A startling mobility of views

The Search for Truths, an essay by Jacques Barzun in The Jacques Barzun Reader by Michael Murray. An essay worth quoting at length. Much wisdom, pithily delivered.

As an historian, I am naturally, professionally, interested in truths - thousands of them - and this interest brings with it several kinds of puzzle. The first is the disentangling of the muddled reports of the past. Another is how to describe faithfully what bygone ages took to be absolute truths, now disbelieved or forgotten. A third is what test of truth to apply in each case. The last and most baffling is to frame a clear idea of what truth actually is.

In any definition of truth, reality is mentioned or implied. What is said to be true must relate to something experienced and must state that experience accurately. Moreover, the whole vast store of recorded truths is supposed to hang together, and every new one must jibe with the rest of them as well. These demands make up a tough assignment, and when one looks at any sizable portion of these claims to truth, one keeps finding a good many more to challenge than to adopt. An obvious sign of this is the amount of nonstop arguing and fighting in the world. Human beings, individually and in groups, are sure that they possess the truth about things here and hereafter, and when they see it doubted or attacked by their neighbors, they find such dissent intolerable and feel that it must be put down.

There is, of course, an obvious exception to this chaos of thought and action. If one measures by the yardstick, then this piece of string is 28 1/2 inches long. One can measure carelessly and make an error, but as soon as it is pointed out, one agrees with the correct answer. Other measures - the meter, the calendar, the clock, the number series, or any other system that rests on common agreement and fixed standards - yield statements that are not denied by anyone in his senses who is familiar with the terms.

These conventions are endlessly useful, both in science and in practical life. But there is a host of equally immediate and important concerns for which no system and no terms have been agreed upon. It is about these interests that the battle of ideas and the bloodshed took place. This in turn tempts one to think that these contested truths are the most important of all. They have to do with religion, art, morals, education, government, and the very definition of man and his nature and his role in the universe.

A cultural historian's work brings him face to face with those passionately held ideas. At a certain time and place, millions of human beings felt sure that a divine revelation proved the existence of God, who dictated all men's beliefs and actions. The uniformity of that faith stamped it as unshakeable truth. After more than a thousand years, some of the descendants of those millions began to question the revelation and all it meant. Since then, there have been many different "truths" about it, each clung to with the same fervor and confidence as before. A like diversity runs through the rest of the culture - in morals, government, and the arts.

The only sure thing is that mankind is eager for truth, lives by it, will not let it go, and turns desperate in the teeth of contradiciton. That may be a noble spectacle, but it is tragic too - and depressing. If, as required, all truths must hang together consistently, it would seem that in religion, art, and the rest, truth has never reigned. Human beings begin to look like incurably misguided seekers for something that never was.

At this point, a small but remarkable group of people put on a superior grin and say: "You forget the method that clears up all doubts and delivers truth on a platter. We scientists are busy taking care of your troubles. Look at what we have done: We have gotten rid of all the follies and superstitions dreamed up about the real world in the first five thousand years of man's existence. Give us a little more time and we will mop up all the other nonsense still in your heads and give you cast-iron truth."

This sounds delightful, but even in those disciplines where exactness and agreement appear at their highest, there is a startling mobility of views. Every day the truths of geology, cosmology, astrophysics, biology, and their sister sciences are upset. The earth is older than was thought; the dinosaurs are younger; the stars in huge galaxies have so much space they can't collide, yet they collide just the same; Mars, after being dry as dust, has liquid water; the human bones in Central Africa do not mean what they were said to mean; a new fossil shows the origin of birds to be different from the origin posited yesterday; as for the speed of light, it can be exceeded. If only the latest is true, then all earlier ideas were hardly better than superstitions.

The condition is still worse in the semi-sciences or psychology and medicine, and confusion grows as we get to the social sciences, ethics, and theology. There are "schools" in each - the telltale sign of uncertainty. The boasts of an earlier day about finding laws governing society and predicting its future have been muted for some time. In history and philosophy, some wise heads have admitted that these laws are not exact transcripts but simply documented visions, respectively, of the past and of Being as a whole. None excludes other accounts of the same particular subject.

A number of scientists have taken time to ponder these puzzles of their own making and have offered two suggestions. One is that science is not description but metaphor. It seems a poor term. A metaphor needs four parts: in "the ship plows the ocean," the ship is likened to a plow and the ocean to a field. The facts and the language of science add up to two parts, not four. Perhaps the meaning is that science is not literal but poetic, its phrasings inspired by observation and calculation. That must be why we now come across the word "charm" and others like it in theoretical physics, a tacit recognition of its suggestive, poetical character.

