All political systems need truth to some extent. Democracies need it in a special form—namely, easily available and widely dispersed. And they need it for a special reason: democracies cannot function without public trust, which depends on the public belief that officials are competent to ascertain relevant truth and committed to presenting it candidly. This does not means that democratic officials are always obligated to declare the truth, because doing so may sometimes undermine other important objectives, such as national security. It does mean that truth-telling enjoys a strong if occasionally rebuttable presumption.
Some of the truths relevant to practice are substantially context-independent and enjoy wide agreement. But many practical truths are hard to obtain, for two reasons above all. Some are embedded in contested theories (about the economy, for example), and others involve predictions about the effects of proposed policies on complex human systems. For both legal and deliberative purposes, therefore, some standard short of certainty is required. Our argument about where the bar should be set rests on values other than truth.
Two considerations complicate the relation between truth and democracy: truth does not trump democratic legitimacy, and democratic governments cannot dictate truth. A law enacted on the basis of false assumptions is not ipso facto illegitimate; conversely, no democratic government may intervene in processes of truth seeking to shape politically convenient findings.
“What is truth?” Pontius Pilate famously asked. We may argue among ourselves about the answer. But we are not permitted to be divided within ourselves. As individuals, we cannot rightly use one conception of truth for scholarly or artistic purposes and another in civic life.
What is the relation between truth and democracy? I approach this question from an unusual vantage point. Trained as an academic political theorist (a field in which I continue to participate), I have also spent considerable time in practical politics. For this reason, among others, I find it impossible to treat the relation between truth and democracy as a theoretical question. We, or at least I, must begin with practice and then attend to the theoretical issues that reflection on practice may raise. So let us begin where we are.
The Iraq War has done to postmodernist skepticism what the Vietnam War did to moral relativism. Four decades ago, academics and social critics discovered that they could not avoid making claims about what was right and wrong; today they have discovered the same thing about truth and falsehood. (Colbertian “truthiness” just isn’t good enough when matters of life and death are at stake.) We can argue all we want about competing conceptions of truth and the criteria for assessing it. While we do, the proposition that “Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in 2003” will still be false.
The late Harold Pinter recognized this. He began his 2005 Nobel lecture by quoting something he wrote in 1958: “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.” Nearly five decades later, Pinter found himself forced to modify his position: “I believe that these assertions . . . do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand behind them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?” In that spirit, he goes on to catalogue a number of factual claims used to justify the American invasion of Iraq, remarking after each, “It was not true.”
At the end of this essay, I will contest the proposition that we can have one conception of truth as an artist (or philosopher) and a different one as a citizen. For current purposes, the key inference from the Iraq example is that at least some politically significant truth-claims are not embedded in fungible conceptual frameworks. Not all facts are “essentially contested.” We share a commonsense conception of what “Iraq” means, and also of what constitutes a weapon of mass destruction. We can argue at the margin, of course. To explain why we found no WMD within the borders of Iraq, some observers suggested that Saddam Hussein’s government had shipped them to Syria as tension with the United States mounted. If that claim had been verified, Iraq would have been guilty as charged, despite the fact that it had no chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons within its territory.
This is an easy case, to be sure, but hardly a trivial or unrepresentative one. In everyday political life, controversies often hinge on matters of fact: Did a public official tell X to fire Y? How many heroin addicts are there in a particular city? Did a public program reach its intended beneficiaries, or were the resources siphoned off by others along the way? Garden-variety factual propositions influence political power when they function as minor premises in practical syllogisms whose major premises are not in dispute. For example, a law may distinguish between permitted and forbidden grounds and procedures for firing an employee. In this context, the factual finding that an official ordered a subordinate to fire someone might warrant the conclusion that the official had acted wrongly and ultra vires.
Other kinds of empirical assertions are harder to evaluate. Consider a time-honored staple of education reform: We need better teachers. In the near-tautological sense—we need more teachers who can help students learn as well as the best teachers now do—the proposition is unimpeachable. Although it is true, it is not useful, because it lacks action-guiding force. Even if we agree on the standards for distinguishing better from worse teachers, we are as yet unable to specify the indicators or characteristics that we could use to pick them out before we hire them. The truths we need are at a lower level of abstraction.
