Barry Schwartz about Truth

It is intellectually fashionable nowadays to attack the very notion of expertise--of truth. You have your truth and I have mine. You have one truth today but you may have a different one tomorrow. Everything is relative, a matter of perspective. People who claim to know the "truth," are in reality just using their positions of power and privilege in society to shove their version of things down our throats.

This turn to relativism is in part a reflection of something good and important that has happened to higher education and intellectual inquiry in general. People have finally caught on to the fact that much of what the intellectual elite thought was the truth was distorted by limitations of perspective. Slowly the voices of the excluded have been welcomed into the conversation. And their perspectives have enriched our understanding enormously. But the reason they've enriched our understanding is that they've given the rest of us an important piece of the truth that was previously invisible to us. Not their truth, but the truth. It is troubling to see how quickly an appreciation that each of us can only attain a partial grasp of the truth degrades into a view that there really isn't any truth out there to be grasped.

This relativistic approach to inquiry has become so pervasive that you've surely encountered it. And you may have found it extremely seductive. It makes intellectual life a whole lot easier. When a fellow student says something in class with which you disagree, you don't need to worry about finding a way to challenge that view and make a case for your own. There's no need to struggle through disagreements to get to the bottom of things if there is no "bottom" of things. Everyone's entitled to an opinion. It's the great democratization of knowledge. Everyone's got it in equal amounts because there really isn't, after all, any of "it" to have.

I think that this enthusiastic embrace of relativism is a moral and practical disaster. Morally, an attitude like this chips away at our most fundamental respect for one another as human beings. When people have respect for the truth, they seek it and speak it in dialogue with one another. Once truth becomes suspect, relations between people become nothing more than efforts at manipulation. Instead of trying to enlighten or persuade people by giving them reasons to see things as we do, we can use any form of influence we think will work. In the absence of respect for truth, all dialogue becomes a Nike ad. This is what "spin" is all about in our modern political discourse. A few years ago I read an interview with a senior advisor to several presidents. He objected to the very idea that politicians "spin" anything, because, he said, there really wasn't anything to be "spun." Spin was all there was. I'm reminded of a cartoon that appeared in the New Yorker several years ago, in which three fish are swimming along, one behind the other. The lead fish is tiny, the middle one is medium sized, and the one in back is huge. Each has a "thought bubble" above its head. "There is no justice in the world," thinks the little fish, with a worried look on its face. "There is some justice in the world," thinks the medium sized fish, as it pursues the little fish with an open mouth. "The world is just," thinks the big fish, with a casual, satisfied smirk on its face. Respect for truth means a commitment to figuring out which of these fish has it right.