Handling the Truth, Jessup Style (Musings on Truth, #1)

I have marinated for too long on “truth” as a concept, anticipating an epic commentary from myself on the subject.  But “truth” is – sadly -- a tricksy concept, because it does not seem to have a consistent definition for most audiences. There’s the regular and common use of the word (“tell me the ‘truth’”) and the metaphoric sense (“’truth,’  justice, and the American” yadda yadda) and the rhetorical sense (cue any political diorama here), among many others. So it has taken several rattling interludes with the coarse, crude world at large for me to truly foment a semi-lucid opinion worth sharing.

So I think I’ll do a series, and tonight is the first. I will endeavor to brevity, but at some point soon I will share several of my favourte treatises on truth and its various and contemplations. Many great minds far greater than mine have waxed long and poetic about this shockingly complicated concept. And it is hard for me to hold all those sometimes competing narratives in my own mind as I try to decide what I think "truth” means.

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Recently, I watched for the untold dozenth time, “A Few Good Men.” And unless one inhabits the dark space under a large stone or has never seen a movie theatre or television screen, then surely this quintessential scene from the American 1992 zeitgeist is reasonably familiar, even if context for the snippet has been lost from the reader’s memory:  "A Few Good Men"   (I insist here that you take two minutes and watch this before continuing. Please.) I find this scene to be among the most memorable moments on film I have ever seen, and it thrills me every time I see it. I will also mention in a moment the “grotesque and incomprehensible” way in which I identify with and certainly sympathize with Colonel Jessup in this piercing monologue. But first – to the truth that can’t be handled.

There seems to be an endless supply of humanity who cannot handle the truth. Why is it collectively so difficult to handle the truth? Why is it even this damned difficult to define the concept? We have countless joyous admonishments on how yummy the truth is, how it will “set us free” (Garfield) and it’s a “deep kindness” (Gibran) and “incontrovertible” (Churchill) and Einstein equated it with beauty. Einstein also equated it with “justice,” and here is where I think experiential, first-person understanding of truth (the concept) parts ways with truth the word. Einstein said, “In matters of truth and justice, there is no difference between large and small problems, for issues concerning the treatment of people are all the same.”  

Ultimately, it seems that truth has held hands so often with sacred concepts like justice that we become detached from the word way up in its lofty heights. “Justice” is hard. Hard, like how we can ever really know what justice is because what is just to some is often unjust to others. This skates into “morality” territory, and I am simply not going to plummet into that abyss at this juncture. It does seem to me, however, that our inextricable linking of “truth” with crystalline, stratospheric concepts like justice and the courts and judges and law and higher thinking makes “justice” seem far off and the concern of more esoteric and non-pedestrian minds. And up there hovering in the untouchable rafters along with it, “truth.”

Truth might actually be an easy thing to define -- what is not untrue is truth. But how can we know what is not true, especially where others are concerned? (After all, how often do we fail to tell even ourselves the truth?) How much cloaking of the some part of the truth (or the untrue) is still truly truth? I am not playing word games. If one lives in the real world on the planet Earth and interacts with other humans, one is not telling a lot of truth (“what is not untrue”) as a general rule. Consider an illustrative example:  I have an argument with my friend, Beth. I think I understand the circumstances in the situation that lead to our skirmish. I know what I think and feel, and I think I have had full disclosure on what she thinks and feels because we have talked about it. But let’s say I choose not to disclose everything to Beth, either because I think it’s unnecessary or would just hurt her feelings, or maybe I’m just sick of talking about it. So I make nice and the fight dies out, thinking I have done the right thing, told enough of the truth to move on, and we continue with life as we know it. But it does not really die out, because I did not get it all off my chest. I – for noble reasons – did not tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” And in a week or a month, whatever I withheld comes to into conflict again. People are flawed creatures, and the normal course of human events is one of strife (even war), heart ache, disappointment, and even betrayal. We make choices every day to bury hatchets, to withhold our most candid thoughts, to choose to take care of ourselves over others or to take care of others over ourselves. Who wants to find fault with another for doing what we ourselves have done? Who wants to call that a lie, when it was not intended as one? When it was done for intentions rooted in affection or hope that it gets better. Herein lies why no one seems to agree on what the truth is – because intentions seem to create reality where “truth” is concerned.

