Why truth matters

And one last good reason for thinking that truth matters, it seems to us, is all about preferences, in the largest and most humanly important sense. It’s about happiness, flourishing, enthusiasm, about what makes life worth living, why we prefer being awake to being asleep, why it’s a privilege to be human. It’s about why truth matters. Really matters. Not in a dull perfunctory dutiful sense, but in a real, lived, felt sense - ‘on the pulses’, as Keats put it.

This is the kind of mattering we’re talking about here - personal but also public, subjective but also communicable and sharable, immediate but also permanent, cognitive but also emotional. In a way it’s just as much about community and solidarity as Rorty’s vision is, but it’s a community that thinks truth matters rather than one that prefers solidarity to truth. Truth is perhaps the capital city on that mattering map.

This reason is based on the thought that enquiry, curiosity, interest, investigation, explanation-seeking, are hugely important components of human happiness. This doesn’t seem to be a terribly popular thought right now. Public rhetoric tends to aim much lower, for some reason. It seems to see us all as hunkered down, and settling. Settling for minimal, parochial, almost biological satisfactions - family, safety, money. But that underestimates us. We want more than more. We want to ask questions, we want to learn, we want to understand. That’s a very human taste and pleasure. Again, as we said in Chapter 1, it seems a waste not to use human capacities and abilities. Anyone can settle for just survival and reproduction and comfort, but we can do more. That’s a privilege - and it seems a kind of sacrilege not to use it.

And real enquiry presupposes that truth matters. That it is true that there is a truth of the matter we’re investigating, even if it turns out that we can’t find it. Maybe the next generation can, or two or three or ten after that, or maybe just someone more skilled than we are. But we have to think there is something to find in order for enquiry to be genuine enquiry and not just an arbitrary game that doesn’t go anywhere. We like games, but we also like genuine enquiry. That’s why truth matters.

Postmodern (and postmodern-aided tradition) attacks on science and truth of the sort quoted above tend to frame science and enquiry as impoverished in various ways: arid, cold, unfeeling, mechanical, dull, empty of poetry and colour and life, devoid of wonder. This is an old Romantic trope - Blake’s ’single vision and Newton’s sleep’, Keat’s ‘cold philosophy would clip an angel’s wings’, Wordsworth’s ‘they murder to dissect’. But scientists with real experience of enquiry and discovery think that Blake, Keats and Wordsworth were simply wrong, and that so are their contemporary avatars. Richard Dawkins for example:

To accuse science of robbing life of the warmth that makes it worth living is so preposterously mistaken, so diametrically opposed to my own feelings and those of most working scientists, I am almost driven to the despair of which I am wrongly suspected … The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.

And Matt Ridley:

The one thing I would try to teach the world about science is that science is not a catalogue of facts, but a search for new mysteries. Science increases the store of wonder and mystery in the world; it does not erode it.

The myth, started by the Romantic poets, that science gets rid of mysteries was well nailed by Albert Einstein - whose thought experiments about relativity are far more otherworldly, elusive, thrilling and baffling than anything dreamt up by poets. Isaac Newton showed us the mysteries of deep space, Charles Darwin showed us the mysteries of deep time, and Francis Crick and James D. Watson showed us the mysteries of deep encoding. To get rid of those insights would be to reduce the world’s stock of awe.

That’s why truth matters.