What is truth? You can speak of moral truths and aesthetic truths but I’m not concerned with those here, important as they may be. By truth I shall mean the kind of truth that a commission of inquiry or a jury trial is designed to establish. I hold the view that scientific truth is of this commonsense kind, although the methods of science may depart from common sense and its truths may even offend it.
Commissions of inquiry may fail, but we assume a truth lurking there even if we don’t have enough evidence. Juries sometimes get it wrong and falsehoods are often sincerely believed. Scientists too can make mistakes and publish erroneous conclusions. That’s all regrettable but not deeply sinister. What is profoundly troubling, however, is any wanton attack on truth itself: the value of truth, the very existence of truth. This is what concerns me here.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell’s O’Brien held that two plus two equals five if the Party decrees it so. The Ministry of Truth existed for the purpose of disseminating lies. In the past four years, the US government has moved in that direction. World-weary cynics sigh that all politicians lie: it goes with the territory. But normal politicians lie as a last resort and try to cover it up. Donald Trump is in a class of his own. For him, lying is not a last resort. It never occurs to him to do anything else. And far from covering up a lie, he can stick to it: his well-named ‘base’ will love him the more for it, and will believe the lie, however far-fetched and shamelessly self–serving. Fortunately Trump is too incompetent to fulfil Orwell’s nightmare, and anyway he is on the way out, albeit kicking and screaming and trying to pull the house down with him as he goes.
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