to look at dogmatists very suspiciously. Saying something forcefully does not make it true.

As someone wise said, “those that know all the answers do not even know the questions.” Show me a dogmatic person and I will show you a person who has not spent enough time thinking.

Now, that brings us to the uncomfortable crossroads: do we choose to determine truth by impossible CTF or erratic coherence?

I suspect that most modern thinkers would agree that the only workable answer to this unsolvable problem is some sort of pragmatic coherence-based compromise. I would love to choose a CTF-based compromise but CTF is too rigid for compromise. You are either using CTF or you are not. So, it has to be a coherence compromise.

In other words, we have to choose to base our truth determinations on an unproven foundation. The foundation we choose has to be as solid as possible, understanding that it is not perfect.

As an illustration of what I mean, I recently toured the NYC 911 Memorial. Part of the museum is in the foundation of the Twin Towers. I was fascinated by just how massive that foundation was. Almost every contingency was covered, including an underground seawall to keep the Hudson Bay away from the building.

Granted, that foundation could have been safer. It could have involved even more concrete and even deeper footers. Engineers made pragmatic decisions that balanced safety with cost.

But while the foundation could have been made safer, the reality is that a perfectly safe foundation was impossible. No foundation ever constructed on earth is 100% safe because, in the end, every foundation is ultimately connected to and dependent on something non-foundational (usually dirt). Consequently, there is always a disaster big enough to cause a foundation to fail.

Think of coherence the same way. Coherence can never truly prove anything because no matter how developed its system is, it is inevitably based on something non-foundational and hence unproven.

However, that is not to say that all coherence is created equal. Some coherence systems have a weak foundation, but some have a quite respectable foundation. The latter may not be perfect, but they still are pragmatically functional. A society can survive with such systems.

That brings me to a simple maxim: if CTF is not possible and coherence is our only viable way to determine truth, we have an obligation to pick our coherence systems carefully.

Because this post is already long, I am going to stop here. In a future post, I am going to discuss just how we go about identifying and choosing the best coherence systems. This is a pragmatic exercise in that we will be looking for systems that work rather than ones that we can guarantee are truthful. As I have already discussed, guaranteed truthfulness is not a legitimate possibility.

The world is composed of objects (physical and non-physical).

Descriptors of those objects and the relationships between them are called facts.

Examples: That Greg is male and Katelyn is female are facts about objects. That Greg is the father of Katelyn is a fact about a relationship between objects.

In a nutshell, that is your world. It is a collection of objects and facts about 1) objects and 2) the relationships between objects.

Facts are neither true nor untrue. They just are. It is not correct to use the phrase “true fact.” That is redundant, or to put it more accurately, “true” is not an appropriate descriptor for a fact.

There are zero untrue facts and zero un-facts in the world. Only facts.

On the other hand, statements about facts can be either true or untrue. Perceptions of facts can be either true or untrue as well.

We are all purveyors of statements, in that we are both constantly giving and receiving them. However, we are not all purveyors of truth.

From both a moral and pragmatic standpoint, we are obligated to weigh the truth of the statements we dispense and absorb.

The same is true of perceptions of facts. As Descartes famously pointed out, our perceptions are not necessarily reliable.

How do we know if a statement or perception is true? The best way is simply to see if it corresponds to a fact. If it does, it is true.

That is what is meant by the oft-used phrase “factually correct.” A factually correct statement is true because it corresponds to one or more facts.

In this article, I am going to refer to this way of discerning truth as CTF (correspondence to fact).

For centuries, rigorous thinkers have adopted CTF as the best way to define truth.

There is, however, another way that is commonly used to examine the truthfulness of a statement/perception. It is called coherence.

When using coherence to examine the truthfulness of a statement, the statement is compared to the examiner’s body of knowledge and view of the world. If it is compatible without contradiction, it is accepted as truth.

Most people tend to judge truthfulness by coherence rather than CTF even though that method is often fatally flawed. We will go into why that happens in a second, but it is not a good thing.