This point is even more obvious when empirical assertions bring the distinction between concept and conception into play. We cannot assess propositions of the form “This war would be in the national interest” until we put a specific conception of the national interest on the table. If someone says “A more democratic world would be a world safer for America, and this war will help create a stable democracy in the heart of the Middle East,” we are then in a position to assess a number of empirical assertions. What is the evidence that more democracy always, or usually, serves U.S. national interests? How sure are we that we can use force to plant democracy in these particular circumstances?
Even if empirical propositions are specific enough to be tested, it is by no means clear that we will be able to do so successfully. Assessing truth-claims that contain assertions about causal relations poses tremendous challenges. Still, political practice forces us to confront them. “What should we do?” is the core question of practical politics. The problem, which Aristotle was perhaps the first to explicate, is that answers to this question always rely on factual hypotheses whose validity is hard to assess ex ante. During the 1996 debate on welfare reform, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the Senate’s leading experts on the subject, charged that we would have large numbers of children sleeping on heating grates if the proposal passed. If that prediction had turned out to be true, it would have constituted a compelling argument against the legislation. During the 2008 debate about shoring up the nation’s financial system, critics of Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s proposal said that it would not accomplish its intended purposes—again, a compelling reason (if true) not to use $700 billion in that manner. Although that intervention did stave off a possible collapse of the U.S. and global financial system, we still do not know whether it will enable us to avoid an extended period of Japanese-style stagnation in which weakened banks that keep devalued assets on their books are reluctant to make new loans.
The difficulty of assessment does not disappear if we ask, down the road, whether we should keep on doing what we previously decided to do. The easiest case is when the problem we set out to solve remains in full force. Clearly, what we are doing is not working, and the argument for changing course is potent. But it is not irresistible; it is always possible to argue that if we simply stay the course, our perseverance will be rewarded. At some point, the latter argument loses plausibility; after years of insisting that our strategy in Iraq was working or would work, President Bush conceded that it was time to try something different.
Consider another example: President Obama’s economic program. Two facts are not in dispute: that it was designed in part to reduce unemployment, and that at this writing (August 2010) it has not yet done so. Everything else is vehemently contested. The program’s supporters argue that without it, unemployment would have been much worse: the problem with the prescription was inadequate dosage, not the drug itself. Its detractors counter that the program rests on a flawed diagnosis and that increasing the dosage will only waste money and make things worse. Behind this controversy lie competing theories of how modern market economies grow and create jobs.
Interpreting success is often no easier. The question then becomes, What would happen if we stopped doing what we are now doing? To answer this question, we have no choice but to dig deeper in an effort to understand why events have taken a turn for the better. If the 2007–8 surge in Iraq succeeded only because American troops interposed themselves between hostile forces who remain implacably opposed to one another, then the odds are high that removing American forces will re-create the status quo ante. On the other hand, if the surge created a breathing space during which the Iraqi combatants moved toward a new modus vivendi, then the orderly phased withdrawal that President Obama is carrying out will leave recent gains more or less intact.
We cannot know for sure which of these theses in true. Indeed the demand for certainty is incompatible with the requirements of politics. In practical life there is no escaping the need to assess truth-claims on the basis of information and arguments that will leave us well short of certainty. In every situation there is a point of equipoise between the extremes of randomness and certainty at which further inquiry will not make us less uncertain, a point at which “look before you leap” shades over into the “paralysis of analysis.” Unfortunately there is no algorithm that locates that point—one of many reasons why politics is an art rather than a science.
This uncertain relation to certainty affects not just politics, but every practice. In U.S. criminal law, the standard for conviction is a finding of guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Given the vagaries of evidence, this turns out to be a demanding criterion. And not by accident; because depriving the innocent of liberty or even life is regarded as a graver wrong than exonerating the guilty, the standard deliberately tilts toward underinclusion rather than overinclusion. In civil cases, by contrast, where property rather than life or liberty is usually at stake, the bar is set lower: not the absence of reasonable doubt but only the preponderance of the evidence is needed to find for one party against the other.
