truth and TRUTH ?

There is a new essay, “Scooter and me” by Nick Bromell http://www.theamericanscholar.org/wi07/scooterandme-bromell.html that should be “required” reading for every American, along with John S. Mill’s essay “On Liberty.”

As a life-long friend of Scooter Libby, Bromell raises important issues about the emerging war of fundamentalisms (liberal and conservative); their fundamental different understandings of what “truth” is; and of how we can maintain friendships with those we love but with whom we hold different views of what is at the heart of reality.

Bromell give us a lucid definition of the terms “liberal” and “fundamentalist.”

A liberal, as I use the term, is someone who never gives up trying to see the other person’s point of view. A liberal never stops doubting himself, for self-doubt is precisely what allows us to make room in our minds for someone else’s views and to keep the possibility of communication between us alive. A fundamentalist, on the other hand, is someone to whom the very idea of point of view is immaterial, or worse—the foundation of relativism. A warrior who pledges fealty to the god of one Truth, a fundamentalist searches for personal conviction, not mutual understanding.

He then argues that the end of the Cold War revealed what the conflicting political ideologies of that struggle had held in check and kept invisible: a deeper struggle between tradition and modernity, faith and agnosticism, monism and pluralism, fundamentalism and, yes, liberalism.

He wonders what if he encountered the wife of Scooter’s boss: If Lynne Cheney and I were to meet, here’s what I imagine she would say to me: “You liberals may have good reasons to be skeptical about the very possibility of the truth, but you insist on using the words true and truth as if they had real meaning without recourse to such a possibility. If you were intellectually honest, you would restrict yourself to words like correct and accurate. If you want to glorify your mere assertions with the numinous associations of the word truth, you should embrace the possibility of the numinous itself. By using true and truth while denying the very possibility of the Truth, you are trying to have your cake and eat it too. You want to use a word that comes trailing clouds of glory to ennoble your scrawny human enterprise and to conceal its dangerous vanity.”

And Cheney would be right. We liberals do want to hold onto the word true because we know that behind our policy proposals lurks a deep sense of right and wrong, a deep instinct about what makes life valuable and meaningful. But we do not fully articulate these beliefs, and we seldom even admit that we have them. Because they rest at bottom on conviction, not reason, and therefore cannot be justified without circularity, we hesitate to bring them into the open. We are nervous about admitting that in this sense our politics are as faith-based as those of any fundamentalist.

This is a failure of nerve, and it has two consequences: to people like Cheney we appear hypocritical, and to many others we appear uncommitted and indecisive. This is why the liberal temperament is challenged as never before. Everywhere in the world we are confronted by the fundamentalism that deposits bombs in commuter trains and that crafts Strangelovian strategies for global preeminence. In the face of these provocations, we are called upon to be firm but not inflexible, tough but not stubborn, determined but not dogmatic. We need something like faith, but it has to be a faith that makes room for the faith of others. Our deepest quarrel with fundamentalists in this country, then, is not about Iraq, health care, abortion, or gay rights. It’s about the very possibility of trying to be true without needing the truth. It’s about being able to commit to a truth while always remembering that this truth could be partial, incomplete, and provisional—a steppingstone forward, not an edifice of certitude.

Bromell concludes: Looking at the snow swirling past my north-facing window, I’m reminded of Wallace Stevens’s famous poem about the snowman who beholds the winter landscape and sees “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” We liberals think we’re very good at living without illusions, seeing only what is “there” and needing nothing else. And so we mock fundamentalists who see “the nothing that is” and who seek to supplement it with something more, something transcendental, something True.

But if we really want to come to grips with the exigencies of our time, we will have to learn, like the snowman, to see both ways at once.

Courage in the face of fundamentalisms is the capacity to “see both ways at once” knowing that the snow man is melting.

Merle

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Nick Bromell teaches English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His essays have appeared in The Boston Review, The Georgia Review, Harper’s, and The Sewanee Review.