Truth is a Narrow Road Among Brambles
Being “right” isn’t as simple as choosing a side
For the audio version, you can go here: https://www.arscorvi.com/p/audio-truth-is-a-narrow-road-among
I’m experimenting with how best to manage these considering I want the full podcast features, but I don’t want the articles to show as primarily audio on the Substack platform. Please let me know if the double editions are annoying.
“Truth” is… what is
That pithy, simple definition is one I got from Fr. Mike Schmitz and I’m quite fond of it. It’s almost too simple to be a useful definition, and yet it is inescapably correct: what is true is what actually exists or existed; it is the thoughts that were actually thunk; it is the words that were actually said; it is the feelings that were actually felt; the material that was actually there.
One could then argue about whether it is “objective” or “subjective” in nature, but that’s a discussion I’ll wade into another day. For now, I want to draw attention to another property of truth. If truth is what is, then what is… is true.
Yes, I know. Sounds like a “deepism.” But what makes the statement significant is it implies that we are surrounded by truth all day every day. The air you breathe is true. The sunlight on your eyes is true. The water in a creek is true. Your house is true. Your car is true. Even if yours is a piece of junk, it is truly a piece of junk. All of these things are, therefore they are true.
With this in mind, looking at all that truth around you, it’s almost more pertinent to ask, “what is false?” Cubic zirconia might be a fake “diamond,” but it exists. So, by my little definition here, it is true… is it not?
It is! And yet intuitively we know that it is still also fake—false.
It is truly a shiny rock… but it is falsely a diamond.
It is clear and shiny. Yes. In fact, it looks very much like a diamond. It’s definitely some kind of mineral and not, say, a plant. At the very least, calling it a diamond is a lot more true than claiming it is a rose. And yet, if we go property by property, we have to get increasingly granular in order to find the point where we can meaningfully observe a difference between cubic zirconia and a diamond.
They’re both clear white
They’re both minerals
They both refract light “brilliantly”
They’re both “hard”
But it’s in “how brilliantly” and “how hard” that we can find the difference, and generally it requires a trained eye. And once we finally can observe a visible discrepancy, we can then judge the claim that the stone is “a diamond” to be false when it is in fact “cubic zirconia.” A claim is made, an expectation is set, an idea is put forth, but that idea fails to describe what is. Therefore, the idea is false.
A gem of cubic zirconia is not a diamond. It does not refract a full rainbow spectrum of light, it is not harder than almost any other material and thus it won’t keep it’s sharp edges in the face of day to day wear.
Why am I talking about any of this? Because, I’m making the claim that it is almost never the case that we have to choose between the full truth and a complete lie. In fact, in the pursuit of Truth, we are almost always picking between two mostly true possibilities. Afterall, If one side of the equation was entirely false, it wouldn’t exist at all.
We all know that we’ll never know everything as mortal humans. We don’t have the capacity or perspective required. We’ll never know the position of every star in the sky or the number of grains of sand in the ocean. These two pieces of information are both things that are—they are truths. All truth together forms capital-T Truth (a larger discussion for another time) and you will never know the full of it in this mortal life.
Yet, by simply observing the world we know a considerable amount of truth. It is so fundamental to our being that it is impossible to make a claim or form an idea which is not at least partly true.
Because of this, you will never arrive at the full truth by simply negating a side you know to be untrustworthy. If you do that, you will end up rejecting the bits of truth that form the core of the lie. As the adage goes, every lie has a kernel of truth. Well, there’s a similar property of lies that we can observe in the world: the more truth we know, the smaller lies must be to slip by our senses—the more subtle they must be.
For example: if we can see the sky, it becomes difficult for the liar to claim that it is green. But if we’re only 3 years old and that about covers the extent of your knowledge about the sky, then it sounds quite plausible if someone claims the sky was green before you were alive. If someone we trust more shows us a picture of the sky being blue before we were born, then the liar can shift the claim to it being green before photos were invented. If someone says, “But writers from back then called it blue!
Well, do I have a surprise for them: depending on your language, the word “blue” used to mean “green.” (Japanese for one example)
To combat this, we must keep growing our “tree of truth.” The more truth is known, and the bigger the tree, the more lies must hide in the branches and then in the leaves.
We know a lot in this age. It has rightly been called the “information age” as we have built ourselves machines that expose us to information on a scale of complexity mankind has never been burdened with at any point before. Even so, this development didn’t suddenly and arbitrarily spring out of thin air.
Compounding centuries of academic traditions have compiled a vast repository of truth in the civilized world. The “big ideas” we contend with today—from political ideologies like monarchism and libertarianism, economic frameworks like capitalism and socialism, and even on to scientific theories like gravity and atomic chemistry—they were all built up year by year, generation by generation.
