The need for objective Truth
The need for objective Truth
The Global South and East calls the West to a dialogue of civilizations
As a young man seeking to understand things during the period 1967 to 1972, I discovered that truth is relative, that truth is understood from a paradigm or frame of reference that is rooted in social position. I discovered this at the Center for Inner City Studies, a teaching center in South Chicago, affiliated with Northeastern Illinois University (on the other side of town). The faculty was black, and the student body was 90% black. Four faculty members who influenced me put forth a comprehensive analysis of modern colonialism from the vantage point of the colonized. Their analysis of the modern world was fundamentally different from and opposed to the progressive worldview to which I was exposed as an undergraduate student at Penn State.
Black nationalist intellectuals of the era assumed they were seeing and disseminating Truth, with insights rooted in their vantage point as colonized. They were seeking to expose a previously hidden Truth; they did not see themselves as delegitimating the concept of a real Truth that is out there independent of individual subjectivities, which all persons have the duty to seek to discover.
As a young white student who was hip to colonial analysis, I was in on the conversations among black students. I learned that they believed that white intellectuals and politicians were insincere, that their discourse was pretense that functioned to legitimate the established world. The students found it difficult to believe that intellectuals with a desire to understand could be so wrong-headed in their view of the world. I did not defend my teachers in white society, but I did amiably point out that I thought they actually believed the things they were saying.
With the completion of my studies at the Center, I returned to white society, now aware of the relativity of knowledge to social location, and pretty much on my own with respect to what to do about it.
I was not at all comfortable with my new awareness of the relativity of knowledge, because the implication was that truth would become what those in power say it is, displacing Truth that is discovered through empirical observation and reasoning. This implied that there could be no reasonable grounds for debunking the claims of the powerful, who would now be free to express and impose their ideas as truth, in accordance with their interests.
I considered it important to find some basis for discerning Truth and right, despite the grounding of understanding in social position. My quest for discerning the foundations for objective Truth brought me to Fordham University, where Fathers Joseph Fitzpatrick and Gerald McCool introduced me to the Catholic philosopher and theologian Bernard Lonergan, who had formulated an explanation of the general cognitional structure that brought persons seeking to understand to insight and objective knowledge, in a process of knowing that begins with the initial understandings formulated in particular social and personal locations. The key to approaching objective knowledge, Lonergan maintained, is seeking personal encounter with persons from other horizons, discovering questions relevant to the issue at hand.
I applied Lonergan’s insight to the theme of colonial analysis of the modern world, expressing the idea that persons from the West and from white society are able to understand the colonial dynamics that have shaped the foundations of the modern world, if they give priority to the desire to understand, and if they engage in sustained personal encounter with the colonized, taking seriously their insights, permitting their insights to challenge previously held assumptions and beliefs, whenever there are reasonable and empirical grounds for doing so.
Having resolved to my own satisfaction the problem of objectivity, I proceeded to write of the method of cross-horizon encounter, through which Western intellectuals could overcome ethnocentrism. I found that there was little interest in the question. I had resolved the question for myself, but hardly anyone was motivated to understand my personal discovery and reflect upon its theoretical and political implications. The epistemological method of cross-horizon encounter, however, provided the foundation for my lifetime of study of the teachings of the leaders and intellectuals of the Global South and East.
The academic world in the United States arrived to a general and widespread discovery of the relativity of knowledge to social position in the early 1980s. The discovery was prompted by the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who gave clear and myopic formulation of a point of view that was at variance with the prevailing views of the academic world. There emerged a style of newspaper reporting in the mainstream media, in which it would be reported that the President had said thus and so, but the actual facts are....
In academia, the Reagan phenomenon gave rise to the common observation that “one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.” There was, however, a tendency to leave it at that, and not to suggest that there might be reasonable, empirical, and objective criteria for distinguishing a freedom fighter from a terrorist, which intellectuals had a responsibility to formulate and disseminate. And the wider epistemological issues provoked by the Reagan discourse were left unexplored.
