Truth

Back in high school, I really wanted to live through something, something big and important that would make my life story worth reading as part of a historical moment. Then Trump came into office and I realized that most historical moments get their titles because a whole lot of people suffer.

It was especially strange time to be a freshman at a very liberal liberal arts college. In learning how academia worked, it seemed to me like high school put a distinctly unscholarly amount of emphasis on objective truth. In my most radical classes I wasn’t allowed to use the word “reality” in papers and the very existence of history was questioned, and even more scientific classes like psychology suggested that memory is constructed and absolute certainty is impossible. It was strange and new, but I wasn’t entirely opposed to it. In high school my favorite books and movies had been the ones that blew up your idea of what was real and what was an illusion (The Things They Carried, The Life of Pi, Memento, The Usual Suspects, to name a few). I had this world view that conservatives were the boring, hard-fact folks, the people who took the Bible as literal and wouldn’t deviate from it, while liberals saw the nuance and subtlety and numerous meanings. Questioning reality was popular and, like all adolescents, I wanted to be with the in-crowd.

Things changed on election day. I fell asleep when the polls were down to try and make this night pass faster and woke up to the Primal Screaming Catharsis Ceremony when they declared the victor. I’d taken his flagrant lying as a joke before, but now that he was really going to take office, I started paying closer attention. As I did, I noticed a disturbing pattern emerging. Trump and Fox News dismissed objective reality with the same kind of rhetoric as a lot of my professors. Maybe they weren’t quite as eloquent, but the core message was the same: media narratives are controlled by those in power, and no one can really know the truth anyway, so trust what your intuitions and you’ll be one of the smart ones. It was such a disturbing thought to approach, but I couldn’t help but wonder if I was falling into the same trap as all the crowds with “Make America Great Again” hats. And it seemed like I wasn’t the only one, as liberals I knew started to change course and champion objective truth and hard facts.

I’ve been thinking about the Kavanaugh hearings a lot lately (it’s hard not to when your dad is on CNN about it twice in a week), and it’s been bugging me how the whole country has a stake in the debate, but no one but Ford and Kavanaugh (and maybe Mark Judge) can ever really know what happened in that bedroom. I believe Ford, based on Kavanaugh’s evasive answers to questions and the statements from people who knew him, but it can never go any further than faith. It’s easy to get caught up in all the charged rhetoric surrounding the debate, but I falter whenever I start riding that wave of righteous anger because there’s always that chance that it could all be a lie. And in all this the Republicans are the voice of the high literary critic, asking you to embrace uncertainty and asking if you would ruin a man’s life on evidence you can’t be sure of. And, if I really wanted Kavanaugh on the bench, might I see the facts in a whole different light?

When we do have to confront uncertainty, the best we can get from questioning our own assumptions is humility. That’s what radical conservatives are forgetting. They’re co-opting academic language of bias and respecting other opinions, but they aren’t doing it in search of a greater truth, they’re doing it to deflect criticism so they can get away with red-faced yelling at a crowd who meets every lie with cheers. And yeah, that anger is its own truth, in a way. But if you’re going to question reality, the first step is to admit that not everyone sees it the same way. Truth for Kavanaugh might be that he wasn’t at the party and is being smeared by a partisan opportunist. He might have even managed to convince himself of that. But at least consider Ford’s truth with the same weight, that she underwent a traumatic experience and kept it secret for as long as she could, until she realized that she couldn’t in good conscience let the man who assaulted her rise to the supreme court, even if telling the truth meant she would be publicly berated and receive hate mail for the rest of her life. And, with that in mind, the opportunist narrative doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, does it?

There’s this great term I learned my second semester in Grinnell, just a couple days after the inauguration . It’s “Thick Description,” and it means understanding an issue through so many perspectives that you can’t come to any one simple truth about it. The anger of poor white people living in the middle of the country is its own truth, and the government indifference to issues like the opioid epidemic and growing anxieties about a changing economy show show that the anger has a legitimate base. But theirs can’t be the only story, the people who are hurt by the person they elect have to be in there too. And only by encountering the contradictory truths can we really come to any deeper understanding.