(Or in the case of some ideologies, built “down” might be a more accurate statement)
Our tree has grown tall. And now, the lies we must sift through are small but numerous and difficult to grasp in their entirety. They are so mixed in with the fine details of the truth we’ve cultivated that we often cut that away too by mistake. In a similar way, the lies often conflict with each other, and in the confusion we mistake the one closer to truth as being truth.
On one hand, the struggle to discern truth is even more daunting than ever before as dealing with thousands of small, indistinct challenges is much more exhausting and complex than dealing with one or two big challengers, mighty though they may be. It is a death by a thousand paper cuts, a war of attrition. Success is hard to measure and each victory is so small that it provides little catharsis.
On the other hand, this is still a great problem to have. It means the tree has grown. Further growth will be difficult, but we should take heart in the progress made and not worry too much about how much longer it takes to finish. Just do your best and pass your work on to the next generation.
Nevertheless, coming down from the cosmic view of man’s pursuit of Truth and returning to the challenges we face day to day, it’s important to realize that even “small” falsehoods can be amplified into gigantic problems. To illustrate this, compare shooting a basketball for a two-point shot to shooting a rocket to the moon. If you are a mere one degree off target with the basketball at that distance you will still make it into the hoop.
However, being even just one degree off target when travelling as far as the moon can be the difference between landing on it and being lost in the black abyss of space to the end of your days.
.01 volts of electricity can be the difference between peak performance of a CPU and it shutting off entirely.
One zero on a bank statement can be the difference between living in prosperity and seeking the aid of charity.
The greater the truth is, the more dangerous even small lies become. Even so, we must seek Truth or we are simply accepting the easy road to destruction, because that is the end of every lie—non-existence.
Matthew 7
13 “Enter by the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is easy, that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. 14 For the gate is narrow and the way is hard, that leads to life, and those who find it are few.”
Avoiding Pedantry
To balance out my ideas, I should also ask what it means to be pedantic given these ideas about truth. If seeking Truth is of the utmost importance, is it possible to fight too hard for it?
Yes.
Going back to our cubic zirconia, imagine there’s a movie, and in it a character wears a “diamond” studded crown. Two friends watch the movie and one is impressed by the crown and likes the movie more for such spectacle and the other friend believes it’s just cubic zirconia and decries how fake it is, then the two friends argue about this.
One reason why this kind of argument could be pedantic is because of the scale of the problem. This is a fuzzy and very context sensitive line to cross, but here at least it’s clear that what’s being argued is subjective opinion in the first place. And, while there is profound importance in the act of expressing our opinions on culture, we have a great deal of agency in shaping the overall outcome of such a dispute on what is true about the work. The outcome of the debate does not actually depend on the points being argued. Quite simply, the friends could be having an argument because it is dumb and that makes it fun. The whole exercise is ambivalent to Truth.
A second and far more technical reason that this could become a “pedantic” argument is because neither man has the resolution of detail needed to discern the truth. Quite literally in this example. Film—especially digital film—can only capture so much detail, and when viewed on a TV, the diamonds are reduced to a small handful of colored squares in a corner of a single shot. From such an image, you wouldn’t be able to see the edges of the stones or the full refractive index or any other fine detail necessary to discern a real diamond from its counterfeit.
Any position taken is merely presupposing what is true and so any further analysis is merely a prediction. And it turns out, a lot of what we do is just that: we predict (a conversation for another time).
Third, finally, most importantly (and quite obviously): you don’t need to number the grains of sand to enjoy the beach. God designed us as beings of limited perception, thus it is reasonable to assume that we don’t need to perceive all to fulfill our calling in life. It is enough to avoid being in conflict with truth while seeking its ultimate source. You don’t personally need to know every little truth out there as you go about your way.
Glad to finally get another one of these articles out after the (much appreciated) slump of Christmas Break. Upon review by myself and with trusted sources, my previous articles promised a bit much with their premises then got too “wandery” to deliver in a satisfyingly precise way. I’m hoping this one stays on topic a bit better, but alas these are ultimately intended as “disciplined streams of consciousness.” I hope what I’ve written leads to fruitful, meaningful contemplation, but I don’t promise that every thread will come to a neatly wrapped conclusion.
And, as will always be the case, I enjoy reading any comments, tangential anecdotes, and feedback you may have, so feel free to share them!
This is why staying in the Word is so important. It is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to seek it out. Press on!
Great read. On the topic of the word blue-green, I wonder if it has something to do with blue being the rarest color in nature so developing languages had no need to have a word for it so they went "it's close enough to this green that we have".