There are political analogues to the distinction between civil and criminal law. If the consequences of failure are unlikely to be grave, one might undertake a diplomatic initiative with only a modest empirical basis for optimism. But if the stakes are high, if the question is one of war and peace, or the death of thousands of individuals, or serious and widespread economic deprivation, then the evidentiary standard should be much more demanding. For example, the argument in favor of dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rested on two premises: the alternative was a land invasion of the Japanese home islands, which would have cost even more lives; and there was no other alternative that would have convinced the Japanese government to surrender. The counterargument was that if the United States had announced and then staged a demonstration of the bomb off the coast of Japan, the more reasonable elements of the imperial government would have seized the initiative and brought the war to a conclusion. (The counter-counterargument was that if the test failed, the United States would have been left with only one bomb, and the Japanese would have been emboldened to resist even longer.)
Amid this uncertainty, one thing is clear: decision makers should have faced this choice with a heavy heart and the realization that they might turn out to be mistaken, whatever they did. President Truman’s statement that he slept soundly after making the decision to drop the bombs suggests he harbored more certainty than the facts warranted. Odd as it may sound, there may be an “ethic of uncertainty” that makes doubt and humility a moral requirement in the conduct of public affairs. Whether leaders are required to put doubt and humility on public display is another question altogether.
The alert reader will have noticed that up to now, I have said almost nothing about democracy. That is no accident. Many of the ways truth matters in political life apply to all regimes, not just to democracies. Certain kinds of truth are a means to every end, because false beliefs increase the chance of failure. If you take a midwinter walk on an ice-covered lake in the belief that the ice is a foot thick and it’s only an inch, the consequences will be unpleasant as well as unexpected. The reverse is also the case: if you accept unduly pessimistic beliefs about the world, you may well refrain from doing things that would have succeeded, and your adversaries have an incentive to make you believe the worst. (It now appears that Saddam Hussein resisted international inspections because he was trying to bluff his neighbors into believing that he was better armed and more dangerous than he turned out to be.)
Not only democratic governments, but also tyrants determined to subdue other nations need accurate assessments of their own military capabilities and those of their adversaries. Often tyrants fail because their subordinates are too terrified to tell them the truth. A characteristic pathology of tyranny is the ruler’s belief that because he has imposed his will on his subjects, he can bend all reality to his own purposes. What begins in hubris ends in megalomania.
This dangerous deformation is found everywhere, of course. One claim in favor of democracy is that dispersing power serves as a check on hubris. The need to assemble a winning coalition forces even the most arrogant statesman to pay attention to the opinions of others. As the will is chastened, information increases and judgment is refined. At least that is the hope. In practice, democracies can make big mistakes, and not always because government has manipulated the people into false beliefs. Popular majorities, and majorities of their representatives, can sometimes convince themselves to believe what is not true and to act on that belief.
Also common to all forms of government is outright resistance to truth. One source of resistance is organized interest groups who understand that they will lose out if certain truths come to shape public policy. These groups try, often successfully, to obscure the truth with plausible rhetoric and selective half-truths. Often culpability is more widely shared, however. Former Vice President Al Gore has famously labeled global climate change an “inconvenient” truth. And so it is, not only for special interest groups but for all of us, because taking it seriously would require us to change the way we live. Human beings tend to resist change per se, especially change that calls on us to sacrifice something we value. This can give rise to a politics of fantasy, a determined effort to ignore an unpleasant reality.
The problem goes even deeper. Taking truth seriously will sometimes require an entire people to acknowledge its complicity in a mistake, even a grave misdeed. To a remarkable extent, Germans have accepted responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era and have reshaped their political, educational, and cultural institutions to ensure that such a thing never happens again. This is unusual, however. To this day the Japanese continue to resist acknowledging what they did to the Chinese during the 1930s and to the enemy soldiers they captured during World War II. It took Americans nearly half a century to apologize and make restitution for the incarceration of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, even though the allegations used to justify this step were disproved long ago.
