When it comes to objective truth, look to physics. All other truth is local in space and time. What seems to me to be fundamentally true would not have been recognized as truth for most of human history, and is certainly not recognized by many of my fellow humans still living. What most people who have already lived and died accepted as truth, I see as an inadequate explanation for the world around me. To me, truth is more a verb than a noun, something that requires constant testing rather than something that is firmly fixed in place. Even the continents move.
I have come to recognize that when we argue with our fellows about which set of observations are reliable and which ones are not reliable, we are mostly exposing our personal preferences on where we get our information and how we choose to interpret that information.
My son (previously mentioned as having joined a church in High School) and I can never really agree on a number of issues because we derive our information from very different sources and we process that information based on fundamentally different assumptions about reality. The problem is that we are both fully entrenched in our own realities. For example, I cannot convince him that a woman should have a right to choose whether or not to have an abortion because his religion tells him that abortion is murder. Period. This is a clear binary choice — there is no middle ground on which he and I are going to be able to agree. I can certainly grant him the choice not to have an abortion — 😉 — , but he is unable within the teachings of his religion to recognize that his beliefs do not necessarily extend to telling other people what to do. (This in spite of my continued existence as a direct and very personal assault on all he holds dear.) If he starts to make exceptions in his belief, then he opens a crack that will eventually erode the foundations of his belief. There is nothing, no amount of discussion, no new information, that will sway him because his whole identity is enmeshed in believing what his religion teaches. To convince him means to drive a wedge between what he believes and the teachings of his religion. It remains to be seen how he will react if one of his daughters gets pregnant in high school. That is perhaps less likely than the chances that one or more of his daughters will, in high school, decide to reject his church as a source of truth. I don’t envy him the decision about what to do in the latter case, and I have some relevant experience in the matter.
I expand on this subject because it is important to clearly understand that truth is relative in spacetime. (Only spacetime has objective reality except that it seems that even spacetime is being questioned if I understand Carlo Rovelli correctly). It may be my own limited imagination, but I don’t see a way forward for logic and argumentation to settle the question about what is truth.
So, having disposed of the first of the fundamental questions of philosophy, we turn to the second: what are we to do?
When we consider that three people with discrete binary preferences (paired comparisons) from among three objects cannot necessarily agree on which one of the three objects is the optimum choice for all three people, we see a quandary. In a country with a population of over 300 million people, nobody is going to be completely happy with all or even any of the choices that have to be made within the society. For the most part, the degree of dissatisfaction is not a sufficient irritant for the bulk of the society to do anything more than grouse about, but now, it seems that one of the vibration modes of our society reveals a possible fission into mutually hostile factions. Calls for unity and a return to the peace of just a few decades ago are not going to be effective when one of those factions is reaching for promises of equality and the other faction is determined to maintain its political supremacy. There appears to be enough energy in the system to drive those factions into a fission not unlike the one that occurred in 1860 in the US. In fact, the current situation seems to be a continuation of that earlier factionalism that did not get resolved by Reconstruction.
Rather than attempting to noodle our way out of the quandary, I think it useful to consider the possible outcomes of our current situation.
Certainly, one outcome is for the calls for unity to pull us back from the brink, leaving our society in a position where Black Lives Matter, just not as much as anyone else’s and where suppressing the vote in large areas (just not large populations) continues to be the norm, and where things continue along the uneasy path until physics (in the guise of global climate change) does more than give us warnings of bad times to come. My point here is that we cannot take our society back to the way it was for long.
Another option is that our society fragments such that the anti government factions gain the upper hand making armed assaults on the US Capitol, State Capitals, and even the local school board and the local planning commission the norm. We have seen this path at work in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Sudan, Nigeria, pre-Hitler Germany, Revolutionary France, Cambodia, ... — clearly another possible, but extremely distasteful outcome. One thing that always has happened to this kind of fragmented society is that it eventually winds up with a strongman in control.
