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Philip Lee
In the present climate of disillusionment, politicians are viewed with suspicion and disbelief, and the mass media evoke scepticism and mistrust. This lack of trust mirrors the absence of truth in public life. Echoing Pilate's question, the author asks what does truth really mean? Is it permanent and universal, or temporal and local? Using case studies from the medieval Crusades to the recent 'peace treaty' in Guatemala, the conclusion is that truth is often the victim of overriding political and economic circumstances: truth to be discovered in context. But truth is more than a contextual jigsaw puzzle. The current crisis of credibility can only be redeemed by a culture in which the mass media bear witness to the truth.
In the Johannine writings in the New Testament, the author recounts an incident which is not to be found in the Synoptic Gospels. Standing before Pilate, Jesus says: 'The reason I was born and came into the world was to testify to the truth. All who own the truth listen to my voice.' In response, Pilate asks, 'What does truth mean?'1
The question, in its 1985 rendition, varies in a subtle but important way from the one used to introduce Francis Bacon's famous essay Of Truth (1601) which begins memorably with: 'What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.' Bacon was probably familiar with William Tyndale's translation of the Bible (published in 1525) or Miles Coverdale's version (1535), which were the basis for Cranmer's 'Great Bible' of 1539 and the later 'Authorised Version' of 1611. Both, however, render the crucial sentence as: 'What thing is truth?'
However, Bacon also knew Latin. He may have seen the newly printed Vulgate issued by Pope Clement VIII in 1592, although given the political tensions of the period - the Spanish Armada set sail in 1588 - perhaps this is unlikely. Nevertheless, the question that introduces his essay is a straightforward rendition of the Latin Quid est veritas? But was that what Pilate actually said or meant? Was it a rhetorical question? Why did Pilate not wait for an answer?
The scene between Pilate and Jesus took place in a country under armed occupation. The Romans had taken over the Jewish homeland in AD 6, when a procurator was appointed for Judea, while Galilee was allowed to continue under the puppet government of Herod Antipas. The whole country was subject to the Roman Legate of Antioch, whose rule prevailed everywhere.
Jewish high priests were appointed by the Romans and, to a considerable extent, were collaborators with the regime. Galilee was seething with unrest, there were beggars everywhere, robbery with violence was common and disease rampant. When Pontius Pilate became procurator of Judea in AD 26, he intended to show the Jews who was master and he used spies to report on gatherings of citizens. This was the context in which 'jesting Pilate' asked 'What does truth mean?'
Fifteen hundred years later Francis Bacon, writing about truth, found himself in a similarly turbulent political era. As a politician and statesman to Elizabeth I and James I, whose reigns were riven by political and religious strife (the Spanish Armada set sail in 1588 and the Gunpowder Plot took place in 1605) Bacon was a supporter of what today would be called a police state. In a land where paid informers monitored suspicious activities and torture was used to extract confessions, Francis Bacon reflected on the meaning of truth.
The two examples above suggest that 'truth' can be ascribed a variable status according to the perspective of the time and circumstance in which it is viewed - that there can be both local and universal understandings of 'truth'. There is an ontological assumption here in that truth-telling is an essential dimension of being human, which is only achieved in being-with-others. Since being-with-others cannot be properly realised without truth, all persons in relationships make a truth claim on each other. However, the mode and manner of that truth claim are cultural, spatial and temporal and there is a continuing search to identify 'protonorms' of communication whose existence lies outside such confines.2 These protonorms - underlying presuppositions that are necessary for ethical reasoning - include truth-telling, commitment to justice, freedom in solidarity, and respect for human dignity.
The search for protonorms continues the centuries-old quest to reconcile the philosophical question of subject-object perceptions. By exploring multicultural comparative ethics, it moves beyond Bertrand Russell's comprehensive attempt to situate the thinking of Western philosophers in the political and socio-economic milieu of their times . In the Introduction to A History of Western Philosophy, Russell wrote: 'To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.'3 Russell seemed to foresee the loss (some might say abandonment) of moral certainty that characterises postmodernity. One reaction to this is the transnational and transdisciplinary search for protonorms, which has an essential or unifying purpose reflecting the religious pluralism and multiculturality of the world in which we live.
