Truth, and the Metaphors That Make It

If, like me, you care about politics and the relationship between people and power, then chances are your recent social media feed has looked like this:

I cannot wait till the Truth comes out and Trump remains POTUS for 4 more years! #democraticfraud #bidencheated and the world knows it!

— Karen Jacobson (@KrickitJ) December 15, 2020

Seven weeks after the incumbent President lost the election, after multiple court cases to overturn the vote have been ejected prima facie for lacking evidence, after the Electoral College has certified the results, and the Supreme Court (one-third of which the incumbent hand-selected) has unanimously refused to even consider a case they consider specious, loyalists continue demanding their definition of truth.

This demand for “truth” strikes me. Thousands of all-caps tweets continue pouring in, asserting the truth, dammit, that Joe Biden could only have won the presidential election through dishonesty. The only material evidence of electoral malfeasance has come from inside the incumbent administration; time and again, the incumbent’s claims of cheating die for lack of evidence. Yet loyalists continue demanding “the truth.”

President-Elect Joe Biden

Late in the George W. Bush administration, Berkeley linguist George Lakoff published his book Whose Freedom? Lakoff, whose career has focused on how linguistic metaphors shape how humans perceive the outside world, observed the late-Bush-era arguments over how to define freedom. He realized that, though conservatives and progressives used the word “freedom” generously, they imputed it with very different meanings.

Electoral politics generally stands or falls according to bromides, not principles. If you tell voters you’ll tax anyone holding remunerative jobs, or that you’ll let the poor starve, they’ll vote against you in numbers sufficient to torpedo your career. So working politicians learn to traffic in generalities: letting the rich hoard resources is “freedom,” and so is lifting the poor from penury. “Freedom” is an eternally elastic metaphor.

So, I’m coming to realize, is “truth.” When the tweeter above, and the thousands of her cohorts demanding the “truth,” shout that Biden stole the election, we progressives respond, almost crinkum-crankum, “Where’s your evidence? Show me the proof!” Because, for us, “truth” means accordance with reality. For claims to have truth value, they must have some real-world correspondence, something measurable enough to stand up in court.

But capital-T Truth, for defenders of the status quo, doesn’t require evidence. Truth is ultimately moral, not evidentiary; truth derives from accordance, not with the world, but with purity. If the world contradicts their Truth, then the world must amend itself, for the world is immoral. Just as morality requires us to examine ourselves and change our ways, it also requires us to change our world, by force if necessary.

Notice who, in public life, continues most assiduously defending the lame-duck administration. It’s mainly public moralists, people who think in black-and-white terms. From religious leaders like Franklin Graham and Kenneth Copeland, to secular moralists like Edwin Meese and Rick Santorum, the figures most inclined to defend this administration have a history of dividing the world into camps of good and evil, and acting accordingly.

Dr. Jill Biden

In fairness, I sympathize with this position. When I witness how our legal system continues to exclude certain populations, even as we’ve excised naked bigotry from the ledgers, I see a world plagued by moral compromise. When I swallow my objections to my coworkers using racist and homophobic slurs, because that’s the culture of industry, and purging it would leave us without skilled workers, I realize my world is unjust.

However, this doesn’t mean I can ignore reality. Elections frequently break in ways I find morally objectionable, and I’d love to overturn the outcomes; in my world, Elizabeth Warren should be preparing her incoming administration. But that’s not how the election happened. Electoral processes are devised by humans, and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem proves we’ll never completely purge unfairness, so we must accept a certain level of arbitrary injustice.

To people who think in mainly moral terms, this acceptance of injustice is intolerable. Whether it’s progressives railing against the fact that we haven’t purged racism’s stain from economics, or conservatives wailing that their champion of continuity lost, any level of perceived injustice is unacceptable. Boring old evidence isn’t a meaningful counter-argument to morally founded truth; only a superior morality can reverse their purified thinking.

We must relinquish the idea that we can out-argue defenders of the status quo based upon evidence. They don’t want arguments based upon facts (though some, like Ben Shapiro, claim they do), because to them, this world is less true than the Truth. Even quoting their holy scripture generally doesn’t dissuade them. Truth, to them, is an eternal verity, not a worldly fact; we can only respond with better verities.