Against 'My Truth'

In the odd moments I peek out of my bubble and into the battlefield of the Culture War, I find myself fascinated by the turns of phrase, standard arguments and stylistic choices common to each army. Then the shells come flying my way and I jump back in the trench. But between those moments, I wonder at those cultural tics.

Birds on a wire in Cataluña

One such phrase, which I primarily see used by Blue forces, is, 'my truth.' Besides being in the title of an upbeat 2004 single and a 2020 sexual abuse documentary, it's fairly common to hear as an affirmation, especially in the context of 'living my truth', or as an exhortation to 'speak your truth.'

It looks to have been given a boost in 2018 by Oprah, although it's much older, and Google Ngram tells me that we're at a local maximum for its use in texts, so I can say with some confidence that the phrase is in the ascendant. 

It took me a little while to notice I had an emotional reaction to the phrase. It revolted me. With a little inspection, I determined that this was mostly because I found the people who used it to be annoying, nothing unusual there. But there was also a smidge of revulsion with the concept. It didn't take me long to remember some relevant sources and consult them.

This draws a lot on Just Another Brick in the Motte. If you're familiar with that essay, this will be known ground. 

In performing an informal review of the phrase's use (I listened to how people talked with it), it didn't take long to notice the fingerprints of postmodern thinking on it. I won't bother to try to define postmodernism here, and it's not my field anyway, so I'll just gesture vaguely at a cluster. There is no objective 'view from nowhere', all experience and knowledge is mediated, facts are subordinate to narratives, no single narrative is 'true', power and knowledge are inseparable.

The way I often hear 'my truth' constructed begins like this: 

None of us have access to the capital-T Truth, even if you grant that such a thing exists, it cannot survive intact through the layers of mediation and representation necessary for human functioning. You have your truth and I have mine, and we have to respect and negotiate with each others' truth, because neither of us have objectivity on our side. 

So far this is reasonable and on good epistemic ground. It's around this time in conversations that I go into the kitchen to make an egg sandwich (two eggs, salted, scrambled, a handful of chistorra, cooked until browning, in an untoasted baguette) and when I come back I hear people screaming:

THIS IS MY TRUTH, I KNOW IT AND YOU CAN'T TELL ME OTHERWISE!!1!111!

I was befuddled, so I ate my sandwich and went back to CS Lewis' The Screwtape Letters, a reliable source of old chestnuts. Soon enough, I found the relevant passage in Letter XXI, in which the devil Screwtape gives advice on how to capture human souls through a sense of false ownership.

We produce this sense of ownership not only by pride but by confusion. We teach them not to notice the different senses of the possessive pronoun — the finely graded differences that run from “my boots” through “my dog”, “my servant”, “my wife”, “my father”, “my master” and “my country”, to “my God”. They can be taught to reduce all these senses to that of “my boots”, the “my” of ownership. Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by “my Teddy-bear” not the old imagined recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relation (for that is what the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful) but “the bear I can pull to pieces if I like”. And at the other end of the scale, we have taught men to say “My God” in a sense not really very different from “My boots”, meaning “The God on whom I have a claim for my distinguished services and whom I exploit from the pulpit — the God I have done a corner in”.

Replace 'God' with 'Truth' and we see the same sleight of hand. We begin discussing the inability of any one person to understand the whole of the universe, of capital-T Truth. Then we construct 'my truth' to signify the truth as we understand it, flawed though it is. From there it undergoes a subtle transmutation into 'the truth to which I have a claim', 'the truth which I exploit', and finally to 'My Truth', the Truth which I possess. 

Because it is 'Truth' it cannot be waved away as an opinion, and because it is 'Mine' any contradiction is a threat to my very identity. And in a society where identity, as expressed through chains of subgroup identifiers in social media bios, is all important, this is the most grievous sort of offense. Compare claims of 'invalidating my existence.'

Further, all personal Truths are equally valid. After all, none of us experience reality directly, and how can you possibly invalidate another's sensory experience without discrediting yourself?

In this way we transmute what might be a valuable expression of humility (even if the phrase tastes too green for my sensibilities) into a regressive all-in-one defense that ties personal identity and green-meme egalitarianism into a great self-satisfied knot. 

I'm not a fan. As far as postmodernism goes, it's not good postmodernism either. A more sophisticated and honest speaker might say 'my narrative' to invoke the concepts more directly and communicate their epistemic status. This is not common.

First, let's address the link to identity. 

Working in a space of narratives as opposed to facts does not render one incapable of distinguishing between narratives, or of evaluating them. Narratives and beliefs have a purpose, and some, myself included, contend that the highest purpose is the minimization of long-term human suffering and the maximization of human happiness. Only the most accurate beliefs and effective narratives will achieve this. If my truth says that the Sun is a sphere of hot plasma and your truth says that it's light glinting off the horns of the Sky Ox, your truth can take a long walk off a short pier.

If our narratives/beliefs/truths were something inherent to us, then this would be a cold and dreary universe indeed. But they aren't. Your model of the world is ever-changing, and though change at the base levels is more difficult than at the top, it is both possible and necessary. 

The exact contents of your 'truth' do not define you, and a reflexive defense of them only holds you back.

(Again I contend I am not a cynic, just a mildly cantankerous idealist)

Next, the green egalitarianism. 

Readers from the rationalist community will recognize this as a variant of the Fallacy of Gray. None of us have the Objective Truth, it's just subjectivity all the way down. Therefore, your truth can be no better than mine, and therefore they must be equal. 

This can only work in a solipsistic world with no outside reality, and I'm quite confident that isn't the case (if I am wrong, I won't be wrong for long). The universe doesn't care what you think of it, and the distance between in and your model of it is measurable. 

'But it's a nice sentiment!' It's a horrible sentiment. It's the worst sort of complacency. Don't abet it.

In summary:

In the same way that 'I'm just as good as you!' is a statement never expressed by someone as good as you, 'It's My Truth!' is a statement only expressed when nothing else remains. 

By virtue of being 'your' truth, it isn't truth. Best case scenario, it approximates the truth, and must be judged on how well it does that. 

Yes, one should respect another's 'truth', but this is a thin respect indeed, a minimum level of regard for another person's subjective experience. If they develop and hold attitudes which lead to the improvement of their beliefs and put in the work to becoming more accurate, then that respect may swell immensely. But if they revel in their ignorance and declare themselves a separate magisterium from all inquiry, that should not be respected beyond the bare minimum.

This concept can do good if it expresses real humility (I said real humility!), though by now I believe that the phrase is poisoned beyond usefulness.