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Journalism of Courage
Sifting truth from falsehood involves a journey through myths of the past
Luckily, perhaps, I can recall almost nothing I learnt in the classroom when I was eight years old; but I remember the playground riddles. For years a particular riddle lingered in my mind as a way of remembering the boys who surrounded it. Now it is taking on a life of its own as a cryptic clue to the problem before me: how to write the history of truth.
There a native squatted. The explorer was minded to ask his advice but, as the locals all dressed identically, could not tell to which tribe he belonged. In a necessary refinement of the riddle, the tribes shared a further custom: they ate anyone who asked more than one question.How could the explorer formulate an enquiry so as to elicit a useful answer?
One possible answer the explorer might have tried to elicit from a liar was, 8220;If you were to ask me which is the way to Njug, I should say it was to the left.8221; The answer would be false, but it would point the explorer in the right direction, for the truth-teller8217;s answer would be the same. Like the rest of us, when we risk decisions or grapple with doubt, the explorer could then proceed on his way, still unable to tell whether he had heard a truth or a falsehood but equipped with the practical information he needed.
The human condition is like that. The nature of truth eludes us; we have no satisfactory definition at our disposal, no agreed or reliable truth-recognition technique; but we have some working assumptions about the reliability of our feelings, our senses, our powers of reason or the authority of our sources of counsel or of inspiration.
The Njug story involves other mythic features: an encounter with asphinx-like creature, on a journey in search of enlightenment, through a world of contrasting but interpenetrated moieties. It summons up one of the starting points of the subject of this book: the quest for techniques for telling truth from falsehood. And it raises one of the preoccupations of modern western philosophy: the relationship of the truth of any formulation to the conditions specified or implied within it.
The conundrum of the secret city, moreover, took the explorer where I want to take the reader: to an encounter with a tribesman squatting lying, perhaps in a road forked like a false tongue. Journeyers call themselves explorers when they think they belong to a higher culture than that of the people among whom they are travelling. Yet they are dependent, like the searcher in the story, on local lore to guide them.
In investigating the unrecorded past in seeking, for instance, an inkling of people8217;s earliest thoughts about truth we have to look for our guides among peoples of slowlychanging cultures who resemble their remotest ancestors. Historians who would like to start among documents in libraries and archives, or philosophers who might prefer a quiet club chair, have to be persuaded to join ethnographers on a walk in the woods.
A history of truth must begin in the world of primitives8217; and will often have to return there.
Excerpted from Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed8217; by Filipe Fernandez-Armesto8217;, St Martin8217;s Press, 23.95