The work of other philosophers argues that there can be no universally and eternally valid answers. For them the perennial task of philosophy is to answer questions anew:
If we step back from the history of ideas into the realm of pure philosophy, we find that neither the modern nor the postmodern are concepts which are helpful to us. Philosophical answers may not be eternal; but the questions recur. And that is what we must expect. Our condition is neither temporal nor timeless.4
If certainty is no longer possible at the end of the 20th century, how closely can we approach truth? Is truth invariable or does it depend on time and place, knowledge and perspective, text and context? How is it possible to 'testify to the truth' and who is responsible for doing so?
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
On 27 November 1095, at Clermont in central France, Pope Urban II delivered a sermon which set in motion the First Crusade. Enthroned on a dais, he addressed a great throng of bishops, knights and common people with the aim of persuading them to liberate the holy places of the Near East from domination by non-Christians. He called on the faithful, in particular the military elites, to make an armed pilgrimage which would simultaneously earn them remission of their sins.
Urban's audience had assembled for a church council and it was only a small number of those who heard his speech that actually went on the crusade. But his message was repeated many times in the following months and it slowly gained the support of the church and secular hierarchy. Urban was faced with the task of persuading an essentially conservative society to do something arduous, expensive, time-consuming and ultimately dangerous. The technique he used is surprisingly familiar.
To win followers to his cause, he described a state of crisis in the eastern Mediterranean where the Byzantine Patriarch was being threatened, churches were being defiled by infidels, and Christians subjected to torture, rape, mutilation and murder by Muslim aggressors. Urban even claimed that Christians were being tied to stakes to be used for archery practice and emphasised the 'defilement' of Jerusalem, the holiest place known to Christendom.5
The reality was somewhat different. Newcomers to the region from Central Asia had on occasion had minor conflicts with Christians living there. But their actions rarely, if ever, amounted to the sort of horrors which Urban recounted. Nor was the power-play as straightforward as Urban implied: for example, the Ottoman Turks lost control of Jerusalem to the Egyptians in 1098, one year before the crusaders arrived. Ironically, at the climax of the Crusade the 'enemies' were not those originally envisaged by Pope Urban II, who had skilfully used misinformation if not outright lies to promote his cause.
Nine hundred years later, in another part of the Middle East, a similar struggle took place. This time the god was oil and the enemy a regime which the US government and its regional allies had alternately supported and destabilised for over 30 years. During the Gulf War of 1991-92 against a demonised Saddam Hussein, considerable debate took place about the notion of a 'just war'. Pope Jean-Paul II called for a cease-fire, while the Archbishop of Canterbury went on radio to say that:
To do justice sometimes compels us to use force. The harsh reality of history is that the use of force has been caused as much by human virtues - our sense of justice, our belief in the difference between right and wrong, our readiness for self-sacrifice on behalf of others - as it has been by any of our failures or wickedness.6
Of course, there is a moral question here. But some might put forward a more fundamental and, as things turned out, more critical question. Did the governments and decision-makers have, or indeed seek, information that would enable them to make a just decision? Was the public given that information or, as in the 11th century, were misinformation and distortion used to political and economic advantage? Where was truth?
Truth in the age of information
The late 20th century has been described as the age of information. This may be accurate but it is not its chief characteristic. It is an age imbued with inhumanity and mass deception on a global scale. The histories of every country without exception are littered with evidence of sustained untruth which has distorted human values, social structures, and the nature of human relationships. In fact, it is an age of lies.
In Washington D. C., visitors to the Library of Congress can see the original Declaration of Independence, ratified on 4 July 1776. At night, as a security measure, the cases in which the documents are displayed sink on hydraulic lifts into bomb-proof vaults. The curious thing is that the original document is now almost illegible, because for years it was exposed to sunlight and the ink has faded. Yet this is the document in which the freedom of the West is believed to have its foundation, the document on which the whole edifice of Western power is said to stand (pace Margaret Thatcher, who believes in the myth of Magna Carta).
It is as if enshrinement of the truth were more important than its real presence in the lives of ordinary people. In 1826 Thomas Jefferson, one of the last surviving signatories to the Declaration of Independence, was invited to attend the fiftieth anniversary celebrations. Declining on the grounds of ill-health, and referring to the Declaration, he wrote:
May it be to the world, what I believe it will be (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.7
More than two hundred years later, the unintentional irony is self-evident as US involvement in Guatemala demonstrates.
