Some Inconvenient Truths About Truth

I’ve recently been thinking about truth. This focus on truth has happened seemingly by chance, but one of the things I’ve learned over my seventy-odd years is to note when life seems to be saying “Pay attention.”

It was a clue to a crossword puzzle that started my recent pondering of truth. Until I was working on the crossword, I didn’t know that “Truth will triumph” is the motto of India. What I was certain of, however, was that this motto must go back to Gandhi’s central moral principle of Satyagraha, truth-force. Gandhi’s amazing career, his role in India’s independence from Great Britain, his commitment to non-violence, stemmed from his personal commitment to choose the truth in every decision he faced. Only by adhering to truth could a person, Gandhi believed, live the moral life God expects of us. For Gandhi, truth was sacred.

From Gandhi’s wisdom, my mind shifted in the opposite direction to the cynical question Pontius Pilate posed to Jesus—“What is truth?” Pilate’s implication is that truth is not just relative but is defined by those in power. For autocrats and tyrants like Pilate, truth is what they say it is.

It is ironic that Pilate’s question about truth, although expressed two thousand years ago, seems more contemporary than Gandhi’s view. Gandhi believed that truth was objective. He did not believe that Britain had its truth and India had another truth. No, there is only one truth in every situation, and it is up to each of us to find the truth and live by it no matter the consequences. Gandhi wouldn’t tolerate the current attitude that “you have your truth, and I have mine.” For Gandhi, we do not choose or create truth. Instead, truth claims us.

Pilate’s cynical relativism led me to ponder another insight into truth—some of the first opponents to be rounded up by tyrants are artists, especially poets. This might seem odd because poets in our society aren’t seen as dangerous figures at all. Of course, tyrants aren’t bothered by those who write poetry for greeting cards or pop songs. The poets who keep tyrants awake at night are those who are like Gandhi, people in search of truth.

Someone must have said that if you are striving for riches and admiration, don’t become a poet. I know I’m not alone in finding many poems hard to understand and easy to ignore. The poems I’m writing about are those that demand that we read them a second, a third, and sometimes a fourth time. Perhaps we will still miss the meaning of a poem until we sit with it awhile and let it work on us. But tyrants recognize that such poems are dangerous. Though difficult to understand, these poems have the capacity to awaken us to a new understanding of truth.

Modern visual artists can also find themselves hunted down by tyrants. Many years ago, I conducted an experiment in class. I brought in two reproductions of artworks. One was of a beautiful Alpen mountain range, a pastoral scene with sheep grazing in the foreground. It’s says a lot that I remember that scene vividly, but I can’t recall the example of modern art that I brought in that day. Let’s say it was one of Picasso’s Cubist works.

I asked the class to share their reactions to the two paintings. As I expected, most of the comments extolled the beauty of the mountain scene in contrast to the ugliness of the modern work. From there, the conversation degenerated into negative comments about modern art in general. Haven’t we all heard the comment “A third-grader could have painted that?”

That was when I let the trap snap shut. I shared that the Alpen pastoral scene was one that Hitler loved, while the artist of the modern work had to flee the Nazis.

True works of art don’t share what we already think is the truth and what we’ve been told by those in power is the truth. True works of art are prophetic, making us search for the underlying and often inconvenient truth. They disturb us in the true sense of the word. To disturb is to interrupt our serenity, to agitate.

In other words, true art is meant to wake us up.