Aristotle’s typology of regimes suggests what observation confirms: some governments that are not democratic may nonetheless care about the interests of their people, not just their own preservation. (Compare the government of Singapore’s former president Lee Kwan Yew with the government of North Korea.) To promote the public interest, it is not enough to be well-intentioned; leaders must possess the requisite skills and knowledge. Effective leadership requires a constant effort to acquire information and to evaluate its reliability. A leader who does not do so is unlikely to succeed. More than that, he has not met a basic moral requirement of office: the political equivalent of the lawyer’s “due diligence” standard.
In explaining a policy fiasco, it is not enough for a leader to say “I did not know.” The question is whether he should have known, whether he did everything that could reasonably be expected to acquire the information that might have made the difference between failure and success. President George W. Bush has often been described as incurious, as making decisions based on gut instinct rather than the patient effort to assemble facts and assess their implications. If this is true (and future historians may determine that it is not), it would represent a culpable shortcoming.
It is this requirement—to make every reasonable effort to acquire the truth on which policy should rest—that makes the case of former secretary of state Colin Powell so difficult. The Bush administration assigned to Powell the task of presenting the U.S. case for war against Iraq to the United Nations Security Council. Powell knew that his speech would be pivotal, and therefore subject to detailed scrutiny. According to several published accounts, he rejected a White House draft as factually flawed and instead went to CIA headquarters, where he remained for four days poring over intelligence files and consulting with senior intelligence officials.1 This was not enough to save Powell from delivering a speech whose central allegations turned out to be false, a speech he himself has called a “blot” on his record.
It is at this point that interpretations diverge. Powell’s defenders argue that no one could have done more, that much of the CIA’s raw intelligence data rested on the testimony of Iraqi defectors of dubious reliability, many of whom had their own political axes to grind. In addition, they claim, the materials Powell was able to review did not adequately reflect dissenting views within the agency. Another position is that though he gave an honest representation of what he took to be the truth, he did not push hard enough to get to the bottom of the matter. If he had, he would have known that experts in his own department had poured cold water on the claim that the famous shipment of aluminum tubes proved that Saddam Hussein had restarted his nuclear weapons program. (The tubes turned out to be components, not of centrifuges to enrich uranium, but rather of conventional rockets.) For our purposes, the point is that this disagreement takes place within a shared moral understanding: that due diligence requirements for ascertaining policy-relevant truth do exist and do apply to public officials.
Not all offices are created equal, of course. Some have wider responsibilities and greater freedom of action, and the content of due diligence norms varies accordingly. Lower level State Department officials would not have had the same broad access to CIA data that their secretary enjoyed. The best they could do was assess the information they were able to obtain, which they did (in many cases quite accurately, as things turned out).
Consider a very different case. For years, scandals in child welfare services have rocked the District of Columbia. In several high-profile cases, foster parents have abused, neglected, and even murdered the children in their care. Questions inevitably arise: Whose responsibility was it to know what was going on? Did child welfare workers diligently work to monitor the children in their jurisdiction, did they fall down on the job, or were they doing the best they could with insufficient resources and caseloads so large that they could not possibly give individual cases the attention they deserved? This final alternative, for which independent observers have adduced considerable evidence, would imply that the fault lies with the government (and ultimately the people) of the District for failing to provide the funding and staffing levels needed to monitor the foster care system. The truth we need for responsible governance is seldom cheap and easy to obtain. In most cases, governments must make substantial investments in the people and institutions needed to ferret out the truth, often from sources with strong incentives to conceal it. In democracies, the people themselves must accept this fact, and its fiscal consequences. If they do not, they are complicit in policies that are made and implemented without the facts these policies need to function effectively.
We have reached, unsurprisingly, an important distinction between democracies and nondemocracies. In democracies, the people have distinctive responsibilities, not only to sustain institutions that can provide the truth that officials require for effective governance, but also to acquire the information that citizens need to make wise decisions in their own right. While this proposition smacks of a high school civics class, it is more than a bromide. If citizens do not make even a modest effort to become informed, they will be vulnerable to manipulative appeals based on emotion and moralism.