The tragedy of Guatemala
In 1992 a 33-year-old Mayan Indian woman was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Rigoberta Menchú won the prize in recognition of her work for social justice and for the rights of indigenous people. She is a symbol of the horrendous suffering of the Guatemalan people and their struggle to improve their lives. Rigoberta Menchú saw one brother die of malnutrition in Guatemala's cotton fields and another tortured and burnt to death by the army. Her mother was also killed by the army and her father burnt alive in the Spanish Embassy in Guatemala City in an infamous massacre in 1980.
By 1993, after more than 40 years of civil war, 40,000 people had 'disappeared', more than 100,000 were dead, and up to a million had been displaced. The majority of victims were poor Indians living in highland villages.8
In 1994 representatives of the Government of Guatemala and the grassroots opposition movement URNG met in Oslo to sign an accord for the 'historical clarification of the human rights violations and violent acts which have provoked the suffering of the Guatemalan people'. One of the key demands of the civil sector was that this 'Truth Commission' should 'individually assign responsibility to those who committed violations.' It was clearly recognised that legal implications and punishment for such violations would be the responsibility of the judiciary.
The civil sector stated that only official acknowledgement of the past and of those who bear responsibility for the systematic bloodshed of the people of Guatemala would create the appropriate environment for democratic transition in the country. Equally importantly, it affirmed that knowing the truth is a moral, historical and legal right of all victims of human rights violations and their relatives. A nation cannot build its future if it does not have the right to fully acknowledge its past.
In the event, the Truth Commission was prohibited from 'individualising responsibility' so that it could not name specific perpetrators of crimes. It became obvious that the Guatemalan Government had negotiated not from a desire to call a halt to human rights abuses, or for peace and reconciliation, but with the cynical intention of gaining financially from international bank loans, trade agreements and market expansion.
On 31 March 1996 a Roman Catholic nun from New Mexico launched a campaign demanding an end to secrecy about US involvement in repression in Guatemala.9 Sr Dianna Ortiz began her silent vigil for truth in front of the White House having publicly asked President Clinton to declassify US records of human rights abuses in Guatemala since 1954 and to release a full account of the Intelligence Oversight Board's investigations into US activities in Guatemala. So far her plea for truth has met with silence.
The Bhopal massacre
On 3 December 1984, the Union Carbide Corporation leaked a virulently poisonous gas into a slum neighbourhood that lay alongside its pesticide factory in Bhopal, India. In just one night, over 4,000 people died and hundreds of thousands of other residents were disabled, blinded and injured, many of them permanently. It was the worst 'public relations' disaster a transnational corporation could imagine, associating its name with death, disease and environmental disaster.
One might assume that Union Carbide immediately admitted liability and offered compensation. Not at all. In fact the company spent millions of dollars selling a story to the media that the chemical leak was an act of sabotage by a disgruntled employee, rather than a consequence of its policy to cut back safety measures as the factory lost profitability. After ducking and weaving in the US and Indian courts for years, Union Carbide executives used their influence to obtain a favourable deal from the Indian government at a time when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was anxious to attract investment in India by foreign corporations.
In the end, the Indian government (which claimed to represent the victims) did a deal with Union Carbide requiring it to pay $470 million in damages in exchange for waiving all future civil claims. Ten years later, in 1994, the possibility of bringing charges against one of the company's senior officials arose. Union Carbide's former Chief Executive Officer, Warren Anderson, had gone into hiding soon after the tragedy, and the Indian government failed to ask the US government to extradite him to India to face criminal charges. The result is that up to now Union Carbide has literally got away with murder.
Communicating truth
'Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht' (The history of the world is its judgement) wrote Schiller in 1786, just ten years after the American Declaration of Independence. Yet, 'history is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous'10 and examples of deception and lies for political or economic expediency are two-a-penny. For thousands of years political leaders (in particular) have been 'economical with the truth', from Egyptian pharaohs erecting stelae commemorating victories that never happened to lies about the (non-)handling of toxic chemicals by British troops during the Gulf War. It should also be recalled that time-honoured myths are a vital component of nation-building and are duly enshrined, often with little regard for their truth.
One such myth, of more recent date, is that freedom of information belongs to the mass media and that they are the bastions of truth and, therefore, of democracy. Even ignoring the context of media empires, the dismantling of public service broadcasting, and the globalisation and convergence of new communication technologies, this is highly questionable:
It is time to release the concept of freedom of information from the hostage it has been taken by media proprietors and to return it where it was originally placed in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - to 'everyone', i.e. the citizen. In other words, the main function of the media in the context of democracy is service to the people, rather than an abstract mission to seek for truth.11
For the media to fulfil this role and be trustworthy, they have to be truthful; and to be truthful, they have to be unbiased and as objective as possible. But the media are not abstract entities. They are run by people, who must themselves be unbiased and as objective as possible in order to be truthful and, therefore, trustworthy. How do people - in the media and generally - determine what is true?
