What Is Truth ? Truth and Contemporary Culture

In 1999, Pulitzer Prize winning historian and biographer Edmund Morris released his much-anticipated work on Ronald Reagan. Entitled Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, this novel—or biography, or biographical novel— set off a great deal of controversy, not least among those who had hoped for a successor to Morris’s magisterial and quite factual, if interpretative, biography of Theodore Roosevelt. Morris was quite upfront that his intention was to capture Reagan’s essence in a mixture of historical narrative, biographical interpretation— and fiction. His publisher, Random House, even had the audacity to claim in its advertising that through this device, Morris was merely telling the truth in an altogether new way. Morris, himself the object of no small amount of criticism, said concerning his project, “It was an advanced and biographical honesty.” In other words, by inventing a good percentage of the biography, he had made the book more honest than it would otherwise have been. We are living in an age of great confusion about the issue of truth. In recent weeks, Ralph Keyes has authored a book entitled The Post Truth Era, in which he suggests that society has now moved beyond a concern for truth. Truth has become such a contested category, he writes, that most persons go through life actually expecting to be lied to, to be the recipients of dishonesty, and to be confronted with endless misrepresentations by advertisers, cultural leaders, and now even biographers. In a world of media invention and virtual reality, truth has become a distant category to many persons, especially in the academic elite. Sociologist Jay A. Barnes, in his recent work on lying, suggests that people have grown so accustomed to untruth that many postmodernists now claim that lies are actually “meaningful data in their own right.”1 Today, in sociological analysis, philosophical discussion, and of course, political debate, the issue is truth itself. Recent debates over issues like embryonic stem cell research, same-sex marriage, sexuality, and human cloning are really disguised arguments about the nature of truth itself.