Let me give you an example of coherence in action. Over the years, I have had a business that sold certain health products. And many times, I have heard conversations with customers that go sort of like this:

I love product X. I had pneumonia and was in the hospital last month. My doctor told me that I was lucky to survive. And I know that product X is why I got better. I would never have gotten out of that hospital without it.

Take a minute and evaluate these statements. Is the speaker using CTF or coherence to determine truth? (Whether the statements are actually true or not is irrelevant to this exercise.)

You should come to the conclusion that the first three sentences represent CTF while the last two represent coherence. Not coincidentally, those last two sentences are where things go off the rails. This is clearly a situation where worldview (rather than facts) is heavily influencing how the speaker determines truth.

As an aside, one wonders how the person might respond if you asked them why they ended up with pneumonia in the first place if product X is so good. I have often wanted to ask that kind of question but always resisted.

I think you get the point. The use of coherence in this example actually attempts to bend truth to fit a viewpoint. The corresponding facts are non-existent and have been neatly replaced by a viewpoint (the superiority of alternative medicine).

While an extreme example, this kind of thinking is prevalent. It is sloppy and erratic and often makes smart people sound stupid, but you see it everywhere.

Before I get more into the coherence trap, it is important to mention that coherence is useful and has its place. While not ideal, but it is often perfectly acceptable because CTF is not always viable. Here are three major reasons why:

1. It is simply not practical or possible to examine the correlation between every single statement/perception and the associated facts.
2. Some questions are unknowable from a CTF perspective.
3. CTF by itself is inadequate for inductive reasoning (predicting the future).

As an example of the first reason, I believe that my employees are working as normal in my warehouse this morning even though I have not left the house to verify this belief. I am basing that belief on a set of assumptions that I trust because of how I view the world. To start, I assume I would have been notified if something was wrong at the warehouse this morning. Thus, my belief is not based on CTF but rather coherence.

My choice to choose to use coherence here is for practical reasons. (I have other things to do at home.)

As an example of the second reason, consider unknowable questions such as the nature of an afterlife. It is impossible to use CTF in such cases, which is where religions and similar structures come into play. Every religion is built on some form of special revelation about unknowable questions. Followers choose to adopt that worldview and then compare other statements against that worldview to determine their accuracy.

That every religious worldview is unverifiable at best and completely false at worst is not the point. People pragmatically choose to adopt such worldviews because they need to at least have a perception of an anchor to reality, and they need to know the unknowable. It turns out that people are not very happy with not knowing, even when knowledge is not possible. And once that foundation is in place, it gives them something to measure other statements against with coherence.

From purely an epistemological perspective, when considering that unknowable questions really are unknowable, adopting a worldview based on religion is probably no worse than a pragmatic choice, and using coherence based on a religious worldview is not necessarily a bad thing. (Many would disagree with me on that point, and for sure, a lot of harm has been done because of religious-based coherence.).

For the time being, I am going to skip an example of the third reason (inductive reasoning) because it is technical and will make this article too long. We will get back to inductive reasoning at some point down the road. For the moment, I will just say that our world would look drastically different if we did not use coherence to predict the future (even the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow).

Now, I want to talk about the dangers of coherence. I just gave three reasons why coherence is acceptable, though let me throw in the caveat that those three reasons can be (and often are) abused. I am not going to complain about those applications of coherence if used legitimately though.

However, where coherence gets dangerous and people start sounding stupid is when they allow a worldview to strengthen to the point where it overwhelms and replaces CTF. In other words, their worldview becomes more important to them than facts.

Rather than facts themselves being the yardstick against which to measure statements for truthfulness, one’s worldview becomes the yardstick.

As a rather obvious example, we are seeing this play out today with conspiracy theories. Because they flagrantly disregard facts, conspiracy theories can only survive when worldviews become more important than facts.

If you are like me, you are somewhat alarmed these days by people that you know to be smart but yet suddenly sound like idiots, spouting false statements and conspiracy theories with conviction. It is important to realize that those people are not idiots; they just have a gigantic flaw in their epistemology. They are in the coherence trap. Recognizing that does not make me feel enormously better, but maybe a bit better.