To begin with, relationships between people are achieved through communication, which is based on trust, which is founded on truth-telling. Truth, therefore, is the corner-stone of the whole edifice of being-in-community. Without truth, there are no certainties. It is impossible to move in any direction because it is impossible to foresee the consequences. Truth, then, becomes a step-by-step set of assumptions leading to a certainty. Should one of the assumptions prove false, the chain is broken and truth fails. Where do people learn about truth? Deni Elliott has summarised the work of Lawrence Kohlberg on moral development theory to describe six stages of development in deciding how to act:12
•The actor believes that the 'right' action is the one that avoids pain or punishment.
•The actor believes that the right action will likely result in a reward for the actor.
•The actor determines what is right by seeking peer approval.
•The actor has respect for a system that is larger than any one authority figure, and loyalty to that system replaces the group as the basis for determining moral prohibition.
•What makes an action right is that it can be decided impartially, without specific loyalties, to bring about the greatest social benefit.
•The actor uses principles of justice (fairness, equity) to determine moral permissibility and prohibition. The principles of justice are based on the perception that individual human beings have equal and inviolate worth.
Clearly these six stages can be applied to the notion of truth and the reasons for truth-telling:
•I shall tell the truth because if I do not, I shall be punished.
•I shall tell the truth because if I do, I shall be rewarded.
•I shall tell the insofar truth as it conforms to what my friends expect.
•I shall tell the truth insofar as it conforms to the community to which I belong.
•I shall tell the truth because by doing so everyone in my community will benefit.
•I shall tell the truth because it is a just assessment of what is morally permissible given particular circumstances.
Not one of these reasons is valid because each is subjective and each relies on context as the determining factor. What of the other person(s) involved? What if the context is flawed? What if the social or cultural environment, the available information from all sources, is untrustworthy? Elliott suggests that it is only in a rational relationship with another person that we can learn how to reason and to act morally and, therefore, to speak the truth:
Moral reasoning and consciousness are not, primarily, about our individual selves but about judgements on actions, or intended actions, regarding others. The socialization of the moral being takes place in the individual's relationship with others.13
The first precept, then, is that truth is located in a relationship of trust with another person. The second is that for truth to be valid, another person has to act as an objective and unbiased witness, since truth cannot exist a priori. Truth is a coalescence of verifiable observations or statements valid at a given moment in time and witnessed by others who share a relationship of trust. And 'truthfulness means commitment to the truth on the part of the individual (intrapersonal), to the truth between individuals (interpersonal), and to the truth in relation to reality.'14 In this sense, truth is a leap of faith.
Towards a culture of truth
Is there any evidence that we live in a culture in which truth is fundamental? The instant response is yes. Many people, pointing to religious precepts or legal statutes, assume truth as the basis of society. Yet in many cases truth seems to be 'a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance.'15 It seems to be variable or negotiable, and at worst something to be covered up or buried (literally, as mass graves in the Katyn Forest, in Rwanda and in Bosnia, to take just three examples, have shown).
It is arguable that far from there being a culture of truth, deception is rife. This is certainly true of the way some political systems have, in practice, failed the majority of people they were intended to serve. In the extreme cases, both Fascism and Communism have corrupted or ruined the lives of millions of people, leading to famine, war, and brutal repression.
Economic systems have hardly fared better. In every country of the world there is a rich elite of tiny proportions. Below that there is a larger middle-class. But in by far the largest proportion, especially in the majority of countries of the South, there is overwhelming poverty and human degradation. Recently the economies in a number of 'developing countries' have improved and international bankers have suddenly discovered an interest in these 'emerging markets'. However, evidence suggests that rapid economic development, while reducing poverty, has not reduced inequality and that growth and democracy have not always been partners. Similarly it is hardly credible that honesty and fair dealing are bed-fellows in the global monetary system.
