Truthfulness Is Not Optional

In a time when crime and inflation are rising together, when independent nations are threatened by massive powers eager to consume them, and when dispassionate public discourse seems impossible, it’s bracing to remember the fairness and generosity that make justice and good judgment possible.

In the last few months, two friends have highly recommended a book by Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Amazon lies in wait for readers like me, of course, so I now have it in hand. Trueman begins by asking how this sentence—“I am a woman trapped in a man’s body”—could make sense in the contemporary world and even elicit sympathy from ordinary people, whereas a generation or two ago it would have been met with pure incredulity. Trueman’s account takes him back into the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then through Marx, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, and others of contemporary importance, such as Judith Butler. I am still in the early chapters, but I can already add my recommendation.

His arguments aside, what strikes me with unusual force is Trueman’s articulation of his approach, because it goes to the heart of an institution like Wyoming Catholic College. In his introduction to the book, Trueman explains what he does as a historian of ideas: “it seems to me that giving an accurate account of one’s opponents’ views, however obnoxious one may consider them to be, is vital, and never more so than our in our age of cheap Twitter insults and casual slanders. There’s nothing to be gained from refuting a straw man.” Perhaps it’s the almost universal absence of this attitude in the public sphere that makes Trueman’s fairness seem startling. After listing thinkers and movements inimical to his own position, he says that he has tried to be “as careful and dispassionate as possible. Some readers might find this odd, given my personal dissent from much of what they each represent. But truthfulness is not optional. My hope is that I have represented the views of these groups and individuals in such a manner that, were they to read this book, they might demur to my conclusions but at least recognize themselves in my account of their thought.” [my emphasis]

St. Thomas Aquinas could articulate the positions of his opponents better than they could themselves—after which, of course, he would demolish their arguments in making his own. And as Trueman points out, accurately presenting the ideas of others is hard work, whether in writing or in the classroom. It’s much easier not to try, especially if one is already in possession of the whole truth. Shouldn’t a Catholic college, for example, make the whole curriculum a safe zone where the student never encounters any idea that contradicts or challenges Church teaching? Or if a professor must refer to Martin Luther or an atheist philosopher like Nietzsche or an apolitical materialist like Lucretius, shouldn’t the thinker in question be forced into a hazmat suit, so to speak, and then subjected to a ritual shunning?

Some people think so, but there is something cringe-worthy in such a display of fear. Would that be the approach of St. Thomas Aquinas? Obviously not. Aquinas unfolds any opposing argument fairly. Similarly, a historian of ideas like Trueman tries to understand an idea in its real shape, but also in its genealogy—its parents, its grandparents and great-grandparents. Under what circumstances did it arise? What influenced the thinker, and why did this idea gain such cultural influence? A student’s real engagement with ideas about the most profound things, especially when they differ from his own, must be a vital part of his education, and the first part of the challenge is facing the actual danger. Ideas have the power to affect how he understands his life and its meaning: it is crucial to get them right. Flannery O’Connor liked to quote St. Cyril of Jerusalem: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” It is unwise, to say the least, to belittle the dragon in advance and foolishly underestimate his power.

In Pacific Crucible, the first volume of his massive Pacific War Trilogy, Ian W. Toll explains why the United States was so easily deceived about the danger of the Japanese before Pearl Harbor. Misled by “experts,” both the Americans and the British believed that “the Japanese would always make bungling pilots … because they suffered from innate physiological defects.” Not only were they cross-eyed and nearsighted, but “as infants, they had been carried on the backs of their mothers, causing their heads to wobble in a way that threw off the balance in the inner ear.” Obviously, they could never be decent pilots. Moreover, Japanese industries were primitive next to British and American capacities. “The idea that Japanese-built planes could be any good was simply beneath consideration.”

The first American and British encounters with the world-class Mitsubishi A6M Zero quickly corrected this misapprehension: “Allied pilots who attacked the Zero using classical dog-fighting techniques— chasing and maneuvering to get on the enemy’s tale—were shot down almost to a man. Those lucky enough to escape into a cloud, or parachute to the ground, were full of horrified expletives at the shocking capabilities of this mysterious fighter.” Within two or three years, American fighters completely outclassed the Zero, but only because Japan’s once-belittled capabilities were understood and respected.

In the war of the mind, students need to master the tools of grammar, logic, and rhetoric that have been painstakingly developed since antiquity. They need the intellectual courage developed through real engagement with minds better than their own. They need to undergo the imaginative experience of a confrontation that takes place deep in the soul, such as Alyosha’s story in The Brothers Karamazov. As O’Connor puts it, “No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.” The most liberating recognition is also the most humbling: that one can never possess the whole truth in advance, especially in a passive mode. In fact, the enemy himself might hold a vital part of the truth. The whole of his power comes from that partial truth, which must be wrested from him. But it might never have been discovered without the encounter.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College.

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The featured image is “The Last Day of Pompeii” (1830 – 1833) by Karl Brullov, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. It has been brightened for clarity.