The Truth About Truth
It takes work
“The opposite of truth has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field.”
— Michel de Montaigne, 1580
Truth, justice, and the American way.
It’s a phrase that is irrevocably linked to Superman, and I recall hearing Christopher Reeves use these words to sum up his ethos to Margot Kidder’s Lois Lane in Superman: The Movie (1978).
Lane kind of laughed it off and it was my distinct impression that the audience in the theater also laughed. After all, at the height of the disco era, traditional values like that seemed out of fashion — corny, even.
This kind of code seems out of date now, but frankly, we need a well-defined moral stance more than ever. Let’s break it down a bit.
Truth
Humans have long sought truth. The truth of the world around us, the truth of who we are and what we stand for. “Know thyself” was inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
And yet it seems like truth is in short supply these days. Not because supply is running low, but because there seems to be little demand for it, despite an ironically-named social network.
Justice
In the broadest sense, justice is doing the right thing and doing it impartially. Justice is expressed in the natural consequences of an action.
The arc of justice is long, so it can be difficult to see it working in many cases. Which is why schadenfreude accompanies an instance of instant justice.
The American Way
But what of the American way? America of today is a country of diverse background and opinion, a country that seems defined by the very differences that unite us.
I think we can agree that America at its best represents opportunity for all, constantly striving to improve itself.
These corny, old-fashioned virtues are timeless and universally applicable to humanity. We seek the truth, want to do what’s right, and support opportunities for people to improve themselves.
It was very much on the mind of one commencement speaker this year, who channeled Superman and his tripartite virtues, expounding on each. Here’s a bit on truth:
“The truth, to some, is no longer empirical. It’s no longer based on data nor common sense nor even common decency. Truth is now considered malleable by opinion and by zero-sum endgames. Imagery is manufactured with audacity and with purpose to achieve the primal task of marring the truth with mock logic, to achieve with fake expertise, with false sincerity, with phrases like, ‘I’m just saying. Well, I’m just asking. I’m just wondering.’”
“Truth is mined at the intersections of our chosen behaviors and our fixed habits. Truth has synonyms such as honesty, honor, transparency — and yet the common practice of so many is to play fast and loose with those words — to create enemies, to claim victimhood, to raise the mediocre into merit, and to make cloudy a vista that is actually crystal clear.
“Likewise, Truth has many opposites. Omission. (You don’t need to know that!) Distraction (That’s not the real story! This is!) Opinion masquerading as clairvoyance (Here’s what is going to happen!) and influence peddling (you know, a lot of people are saying…)
“Truth too has a nemesis, equal to any color kryptonite, that like a feral hound is never too far off the path in the weeds and the shadows lying in wait for the lethal opportunity to bring truth down.
“And that beast is indifference, which will make moot all the impermanence found in truth. Indifference will rust away the promise of our promised land. Propaganda and bald-faced lies will erode over time. Idolatry and imagery lose luster in effect. Ignorance and intolerance can be replaced by experience in the wink of an eye, but indifference will narrow the vision of America's people and make dim the light of Lady Liberty's symbolic torch.
“Indifference will make citizens into indentured servants held in labor by the despots and tyrants whose default setting is cynicism, who outlaw dissent and ban art and dialogue and books, who grab power any way they can, enabled by the subterfuge of their co-conspirators, rewarding their rationale of the complicit, and surging into the vacuum caused by the indifference of a people who have been made weary by struggle, so weary that they lose hope and are left to yearn to be saved by the fiction of superheroes. Every day, every year, and for every graduating class, there is a choice to be made.”
Read the transcript or watch the full speech. It is well worth 20 minutes of your time.
Doing all of this — seeking the truth, practicing justice, and treating fellow citizens the way you would want to be treated — takes work.
Ultimately, it’s about modeling good behavior for our children, our employees, and our colleagues.
We can’t all be Superman, but we do want the world to be a better place.
“In college commencement speeches, as with the handing out of prizes for trendsetting journalism, I often hear it said that the truth shall make men free, but I notice that relatively few people know what the phrase means. The truth isn’t about the receipt of the diploma or acceptance into law school, not even about the thievery in Washington or the late-breaking scandal in Hollywood. It’s synonymous with the courage derived from the habit of not running a con game on the unique and specific temper of one’s own mind. What makes men and women free is learning to trust their own thought, possess their own history, speak in their own voices. It doesn’t matter how or when the mind achieves the spark of ignition—in an old book or a new video game, from a teacher encountered by accident in graduate or grammar school, in the course of dissecting a frog or pruning an apple tree, while looking at a painting by Jan Vermeer or listening to the Beatles sing ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’” (Lapham’s Quarterly)
One of the most difficult things a leader must do is to help their team deal with hard truths. But doing so pays off because people appreciate operating within reality. Those who avoid it are just setting up themselves and their people for failure. (Timeless & Timely)
On Decoration Day (the precursor to Memorial Day) in 1871, Frederick Douglass gave a short speech at Arlington National Cemetery. In part he said, “We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it, those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice. (“The Truth Is Marching On,” Lapham’s Quarterly)
There are some players out there who don’t want to deal in truth. When they have the media in their thrall, it can be dangerous to the public. Casey Newton cautions the press: It’s time to change how we cover Elon Musk. (Platformer)
At DC FanDome in 2021, DC publisher Jim Lee announced the Man of Steel has a new motto: “Truth, justice, and a better tomorrow.” Superman didn’t abandon the American way. We did. (Inverse)
Truth, trust and democracy — these were some of the key topics from the roundtable with President Biden on artificial intelligence. (NPR)
Michael J. Sandel, professor of the most popular course at Harvard University, wrote Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do? Using a compelling, entertaining mix of hypotheticals, news stories, episodes from history, pop-culture tidbits, literary examples, legal cases and teachings from the great philosophers—principally, Aristotle, Kant, Bentham, Mill and Rawls—Sandel takes on a variety of controversial issues and gets us to think as well.
Ezra Klein interviewed Tom Hanks about a variety of things, including typewriters. But What Tom Hanks Thinks About America contained this important nugget: “I think there is a throughline to our history of the United States of America that is both checkered and promising.” Listen above, or get the transcript instead.
There’s so much to learn,