Here are three big risk factors for the coherence trap:

Getting old
Growing up, I was taught that older people are wise. As it turns out, the percentage of the elderly that are really wise is rather low. Because older people have had more time to develop a worldview, they are more susceptible to letting coherence to that worldview override CTF. The more developed the worldview, the greater the danger.

As you grow older, you will find that this fatal attraction with worldview will get stronger. We all eventually have to face a decision as we become mature adults: are we going to know everything or are we going to be able to identify what we don’t know and hold our theories loosely?

You cannot control your age, but you can do everything possible to avoid the coherence trap as you age.

A too-small world
Growing a dominant worldview is easy when your world is small and you do not know what you do not know. It is easy to know everything when there is not much to know.

If you enlarge your world, you will find it much harder to rely on coherence. In short, travel as widely as you can, read as widely as you can, experience as much as you can, and have a diverse set of friends.

The siloed echo chamber
Since I started this blog, I have been meandering toward a discussion of how social media and other internet forces have created a very dangerous situation where one can find friends, “facts,” and evidence to support any worldview. (I am using the word “facts” here even though those facts are often not facts at all. They are simply false statements about facts.)

Especially in a digital world, it is easy to enter a silo where one believes that their worldview is the only legitimate one and an acceptable replacement yardstick for facts.

It is very obvious that the longer you exist in such an echo chamber, the harder it is to differentiate between worldview and facts. Views get more and more and extreme, and dogmatism increases exponentially. If you look around, you see this phenomenon claiming people around you. It is not pretty and is not easy to escape.

Many people should reevaluate their social media, the sources they read, the entertainment they consume (such as cable news entertainment), and the friends they talk to. In a lot of cases, these things should just be pruned out of our lives. I will talk later on about how people are manipulated online toward silo thinking.

The first two dangers are common enough, but the third has become more prevalent in the last decade. We all have to be careful. If you think I am writing this warning about coherence to someone besides you, you are wrong. You already fall into the trap; I do too.

So how do you deal with those people who suddenly sound like idiots? Frankly, you probably cannot do much. I personally disengage as soon as possible to protect myself. The surest way to become that way yourself is getting in the mud and arguing with them. Only in my weakest moments do I react to untrue statements from people blinded by coherence. And every time I do, I regret it.

Arguing really is a waste of time. Let them be, keep things peaceful, and focus on fixing/protecting yourself from the same problem.

This post was a bit of a detour from my epistemology series but is sort of related. I will get back to normal in the next post.

If you have not read the first two articles of this series, I encourage you to. They are introductory to some of the concepts I am going to discuss here.

The Foundation: The Question of Universal Truth
The Band-aid: How Humans Survive Without Knowing

As a brief refresher, remember that Western epistemology falls into roughly three time periods/categories: premodernism, modernism, and postmodernism.

In premodernist espistemology, truth is objective and obtained from sources that are typically supernatural and Christian-influenced.

Modernism introduced the idea that truth can be ascertained by rationalism and science, and one should rely on experts in various disciplines to determine truth.

Postmodernism rejects objective truth in religion and also asserts that experts cannot be trusted (making all opinions relatively equal). The keystone belief of postmodernism is that truth may be relative to a culture. In postmodernism, various truths can coexist, and no truth is necessarily superior to others.

So where are we now? That is the question of the hour, and it is an important question. As I am writing, we are on the eve of the 2020 Presidential inauguration. It is a time where multiple perceptions of truth are clashing in a violent way, and our culture is highly stressed, if not on the verge of collapse.

There are two important questions I want to discuss:

1. Is this dark time just temporary or are we at a point where no recovery is possible and a spiral into destruction is inevitable?
2. Is what we are seeing simply postmodernism or have we graduated to something worse than postmodernism?

Remember that Western civilization has cycled through many, many cycles of violence and peace. Even in the United States, we have seen many such cycles. Violent protests are nothing new, and by historical standards, today’s violence is not even extreme. Even when you throw out all the wars including the Civil War, today’s violence is not extreme. For example, here is a brief history of labor disputes in the United States.

