Treading Towards Truth

I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken. 

- Oliver Cromwell 

Today I'm typing these lines at Zus Coffee, Putra Heights. The hot news these past 2 days have been the indictment of former President Donald Trump related to his mishandling of confidential government documents. As always with anything related to Donald Trump, social media is split into two camps: the right believes that it's a conspiracy against the former president and the left who thinks that action against him is long overdue.

It is also a reflection on the state of our social media today. Everyone lives in their own partisan bubbles. No one reads news that is fair and balanced. Come to think of it, is there a news organisation that's fair and balanced? Well, to a certain extent, some are. Or at least they try. But new organisations are run by humans who naturally have their biases.

I'm of the belief that our political leaning is influenced by personality trait.  It is by and large determine by our genes. We think that we are guided by reason, but that's just an illusion. We have subconscious fears and inclinations that guide most of our decisions, especially when it comes to choosing political candidates in an election. We justify our subconscious choices by offering 'reason' as to why we support a certain candidate. 

In many social and political issues, there's often no clear-cut answer, unlike what you'd expect from a solvable mathematical problem. Unfortunately we delude ourselves into thinking there's such a thing as a right answer. Issues like abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment are ethical issues which do not have a definitive answer. We decide when it is right for society to kill off another individual, or a potential human being (like an embryo) and stick to it. Society often decides what is palatable, based on the zeitgeist.

Are all ethical considerations relative then?  Is there such a thing as  absolute truth?  If we grasp the entire workings of the universe all at once, the answer is yes. But we don't. So at any point in time, we are just using our best guess, based on our human wisdom, which is limited by space and time. 

Some of our society norms and laws could be wrong and misguided. But it's the best that we could do, at this stage of human evolution. Throughout human history, humans have latched on to certain ideas and beliefs, thinking that they are the absolute truth and then fight wars against fellow human beings with the belief that they are good and the other side is evil. 

"I am right and you are wrong", is by definition divisive. But it is what the human mind likes: true or false, ones and zeros. Without such certainty, we do not know how to act. All deliberations have to end with an action. If we are only 51% sure, we will round it up to 100% and proceed.

We take each step forward with an optimistic confidence based on our best guess. But at the same time we have to realise that we are always treading on thin ice. The next step could be a catastrophically wrong one, and if we do not tread lightly, we could fall into an icy abyss.

There's no such thing as absolute certainty. In an episode of the Ascent of Man, which I watched when I was a teenager, and had to this day remained fresh in my mind, the scientist Jacob Bronowski stood in a pond where the ashes of the crematorium of Auschwitz were flushed into, and said: 

"When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods."

Scientists do aspire to the knowledge of gods, but a good scientist also understands that science, in Bronowski's words again "is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible". And "we must cure ourselves of the itch of absolute knowledge and power".

Truth is a direction we are always aiming for. But know that, it is something we can never grasp with absolute certainty. So tread forward confidently, but ever so lightly.