What does it mean, to seek truth from facts? From where else should truth be sought – assuming, of course, that one wants to seek it?
China, from where the slogan originated, shows, in Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong, both what it means to seek truth from facts, and the alternative.
Facts are reality. To seek truth from facts is to seek truth from the things around you. Such truth, naturally, doesn’t give a fig about your preferences, about what you want the truth to be, or even your ideas, about what you think the truth might be.
When prices rise or layoffs happen, the communist sees the hand of the exploitative bourgeoisie milking more profit. When people from different faiths intermarry, the fanatic sees conspiracy. When countries go to war, the neocolonialist sees the re-emergence of empires.
The point isn’t that they’re wrong. They probably are, though they might, on occasion, actually be correct in their conclusions. Even when they’re right, though, they’re still wrong, because their rightness is simply by fluke, a one-off where the chain built by facts happened to reach the same conclusion they’d already leapt to. Ideology implies mono-causal probability. X could have happened only because of one set of explanations; the war in the Middle East is because of Y or Z, where Y and Z depend not on what actually happened but on whether you happen to be a communist or an anti-semite. Reality, though, has millions of possible explanations, and to ever hope to arrive at one which appears to fit the case one must sift through facts.
To commit to an ideology, to a label, to an idea, is to renege on one’s commitment to facts. It is a distortion of clear thinking. The ideology matters more than reality, the glasses through which one views the world are coloured. For the communist the cat can only be red. If it isn’t, one paints it red or pretends it is red, assuming, that is, one hasn’t already killed it for not being red.
A label – whether conservative or liberal or any other – subsumes a vast set of positions. It’d be exceedingly unlikely to find anyone who happens to agree on every position their label is supposed to require them to. The label brings cognitive dissonance – how can you call yourself a Hindu or Muslim or liberal or conservative if you think X? If you don’t believe or do Y, how can you be one of us?
When one cares about facts, however, “it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or yellow, as long as it catches mice.” What one believes, what one wants things to be, all of one’s preferences, are irrelevant; reality is the ultimate test. The cat that catches mice is a good cat, whatever colour it happens to be.
So far, so good. I began this essay with a strong admiration for the mindset that seeks truth from facts. To not be rigid or cling on to obsolete beliefs at odds with present scenarios, but nimbly adapt to whatever is before one – what is there to take issue with in that?
Worshipping at the altar of reality, however, can, though it need not always do so, mean abandoning curiosity. That happens when one no longer seeks explanations, underlying mechanisms, but merely accepts reality unquestioningly. If something works, don’t question it, don’t seek to understand why, don’t test edge cases – just blindly accept it, apply it, preach it, elevate it to an article of faith. If yellow cats outperform all others in catching mice, accept this fact without question. Yellow is best, and we will only get yellow cats, and that is the end of the story.
The other approach, however, notes that yellow cats appear to be better, and tries to understand why. Is it their yellowness that enables them to catch mice? Or is there some other underlying explanation, a specific protein in their DNA for instance, that explains their performance? Something perhaps unrelated to colour at all, that could be transferable to other coloured cats too. This literally seeks truth from facts, for the fact is that yellow cats appear to catch mice better, not that yellowness of a cat is what makes it catch mice. The deeper truth, that yields itself only to the curious mind, is what it is about the yellow cat that makes it a catcher of mice, and for that, one needs to hunt down more facts.
The other flip side of this pragmatism is the cynical nihilism that success is the truest – and only – test. Seek truth from facts. If the fact is that demagoguery wins mandates, if the fact is that bullies and narcissists succeed, does that mean that one leans that way to win? The same pragmatism can, I suppose, be applied wherever one chooses, for good or for evil, as one defines them. Spirited ideologues may argue and split hairs about the finer shades of communism or socialism, others may cherish monarchism, but the cynic, who knows that all are matters of complete indifference, can be anything to anyone, as long as he wins. Junger drew the conclusion from his own principles that it was better to be criminal than bourgeois. Hitler… knew that to be either one or the other was a matter of complete indifference, from the moment that one ceased to believe in anything but success. When the cat cares solely for catching mice – or humans – it can be red, or yellow, or whatever it needs to be.
If that is the case, does pragmatism imply an end to principles, to ideologies, to convictions? Are they merely naive beliefs of gullible children unaware of, or unwilling to learn, how the world works, unable to seek truth from facts? Is it naive to believe in anything – except success? Is wisdom only to see what works and adopt it, though one doesn’t believe in it, or even despises it?
Perhaps one reconciles this with the argument that there are no truths in the world of values, and therefore goals. Which is to say that there is no truth when it comes to what to do, to a goal one sets for oneself. No fact will lead me to a truth that tells me what to do, what goal to work towards. Convictions, beliefs, ideologies, I suppose rule this domain.
The truths derived from facts apply to the means to reach the end, not to the end in itself. No fact in the world, therefore, can tell me whether to be a saint or a soldier or anything in between, but, once I’ve made my choice, the facts can tell me how to become one. Here too, though, one’s beliefs shape even the truth one sees, or accepts, in the facts. If you believe the end justifies the means, you aren’t finicky about the truths you derive from facts. If the means justify the end, however, one might reject truths, even if they are efficacious. A business that refuses to line pockets, a leader who refuses to instigate – not out of naivety but principle.
This is the argument that no truth can tell me what to do – Hume’s is-ought problem, that no ‘is’ leads to an ‘ought’, or no facts can imply any ethical obligation or course of action. Between an ‘is’ and an ‘ought’ is an unbridgeable gap too easily looked over. There is a test tomorrow; I ought to be studying. It is too easily assumed that the second follows naturally from the first, but between the two is the underlying assumption, this gap that I unconsciously bridge, the assumption that I want to do well in my test (and that studying helps in doing well). Negate the assumption and that gap is unsurmountable; the second sentence no longer follows.
So too, can two individuals see the same truths from the same facts, yet respond differently. Two Indian clerks under British rule both see the same truth from the same facts – that a colonial power is in place, that it will not be dislodged easily, that any contribution they can make as individuals will in all likelihood be insignificant, that they have a comfortable, cushy life and a family to support. One decides to continue with his job, one decides to join the freedom movement. How one appraises them depends on one’s own values as much as theirs.
When one seeks truth from facts, then, it doesn’t matter if cat is black or yellow as long as it catches mice – which is desirable, if one has decided to catch mice. But whether to catch mice or sparrows or nothing at all, no facts can help to answer.