The Relativity of Truth

When I was in college studying psychology, I was drawn to the Behaviorist’s explanation of human behavior. This is the part of psychology that uses things like Skinner boxes — those little metal housings that rats run about in and press bars to get food pellets — and talks about how we are conditioned to behave based on reward or the lack thereof. As a child of parents who were chaotic and dysregulated emotionally, I found the idea that we could control outcomes by arranging circumstances such that we produced smarter, nicer, more capable people quite appealing.

The notion that we could make the “right” choices to get the “right” outcome or concoct little experiments to find out the hard truths appealed to me at that time. I had an emotional need to believe in such “order” and placed my faith in the validity of systemic approaches to understanding the world and the people that populate it. Behaviorism was so much more structured and scientific than many other theories in psychology. It especially stood out in contrast to psychoanalytical theories and the Freudian flights of fancy about the id, ego, and superego.

I loved science then, and still do now, but I’ve come to realize the limits of science and the relativity of truth. I even learned a new word for how I used to be and many people continue to operate in the modern world: cognicentric. This is an over-reliance on what is observable to determine our understanding of the world. It is a belief that only that which the scientific method can measure, despite its reductionist approach, is “true.” At the core of cognicentrism is the idea that the individual cannot be trusted to reach the correct conclusion, but multiple individuals doing the same thing and getting the same result can be.

My purchase on the cognicentric perspective started to slip away when I lived in Japan and slowly dismantled my ethnocentric perspective on their culture. I learned that it wasn’t “wrong” and “right” so much as “different.” As someone who grew up with a traditional Western sense of romantic partnerships, I felt that the truth of a good marriage was that strong emotional bonds helped overcome objective obstacles and that good matches were based on characterological compatibility and mutual feelings of respect, devotion, and passion.

In Japan, I was told that marriages were not infrequently based on the capacity to build a good family and home. A sense of true love was a plus, but not a must, in many cases and many of the people I spoke with about this topic said that they looked at factors like income, school background, family trees, and the prestige of a man’s company. It was much more calculated than I felt was “proper.” This was their truth, but it wasn’t mine and I initially scoffed at how bloodless and “wrong” it all seemed.

My feeling that it was a false notion of what would result in a good partnership didn’t make it any less a truth. It was just a relative one that applied to a society that I didn’t grow up in. It worked in Japan for Japanese people. This was my first lesson in how how a situation seemed “right” from that corner of the room, but not from the corner I’d previously occupied.

In matters of psychology, people are much more likely to accept that there are multiple truths. In matters of more observable reality, they are not. However, truth is relative even when you are looking at the concerns of hard science. We generally accept that something which is experienced by multiple people as an observable event is “true” and doubt that something fantastic that is observed by one person is anything more than a hallucination — a random brain fart that is not an external reality. But, even a shared experience which can be replicated, observed, and recorded can result in a “lie.”

You may feel that such an assertion is talking about a hoax of some sort, but that is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the relativity of truth. We may all stand on the face of the earth and look up at the sky and see a star. We can take a picture of its position. We can ask millions of people if they see the star, but does that mean it is really there? It actually does not. The star may be dead and gone, but we are still witnessing its light for some time due to the time it takes that light to reach us. The truth on earth is not the truth of that star’s existence though we may all observe that it is actually “there.”

I present this example not to teach about light and time, but rather to encourage everyone to be open to the possibility that there is no absolute truth, even when we are sure that there is. The way that you experience the world is governed by multiple factors that no one else can share with you. For example, your unique biology means that you may be aroused by things that others are not or unmoved by things that others are passionate about. I can’t tell you how many times some stranger has questioned the “rightness” of my response to something which hepped up my limbic system or told me that I should “calm down” (an act of invalidation on their part meant to pull my responses in line with their personal truth).

As an example of this, I offer a true story. I was once called a drama queen for having the temerity to be upset that an old man in Japan tried to shove me off my bicycle in an act of racist aggression. The commenter who leveled this accusation at me believed that Japanese people could never behave badly and my feelings upset the apple cart of his personal truth. So, the truth wasn’t that I was attacked by a person who disliked foreigners in his country. The truth, according to this man, was that I was overly emotional and ridiculous in the face of a minor incident. He very likely carries that truth with him to this day and has others who share it with him because that is how it looks from the corner of the room they happen to occupy.

One of the struggles for all of us is to accept that other people’s truths are as valid to them and to their situation as ours are to us. I am never going to accept that I was unsettled and upset at being randomly shoved hard by a stranger in an attempt to knock me off my bike because I need attention. I’m always going to see that as a reasonable response because I like to think I’m a reasonable person. My commenter will likewise see himself as more rational than me and views me as a big baby who needs to stop fussing over minor altercations. It’s important to remember that seeing someone else’s truth as valid to them doesn’t mean you must see it as valid for you.

The reason that this is important is that we need to stop spending so much time and energy proving other people “wrong” or trying to convince them that we are “right” and just accept that, from where they sit, the truth looks quite different and we’re never going to do anything other than polarize the discussion. It also helps to incorporate their perspective and validate their truth in order to have a more productive and less emotional discussion. This is where we sow the seeds of a compromise rather than sitting on our high horses pointlessly screeching about and at the opposition.

Time and time again, I’ve argued with liberals about their views of conservatives and had them refuse to see that there is validity to the particular conservative perspective that they are railing against. I am also a liberal, but I practice active perspective-taking when I hear opposing viewpoints so I can see where the other side is coming from in an attempt to advance an argument beyond conventional ideological roadblocks. What I’ve found, and been very frustrated by, is the fact that I’ve met few liberals who are any less entrenched in their perspectives than conservatives and who are just as prone to straw man arguments and shifting the point to appear more “right” as any conservative.

I once had a discussion about anti-abortion/pro-lifers with a liberal friend in which she talked about the hypocrisy of people who felt abortions were wrong because it is “murder”, but capital punishment was okay with them. When I told her that they were distinguishing between the killing of an innocent and the termination of the guilty, she sat there for several beats in stunned silence at the existence of this underlying logic. She quickly changed the subject to the fact that wrongfully convicted people were killed under the death penalty so innocents were still killed. She simply could not accept that conservative views in this case may come from a legitimate and different moral compass than her own and found a way to shift the argument back to one that saw them as characterologically flawed individuals.

Polarization and dismissal of the beliefs, feelings, and ideologies of others is something which is fanning the flames of divisiveness in America and it’s increasingly ugly. It has resulted in the rise of identity politics, social justice wars, and a loss of meaningful discourse and civility. Raising the bar in these situations isn’t about getting the other guy to blink first or bullying harder, longer, and louder, it’s about being open to the relativity of truth and using that to find a middle ground.

And, yes, the “bigger” man has to “go first” and the smaller man may still act like a particularly narrow-minded and myopic rabid dog despite your efforts to be open-minded and find a middle ground. You could see that as a loss, but then you’d be missing the point. This isn’t about winning or losing. It’s about being not only book smart, but emotionally so, and being intellectually honest. It’s about understanding the complexity of the nature of reality and the lability of the idea of truth.

The first step in truly understanding “truth” is understanding that you don’t have the market cornered on it. No one does. It is something that we all explore from every corner of the room rather than from our personal position in the center of it. At the moment, that is one of the few “absolute truths” that I’m willing to entertain.