If so, it also means that reality is beyond our grasp, and truth along with it. Such is, in fact, the other suggested answer to the riddle, which is that there is no need for the idea of reality. From this negative it follows that we should stop being so solemnly intent on truth. Above all, we should stop fighting over tentative notions we believe in. Imagine instead that we are at a picnic, making up disposable fictions about what we see and feel. We then play with the jigsaw, but pieces are missing and others don't fit.

Where does that leave me as an historian who struggles to discover what happened in the past and to make of events and persons some intelligible patterns? First, I am not ready to throw reality into the trash can. I feel it ever present and call it by the more vivd term experience. It includes all my thoughts and feelings, the tabletop and the electrons, light as waves and as particles, the current truths and the past superstitions. The common task, I conclude, is to place each of these within its sphere and on its level; they are incompatible only under a single-track system. One must, moreover, be ready to deal with new paradoxes and contradictions, because experience is neither fixed nor finished; it grows as we make it by our restless search for truth. Truth is a goal and a guide that cannot be dispensed with. The all-doubting skeptics only pretend to do without it.

But we must recognize that our work to attain truth succeeds only piecemeal. Where our hope of truth breaks down is at the stage of making great inferences from well-tested lesser truths. Still, we cannot help inferring. Our love of order impels us to make theories, systems, sets of principles. We need them both for comfort and for action. A society, however pluralist, needs some beliefs in common and will not trust them unless they are labeled truths. It is there that our efforts betray us. Sooner or later, experience jabs us with an event, a feeling, or a perception that shatters the truth-value of the great inferred idea. It is like actually going to the moon or prospecting the planets with a sensor and finding that the entirely logical and satisfying inference is dead wrong. As the historian knows, the breakup of old truths is painful, often bloody, but it does not condemn the search for truth and its recurrent bafflement, which are part of man's fate. It should only strengthen tolerance and make us lessen our pretensions. Just as in the past man was defined as the rational animal and later comers said, "No - only capable of reason," so man should not be called seeker and finder of truth but fallible maker and reviser of truths.

Getting better and more equal

The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley. Page 19.

In another respect, too, inequality has been retreating. The spread of IQ scores has been shrinking steadily - because the low scores have been catching up with the high ones. This explains the steady, progressive and ubiquitous improvement in the average IQ scores people achieve at a given age - at a rate of 3 per cent per decade. In two Spanish studies, IQ proved to be 9.7 points higher after thirty years, most of it among the least intelligent half of the group. Known as the Flynn effect, after James Flynn who first drew attention to it, this phenomenon was at first dismissed as an artefact of changes in tests, or a simple reflection of longer or better schooling. But the facts do not fit such explanations because the effect is consistently weakest in the cleverest children and in the tests that relate most to educational content. It is a levelling-up caused by an equalisation of nutrition, stimulation or diversity of childhood experience. You can, of course, argue that IQ may not be truly representative of intelligence, but you cannot argue that something is getting better - and more equal at the same time.

Die Ente

I once spoke German with some fluency - more correctly, I once passed a fluency exam in German. An interesting language of a fascinating and impressive culture. I still have very occasional opportunities to use my remaining German.

A theme that recurs in some of my posts is the role of serendipity in life. The more intensely one leads life, the greater one reads, the more likely there will be improbable coincidences. Sometimes that serendipity is momentous, sometimes inconsequential but intriguing. The following falls into the latter category.

Yesterday I was reading an interesting article, Immanuel Kant's Guide to a Good Dinner Party. At the end of the essay is a brief remark on Kant's humor, hinging on a circumlocutious play on the German and English words for Ant, Aunt, Ente and Duck. It registered in my mind simply because I had forgotten the word for duck in German was Die Ente. That, and the fact that it was a reminder not to expect too much slapstick humor at the dining table of a German philosopher.

Kant, by the way, at one point gives an example of a joke he apparently thought very good and that he apparently heard told at a dinner party. Countess von Keyserling was visited by Count Sagramoso, who knew only broken German; at the time a schoolmaster came by who was putting together a natural history collection in Hamburg and therefore had birds on the brain. In order to make conversation, the Count said, "I have an aunt in Hamburg, but she is dead." To which the schoolmaster replied, "Why didn't you have her skinned and stuffed?" The Count had used an anglicism, Ant, for the German word for 'aunt', Tante and the schoolmaster had heard Ente (duck) instead of Ant (aunt). Life of the party; that's Kant.

Now it is some thirty years since I received instruction in German, and probably close to that since I last encountered Die Ente.

Today I was glancing over an essay, How to Learn Facts by Steven Dutch, a professor at the University of Wisconsin. With my oldest just having started college, pursuing an engineering degree and likely being deluged by facts, I was considering whether he might find it interesting. There, lurking in the middle of the essay:

The interesting thing is that when information is fully learned, it actually travels in a loop in the brain. You get new data in an often passive way (reading, hearing in lecture). Thinking about what it means leads to ideas about what you can do with the information. If the application is enticing enough, you try it out. If it works, the learning has been powerfully reinforced. If not, you have to go back, review what you learned, and try again.