In late 2008 the U.S. financial system was in crisis, with capital eroding and confidence waning. The people were understandably upset that the government had allowed matters to deteriorate to that point, and also furious that they were being asked to put taxpayer dollars at risk. While their desire to punish the guilty was predictable, it got in the way of a basic fact: even if your neighbor’s house catches fire because he stupidly smoked in bed, letting it burn down is not in your interest. The essential idea is that the interests of individuals who want to buy cars and homes on credit are linked not only to their neighborhoods, but also to the fate of large, remote economic institutions whose leaders have distinguished themselves for shortsightedness, greed, and hubris. This is not to say that the plan the Bush administration initiated and the Obama administration largely continued was the best response. But trying to punish the guilty without addressing the systemic crisis would have been the worst. While the people’s initial impulse to do just that reflected their leaders’ failure to explain the stakes with clarity, it also represented their own failure to stop, read a few newspapers, and learn the basics. How else could they sensibly hold their representatives accountable?
This example suggests a broader point, so obvious that it is often overlooked. Because democracies disperse decision-making power, access to reliable information must be dispersed as well. This means that government and other centers of concentrated power should erect the fewest possible barriers to the acquisition of such information. It means, as well, that accurate information must exist along with mechanisms that distinguish it, nonrandomly if not infallibly, from inaccuracies, half-truths, and outright errors. The Internet now offers everyone access to primary data and full texts. It also multiplies beyond measure the babble of competing voices and undermines the power of gatekeepers who once took it upon themselves to exercise control over the quality of information that went out via print and the public airwaves. It is an open question whether, on balance, this momentous technological change will yield a net gain for democracy—that is, whether, over time, citizens will be more or less likely than in previous generations to approach politics armed with the basic information they will need to make democracy work.
Drawing on John Dewey’s analogy between democratic publics and communities of scientific inquiry, some argue that democracy has an inherent orientation toward truth. This is too optimistic. The analogy between democracy and the market seems closer, and we all know about market failures, not to mention Gresham’s Law, which offers a parsimonious explanation of most electoral campaigns. As Bernard Williams points out, “free scientific inquiry” is not a free-for-all, but rather a “managed market” with high, carefully policed barriers to entry. The competition to seek the truth takes place only among those who have been certified as competent truth-seekers.2
The political marketplace in the United States is much less managed than it once was. As a result, more people can express themselves more freely and communicate their views to others. This does not necessarily mean progress toward a politics of truth. Although the relation between freedom of expression and the acquisition of truth isn’t random, it’s not linear either. The disappearance of gatekeepers may broaden the range of views to which citizens are exposed, but their absence also means that there is more noise in the political system and that it is harder to prevent knaves and fools from influencing public opinion.
Some truth is managed, of course. Like all forms of government, democracies try to keep certain matters secret. Unlike other forms of government, this effort creates an essential tension. How can the people judge what they do not know? The classic answer is that their representatives will advance their interests and safeguard their liberties. As we know, it doesn’t always work out that way in practice. Governments can keep secrets for bad reasons as well as good: to aggrandize power and conceal mistakes, for example. The more closely held information is, the more difficult it is for normal checks and balances to operate.
It is easy to respond with bromides such as “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Sometimes it is; at other times it blinds us to real dangers. Democracies have enemies, and certain kinds of information can strengthen them. Truth is one thing, its dissemination another. It is not self-contradictory to want truth to guide government policy while also believing that democratic governments may appropriately withhold certain policy-relevant truths from the public. As we have learned, however, there is no simple blueprint for constructing policies and institutions that can police the boundary between justified and unjustified secrecy.
While recognizing disagreeable but legitimate necessities, we must be careful not to lose our bearings. Yes, there is a distinction between public and private morality. But in politics as well as in our personal lives, there is still a presumption in favor of disclosure. Withholding or distorting the truth always requires a justification, whereas deliberate truthfulness usually doesn’t. Despite their flaws, democratic governments are more likely to end up honoring this presumption than are other regimes, a not insubstantial argument in favor of democracy.
