Like some other diaries I've read on DKos, I began to write this one as a response to Erevann's diary Impeachment: "War is the continuation of policy (politics) by other means."
It took a tangent to the main theme of Erevann's diary, the question of impeachment, and so I've decided to spin it out on its own, hopefully for your pleasure and thoughtful commentary.
It deals with the issue of the truth we speak to power, as when we question the lies of the Bush administration. Lest there be misunderstanding about my intent, I make clear now (and later in the diary) that we must continue this task of "speaking truth to power," of questioning the administration as well as the other branches of our government, and the press/media industrial complex too.
But this diary also poses, by way of a quote from Nietzsche, a reflexive question to the netroots about the truths we speak.
I hope you will read the question written below the fold.
There does indeed seem to be a nexus between politics and war, and it is unclear which is the extension of the other. I've thought in the past that commonsense would say that politics is the extension of war, if one assumes that the former was a less-violent way to address problems deadly war used to resolve. But one can also speculate that the first war must have been sparked by a breakdown in negotiation over some common term or resource. And so, perhaps, we continue going round and around and never really deciding on the truth of the matter, as they say.
The "truth of the matter" is important because it is arguably one of the most significant issues around which both politics and war are often claimed to revolve. At the same time, neither wars nor political gambits are strangers to deception.
Nietzsche proposed a solution to this circularity when he asked and provided his own response to the question of what truth is:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. [my emphasis]
Nietzsche says truth is two things: 1) a mobile army of tropes and 2) illusion mistaken for actuality.
We can say that one person's illusion is another's reality (actuality), and may even susbcribe to the precept of "live and let live." But the imagery Nietzsche invokes by the phrase "mobile army of metaphors ..." suggests a decidedly less genial state of matters. To be sure, in his own terms, he states the truth about truth in metaphorical (perhaps illusive) terms. But his choice of "mobile army" from among the possible terms for grouping or collecting rhetorical figures is significant, I believe. Because it gets at another important truth about truths, besides being illusions mistaken for actuality, which is that they are subject to being imposed by force.
If illusions being mistaken for actualities describes how we take understand facts, the image of the mobile army of tropes explains how such facts become imposed. This is captured very well in the proverb about history being written by the winners.
I've been pondering for some time how this insight, if it is any at all, can inform how we handle a patently dishonest and fascistic administration such as we currently have in office. I think it is one thing to say that we need to speak truth to power. But how do we do so if we take into account the difficult status of truth as proposed by Nietzsche?
And I don't really have a good solution, or a simple solution where we can speak truth to Bush's illusions (lies) and feel completely free of the pitfalls Nietzsche warns against. To be sure, it is not clear the Nietzsche himself can state the truth about truth without also falling into the trap of truth that he admonishes.
The "solution" I have is a provisional one: we must question Bush's lies and speak truth when we can; but we must remain ever self-vigilant about our own beliefs and perceptions of reality. Here, science can serve as a partial model, in that its method is a theoretical one, meaning that its results (not truths) are always subject to re-testing. A theory is "good" until it no longer reflects experimental results.
The internet has allowed us all to be testers of the truth parroted by our(?) media outlets in a new way. We sense our new power, but we should be self-vigilant about it as well.
On that note, one more quotation:
Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely. -- John Emerich Edward Dalbert Acton, British historian