Example: you learn that the German word for "duck" is "die Ente." The integration part isn't all that challenging. Later that day you see a duck in the park, think "I just learned that word" and say to a classmate "Das ist eine Ente." You now have reinforced the learning with a concrete, successful application.

So what are the odds that, knowing the word Die Ente but not having used it for some thirty years, I should come across two instances of it in the space of twenty-four hours. As astronomical as those odds might be, what then are the odds that the experience should so nearly mirror the example being offered in the second instance? Close to impossible one would say, but there you have it. We look for patterns and meaning but sometimes life just gives us improbabilities.

Such immortal vermin

There is nobody like Mencken to put an argument so robustly that even if you agree with him to a point, you still shrink back from his articulation. Mencken, reporting on the Scopes trial in his column, Homo Neanderthalensis:

Such obscenities as the forthcoming trial of the Tennessee evolutionist, if they serve no other purpose, at least call attention dramatically to the fact that enlightenment, among mankind, is very narrowly dispersed. It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone -- that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous. The men of the educated minority, no doubt, know more than their predecessors, and of some of them, perhaps, it may be said that they are more civilized -- though I should not like to be put to giving names -- but the great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge.

Such immortal vermin, true enough, get their share of the fruits of human progress, and so they may be said, in a way, to have their part in it. The most ignorant man, when he is ill, may enjoy whatever boons and usufructs modern medicine may offer -- that is, provided he is too poor to choose his own doctor. He is free, if he wants to, to take a bath. The literature of the world is at his disposal in public libraries. He may look at works of art. He may hear good music. He has at hand a thousand devices for making life less wearisome and more tolerable: the telephone, railroads, bichloride tablets, newspapers, sewers, correspondence schools, delicatessen. But he had no more to do with bringing these things into the world than the horned cattle in the fields, and he does no more to increase them today than the birds of the air.

On the contrary, he is generally against them, and sometimes with immense violence. Every step in human progress, from the first feeble stirrings in the abyss of time, has been opposed by the great majority of men. Every valuable thing that has been added to the store of man's possessions has been derided by them when it was new, and destroyed by them when they had the power. They have fought every new truth ever heard of, and they have killed every truth-seeker who got into their hands.

Re-establishing our former ignorance

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities for re-establishing our former ignorance?

Somtimes it seems as if we may have arrived at that date.

define: Amphigoric

From Unnatural Causes by P.D. James.

The snippets of information, most of which changed subtly in the telling and some of which were founded on hope rather than fact, built up an incomplete and amphigoric picture.

From The Free Dictionary:

Am'phi'gor'ic
a. 1. Nonsensical; absurd; pertaining to an amphigory.

Not because men will become better

From Anatole France in Sur la Pierre blanche:

Universal peace will come about one day, not because men will become better (one cannot hope for that) but because a new order of things, new science, new economic needs, will impose a state of peace on them, just as the very conditions of their existence formerly placed and maintained them in a state of war.

A story is a doorway

By Richard Peck? From his Ezra Jack Keats Lecture:

A story is a doorway
That opens on a wider place;
A story is a mirror
To reflect the reader's face.

A story is a question
You hadn't thought to ponder;
A story is a pathway
Inviting you to wander.

A story is a window,
A story is a key,
A story is a lighthouse
Beaming out to sea.

A story's a beginning,
A story is an end,
And in the story's middle
You might just find a friend.

A shore alien, eerie, and utterly desolate

From Unnatural Causes by P.D. James.

A marvelous description of the North Sea along England's East Anglia, a region where I have visited and even spent a year in boarding school.

Buffeted and foam-flecked, he squelched onward over the shingle finding the occasional and welcome stretch of firm serrated sand, and pausing from time to time to watch the smooth green underbelly of the waves as they rose in their last curve before crashing at his feet, in a tumult of flying shingle and stinging spray. It was a lonely shore, empty and desolate, like the last fringes of the world. It evoked no memories, cosily nostalgic, of the enchantments of childhood holidays by the sea. Here were no rockpools to explore, no exotic shells, no breakwaters festooned with sea weed, no long stretches of yellow sand sliced by innumerable spades. Here was nothing but sea, sky and marshland, an empty beach with little to mark the miles of outspate shingle but the occasional tangle of tar-splotched driftwood and rusting spikes of old fortifications. Dalgliesh loved this emptiness, this fusion of sea and sky. But today the place held no peace for him. He saw it suddenly with new eyes, a shore alien, eerie, and utterly desolate.

As long as we cannot prophesy

From Jacques Barzun's Teacher in America:

As long as we cannot prophesy who will turn out a winner, we have no right to question initiative and self-dedication.