Institutionalized

Truth. Ontology is the branch of philosophy concerned with exploring how we know what we know. In a certain sense I suppose it is the search for a means to validate facts. A quest not necessarily for truth itself so much as the means to verify it, without which the former would be impossible. Though really there’s probably a sub branch of philosophy that concerns itself with verifying truth, indistinguishable from “knowing what we know” though it seems to us mere mortals. Heavy metal wishes it could be as variegated as philosophy, each narrow wending branch distinguished only by some shading of the screams or flavor of the language, as applicable: Sludge Philosophy, Episte-Core. Power Ethics, Meta Metal.

We all possess some innate capacity for arriving at a commonly agreed upon notion of what is true within a compass limited to the range of our senses. If I tell you the sun is shining at 3am, it’s very easy to ascertain that I’m full of bananas. We can even extend our truth telling capabilities through the application of a bit of reason—the sun may not be out in the middle of the night but if I told you it will rise in a few hours your experience with the sun and its patterns will lead you to agree. Probably. If I tell you that it will rise because the Earth is a rotating ball, it’s harder to extrapolate this point from daily experience, but you can grasp the theory that explains the phenomena of sunset and sunrise as well as the movement of the stars, and you can make deductions from things like ships disappearing hull first over the horizon or the shape of the Earth’s shadow during lunar eclipses, and with some effort, arrive at the conclusion that this is in fact the most reasonable explanation, flat earth societies notwithstanding. 

The difficulty arises when we are asked to make determinations about matters beyond the narrow orbit of our senses. Historically these limitations have been recognized—they have given rise to a whole panoply of institutions aimed at extending our truth-validation powers. 

Take courts. I have served on three juries. In two cases I and my fellow jurors were asked to make determinations of guilt based on the testimonies of the accused, the victims, and eye witnesses. Our sensoria were extended to include theirs, though of course this extension came at a price: the possibility that the witness is lying or mistaken. So we weighed the information we received with respect to our estimations of the veracity and motivations of its sources, as well as the cohesiveness of dueling narratives across multiple testimonies. It’s not a perfect system—the failings of the courts are well-documented—but I don’t think anyone would argue that this system is not an upgrade over, say, trial by ordeal. And moreover there are many groups—institutions if you will—outside the court system that seek to reform and address its various shortcomings. The result is less surety than the individual sensorium, but a system which can be expected to produce a strong enough foundation of truth upon which to sustain a society. We returned a guilty verdict in both cases and I carry no doubts about the validity of those judgements.

The third case in which I was involved is interesting, because it provides a path in the direction of the idea I’m attempting to approach. This was my first trial, some twenty years ago when I was living in Boston, and in this case we were asked to determine the sexual dangerousness of a man who had committed a rape in the late 1970s. The man had served his sentence but under Massachusetts law required a jury to agree that he was more likely than not to not reoffend.

Let me tell you folks: figuring out what a person you just met will do in the future is tough! Doubly so when you don’t know the first thing about the psychology of sexual predation. Fortunately the attorneys had anticipated our ignorance and helpfully supplied us with a passel of expert witnesses—criminal psychologists—who testified on the body of research related to the matter. Needless to say, this meant a lot of weighing conflicting professional opinions, although we could be fairly certain that the facts over which they were haggling were not themselves fabrications. We remanded the fellow back to prison and although I’ve always carried some niggling doubts about this decision I can’t say that there exists some better process that would have produced a different outcome. 

Stepping out further, how do we ascertain truth at the state, national, or world level? Perhaps unsurprisingly we have another institution for this: journalism (and, for certain select audiences, intelligence services). We trust journalists to do their best to bring us the facts, out of personal respect in the cases of those with extensive careers, but also because simply being a professional journalist implies adherence to a well-developed body of ethics, which is taught to aspiring journalists in another institution—universities—and further promulgated through a system of editors and publishers. It’s not perfect; one need look no further than Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair to see examples of failure, though it’s instructive to note that neither of these people is a professional journalist any longer, having been drummed out once their fabrications were discovered. It would seem that undercutting the veracity of journalism, writ large, is not an easy matter, since like any strong institution it musters strong defenses against corruption.