We could wind up with an autocracy. We have narrowly missed that, but its adherents are still out there making a lot of noise. It would be easy. Joe Biden could have decided that the unrest in the country requires that the fences stay up in DC, that the National Guard is required to secure the peace everywhere and that dissention is not only non-productive, it is un-American. Joe Biden has had the best opportunity that has ever existed in the US to become an autocrat just handed to him. All the pieces are in place if he would just choose to use them. Give that opportunity to take over what tRump has left in place to Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz, or a host of other extant politicians and watch out! We can see autocracy (plutocracy, theocracy, oligarchy) at work in the world in China, Russia, North Korea, Malaysia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, …
Monarchy certainly seems to be a thing of the past.
Finally, there is the outcome that we re-engage with the rule of law. But this time applying the law to every citizen regardless of race, color, gender, sexual preference, sexual orientation, country of origin, religion, age, weight, species — oops, I got carried away. Perhaps it appears that this is what we already have, but I suspect that there are many people who would tell you that what we have is actually divided into a privileged class and a second class that has to work harder for equal pay, equal treatment under the law, equal opportunity, economic justice, … The thing about this outcome is that although superficially like what we have now, this outcome MUST include explicit rejection of white supremacy, white nationalism, violence as a tool of political power, MONEY as a tool of political power. This outcome requires that we look ourselves and our country in the face and recognize that we need to do a better job of extending the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. We also need to recognize that there will always be elements in a true democracy that will hate the very notion of democracy and will work to destroy it. There is an ever so thin line between freedom of speech and hate speech. Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are the foundation of free society.
I am an older (70), white, heterosexual male living in a community that is majority white, mostly affluent, and pretty far off the beaten track. There is not a major airport within reasonable driving distance (OK, I live in Hawaii, and it simply isn’t possible to drive to Honolulu from here). Most of my working life, I lived and worked in places where it took at least a couple of hours to drive to any airport of consequence. I have never been denied a job, a loan, or anything else because of my race, my gender, my sexual orientation or identity, or any other superficial characteristic. Although not wealthy, I am comfortably well off with my retirement income. I have had a life of PRIVILEGE. I didn’t choose it, but then, the people who haven’t had the same level of privilege didn’t choose that life, either.
I once had a very hard discussion with one of my daughters that changed my outlook on a lot of things. My question to her was this: My long-time employer had a subsidiary organization for supporting special interest social groups within the community (for reasons that are not relevant here). One of those special interest groups was specifically meant for the LGBTQ community (although it was open to people like me). Why, I asked, was it OK to organize a group focused on sexual orientation under the umbrella organization when it would have been absurd to have attempted to organize a similar group around the notion of being heterosexual? I just couldn’t wrap my mind around that notion. The discussion was very hard, and very personal as she is lesbian and was married to a transgender person. I’ll cut to the chase. A person who grows up gay in a straight society has no role models, no sense of belonging, no way to determine who they can trust, no way to explore or to explain themselves to others. They face potential or real ridicule or harassment. They have not had the support that all humans need to be able to come to terms with who they are. By the way, that same set of deficiencies in opportunity are also present for black or brown people growing up in a white society or for females growing up in a society dominated by males. The light came on, and I have never been the same since. But that experience also teaches me that before I understood the point, I was one of the unwoke (pre-woke?). Everybody is somewhere on the path to understanding, not all of us are in the same place. We all need to be aware that we are not all aware of the privileges we have had or not had. We need to recognize that some of us will never make it to any semblance of understanding of each other. Our society needs to be accessible to everyone, even the pre-woke, because even the pre-woke can eventually wake up.
We don’t have a lot of time before physics answers a lot of questions for us, and perhaps natural selection is still operating on humans. But if we have any chance of making it through the next half century as a civil society, we’re going to have to get past arguing about which facts are fake with those who won’t change their stripes based on reason. We have to move ahead and carry (or drag) them with us.