I have been thinking about Truth, and truths. Especially at the moment, when we have some rather big ones to look in the eye. This reflection doesn't feel like poetry, so it won't be. These are interim notes, with a finished product some way off.
It is difficult to move beyond Keats' dictum that Truth is Beauty and Beauty Truth. Oh that that were all we really need to know! It seems to me that I'd have to be Rousseau's Noble Savage to take Truth in such a graceful stride.
Facts, half facts, half lies, lies, theories, bias,fantasy, projections masquerading as the honest straightforward gold standard regular how it is, the whole howling wilderness of the mind assails us, especially in politics. Much of it isn't even really dishonest, just what the fevered brain comes up with. Not the best time to dissect Capitalism or the polities and Wealth of Nations carefully, but of course it is exactly the time we need to pick up our shovels and head for the mine. (Remember the song: the chorus says he owes his soul to the Company Store.)
Last night on the BBC (and, sorry, fellow-Americans, I usually find the best stuff on the BBC - even though that is hardly a flawless institution, it doesn't have a statue of George Orwell outside its HQ for nothing) I heard an extraordinarily sharp and incisive discussion on the present state of Informational Capitalism. (Another aside: how good it is not to feel the need to remark on the fact that all three participants happened to be women, which fifty years ago in my salad days would have been remarkable, and now all I feel the need to do is to remark on how that is not remarkable). The issues discussed were concerned mainly with the giants of the internet and social media, the present reach and power of whom deserve more attention than I shall give in this piece, especially the fact that they were evoked as PERSONS, G** help us.
The broadcast fed into my current obsession with Truth. Since it was coming in at about 3.30 a.m. I am not at sure what in my page of hastily scrawled notes came straight from the wireless (OK, this is getting into silly antique nomenclature) and how much from my nighttime labyrinthine consciousness. But here, after what my family would groan is one of my longer preambles, with the emphasis on the ambling, are a few thoughts on Truth I am still chewing over:
Yes, Truth can be Beauty, brilliant, trailing a shiny comet's tail across the cosmos. But it has a much more workaday aspect.
Truth should be a public service, a public utility.
Not carved in stone, more an open, on-going debate, with rules and high standards.
A dynamic movement towards a shifting goal, none the less dazzling for that.
A cleaning-up process.
A well-designed and constructed bridge to everywhere.
No more to be owned than the planet we belong to.
But needs constant care and maintenance.
I address these thoughts to some extent in my Little Book, second edition, as advertised this week, free of course and just ask. However, I am not sorted out enough and this by my book should be a concerted effort of We the Many.
Over to you – and me. Living in the sticks doesn't absolve us. They could certainly do with our help in Silicon Valley, DC and everywhere else.
