Trust & Numbers: Part 3

This is the third of a three-part series on Trust, Power, Objectivity, and Truth in evaluation and learning for the social sector, based on a talk I delivered at Evaluation 2018. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

Truth

To answer this question of how to capture the multiplicity of truths, I will return to the four maxims I opened this series with, which have helped me navigate my relationship to the truth.

First: it is important to speak truth to power.

My mother was my first real example of political engagement and activism. She fought for my brother Scott’s rights. She was his advocate in medical, educational, social and even familial settings. She taught me to imagine the world through his eyes, as well as seeing it through my own. I’m certain that’s a big part of what led me to study cultural anthropology, and to activism of various kinds.

The second maxim might seem contradictory but I don’t believe it is:

Neither truth nor power is singular.

They mean different things to different people under different circumstances. Truths can be contradictory — even mutually incompatible — without rendering one another invalid. Power can be expressed in myriad ways — there can be rich and moving, compelling, and accountable ways to exercise power (Remember Arendt: “power always stands in need of numbers.”) It’s not by definition a bad thing. So while speaking truth to power is essential to any social change effort, it’s equally vital to understand which truths matter at any given time, to which powers. Simply speaking “truth” to “power” isn’t necessarily enough, for instance, to get us to diversity, equity and inclusion — never mind “justice.”

It is true that my brother was profoundly retarded and legally blind. It’s also true that I grew up believing in — and deeply learning from — his capacities to interact with me. The power of medicine and IEPs could never, alone, define who Scott was to me, nor what it meant to be his sister. My mother’s relativism was more helpful to me as a child: Scott has disabilities. We all have disabilities. But that was far from truthful in ways I couldn’t see at the time. His disabilities were profound. They were orders of magnitude worse than needing glasses to get 20/20 vision.

Growing up fiercely defending him against the taunts of kids in our neighborhood, gave me the confidence to believe and assert this third maxim that, multiple perspectives notwithstanding:

Some things are truer than others; and there are such things as lies.

It would be a fabrication to say my brother could use words, or that he could walk. It is more true to say that Scott was legally blind than to suggest he purposefully grabbed the doctor’s glasses in response to this diagnosis. If it happened at all, I don’t think it was the symbolic gesture my mom made it out to be.

Finally, to speak truth to power in credible, persuasive ways, we must cultivate trust.

Only by building trust can we shift the numbers that are, as Arendt reminds us, the basis of power. Pursuing a multifaceted truth also requires navigating multiple types of power. Deriving a credible truth about my brother involved navigating the power of medical authorities, IEPs, numerical benchmarks, as well as the narratives of family members. This navigation is possible for me not because I am objective — a “Modest Witness” — but because I can draw on the strength of a relationship. This strength of relationship, or trust, allows me to find and express a credible truth, even in the presence of power. Only by expressing credible truth can power be built and shifted.

Objectivity is power really… it is the convention we have come to trust most for conveying truth and, for this very reason, it is powerful. Power is a chicken and egg kind of thing. Objectivity is powerful because powerful people got to say what counted as objective, and therefore true. And statistics are powerful because they seem to embody the god’s-eye version of objectivity. Now we have internalized it so much that we have a tendency to distrust other forms of truth, other potential sources of objectivity.

Anthropologist Johannes Fabian formulates two theses about ethnographic objectivity, for instance. First, that it lies “…not in the givenness of data, but in the foundation of intersubjectivity.” Second, he argued, “Objectivity in anthropological investigations is attained by entering a context of communicative interaction through…” the medium of language.

Quantitative measures may be a language of distance, but truth can also be found through intersubjectivity and communicative interaction — and because of my brother, I’d modify Fabian’s second thesis about language. One can have communicative interaction even in the absence of language. Touch, closeness, exchanging smiles — these are communicative interactions and I had them in spades with my brother.

Ultimately, I want to argue for the importance of foregrounding and re-centering trust building in and with social research. I want to look behind the façade of depersonalized surety that statistics purport to provide us. To be clear, I do not aim to minimize the utility of numbers, but rather to advocate for transparency around their creation and interpretation. Numbers represent credible evidence to some, but not all. As many people at this conference are saying this week, and as evaluators are uniquely positioned to remind us, evaluative findings are most credible when we communicate them in language that resonates with an evaluation’s consumers. That is communicative interaction and it can achieve a more nuanced form of objectivity.

As Patton proclaimed years ago in Utilization-focused Evaluation, the first step in research design is to figure out who needs to use our evaluation findings and for what purposes. Truth is always contextual, meaning different things to different people. You need to figure out which people you want to convince and what forms of evidence they will find persuasive. We need to be prepared for situations in which our audience simply will not be swayed by numerical evidence.

I think this is important to talk about now because I see so many people responding to “alternative facts” with louder and more vitriolic adherence to a single truth that they claim stands above or outside of context. Meanwhile, we surround ourselves with people who think like us, so we are not getting exposure to people who think differently unless it’s filtered through people we agree with. I’m as guilty of this as anyone — I only know what Fox News is up to because I watch late night comedy.

I don’t think there’s an easy fix, but it feels lazy to me to say we just need to find the truth and then we’ll all be fine. We’re data people, right? And by now we should all be very well aware of how much data there is to demonstrate that “view from nowhere” facts don’t change people’s minds. I believe this crisis of truth cannot be solved with numbers alone, in a context where people ask first who you are, and then derive their confidence about what you say from what they believe about your identity categories. At times like these, it’s the relationship, the trust, that must come first.

We are going to have moments of convergence and divergence of values. Moments of trust and distrust, feelings of identification, recognition, alienation, and disappointment. Grappling with the incommensurability of conflicting truth claims is uncomfortable and messy. But it’s the working back and forth across those oscillations, the trial-and-error communication, repeated over and over, that will help us jostle our way toward change.

Real creativity and change-making happens through messy encounters, where one person’s thinking is different enough that it startles us into curiosity — into wanting to hear more, into seeing things from a different perspective. On my more optimistic days, I think we might just be in a moment of opportunity that helps us get ourselves past the binary of truth/not-truth, because that is seldom as helpful as asking, “What truths matter most in this context, to these audiences, for these purposes?”

Love

To conclude, were I now to evaluate how our society grapples with people who have profound disabilities, I would be inclined to focus on profound incommensurabilities: between on the one hand, love based on the present tense, on co-existence, and on the other hand, love that accrues from the expectation of a long and evolving future. When I put all my maxims together, I can appreciate — and have hopefully conveyed — how it is true that my brother’s vision was limited and that he was profoundly retarded. But it’s even more true — to me — that loving him, living in rich relationship to him, taught me an entirely different sense of the profound.