A think is not true unless it is also kind
A thing is not true unless it is also kind.
I wrote this at the end of a recent article, and I think it’s really an important idea although my attempts to get it across to anyone else have so far been unsatisfactory. So I want to give it one last try.
Fox News provides a clear counterexample. They ran a story about Barak Obama having attended a madrassa as a six year old in Indonesia. Factually the story is correct, but it’s not true in the slightest. Madrassa is an Arabic word meaning “school”. Obama attended a secular elementary school which would not have looked out of place anywhere in the United States. The truth of the situation was nothing like the same as the facts which were reported.
To me the difference is in the intent. This is where Fox made the truth into a lie, and it reveals the importance of the word kind.
People often assume that kindness means nurturing, supporting, and even pampering or pandering to the desires of another. That’s an easy pattern to fall into, because it relates to selfishness. If you are being “kind” to someone because you want them to like you, or even worse you want them to feel obligated to you, then it is a kindness which can easily be harmful. In such a situation you give someone what they want not what they need. An illusion rather than the honest reality.
True kindness nurtures and supports, but it can contain hard truths because it is done for the real benefit of the other. A kind gardener needs pruning shears as well as fertiliser. That’s not to say it comes from a controlling or patronising headspace - the most important gift to any friend is their autonomy and freedom. But supporting addictive or destructive behaviour or relationships is not an act of kindness, instead it is often a way of creating dependence and control.
I believe a person’s best interest is always to have the maximum autonomy of which they are capable. That’s what it means to be human. But autonomy is founded on truth, because lies and illusions – whether fostered by others or built from a person’s own narrative, fears, and desires – make real choice impossible. So I’ve put a slightly circular argument: to be kind requires being honest and unselfish, and to seek to benefit the other. Very few truths are absolute, it is the intent of the choice of fact and context which distinguishes a “false” truth from a real truth. It makes sense that when you see something from a selfish point of view your truth is self-serving.
Postmodernism notwithstanding, this doesn’t mean that there can be no objective reality or that all meaning is relative. I think that there is so much objective reality that we can never encompass more than a portion of it. How we choose which portion, and how we ascribe meaning to that changes the subjective reality.
Scientific method has laid down an approach which is as nearly perfectly objective as is so far possible - but it’s a long way from truth. This is because exactly what answers it finds depends closely on what questions are asked and how they are framed in context. A great deal of junk science from tobacco to anti- global warming is founded on this mistake, and there are movements (evidence based medicine for example) to re-find objectivity. Just the same, the areas of greatest human progress have been those in which real joy in understanding most easily overcomes the prejudices of vested interests, like mathematics and deep physics. We can, in the end, use scientific method to distinguish objective reality, or at least that part of it for which we can ask the right questions. To bring that as far as human truth requires more.
The detached “objective” style of high quality journalism attempts this. It shows both sides of the story without emotional involvement. But to my mind it’s one of the least successful solutions. Just how unsuccessful can be seen not in the Obama story (which was clearly partisan), but in the New York Times investigations into lynchings in the deep south in 1930. They heard one side of the story from the murderers and their supporters - a twisted rationale. The victims, though, were dead or scared and deeply mistrustful of white reporters from the big smoke. The journalists came with their own perceptions and their own views, even their own culture, which they did not acknowledge and could not be free of. That’s not to say they misrepresented the facts, but their story did not challenge the preconceptions of their audience as it should have done. The mask of objectivity lent authority the story did not deserve. Journalism is poor at telling hard truths - to do so would require more self reflection than reporters are taught, and expect the same from a readership who would rather not have their comfortable world disturbed. It would not sell papers.
So from the infinitely malleable subjective reality what is truth? It is that which is also kind. When we step outside our own needs and wish to truly benefit others we leave the ego-boundary which distorts truth to the merely factual. From a selfless standpoint we see facts in context and connection such that we are honest with ourselves and honest with others. This is the truth which sets us free. This is essential for our autonomy and that of others. It has an infinity of expressions by they all reflect the one kind truth:
I love you.
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