A Clarification

[poliphilo]

"And what they're running scared of is the truth."

That was a glib formulation. Or else shorthand.  Because "What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an answer". None of us knows what the truth is. And if it came down the pike today we wouldn't recognise it.

Perhaps I should have written not "the truth" but "the quest for truth" or something like that. What fanatics of either or any party are turning their backs on is the need for painful thought, research and the sort of debate that actually listens to the opposition.  I can understand why they get into that sclerotic condition; it's horrible to be in a state of doubt. But being in a state of doubt is the human condition.

The scientific method, the philosophical method- I think one might add the theological method- is to take a proposition and test it and test it and test it to destruction. If it survives all one's best assaults it acquires the status of a provisional truth.

This is how humankind inches forward. How it becomes better informed, wiser, more moral. The person who insists his "truth" is inviolable is standing in the way of this process.

Faith isn't knowledge, nor is scientific fact ever anything more than a working hypothesis. We know what we know, but we don't know what we don't know. At any time a new truth- one of Dick Cheyney's "unknown unknowns"- could cross the boundary and knock all our certainties skew-whiff. 

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Over here- in the words of Tony Blair's right hand man, Alastair Campbell- politicians "don't do God". If they did they'd be laughed at. Blair is a religious man, but kept a lid on it- and delayed his formal conversion to Roman Catholicism until after he'd left office. A British Palin is, I think (and hope), inconceivable.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I think that's because Britain is a civilized nation.

While there have been improvements since H L Mencken's savage critiques of the early 20th, I feel his observations still hold true. The culture here in the US is based on Puritanism, with all its insecurities and fears of the unknown. Alas, what England rejected centuries ago found fertile ground here in the New World.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I'm very fond of Willian Carlos Williams' In The American Grain- a series of prose-poetical essays which take the Mencken line.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Suddenly, I feel a bit illiterate. Hadn't discovered Williams before and thanks for the suggestion.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

He seems to be a bit out of fashion these days- at least, I don't often stumble across his name- but he was a good writer I think.

[richenda.livejournal.com]

Do we know that it was he who delayed it or inded whether there was a delay? It's usually guides/mentors/sponsors who advise whether and when to rspond to the request for reception.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It had been an open secret for years that Blair leaned towards the Catholic Church. Of course, the only people who know exactly why his conversion was delayed are Blair himself and his immediate friends and advisers- but I don't think this affects my basic point- that it would have been political madness for him to make the move while still in office. Britain is still, in its instincts, a Protestant nation- and not yet ready for the idea of its top man being answerable to the Pope.

[richenda.livejournal.com]

well - you are welcome to call me naive - but my experience was that I was asked to wait until I had completed various family and public commitments
That' s why I'm suggestng the possibility that he was asked to wait.