When in a troubled time, it is easy to get pessimistic and assume that the current situation is permanent and fatal to our society, but thankfully, it never has been. We have always recovered. Sometimes there has been a lot of pain, but we have always recovered.

I suspect we will recover this time as well. On the other hand, I suspect we are only at the beginning of this trouble, and only at the beginning of the pain. I actually think things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get better, and I think we as a culture are going to come out very different on the other end.

To explain why I come to that conclusion for the first question, I want to talk about the second question. There are a lot of thinkers right now thinking about that second question.

Let us consider what seems to have changed.

The fact that people have different perspectives and worldviews is nothing new of course. Our country has had battles over ideas since its founding. In fact, our battles have always been pretty much about the same things: individualism vs pluralism, freedom vs security, populism vs elitism, and big government vs small government. Sometimes, those fights have been intense, but they are also healthy. There are two valid sides to all of those arguments.

However, what we see today is different in a very important way. Before I get into that, let me define a few concepts that I am going to borrow from philosopher Bertrand Russell. This is going to get a bit tedious and technical, but it is necessary to set up future discussions.

Russell differentiates between two different kinds of knowledge:

• Knowledge of things: the knowledge of objects that exist outside ourselves. We get knowledge of things either by personal acquaintance with those things OR by descriptions of those things that include objects with which we are acquainted.*
• Knowledge of truths: value judgments, convictions, and opinions that exist within ourselves.

Until recently, most of the fighting in the United States has been over the second category. We fight over ideas, but typically, we do not fight over facts and evidence of facts. To put it in Russell’s terms, our society has generally agreed on the knowledge of things but not the knowledge of truths.

Here is what that looks like:

Now, over the past few years, we have seen a big shift. Fairly suddenly, we no longer have consensus on the knowledge of things. While our differences used to be only in the realm of knowledge of truths, now we cannot even agree on facts or the evidence of facts. In other words, here is where we are today:

I am reminded of a quote: You have the right to have your own opinion but you don’t have the right to have your own facts.

I have heard that quote my entire life, but it no longer applies in 2020. It is more of a 1990s thing.

That in a nutshell is what is new and quite possibly a fatal problem for the society that we currently know. While it quite clear that a society can survive disagreement in the knowledge of truths, it is somewhat doubtful that it can survive an inability to agree in the realm of the knowledge of things.**

This is what has so many concerned. What we see today feels new, because while postmodernism has always accepted the possibility for relativity in the knowledge of things, it has been more focused on the knowledge of truths. To put it another way, postmodernism has generally not challenged underlying data, but rather focused its concern on the interpretation of data.

This relatively sudden shift in the battleground for truth is why you may have started hearing new terms being used to describe current epistemology. The two most prevalent ones I hear are post-truth and post-postmodernism.

So have we really exited postmodernism for something more sinister? I don’t know for sure, and I am not sure it matters what we call the current state of affairs. However, at the very least, we are in a dark place where postmodernism is off the rails, mostly untempered by pragmatic influences that historically balance it out and allow us to function as a society.

As I wrote in an earlier article, it is impossible for a person to function as a true postmodernist. A level of pragmatism is necessary just to get out of bed in the morning. Similarly, pragmatism is needed in a society in that people have to choose to generally agree on facts and evidence even when that truth is hard to ascertain.

Without that pragmatic choice to find agreement on knowledge of things, I am not sure how the society can agree on much of anything. It is simply impossible to find common ground on the knowledge of truths when there is no agreement on the underlying knowledge of things. If you have tried to argue with people that disagree with you lately, you have probably seen that futility. You probably felt like you lived in a different world than them. Their facts were different than your facts.

Sadly, not only is pragmatism in short supply these days, but there are forces working overtime to make things worse. Technology to postmodernism is like gas on a fire. In particular, social media and entertainment news are wreaking havoc. I am going to discuss these two things in detail in due time.

