Truth and Intelligence

One of my commenters (and we all know that Gone Away has the best commenters on the net, don't we?), Fragile Industries, has posted an article entitled Inconvenient Truth and "Truthiness". In reading this, I was struck first by the usefulness of the word "truthiness", which she defines as follows: "Truthiness is the quality by which a person purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or to what the person might conclude from intellectual examination."

What an excellent word, I thought; how aptly it describes the thought processes of those who disagree with us. It was only as I read on that I realized that there was a flaw in the whole matter of truthiness. Pick any subject in which a dividing line has been drawn and you will find that one side thinks the other indulges in truthiness and their opponents are equally convinced that all truthiness belongs to their foes. We are so sure that only we have the facts, that we are the ones who have come to our conclusions through logic and an insistence upon sticking to the truth.

Although I avoid politics and prefer not to talk about them, it is true that my general world view could be classed as conservative. And my good friend, Fragile, would be equally prepared to admit that she tends towards the liberal side of the political spectrum (I know this because I asked her). How is it that we two, both reasonably intelligent people who try to keep open minds, have come to such differing conclusions on many of the issues confronting humanity today?

The rest of Fragile's post gives an excellent example of this; it is her consideration of Al Gore's film about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. And she makes some very good points, coming down firmly on the side of those who believe ardently in the whole issue of global warming and, in the process, making me feel quite guilty for my continuing doubts of its existence.

To be fair, however, we should set out the arguments of those who do not see global warming as much of an issue at all. Tom Harris, of the National Post of Canada, has published an article entitled The gods are laughing in which he too reviews An Inconvenient Truth. He has assembled an impressive array of experts to show that many of the facts used to support Mr Gore's argument are false.

So who are we to believe? Ultimately, I think that we decide which experts to place credence in according to our preconceived world view. And that view is the result of our life experience and the decisions we made in dealing with it; we are the sum of all that ever happened to us plus our natural reactions to those events (nature and nurture, please note).

This would explain why my immediate feeling on hearing of Mr Gore's film is to doubt that it has anything worthwhile to say; after all, isn't he the guy who announced to the world that he invented the internet? And, no doubt, Fragile would suspect that all experts who disagree with the movie are secretly under the influence of that pawn of the fundamentalist oil barons, George W Bush.

I have no doubt that the truth lies somewhere in between these opposing viewpoints. Both Mr Gore and Mr Bush are acting in good faith and believe in what they say; neither is a figurehead for some evil and destructive conspiracy to subvert the world. The difference between their standpoints is caused, not by stupidity or malicious intent, but by their differing world views. And who we choose to believe depends equally upon our own already-existing world views.

Can we humans ever reach a point where emotion and preconceived notion take no part in our debates? Is it possible that we can be so aware (and therefore in control) of our natural prejudices that we approach each issue with a truly open mind? Will we ever be able to agree upon what is truth and what pure conjecture?

I would like to think that it is so, that in the future we might attain a position where our discussions are concerned only with truth and not with how we may feel.

But isn't that truthiness...?

Technorati tags: Truthiness; An Inconvenient Truth; Al Gore; Truth.