Here’s my first of two Great Minds on Truth recommendations for this musing: Sam Harris has an amazing, life-altering (for me, anyway) essay, called “Lying.” It’s $2 USD on Amazon.com if you have a Kindle (http://www.amazon.com/Lying-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005N0KL5G/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343271098&sr=8-1&keywords=lying). No matter what your walk of life, his essay is worth reading more than once.  The first two-thirds is a klaxon in a world lost in polite lies and half-truths. And agree with him or no, he has some thought-provoking insights on just how valuable full truth is – not half-truths, not truths meant for soft-contact on difficult subjects – on matters that really call for truth among people who purport to care about one another.

Ah, intentions. That oh-so-noble, oh-so-unique-to-humans (as far as we yet know) mental construct. Intentions can make the difference between murder and manslaughter or accident. (I put salt in your coffee, thinking it is rat poison, but you don't die. Did I try to murder you? I put rat poison in your coffee, thinking it is sugar, and you die. Did I murder you? What am I guilty of, if anything?) The Delphic Oracle in Greece (8^th century BCE until 4^th century CE) helped hone the concept of intention in the ancient world, where countless people died in a culture that sanctioned and encouraged blood retribution. Before she admonished king and commoner alike to evaluate tragic situations with consideration of intention, people slaughtered each other wholesale, regardless of intention for "blood honor" or "blood justice." It was authentic “eye-for-an-eye” justice three thousand years ago. So if your horse throws me, and I break my neck and die, my brother finds you, slaughters your horse, and slaughters you. Your brother finds my brother’s family and slaughters them. My father finds your brother’s family and slaughters them. (One wonders if all those ancient wars ultimately tied back to ornery horses.) Intentions, it would seem, do count for a lot.

Ultimately, we seem muddy about truth because we understand that intentions are endless and rarely fully disclosed. “We mean well,” both in the intending to tell the truth and the intending to err on the side of caution. So it would seem we vaunt truth and sully it by turns with the noblest of intentions. And that’s why we do not really know what we mean when we say it or use it in conversation. We just know we like it, but often not all of it.

So back to Colonel Jessup. Jessup has so many valid, difficult-to-admit-to observations in his beleaguered appearance on the stand. He has a rough job, and everyone wants to tell him how to do it, but no one wants to do it instead of him. He has to command troops -- human lives in all their vagaries, as tools, capital, resources and living weapons -- and he has to ensure they do their jobs, which includes an enormous amount of danger and strain, on the behalf of unseen millions of Americans. He has to make decisions under the burden of distant red-tape purveyors, who occasionally do have a good idea, but it has to be hard to pick the gems out of the dust. As so often happens, it is all too easy to be an armchair quarterback on a single day of the weekend. I feel his pain, especially in his “existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible.” I identify with Jessup, because I often feel few appreciate the shoes I have walked in or the decisions I continue to have to make. Surely we all feel this way much of the time. It would seem a far better use of our time to try to find the commonality in each other’s difficulties and pain, and sympathize, even empathize, with what we all go through in trying to find love and laughter in a world that is largely callous and disinterested in us.  Ultimately, I think that is a truth we all really should learn how to handle, on behalf of ourselves and each other. Sometimes we choose to engage, and sometimes we choose to let things and people go. Those choices are often very tough to make, but that does not make the need to make them any less necessary.  That seems to make us all, occasionally, grotesque and incomprehensible. So it goes.

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My second recommendation for my musing is for William J. Broad’s fascinating and even riveting account of the search for the truth (natch) behind the legendary stories of the Delphic Oracle in ancient Greece and her writhing, cryptic, tranced utterances in communion with a god: “The Oracle: Ancient Delphi and the Science Behind Its Lost Secrets.”