That being said, things are a bit more complicated than I portrayed them in the charts above. As it turns out, it is not so easy to disentangle the knowledge of truths from the knowledge of things. That has become a big problem that has been exploited remarkably well by bad actors. In the next article, I want to start talking about how the attacks are happening and why suddenly, facts and evidence of facts are under siege.

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* It is not relevant to this article to know about the difference between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. However, in future articles, this distinction becomes very important. If you are curious and want to get ahead of where I currently am, here is a brief summary.

Let us use the example of a kitchen table. You almost certainly have knowledge of a particular table by acquaintance because you have personally experienced the table. You are personally acquainted with the table through sense data your body has collected about the table.

On the other hand, you probably have no experience with the table in the personal residence of the queen of England. However, even though you have no acquaintance of that table, you can still have knowledge by description of that table because a description can be provided to you using terms of which you are personally acquainted. For example, if someone tells you that the queen’s table is large, black, round, and six-legged, you can have knowledge of the table because you have personal acquaintance with the concepts of “large, black, round, six, and legs.”

The key takeaway is this. You can only know a fact if you have personal experience/acquaintance with the fact OR you have a description of the fact that only contains terms with which you have experience/acquaintance.

** Obviously, an inability to agree on the knowledge of things is not entirely new. People have always struggled to determine the truth at the factual level. Even when access to facts is readily available (and it often is not), perspective and bias have always made truth gathering hard. However, due to certain forces in society, this problem is getting much worse.

If you did not read my first article in this series, I encourage you to. You can find it here.

In that article, I discussed the difficulty of knowing things, and I developed the idea that there is a difference between an object and a perception of an object.

Side note: While the distinction between objects and the perception of objects is logical, I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that there are other theories about reality (such as idealism). Over time, I will cover some of them but for right now, I am going to stick with this paradigm.

By the end of that last post, we were in a fairly bleak place. If you are a modernist, you may believe that objects are universal, but see all perceptions of objects as relative and thus unreliable. If you are a postmodernist, it is even worse. You may see both the perception of objects and the objects themselves as relative and unreliable.

If you live in this world of unknowing, there is an uncomfortable question you have to answer: how do you get out of bed in the morning?

In other words, when you swing your legs out of bed, how do you know there is going to be a floor under your feet? Why would you assume such a thing? Even the fact that you perceived a floor yesterday is irrelevant. What evidence do you have that your perception will not let you down today?

Obviously, no one lives that way. We all have to put trust in our perception of reality. Even David Hume, perhaps the most famous proponent of this kind of thinking, chose to live in opposition to what he claimed to believe. He actually admitted to that hypocrisy later in life.

This inconsistency between belief and practice is unavoidable if you accept the proposition that either perception of an object or the underlying object may be relative and untrustworthy. We can tout relativism all we want, but we cannot live that way. We have to have a band-aid.

That band-aid is sometimes called pragmatism.

Pragmatism has different meanings, but in a philosophical context, it simply means living in a way that you hope produces the best outcome. It acknowledges that 1) we may not know things for sure but 2) we often have to live as though we know things for sure nonetheless.

Or to put it another way, it is choosing to make unproven assumptions because you have no real choice. Living requires such assumptions. In our getting-out-of-bed example, pragmatism is what gets a relativist out of bed. Relativists choose to believe the floor is there and live as if the floor is there even if they cannot say for sure that the floor is there.

If you show me a postmodernist, I will show you a pragmatist. But if you consider yourself premodernist or modernist, do not turn up your nose at pragmatism, because you are almost certainly a pragmatist too. I am pretty sure that we are all pragmatists whether we want to admit it or not.

What I am about to say is something I have never heard anyone say and is probably controversial, but the best examples of pragmatism I know of exist in two major systems for understanding reality: science and religion.

Let me give another premise before I dive into this a bit. When you go back to our paradigm of objects and perception of objects, religion is a pragmatic solution for the uncertainty of objects in themselves while science generally provides pragmatic solutions for the uncertainty of the perception of objects.

