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Belgium did not invade Germany Samuel Brittan: Spectator 10/10/02 Review of Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy By Bernard Williams Princeton, £19.95, pp.322, ISBN:0691102767  There is a well-worn saying, ‘History is written by the victors.’ A dozen witnesses to an accident will give a dozen different accounts. If students are asked for all the facts about the room in which they are sitting they will have to make a selection from an indefinitely large number of statements that can be made, as well as ponder the conundrum, ‘What is a fact?’
These complexities have been known since at least the time of Thucydides. But only in recent years have we seen a whole group of so-called post-modernist or deconstructionist writers who appear to deny that there is any such thing as truth. They go on to say that there are only rival texts or stories from which we can choose at will. Traditional accounts are dismissed, for good measure, as self-serving endeavours to propagate the power of the ruling classes. The kindest explanation of their activities is that they take legitimate sceptical doubts about topics such as the existence of other minds or the existence of the external world and apply them at the wrong level of discourse. If you are going to talk about history or the social sciences, or for that matter everyday life, you have to suspend metaphysical doubt while doing so. Indeed the only reason for taking these fantasies of bad philosophy seriously is that they have gained a following in departments of humanities and the social sciences. There they have almost succeeded in placing the very notion of sensible social studies at risk, as Bernard Williams, one of Britain’s best known senior philosophers, warns us. If anything, Williams is too charitable. The aim of such academics is so obviously to carry the war against ‘capitalism’ which they have lost in the real world into academia; and their activities are only possible because of the facilities provided for them in the universities by gullible bourgeois taxpayers or by innocent foundations. Indeed Williams disposes of the extreme truth-deniers in one footnote sentence: If the categories that they despise really do no work except to disguise elementary social forces, why should they, with their academic conversation, expect to remain in business?Or as he says early on in the main text: The impression of frivolity is enhanced when the humanities adopt a rhetoric of political urgency which represents only the café politics of émigrés from the world of real power, the secret agents of literature departments.Williams’s essay is mercifully not another attempt at a theory of truth, but a rehabilitation of its value, which he asserts lies in sincerity and accuracy. His method is what he calls genealogical, by which he means the inspection of origins. He has a fable of how the need for truth emerges in a primitive society where people require simple information; and he has an actual account of the efforts of Thucydides to establish a critical approach by disposing of characters such as King Minos, who was supposed to have been the son of Zeus by a mortal woman. If anything he is too subtle and polite; and I found myself longing for the more direct onslaught we might have had in their different ways from writers such as Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin. I must admit to my own doubts about whether ‘truth’ is the most fruitful concept for social investigation — but not because ‘anything goes’. Too much depends on interpretation or context. Does the street Kensington Park Gardens run into Ladbroke Grove? You might say ‘Yes, obviously.’ But would you still say the same if the police put up a barrier between the two streets during the Notting Hill Gate carnival? On the other hand, the statement that Kensington Park Gardens runs into Kensington High Street is undeniably false. An insistence on statements that can in principle be falsified may be the best way to bring the extreme post-modernists down to earth. Did Wellington win the battle of Waterloo? Can you give a yes or no answer in view of the contribution made by the Prussian general, Blücher? Maybe you think that making either general the main agent overemphasises the role of leaders and that it was the actual troops who won. But in any case it is undeniable that Napoleon lost that battle. Williams himself aptly quotes Clemenceau’ s riposte to those who asked what future historians will say about the first world war: ‘They will not say that Belgium invaded Germany.’ Or to take an actual social science example. Does Keynes’s General Theory give a true account of the determinants of output and employment? Or is the Quantity Theory of money a true account of inflation? Only a fanatic would try to give a straight yes or no answer to these questions. Too much depends both on how the theories are elaborated and the conditions under which they are claimed to operate. But anyone who discusses these matters must accept that there was a Great Depression in the early 1930s and that double-digit inflation occurred in many countries in the 1970s. Is the account given by evolutionary scientists of the development of life on earth from the most primitive organisms to anthropoid apes and then to Homo sapiens ‘true’? It is the best account that can be given at present. Future research may provide a still better account. But to say, with Bishop Ussher, that the world began in 404 BC is false. Highly probably false. There is very little certainty outside the systems of formal logic and mathematics which are true by definition. Williams’s ultimate position is given by a sentence near the end: Different audiences welcome different interpretations, but at the same time there is enough overlap between the audiences, if the culture is in good shape, for one group to know what may be brought against it by others.My response would be that Western culture is just about in good enough shape, but that the forces of fragmentation are never far away. |
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