One thing is clear: no matter how open our government may be and how committed we are as individuals to civic responsibility, democratic citizens cannot possibly know what we would need to evaluate every proposal that comes before us. We have no choice, then, but to follow the lead of those we regard as trustworthy, those we believe know what we do not and honestly convey their knowledge to others. Politics can be a realm of truth only when we trust those who are worthy of trust. Nondemocratic governments do not care much about maintaining trust between the governors and the governed. Indeed they often employ mistrust to keep potential opponents off-balance, because they can use force and fear to enforce compliance. Democratic governance needs trust. When trust disappears, democracy collapses into a politics of suspicion.
Recent events in the United States offer sad illustration of this risk. When Treasury Secretary Paulson put his initial proposal on the table in the fall of 2008, the public was incredulous. In part, their response was moral: “You’re expecting us to pay for their incompetence and greed?” In part, though, it reflected a generalized mistrust of government assertions. A typical reaction: “They said that we had to go to war against Iraq because Saddam’s weapons were a threat. They were wrong then, so why should we believe them now, when they tell us that our economy faces a comparable risk? Our leaders are either incompetent or dishonest, so why should we trust them?” (One anonymous wit grimly labeled Paulson’s proposal the “Authorization to Use Financial Force.”)
There is a school of thought, supported by some evidence, that Colin Powell’s speech reflected neither of the errors discussed above, but rather a systematic effort to twist the evidence and deceive the people. I do not know whether this is true, but the fact that so many people believe it is an indication of just how much trust has waned. It is one thing for a government to make a mistake, however catastrophic; it is another thing altogether for a government to lie, especially when the stakes are so high. “Bush lied, people died,” chant the protesters. I hope they are wrong. The bad news is that so many Americans are ready to believe the worst. The good news is that they continue to believe in the distinction between truth and falsehood, and in the possibility that truth can guide political decisions.
Democracies often create institutions whose mission is to resist the tendencies of everyday politics, ferret out the truth, and make it available to the public. Some of these institutions are ongoing; for example, each cabinet agency in the U.S. government has an inspector-general with independent powers. Others are ad hoc, which need not mean that their impact is transitory. The best recent example is the 9/11 Commission, which used powers formal and informal to establish the sequence of events that led to the terrorist attacks, assign responsibility, and make recommendations to help the government ward off future incidents. Though imperfect, the Commission’s report exemplified the ability of a democratic government to pursue, and act on, uncomfortable truths. It is not an accident that Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the Commission’s cochairs, remain widely trusted by other officials and by the people.
As Michael Walzer has rightly argued, the writ of truth over democracy is limited. In democratic contestation, the scientist’s voice is one among many others.3 If a democratic legislature believes that human activity has no impact on global climate change and makes policy on the basis of that belief, the scientist has every right to protest in the name of truth. He can argue that the adopted policy is wrong, shortsighted, and dangerous. He cannot argue that the legislature had no right to do what it did. Truth is one thing, legitimacy another. The people have a right to be wrong, a right they often exercise.
The reverse is also true: democracy has limited sway over truth and the processes through which it is acquired. Consider the nature of democratic authority over scientific inquiry. It seems perfectly appropriate for democratic institutions to determine the distribution of resources devoted to various domains of inquiry. From the standpoint of many physicists, it may be regrettable when the U.S. government declines to invest the billions of dollars needed to construct the next-generation particle accelerator, ceding world leadership to Europe, but it cannot be said that the government has overstepped its bounds. It is legitimate, moreover, for democratic governments to make such decisions based, in part, on their assessment of the kinds of inquiry that are most likely to sustain democratic institutions. (They may choose not to fund research that might end up underscoring genetically based inequalities among human beings.) Democracies can impose restrictions on research methods (on human subjects, for example), although these restraints may make it more difficult for research to succeed. And in certain circumstances, it may even be legitimate for democracies to restrict the public discussion of specific research results.
Distinct from all these actions is government intervention to dictate the outcome of inquiry. The quest for truth is an autonomous activity guided by its own rules. To be sure, communities of inquiry shape these rules and judge their products, but not on a democratic basis.
