“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate asks the crowd, after Jesus tells him that he is not a king, but a man whose task is to bear witness to the truth.
In the “Jesus Christ Superstar” version of the above, the governor of Judea continues, “Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths. Are mine the same as yours?”
Certainly not. Not for the two millennia since — actually, longer. Plato, four centuries before the Crucifixion, spent much time arguing what we know and how we know it.
So as the United States of America prepares to inaugurate, once again, a man with a proven proclivity for telling lies — easily, continually, and without consequence — we can take a bit of cold comfort that at least we didn’t invent this conversation.
Mark Zuckerberg just gave up Tuesday and announced that Facebook will cease third party fact-checking, and instead count on community notes after posts.
How will that work?
Take an indisputable fact: Los Angeles is on fire. Which leads to the obvious follow-up question: Why is Los Angeles on fire? I would point to the 99-mile-an-hour winds and tinder-dry landscape. Prodded to dig deeper, I might remind readers how climate change is making ecological disasters more severe and more frequent.
But a member of the community could attach a note saying: no, Elon Musk claims on his private megaphone, X, that the fires were fanned by racial inclusivity.
“They prioritized DEI over saving lives and homes,” Musk wrote, retweeting a notorious troll’s assessment about the LA fire department’s “racial equality plan.”
In the past, Facebook might remove that odious piece of racism. Now it won’t, but is counting on community members to, perhaps, point out that it is a classic post hoc ergo propter hoc logical fallacy to suggest that because the disastrous fire followed efforts to combat racism, it was therefore caused by them. You could just as easily, and just as inaccurately, argue that the department’s Taco Tuesday caused the escalation of the fires Wednesday, since it happened first.
Plato — spoiler alert — concluded that the truth is whatever he can convince others is true, though that could take some doing, even then, long before the advent of social media.
“Could you persuade men who do not listen?” one of his associates asks, in the beginning of the “Republic,” sounding a central question of our time.
To me, truth is an onion. There is the rough outer surface, the “lie agreed upon” as Voltaire put it — “Los Angeles is on fire” — and then layers underneath. Guys like Musk start peeling the onion and claim to find an apple.
That said, even apparently obvious facts are open to interpretation. The one I just tossed out, “Los Angeles is on fire,” probably didn’t give you a moment’s pause — you saw the videos of blazing blocks. But Los Angeles County is 4,753 square miles. Thursday morning about 30,000 acres, or 50 square miles, had burned. Barely 1%; The other 99% of Los Angeles is fine, if a little smoky. Right now, anyway. So Los Angeles is both on fire and not on fire.
Welcome to sophistry. Is the above helpful? Not really, because it downplays the seriousness of the fire, the worst in city history.
Plato was at his prime when Athens was defeated by Sparta, ending its Golden Age. The philosopher blamed the city’s love of twisting the truth into amusing shapes, like animal balloons.
“Plato believed that the Sophists’ verbal trickery was to blame for Athens’s downfall and submission to foreign tyranny,” Robin Reames writes in her excellent rhetorical guide, “The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself.”
“It might be entertaining for Gorgias to prove that nothing exists or for Protagoras to prove — without contradicting himself — that contradiction was both inevitable and impossible. But when such verbal tricks were done not for entertainment but for deciding whether to send ships to battle or troops to war, the consequences could be devastating.”
Devastating consequences. Tuck that phrase away for future use. A burning city — well, part of a city — is a prime example of what happens when you mistake talking around a problem with solving it. As I’ve said before and no doubt will have opportunity to say again, we can ignore reality, but that doesn’t mean reality ignores us.
Nothing is more real than your house burning down. And you can ascribe that calamity to DEI or Democratic governance or immigrants or trans people using the wrong bathroom. The real reasons for the fire don’t change, and those reasons are clear enough to anyone who bothers to actually consider them.