If there seems to be a theme at work here, it’s because there is, though I will admit I didn’t know when I put my quill to the vellum that such a theme would emerge. I guess I am intrinsically an institutionalist. What can I say? I honestly don’t see any alternative. Take a quick look with me:

Individualism still has a lot of currency in the U.S. I get it. Hugh Glass, mauled by a grizzly bear and left to die by the banks of the Missouri, only to emerge from the wilderness like an American Jesus after weeks’ exercise of a degree of grit and ingenuity to which I suppose we all aspire. Individualism is a pillar of American myth. Pa Ingalls cutting a life into the wild West with little Laura tagging at his heels. But it’s an individualism often weirdly marbled with reactionary groupthink, alas. John Henry being a stubborn ass and working himself to death for no other reason than the holy elevation of the individual over sense. This is why we still use Imperial measurements. And Laura Ingalls Wilder watched human beings walk in space already. And Hugh Glass… I mean, come on. 

The idea that individualism is a stable foundation for a society, particularly one comprising 330 million individuals all fighting bears and driving railroad spikes, is risible. Considering only the matter of the acquisition of truth, it’s pretty easy to see how little individualism provides. Even if you believe wars in foreign lands don’t affect you and you don’t need to know anything about them, consider that even in more humble matters like what’s for dinner there is a degree of trust involved. Trust that that burger isn’t steeped in E. coli. Trust that the bridge you’re driving over isn’t about to collapse. Trust that the battery factory down the road from your house isn’t dumping toxic sludge into the river that supplies your sink. Unless you’re out in the forests of South Dakota killing bears in hand-to-hand combat of course. Y’all are good to go. 

Autocracy is alarmingly popular these days, despite being the flat earth theory of governmental systems. I’m not even sure this bears dissecting, particularly given that autocracies aren’t simply governments of one—they’re governments in which the institutions are aligned to the will of one. You still need the institutions.

All of this to say it worries me when faith in institutions begins to erode as it has here over the past few decades. Putting aside for the moment whether or not this diminution in faith is warranted, it’s worth considering what we’re in danger of losing: our faculties for determining truth in a world much wider than the ambit of our senses. Without strong institutions we are blind, deaf, and dumb, wandering aimlessly across the wild moors of time and attracting the attention of wolves. 

What happens to countries that lose their senses? I guess there are a lot of precedents to choose from, but one stands out to me. France, in the spring of 1940, was widely regarded as vastly more powerful than Germany. And this wasn’t merely an illusion. I’ll turn again to Ernest May once more: “Overall, France and its allies turn out to have been better equipped for war than was Germany, with more trained men, more guns, more and better tanks, more bombers and fighters.” May goes on to state that French leadership was excellent, without the brilliance of standouts like Heinz Guderian, but probably superior to that of the Germans in general. And further that the French people had the will to fight. “By the summer of 1939, when a new Great War clearly impended, Daladier complained that he could not appear in an open place or in a bistro without seeing people stand up and cry, “Lead! We will follow you!”” In six weeks’ fighting the French sacrificed 124,000 men—a shocking number and a far cry from the caricature of the cheese-eating surrender monkey that is the length and breadth of the American public consciousness of France and the war. 

Nope.

So if it wasn’t guns facing the wrong way or second-rate leadership or a propensity to turn tail at the first sight of adversity, what was it? I think the answer is that France had lost a little bit of its truth-telling machinery. They could see all of the evidence, but they lacked the imagination to accept what it meant. Do you know that the French actually captured a detailed copy of the German battle plans? They knew every beat of the music that was about to play, but they simply couldn’t believe that Germany would try something as audacious as driving a mechanized army through the dense and hilly Ardennes Forest. And so the Germans stole a march on them. 

It was a relatively small failure in thinking, but it cost the French dearly. And here we are, we can’t believe anything. We’re in the process of dismantling journalism in favor of vast burbling shouting matches between millions of individuals, each with his or her own sensorium, his or her own tiny particle of truth. The actual truth will no more emerge from this babble than would a sand castle spontaneously manifest from the ocean. Worse, this ocean is being actively poisoned by bad actors, Russia most notably. Why wouldn’t they? We’ve given them a platform to talk directly to individual Americans.

Predicting the future, as I say, is not easy. I won’t do it. I won’t say that we’re barreling toward World War III. We are not, in plain fact, barreling toward anything. We’re staggering drunkenly on a cliff’s edge. We might well blunder all the way home with nary a scratch; we might plunge onto the rocks below. Either way, this country is going to need to undergo a change. We have to find a way through this present disunion, for the obvious reason that every cliffside stroll is another opportunity to reap a real motherfucking whirlwind, and very few among us have any living knowledge of what that could entail. Somehow, we have to effect change without finding out.