One of the sorriest episodes in the sorry history of the Soviet Union was the use of state power to impose the pseudo-Lamarckian views of the quack agronomist Trofim Lysenko on the whole of Soviet biology. Plant scientists of unimpeachable international standing were forced to recant their adherence to Mendelian genetics and to conduct their research on the basis of an ideologically based theory preaching the environmental determination of species change. This affair is frequently presented as the epitome of totalitarianism. But the real point is broader: Lysenko’s biology would have been no better, and no more legitimate, if it had been imposed by a democratic vote after full public deliberation. The sphere of democratic politics has no rightful authority over the internal processes that guide the quest for truth in diverse communities of inquiry.4
If we don’t think too hard about it, it is easy to worship truth monotheistically, or at least as the god before whom none other shall be placed. Whatever may be the case in the conduct of inquiry, matters are more complicated in the arena of politics. A Jewish sage once stated that the world rests on three pillars: truth, justice, and peace.5 In practice, these pillars may not be mutually supporting and can actually conflict. Consider the truth and reconciliation commissions used to great effect in postapartheid South Africa and to less effect elsewhere. One of the pillars, justice, is conspicuous by its absence. That is no accident: these commissions rest on the proposition that if we want peace within badly divided societies, we may have to forgo justice, at least as it is typically understood. We may choose to regard truth publicly acknowledged as a kind of justice, but the survivors of the abuse may disagree. And if they do, who can blame them?
In politics there is no guarantee that truth will always be the trumping value. In David Park’s latest novel, The Truth Commissioner, the effort to exhume buried truths and make them public leaves a trail of destruction.6 For nations as for individuals, life demands a complex weave of remembering and forgetting, of truth-telling and obfuscation. Hamlet asks (I paraphrase), Treat every man according to his desert, and who would escape whipping? There are great crimes in the history of every nation. Sometimes it is right to bring them to light, acknowledge them, and ask future generations to remember. At other times, insisting on the truth yields little except outrage and resentment. In some communities, achieving even a modus vivendi will require all parties to accept something less than their full measure of truth. Although outsiders may criticize them for practicing social amnesia, ordinary citizens who most of all want their children to grow up in peace are entitled to a different view.
“We the people of the United States . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” While these words explicitly state a political fact, they implicitly advance a moral claim: the people, and only the people, are entitled to ordain and establish a constitution. What can justify such a claim? It is reasonable to regard the Declaration of Independence as offering at least a sketch of the answer. Note the words that frame and situate this answer: “We hold these Truths to be self-evident.” If they are not, then one may well doubt that it is the right of the people, having discerned flaws in existing arrangements, to “alter or abolish [them]” and to “institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
Democratic government, we have seen, needs truth to do its business well. It also needs truth to justify the power it wields. The alternatives to truth as the basis of democratic legitimacy are unattractive. Either the people rule by force majeure, a claim that fails as soon as undemocratic leaders can mobilize power against the failing of democracy, or they rule by custom and habit—because this is the way we do things around here—a claim that fails as soon as people who want to do things differently accumulate enough power to challenge democratic complacency.
We have reached the end neither of history nor of political theory. We may, if we choose, draw a conception of citizens as free and equal from the “public culture of a democratic society.” This complacent self-inspection will hardly move those individuals (and they are numerous) who have grown up in nondemocratic cultures and who are less persuaded of the merits of democracy than we are. We must make our case to those who disagree with us, which means defending certain propositions about politics as true, or at least as more nearly true than any competitors.
This is why I doubt that in the final analysis, Harold Pinter or anyone else can adopt one stance toward truth as an artist, scientist, or philosopher, and another as a citizen. The truths science uncovers about climate change are among the propositions that should shape public policy. Philosophers who conclude that ordinary conceptions of moral desert rest on false premises about personal responsibility are obligated to bring that conclusion into practical debates about punishment and distribution. To be sure, artists who dive deep to plumb the human heart may return to the surface with ambiguous results. But the same is true in ordinary civic life. We may hypothesize that Ronald Reagan’s affable distance from most human beings somehow reflects growing up with an alcoholic father, or that George W. Bush’s assertive self-confidence emerged through an effort to break free of his father, or that Barack Obama’s disciplined, self-contained style is the product of his struggle to construct a coherent identity. The artist and the citizen may use different strategies to investigate these hypotheses. But the truth they seek is the same.