The failure from the late 1960s to the early 1980s to address the question of Truth is the foundation for where we are now. The United States is in the midst of a full-blown ideological civil war, in which each side mobilizes information in defense of its agenda, without concern for objective standards of truth, now considered a quaint and naïve concern. Each side reads or listens to podcasts of its own tribe, both of which formulate an entirely one-sided understanding of the facts and assumptions relevant to the issue at hand.
Recently The Washington Post has been reporting that Trump and Vance have been objecting to the fact checking of their statements. The Washington Post does not know or does not care to report that for conservatives, “fact-checking” is a ruse, in that it calls out people for “disinformation” whenever they say anything that challenges the establishment line. It is, for conservatives, a strategy for restricting freedom of speech. Media “fact-checking” in presidential and vice-presidential debates, from the conservative point of view, constitutes interference in the electoral process, which should be characterized by free public debate.
The situation we are in is worse than what I imagined years ago, in the aftermath of my personal discovery that truth is relative to social position. Without a method like cross-horizon encounter, we not only are unable to debunk the claims of the powerful; we are unable to debunk anyone’s claims. Reasoned public debate has been cast aside by a post-modern Tower of Babel.
As noted above, my own personal discovery of the relativity of knowledge to social location led me to the epistemological method of cross-horizon encounter, which recognizes the relativity of knowledge as the empirical reality in the first stage of knowing, but maintains that this limitation on understanding can be overcome through sustained personal encounter with persons of other horizons. With respect to issues related to the inequalities of wealth and power in the political-economy of the world system, this approach calls Western intellectuals to sustained personal encounter with the leaders, intellectuals, and peoples of the colonized.
In my fulfillment of this duty, I have observed that the leaders and intellectuals of the Global South and East have avoided falling into the trap of the post-modern Tower of Babel. The exceptional leaders that have emerged to lead people’s revolutions and processes of change have appreciated the wisdom of the ancient prophets, who proclaimed the fundamental truths that ought to guide humanity. And they have appropriated the fundamental principles of the modern Western bourgeois revolutions, which proclaimed that all human beings by nature possess unalienable rights, endowed by their Creator. On the foundation of the ancient and modern cultural legacy of humanity, exceptional leaders have led their nations to a more advanced stage of political struggle, which affirms the social and economic rights—including an adequate standard of living, education, and the full and free development of the human personality—of all citizens in all nations; and which includes the rights of nations and peoples to self-determination and of states to sovereignty, without interference in their internal affairs. On the foundation of these principles, the nations of the Global South and East have constructed a consensus in theory and practice, forging a political reality far different from the ideological divisions of the West. This political reality of the Global South can be obscured by right-wing victories in key nations, as has occurred with respect to Brazil and Argentina. But these phenomena are counterrevolutions against the prevailing process of change in the Global South and East, which continues to constitute the prevailing tendency.
Thus, the current political reality of the Global South and East rejects, in theory and practice, the post-Truth assumptions of the West. It affirms that the principles that ought to guide humanity are known, and a world based on universal moral values can be constructed, a post-imperialist and more just world of peace and prosperity.
There is a common misunderstanding in U.S. public discourse today with respect to the nations constructing socialism, believing that such nations stand against democratic values. But in truth, the nations constructing socialism have played a leading role since 1945 in the proclamation of the universal moral values that ought to guide humanity, and in the implementation of these values in practice in their own nations, as can be seen through open-minded observation of these political processes. The threat today to the fulfillment of the American promise of democracy is not socialism as it exists in the real world, but post-modernism, which celebrates the subjective creation of “my truth” versus “your truth,” grounding a dysfunctional Tower of Babel.
The neocolonized peoples of the earth today are calling for a “dialogue of civilizations.” With this call, they suggest a way out for the nations and peoples of the West. To wit, engagement, at all levels and through a variety of venues and experiences, with the peoples of that other world of the colonized. Such experiences would lead to a gradual discovery of an alternative road.
Responding to the call for a dialogue of civilizations is the key to setting aside our ideological divisions and empowering us to forge a consensus with respect to a proposed national project. It likely would involve a project that is based in cooperation with the peoples and nations of the world.
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