Let us consider each for a bit.

The pragmatic nature of science

I am a huge fan of science, and we all are its beneficiaries in unmeasurable ways. I am typing this during the coronavirus pandemic, and just this month, multiple companies announced successful vaccines after only a few months of development.

However, science has a few problems. First of all, it is primarily based on observation, or in other words, the perception of objects. In spite of all scientists know about the observation of objects, they still cannot answer the deep metaphysical questions about the nature of the objects themselves.

Read that last sentence again. Science at best can provide laws about the perception of reality but not reality itself. Science can tell you how a table operates in the world we perceive but it knows nothing about the world in itself. For example, it cannot answer the question as to whether the world in itself exists in a physical way or simply in our imagination.

That makes science subservient to philosophy. Furthermore, because such questions about the nature of reality will always be unanswerable, science will always be in that subservient position.

Second, science starts with inductive reasoning, which is the process of observation and then trying to work backward towards scientific laws. In other words, if you drop a stone and it falls to the ground over and over, you begin to develop the law of gravity.

There is a problem however with inductive reasoning: it cannot lead to universal truth.

Here is a simple example to illustrate why that is true: let us say you have a bag that contains one hundred marbles and you ask someone to pull out the marbles one at a time and record the color. The first marble is white as is the second marble. In fact, 98 marbles are pulled out of the bag and each one is white.

So what color will the last two marbles be?

You might be tempted to say they will be white because every other marble has been white. You would be wrong however. A scientist can only say that there is a high likelihood that the last two marbles will be white. Even if there were a million marbles in the bag and the first 999,999 came out white, a scientist cannot say for sure what the color of the last marble will be.

That is the huge deficiency of inductive reasoning, and it is also a key reason why science works well in the realm of perception but not so well in the realm of objects of perception. While we can get hints about the nature of such an object, the truth of the object is always slightly hidden. To take the example of the marble, we may be able to say that there is a 99.9999% chance that the next marble out of the bag must be white but science can never guarantee us 100%.

So, for these two reasons, science fails to provide much in the way of universal truth. What science can do is develop highly-probable laws that can provide a way to live in a world of perception. In other words, science is pragmatic in nature.

The pragmatic nature of religion

I am religious, but on this blog, I choose to intentionally step back and look at religion critically and from a secular viewpoint. Some may find this uncomfortable and if that is you, I apologize in advance.

While science uses inductive reasoning, theology uses deductive reasoning. With deductive reasoning, you start with universal truth and develop conclusions from those premises. While this sounds promising, there is a big problem: you have to make assumptions about what universal truth is. There is simply no way around the reality that theological universals cannot be proven.

Let us consider an example. If you ask Christians if they know what will happen to them after death, they will likely say that they are going to heaven. If you ask them if they know that for sure, they will say yes. They will likely be very dogmatic that they know for sure.

Actually, they know no such thing for sure. In fact, they are using the word “know” in a different way than we are discussing here. When religious people say that they know things about God and the eternal, what they are really referring to is a faith paradigm. They are really saying that they are choosing to believe something that they cannot know.

This decision to believe something that cannot be proven and live according to that belief is foundational to religion, and I see no reason for a religious person to feel ashamed of that kind of pragmatism. In fact, in the Bible, Hebrews 11:13-16 acknowledges the pragmatic nature of such faith in a positive way.

¹³ All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. ¹⁴ People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. ¹⁵ If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. ¹⁶ Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. (NIV)

That being said, it is intellectually honest to note the deficiency of religion. Religion provides universal answers, but does so outside of logic, science, or any other rationalistic systems that we generally look to for proof (or at least strong evidence). Faith is the key ingredient of religion that helps create a successful pragmatic framework for living in an uncertain world. The problem with faith is it cannot prove universal truth any more than science can.

Throughout the history of humanity, we have looked primarily to religion and science for universal truth. As I have demonstrated, both can work in a pragmatic way but both have inherent flaws. That is why I argue that all of us (not just postmodernists) are pragmatists. Neither the deductive reasoning of religion nor the inductive reasoning of science can provide universal truth.