In this situation, the mass media - as the supposed public voice of truth - have a crucial role to play. People turn to the media for the kind of information that sustains democracy and which should promote and maintain a culture of truth. Communication practitioners have a moral as well as a professional duty to witness to the truth, and sadly they often pay the ultimate price. On 25 January 1997 the photo journalist José Luis Cabezas, who worked for the weekly political magazine Noticias, was murdered in Pianmar, Argentina. He had been investigating corruption in the region of Entre Ríos. The previous year, according to the International Federation of Journalists, 38 journalists were killed, many for their investigative work, six of them in Latin America.
Truth is a risky business. If the truth ethic were an active moral principle in the higher echelons of government, one imagines that it might also permeate the rest of society. Conversely, if society were imbued with truth, if all the structures of society conspired to promote truth, the universal values of respect for human dignity, commitment to justice, and freedom in solidarity might be more readily attainable.
In Johan Galtung's most recent and magisterial account of peace theory, he proposes two compatible definitions of peace:16
•Peace is the absence/reduction of violence of all kinds.
•Peace is nonviolent and creative conflict transformation.
It would be reasonable to apply this thinking to the concept of truth:
•Truth is the absence/reduction of deception of all kinds.
•Truth is the constructive transformation of deception.
The first definition requires public knowledge of deception, how, why and where it is practised. The second requires truth to be a culture in which deception can be and is recognised, acknowledged and transformed. None of this can take place at the surface level of public actors and institutions. It must reach the deepest levels of society by means of education and through public witness by the mass media.
Francis Bacon died in 1626 when science and philosophy were being fundamentally rethought. In 1543 Mikolaj Kopernik (better known as Nicholas Copernicus) received the first published copy of his lifetime's work, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. The book placed truth at the centre of the universe by proving that the earth revolves around the sun. By the early 1600s the implications of these earth-shaking revelations were being developed and applied by Michael Mästlin, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei, whose work profoundly influenced the coming Age of Enlightenment and the subsequent history of the world.
This successful challenge to the entire system of ancient authority turned people's philosophical conception of the universe on its head and was rightly termed the 'Copernican Revolution'. It went a considerable way towards justifying what Bacon himself wrote in his essay at the very beginning of that momentous century: 'Truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature.'
Notes
1. In The Original New Testament, edited and translated from the Greek by the Jewish historian of Christian beginnings, Hugh J. Schonfield. London: Firethorn Press, 1985, p. 525.
2. See Communication Ethics and Universal Values, edited by Clifford G. Christians and Michael Traber. Newbury Park: Sage, 1997, p. xi and p. 341.
3. A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1946, p. 14.
4. An Intelligent Person's Guide To Philosophy, by Roger Scruton. London: Duckworth, 1996, p. 164.
5. See Europe: A History, by Norman Davies. Oxford/New York: OUP, 1996. pp. 345-48; and 'Who were the first crusaders?', by Jonanthan Phillips, in History Today, Vol. 47 (3), March 1997.
6. 'Thought for the Day', BBC Radio 4, 17 January 1991.
7. Letter from Thomas Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, 24 June 1826. Exhibited in 1995 in the Library of Congress, Washington D. C.
8. In Guatemala: Transition from terror?, published in the Comment series by the Catholic Institute for International Relations. London, 1993, p. 5.
9. Washington Times, Monday, 1 April 1996.
10. George Orwell. 'Who are the War Criminals?', Tribune, 1941.
11. Kaarle Nordenstreng, 'The journalist: A walking paradox', in The Democratization of Communication, edited by Philip Lee. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1995, p. 120.
12. In 'Universal Values and Moral Development Theories', by Deni Elliott, in Communication Ethics and Universal Values, edited by Clifford Christians and Michael Traber. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997, pp. 75-76.
13. Ibid. p. 80.
14. In 'The Basic Norms of Truthfulness', by Dietmar Mieth, in Communication Ethics and Universal Values, edited by Clifford Christians and Michael Traber. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997, p. 93.
15. Shakespeare, Hamlet, I.iv.
- 16. In Peace By Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilisation, by Johan Galtung. London: Sage Publications, and Oslo: International Peace Research Institute. 1996.
Philip Lee studied modern languages at the University of Warwick, England, followed by piano and conducting at the Royal Academy of Music, London. Since 1976 he has worked for the World Association for Christian Communication at its General Secretariat where he is jointly responsible for studies and publications. He has sat on several Ecumenical Juries at international film festivals. His publications as editor include Communication For All (1986) and The Democratisation of Communication (1995).
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