Connect Magazine - Term 2, 2022

Truth

Is Truth Relative?
    by pixabay.com

There’s a great scene in the 1992 movie ‘A Few Good Men’, in which the lawyer, played by Tom Cruise, demands the ‘truth’ from the Colonel (played by the great Jack Nicholson), whom he has on the witness stand. The Colonel shouts back at Cruise, ‘You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!’

I wonder how many of us can ‘handle the truth’? We live in a day and age when truth seems a very slippery beast. It’s been that way for a while now. In 2006, the Merriman-Webster Dictionary declared ‘truthiness’ the word of the year, it having been introduced to the world the previous year by Stephen Colbert in his comedy show.

When I was a teenager (my students will tell you that brontosauri walked past the windows back then), there were only two official genders, New Zealand was a non-racist country, and women couldn’t open their own cheque accounts. At least one of these is false. Maybe two. Maybe all three? Who’s to say? How do we make the call? Do we need to make a call?

‘Truthiness’ carries the sense of something being true just because we want it to be so. In some respects, all political parties indulge in ‘truthiness’. I’m sure there’s lots of it in Russia now, as they don’t get to see the images we can here in the West. That’s not to say our media is always lily-white. On the contrary, they will insist on focusing on the worst in any situation. Try listening to a public news broadcast and the adjectives used to describe an event, or play ‘count the cliché’. You’d think society was on the brink of chaos and collapse were you to take their literal words. But I digress.

We saw great examples of truthiness coupled with ‘The Big Lie’ in Donald Trump’s recent presidency and subsequent campaign. The Big Lie was a technique perfected by the Nazis in WWII and then raised to a sublime height by advertising agencies. You know you won’t have more friends or fun or money or health or hair or muscles or get a job or anything else if you eat Maccas, drink coke, use Trademe or buy a rowing machine or use Dove products or… yet you’ll do these things because someone sowed a thought in your head, a dissatisfaction, made you think truthy thoughts (this paragraph is mostly true…)

So, what is truth, except a much-abused word? Well, perhaps we should move past ‘fact’ (remember, ‘fact’ is just fat with a ‘c’ in it – this is a fact ) and logic and start to look at how we know something to be genuinely true. If we’re honest, I suspect that most of us would say we accept something as true because we trust the one telling it to us. And that trust is usually embedded in a relationship*. For example, for nearly 30 years, I have had the same mechanic work on all the cars I have owned. I trust him when he says the flungle-wurtz needs replacing. In fact, I don’t even expect him to ask me if I want it done because I trust him, and I know his work is reliable. I’ve seen it over the years. I know the work is true because I know the mechanic. I’m sure you can see where this is going. These days, I no longer worry if something is true. I’m more concerned about whether there is a relationship that is true. Jesus said that he was the way and the truth. Not because he could prove he was, but because those who walked with him saw the living truth expressed in loving relationship- just ask Peter (which, curiously, is the name of my mechanic…)

So, is truth relative? Of course it is, because the real question isn’t that, but what is it relative to? What relationship is it tied into? Jesus is the truth because he calls us into relationship with himself. He opens his arms wide and lets himself be impaled on our thorniness, hugging us tightly until one day the thorns are gone and the ‘…truth has set (us) free’.

* I must confess to abusing this on a mission trip to Vanuatu. I managed to convince several students that there were pygmy elephants living up the top of coconut palm trees. I think I only got away with it because they trusted me and didn’t think I would say something that was so patently ridiculous.

Sean Cleary
Senior School Science Teacher