With this background behind us, I want to get into some modern applications in coming weeks.

When you start to think seriously about universal truth, I can think of no better introductory place to send you than Bertrand Russell’s classic book The Problems of Philosophy. (You can read it here for free.)

Russell was a modernist philosopher who wrote in the early twentieth century. He was very technical in his approach and his writing is very dense, but anyone can understand the well-known example of his writing-table that he gives in the first chapter.

Within just a few pages, Russell proves that

• There is a big difference between one’s perceptions of the table (what Russell refers to as “sense data”) and the table itself (the reality/truth of the table).
• While it is easy to identify perceptions about the table, it is very difficult (if not impossible) to know anything about the reality/truth of the table itself.
• The perceptions of the table are relative to the perceiver and the environment and based on many factors that have nothing to do with the table.

Again, if you are not familiar with the concept I am discussing, take fifteen minutes and read the first chapter of that book.

A non-philosopher might look at what I have written so far and wonder why I am making mountains out of molehills. I get that. The distinction between the table itself (what I am going to call an object) and our perception of the table (perception of the object) is possibly unimportant in everyday life.

When you start teasing at the implications though, you get a sense of why this is so important. Discussing a writing-table is one thing but what happens when you start examining other objects including non-physical objects?

For example, how about the concept of justice? If we consider justice to be an object, you could easily argue that the same differentiation exists between the perception of justice and what justice actually is. The same goes for morality and other non-physical objects. In fact, perception is itself an object. Do we have to question our perception of our perception?

What I am discussing here is the essence of philosophy. While throughout history, philosophy has sometimes included many disciplines from medicine to astronomy, today, philosophy primarily limits itself to two important yet unanswerable questions:

1. Metaphysics: What is the nature of reality?
2. Epistemology: What is the nature and source of knowledge?

Russell’s example of the writing desk goes to the heart of these two questions, which are really two different ways of looking at a few bigger questions:

Is there universal truth/reality independent and outside of ourselves and our perception? And if so, how do we learn what it is?

To return to our example one more time, when considering the writing-table, what, if anything, is universally true about the table that exists outside of our perceptions about that table?

Even after thousands of years of bright minds arguing sophisticated theories, this question of universal truth is difficult and every answer is unprovable. If you talk to someone that provides a dogmatic answer, that person is either unfamiliar with the difficulty of the problem or is speaking from a faith paradigm. (As you will see later, I do not have a problem with either of those things.)

Whether unanswerable or not, the question is important. How a person or culture answers that question shapes a lot of things downstream such as religion and science. Yes, I think that the universal truth question is upstream from any religious decision, and it is fairly easy to prove that it is upstream from science. I am going to demonstrate why I believe this in the next post.

Before I end this article, I want to give a very general outline of how Western civilization has historically viewed universal truth. I am going to categorize by time period and also differentiate as Russell did between the perception of an object and the object itself.

I hesitate to do this not only because of the danger of oversimplification but also because there always have been philosophers and theologians that were outside their mainstream. Hume for example lived during the modernist era, but would probably have been more comfortable in postmodernism.

Period	Timeframe	Perception	Object of perception
Premodernism	Ancient Greece – Middle Ages (400 BCE – 1600 CE)	Varied*	Universal
Modernism	Enlightment – modern era (1600 – mid-20th century)	Relative	Universal
Postmodernism	mid-20th century to present	Relative	Relative

Note how the concept of universals has changed over time. While premodernists generally saw objects as universal, modernists decoupled the perception of an object from the object itself, generally accepting the object as a universal but the perception as relative. Today’s postmodernist generally goes further by rejecting the universal nature of at least some objects themselves.

Most of you are probably either modernist or postmodernist at least in a lot of your thinking. Unfortunately, there is a big problem with accepting the inherent uncertainty of either position: if you cannot be sure of universals, how is doing life even possible? In the next post, I want to talk about the band-aid we all use that makes life liveable in a world where our perception of truth/reality may not be reliable.