it all begins with truth...

So, I figure that I'll just establish a few things about myself. Starting with what I think about the notion of 'truth'.

It's one that we discussed a lot last year in both Extension History ("there is no truth") and in Extension English (postmodernism). After a while, I began to try and reconcile what we were learning according to the syllabus with what I believe about 'truth'.

So I sent this email to my Ext Hist teacher to fill him in on my thoughts..

"So, I am procrastinating and I thought I would present my way of seeing things to you. Of course, I expect that because you’re vastly more intelligent you’ll rip my argument to shreds – but you know what? I don’t care.

I was thinking about the very first thing you ever taught us on that fateful morning all those months ago. “There is no truth”. And although I ‘get’ the argument – that all history is merely perspective, blablabla – the premise behind it jars with me. It suggests that if there is no truth, that all meaning is kinda, I dn, diminished. For example, (to take the clichéd example) although Nazi propaganda would suggest that killing Jews was OK, more than that, that it was GOOD – and that was their perspective on history – I still maintain that there is an innate sense of right and wrong engrained in humanity. I can hear you playing devil’s advocate, and saying that it is all relative to your culture, your conditioning, your context blabla… but I would consider those clusters within mankind to be anomalies (waiting to be ripped into on that one) – there is an overriding consensus on what is morally reprehensible. That would suggest that there is a truth, of sorts.

That was kinda tangential to what I wanted to say. I’m not gonna go and argue that there are versions of the truth – b/c I think that’s kinda synonymous with perspective. Because as soon as you select which fragments you present, you are presenting a diminished truth. But I don’t… OK, well I’ll tell you what I think. Here goes:

OK, I’ll accept that historians’ views and historical records are fallible. Yes, they are coloured by perspective and interpretation. Etc. but I think that there is a vast difference between the history that has been recorded, and the history that actually happened. Sure, by all means, say that there is no single truths, that truth is fluid, subvert the notion of grand narratives – totally, I love a bit of postmodernism. But we were talking about this in Ext English last year, I think, and Hoody disagreed that “there is no truth”; he replaced it with “the truth is often obscure and difficult to access”. Or something like that.
And I’m inclined to agree. Call me soft, or conservative, but I think there’s validity in that argument.

The historical “truth” that is presented to us thru texts is not the actual “truth” that happened. All the things we talk about in class – Carr’s comments on selection of sources, perspective, blablabla – they limit the “truth” and reduce it down to a narrow representation of truth. And that’s the thing. Just because history isn’t an accurate or complete representation of truth, of the reality that was, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Just because we can’t access the truth thru what remains of it, doesn’t negate the existence of a truth. Just because humans can’t grasp truth doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t there. In a way, if we could grasp it, if we could get our heads around “truth”, then that would suggest, implicitly, that it had been conceived by a human mind – and was therefore a construct. Which would suggest that it wasn’t a holistic representation of reality. And therefore wouldn’t be “truth”.

There is a truth behind history. Every event has an underlying truth. How people have interpreted events, and recorded them – that is coloured by perspective and bias. It’s one of the flaws of language and texts. As soon as you scratch words into a page, you are reducing something down to language, which is inherently limited. But just because we’re not good enough to be able to represent “truth” with our tiny brains without the flaws of its representation, doesn’t diminish the “truth” itself down to its representation, nor does it render “truth” nonexistent.

The fact is, sir, I disagree that there is no truth. I think it’s just very difficult to access. "