A brief history of truth

Do you enjoy thinking about the big questions in life? What are we here for? What’s the point of it all? Is this all just a simulation? You know, that sort of thing.Most of us too often skip rapidly to the end here, rushing to whatever conclusion we come to without asking ourselves the most important question of all: how will I recognise truth when I come across it?There are experts around to help us of course and they’ve come up with a whole galaxy of ways to see the universe, depending on the truth we’re most comfortable with, how we get the knowledge that works with it and the way we go about finding things out.However, they mainly talk about two opposing ideas: ‘realism’ and ‘constructivism’. The first sees truth as something sent to us from outside of the universe, another place, which we then discover. The second makes it something we construct to help us solve problems and make sense of the world we encounter.The first brings us coherence, correcting our indiscipline and fancies. The second asks us to work coherently as we muddle through it all. The arguments for each of these very different ideas are pretty compelling and will keep turning you around until you’re dizzy if you let them. So don’t worry too much about the details here.There’s only one thing you need to remember at this point. Regardless of which option you go for, there can be no truth without the power to decide the route you take to reach it.This relationship, between choice and truth, remains potent, dynamic, alternating, one of moving goalposts, shifting definitions, and emerging exceptions as the conditions and contingencies of time dictate. Indeed, history shows this somewhat repeatedly and clearly (Carter).Truth must be the ‘real world’In the earliest recorded societies, truth was not the abstract matter we believe it is today but a narrative form of lived experience, an expression of the ‘real’ world (Vansina). Our understanding of this world was not always clear. Cosmologies, myths and ritual performances functioned as both explanations of everything that surrounds us and the preferred way to social order.Truth was inseparable from power because it permitted cohesion, a coming together, a sharing of bonds and the forming of something better than isolation. Other people became the means through which reality was established, the verification of something more than our own personal imagination, fear or confusion. This bound communities through shared stories of origin and destiny. To question truth was to risk exclusion from these sources of validity and protection. One’s belonging, indeed life or very sanity, hinged on reaffirming, living ‘true’ to, this joint narrative.In this sense, truth was not tested against critical criteria, objective tests we could all sign-up to, but lived through ritual, embedded in a collective memory and enforced by custom.Truth is faithAs human communities formed, larger collectives stratified, and more sophisticated forms of association and compliance (Service) were developed. The mythologies of the past became strained, wayward, viewed as unregulated or unresponsive to the surveillance needed to safeguard social cohesion.Truth as power became increasingly anchored instead to a more direct, pervasive and supernatural observation and sanction. Kingship, priesthoods, and religious law claimed authority by aligning with this divine order and approval.Truth was revealed as the word of gods or the embodiment of cosmic balance. Power here could then become exercised as legitimation. Rulers could govern because their authority expressed the divine will of our supernatural overlords.The truth–power nexus took on an institutional character, visible in temples, priestly direction and the intertwining of sacred texts within legal codes. Truth could not be open to negotiation. After all, its authority was transcendent, beyond what we can challenge.In medieval Europe (Southern) and much of the Islamic world (Nasr), this encouraged the systematisation of truth through natural philosophy as well as theology. Thinkers sought to reconcile revelation with reason, producing frameworks that located truth within both a divine disposition as well as logical consistency.Power here became interpretive. It lay in who could read, comment on and define the meaning of sacred texts. Institutions such as the Church or the madrasa became custodians of this truth, shaping not only religious belief but political legitimacy, education and law.This synthesis exposed many tensions, moments when philosophy strained against orthodoxy, but the central relationship between truth and power endured. Truth was authoritative because it was rooted in the sacred and its guardians were able to hold power over others through their interpretive monopoly.Across these pre-Enlightenment eras, the truth–power relationship rested less on verification than it did on authority. Truth was not understood as something separate from power but as its visible expression. This might be the king’s decree, the priest’s blessing or the scholar’s explanation. What mattered, what was understood, was not that truth was distinct but that it existed in a sort of joint coherence, moving us sometimes in ‘mysterious ways’.Truth is reasonableThe Enlightenment, considered by most historians as covering a large chunk of the 17th–18th centuries, ruptured this cosy coterminosity. Truth came to be defined instead by reason, observation, and categorisation, and power could no longer be justified simply by the apparent choices offered to us by a sacred authority or through the ‘reality’ of revelation.This awareness required a new alignment with new criteria, one embracing rationality, legality and expertise. The Enlightenment did not sever truth from power. Instead, it rewired the connections so that they could respond more sensitively to the rational and its institutions.Yet it did establish truth as a means to classification. This is more far-reaching than it sounds and it speaks to the power to choose both the boundaries and pecking order of what can be known or, more importantly, acted upon by something more than spiritual authority.The most obvious illustration of this way of thinking is probably shown by an increased interest in order and taxonomy. It was the time of the first encyclopaedias and natural histories. Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), a physician and biologist, may be partly responsible for this development in knowledge. He brought together and codified our system for naming living things and is considered ‘the father of modern taxonomy’ (Calisher).Truth became illustrative of this categorical clarity, the ability to name, classify and situate phenomena within a more general or universal scheme. Power is then able to appeal to the reason or logic of such schemes and, in turn, enable authority, mostly that of the state, to manage similar ordering systems such as censuses, taxes, maps or libraries.The implication here is that what constitutes truth must be clearly defined and located inside a stable hierarchy. This is all well and good, of course, for those who control the lists or sit at the top of the pyramid but categorisation is a brittle and bureaucratic form of truth that’s often tested to destruction by radical change, dynamism and the realisation of interdependence.Truth is observedMuch of this power-truth relationship anticipated and required somewhat strict epistemological compliance. In other words, it relied in large part on an implied natural order or a pre-selected determinism, one worked out in churches and learned gatherings rather than observed in laboratories or on the mortician’s slab. It was often all we had.The arrival of the industrial revolution and the early modern period, let’s say during the 19th and mid-20th centuries, allowed power-truth to become more finely tuned, more responsive to observation, systematic and capable of greater granular distinction. It was a period of radical discovery and scientific advance in electromagnetism, thermodynamics and chemical sciences.Auguste Comte (1798-1857) believed the scientific method that evolved and its way of establishing reality should become central to more areas of human endeavour, replacing almost completely our dependence on theological and metaphysical preoccupations.Truth here became more about relationships, interconnections and processes, not something restrained by classification. Truths became systems, often sharing components from alternative frames of reference that were working towards opposing purposes.Power was manifest through our relative ability to regulate and manage these systems, such as factories, social institutions, even our own bodies. Truth was what could be modelled as a whole from these interdependent parts. Using common historical shorthand, it marked a shift from ‘naming’ to ‘explaining.’ Truth makes many pointsThe late modern or post-war era, usually understood as emerging in the mid-20th century, established truth as control over discourse and as the communications capacity needed to do this. This is a complex modification.In some ways, it extends to its fullest the power to regulate and manage the systems of truth established in the previous decades. It involved the concentration of, and greater control over, the technologies of knowledge.Power developed this as capacity to shape and build ideology, validate positions and even commodify or sell meaning. Technology, however, made this more reliant on data, particularly in terms of what it reveals and what it can be designed to exploit or imply.As systems expand this sort of reach, or restrain previous forms, the power-truth relationship has adjusted itself. Truth still remains bound to system effectiveness, say in terms of feedback, stability or the potency of outgoing signals, but power becomes increasingly expressed through the strength of the system’s use of surveillance, its capacity for prediction, and the identification and management of risk and uncertainty.Data and information, and its probabilities and relationships, have become central to this (Shannon), serving even socially embedded or well-worn ideologies and positions (Wiener). Truth has become what can be transmitted, measured and stabilised against the noise it encounters, marking the completion of a sort of shift from systems as ‘wholes’ to systems as ‘flows’.This is a little complicated to get to grips with but, to use a common example, its about the difference between, say, power as newspapers or television news programmes on the one hand and modern digital systems that influence us via single moments or by the collective effects of numerous but more marginal and diverse points of contact.We have a problemOver the last century, we have seen radical developments in communications, their engineering and technology. They have had, perhaps, a more profound effect on the relationship between truth and power than anything that came before.Yet, there’s something else happening to truth today which the power-medium is revealing and it might just be the most important challenge faced by those who think truth should be repeatable and consistent. There’s too much to cover here but we’ll talk about this next time.ReferencesCalisher, C.H. 2007. Taxonomy: what’s in a name? Doesn’t a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Croatian Medical Journal. 48 (2): 268–270. PMC 2080517. PMID 17436393.Carter, E. 2009. Faith, Power, and Knowledge: Political Theology and the Foundations of the Modern State. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 39(2), pp. 387–419.Comte, A. 1848. A General View of Positivism. Translated by J. H. Bridges. London: Trübner and Co. (Reprinted 2009, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Nasr, S.H. 1968. Science and Civilization in Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Service, E.R. 1975. Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution. New York: Norton.Shannon, C. E. 1948. ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, Bell System Technical Journal, 27(3–4), pp. 379–423.Southern, R.W. 1995. Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Volume I. Oxford: Blackwell.Vansina, J. 1985. Oral Tradition as History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Wiener, N. 1950. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.Image: Alexas FotosThanks for reading The choreography of power! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit drrobdalton.substack.com