It is said that we live in a post-truth world, but is truth really a thing of the past? I would argue that while the word has lost its traditional meaning it is still as powerful as ever. How can I say that when we throw “truth” around like an “um” in a poorly polished high school speech? Is it really that powerful when culture dilutes its significance by encouraging everyone to write their own micronarrative while simultaneously leaving the universal metanarrative without a publisher? The answer is still yes! The definition of truth has changed but not its gravitas.
Everybody knows that when somebody says, “my truth is my truth and your truth is your truth,” they are really just talking about opinions. We are not fooled! However, in true original sin fashion we believe that our ideas can be like gods and so we divinize them in the hope that no one will call our bluff and expose our sacred ideas as abominations of desolation. We have this notion that if we affix the word “truth” to our thoughts they will become sacrosanct and allow us to defend the indefensible by the power of divine linguistic fiat.
Whenever we come up with an idea that we know is suspect and want to protect it from attack we usher it into the sanctuary of personal truth. We then baptize it in the font of tolerance and confuse the slippery-when-wet sheen with a sacred glow. We then wrap it in holy robes and demand everybody genuflects. Unfortunately, our moment of sacred silence is interrupted by the knock of reason at the door announcing that it has a few questions. Indignant, we cry “sanctuary” and retreat to our safe space only to find that our postmodern clergy has been abusing the truth for years.
Since Truth is the correspondence of thought and reality, it is ultimately impossible to live in a world where our ideas are unhinged from the way the world truly is. However, knowing that reality cannot be changed, our postmodern friends and neighbors do the next best thing and change the meanings of the words that describe it. They create a linguistic fantasy land that feels like a magic kingdom until the postmodern paint wears off and the reality behind the words is revealed. Defining truth as the correspondence of thought and language is unsustainable because someone always comes along and changes the cultural vocabulary.
Truth cannot be changed and this creates a cognitive dissonance in our young people. They are told the lie that they can create their own reality but then quickly find that the world will not oblige. Reality then becomes a trigger word which causes them to retreat to their safe space. Sadly, they become despondent because they can’t shake the feeling that the world is just one big microaggression. While in the past they had successfully used the legal system to transform the culture into a grammatical gulag they now find that they cannot legislate the real world by rewriting the dictionary.
Postmodernists know that “Truth” has power because it has consistently matched thought and reality for centuries but they then use it off-label in order to white-wash the tombs of decaying ideas. They want us to be distracted by the smoke and fire of the word “truth” so that we won’t look behind the curtain and see that a weak-kneed and frail “opinion” is pulling the levers.
We can choose to live in the real world or hide in a dingy cultural crack house. We can take our daily vitamin of truth to maintain spiritual health or we can mainline the opiate of opinion and become addicted to the sound of our own voice. Our culture is homeless not because the dwelling of Truth is too expensive but because the drug of personal truth is too cheap.
Photo by Jonathan Gonzalez on Unsplash
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