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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

truth in politics « Previous | |Next »
September 1, 2004

Raymond Gaita's understanding of truth in politics does away with any understanding of truth as Truth (ie Absolute Truth). He has a far more prosaic understanding of truth. He says:


"Anything that counts as serious reflection will acknowledge itself to be answerable to the contrast between how things appear to us and how they are. Everyone knows that we must struggle to adjust distorting perspectives, free ourselves from prejudice, try to resist propaganda, try to resist the fashions of the times, try to overcome vanity and fears, try to resist our vulnerability to sentimentality, bathos and cliche, and so on. This is as true of narrative as it is of philosophy. These efforts are not efforts to be objective with a capital "O", they are just what it means to try to be objective in its ordinary, workaday sense of efforts "oriented towards truth".

What then is this more ordinary workaday understanding of truth?

"To seek to avoid sentimentality, for example, is to seek to avoid falsehood, as much as efforts to check on the facts are efforts to avoid falsehood. But then, one could put the point the other way about - perhaps more congenial to those who fear that talk of truth disguises an inclination to reach for a capital "T". To try to be truthful, to orient one's efforts towards truth, is nothing more than to make one's efforts answerable to those critical concepts whose applications mark our efforts to overcome vanity, seek out of the relevant facts, overcome sentimentality and so on."

We have this everyday sense operating in terms of politics around the Tampa affair or going to war with Iraq. There was a lack of honesty here. That honesty has lead to distrust between governors and governed, between politics and people. The straight talk of politicians and them being level with the people has given way to lies and spin to keep themselves in power.

Keeping themselves in power is all that matters. Everything is now bent towards ensuring this end. Even sections of the media particapte. Politics is about war and destroying the enemy. Distortion, polemics and misrepresentation have become standard operating procedure of the conservative media.

Gaita concludes his essay by saying:


"The mendacity that now pollutes the life of this nation provokes a degree of understandable cynicism that makes trust an almost saintly virtue. Lower standards and a diminished regard for truthfulness in the public institutions entrusted to serve our need for truth - most notably in the universities and media - make it difficult for us to develop the kind of judgement necessary for trust to be lucid. Both undermine the space in which we must try to learn again about the nature of political virtue and what it can mean for politics to be a vocation."

We do need to recover the old language of political virtue and the old sense of politics as public service and not as a career. But it is a political language that has been emptied out of any public meaning in a neo-liberal world.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:26 AM | | Comments (0)
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