F is for Felipe Fernández-Armesto
I have always admired historians, especially those who prefer to take the long view and identify the underlying forces and influences that shape our world. Felipe Fernández-Armesto is one such. Born in the UK, he has been a history professor at Notre Dame University, Indiana, since 2009. A prolific writer, among his twenty-two books he acquired a large readership with the publication of two synoptic reviews, Millennium in 1995, and Civilisations in 2000.
In some ways, Fernández-Armesto shares the same approach followed by Yuval Noah Harari. His books are big, packed with detail, sweeping you along with their breadth and excitement. Again, like Harari, you occasionally feel that you are being sold an answer rather than being made to think: ideas are being marketed, and the pace is such there is little time for reflection. In just two paragraphs in Civilisations, for example, we explore men of the forest, from knight’s adversaries, Gilgamesh’s companion Enkidu, the fear of forest men in China, the naming of Orang-outan in Malay, bestial foresters in Angkor, others found on a sultan’s bedchamber wall painting in the Alhambra, the doorkeepers of a Dominican college in Valladolid, in a Bavarian painting of a lady teaching one to play chess, in a painting of a ballet in Biches, to the story of Sir Gawayne (also known as Gawain) and the Green Knight. Exhausting, and the end of the second paragraph, you can be forgiven for forgetting why we raced through it all. [i]
The style is certainly entertaining. I read Civilisations by dipping into it, a few pages at a time. While I have been accused of having a dustbin brain, the paltry collection of items rattling around in my skull are meagre compared to the avalanche of ‘stuff’ that Fernández-Armesto delivers. Not just many stories, but he also took a somewhat controversial approach overall, linking civilisations in comparable environmental settings but found anywhere in the world together, and connecting their development to the physical world around them. Once done, he then ranked the cultures he’d examined according to how civilised he considered them. Sadly for white westerners, many of their countries came out rather poorly!
I can’t do justice to a study with 640 densely written pages. Instead, I want to focus on another of his books, Truth, which he released in 1997, subtitled ‘a history and guide for the perplexed’.[ii] At just over 250 pages, with a smaller page size, this is easier to grasp. However, it is not just size that made my choice, but also because Fernández-Armesto is addressing what has become a very contemporary problem: what do we mean by truth in an era of everyday falsehoods and fake news? Have modern science and post-modernism conspired to make everything relative? We are told Fernández-Armesto’s book gives an ‘excellent’ overview of his topic, responding to the question “In what ways might society be affected, for good or for bad, if we were to collectively agree that there is no such thing as ABSOLUTE TRUTH?”, [iii] (his response includes an interestingly hopeful statement at the beginning):
“It would be disastrous, but it would never happen. Thank God, agreement is elusive, even on commonsense matters of fact. ‘There’s no absolute truth’ is an absolute statement. All statements about nothing are necessarily absolute, and therefore self-falsifying. Anyone – Cretan or cretin – who denies the existence of truth, invites disbelief. … Even a truth that implies contingency, such as ‘Swans are black in Australia’ involves the absolutely true adumbration that ‘The proposition that swans are black in Australia is true.’ People who say, ‘It’s true for me’ are either gilding falsehoods or misrepresenting matters of opinion. If we abandon the search for truth, we shall fall victim to two evils. First, we shall be hobbled in the fight against falsehood. People who deny that Nazis killed Jews, or who justify war by telling us that such-and-such an enemy has weapons of mass destruction, or who ascribe literal truth to poetic texts or self-interested dogmas will get away with their lies and evasions. Secondly, we shall make agreement depend on some other criterion, such as whether a proposition hurts anyone’s feelings, or causes offence, or transgresses political correctness, or subverts society, or challenges the state, or infringes consensus. … different cultures, at different times, have favored, on balance, different techniques for telling truth from falsehood, and therefore may be said to have had, to that extent, different concepts of truth. In that sense, the predictions of relativism have proved valid. And it is important to remember that truth is elusive. It takes hard work, discipline, and time to approach it. Although the truth is out there, we shall not grasp it quickly or easily embrace it whole.”
Oh my goodness. No wonder President Trump doesn’t read books. Understanding a paragraph like that might cause him to reflect on his life as an unrestrained tweeter, (does that make him a twit?). Well, that’s enough imaginative speculation: he doesn’t read, he wouldn’t understand this, and he certainly wouldn’t suddenly become thoughtful. Time to move on!
In his book, Fernández-Armesto sets out his account of what we mean by truth in five chapters, focussing on evolving notions of what is accepted in society, rather than summarising ideas from the intellectual biographies of great thinkers. The framework makes good sense, despite each of the chapters being, once again, packed with stories and illustrations. The history of truth covers four major phases, but he makes it clear developments overlap, and all four categories of truth tend to persist, even if from time to time one may become more dominant than the others.
Never unwilling to reach way back in time, the first of these phases, he argues, can be found to have arisen in pre-literate societies, an approach he calls “the truth you can feel”, a truth known emotionally, rather than by sensory or rational perceptions. This is the oddest part of the book, as in some ways it seems very modern. Truth feeling is described as ‘direct’, without any logic, frameworks or even words necessary: to my way of thinking, it is describing an experience very similar to Heidegger’s epoché. In phenomenology ‘bracketing’ (or epoché) is a suspension of any need to believe in the objectivity of the world, setting aside judgements about the reality of an object. But bracketing is also a process, making possible the ‘unpacking’ of phenomena, to allow a systematic peeling away their symbolic meanings like layers of an onion until all that is left is the thing itself as directly sensed and experienced. It sounds rather like Fernández-Armesto’s ‘truth feeling’, and it is at least as difficult to understand! Can we ever see things free of frameworks and associations, let alone language? I have my doubts.
We are on firmer ground with the second phase in the history of truth when Fernández-Armesto moves on to the concept of ‘received truth’, or the truth you are told. In this stage in the history of truth, there are revelatory texts, oracles and divinations, truths proposed by leaders or seers, and even poetic truth. Truth is a matter of belief, revealed by some kind of authoritative source. This, too, is also very contemporary, not just the truth found during the time before the scientific revolution. For some Christians the Bible, for some Moslems the Qur’an, and for some Hindus the Vedas still serve as the source of the truth. Rather more prosaically, for English schoolboys, at least back when I was a child, truth was what our teachers told us!
We live in a world of received truths. Many of these derive from the authority of science, and the issues to do with truth and science will reappear in his third category. However, the ‘bibles’ of received truth are much larger than that. Democracy is the best political system (or not that good, but better than any other alternative!); the free market encourages competition and ensures the most efficient ways to produce goods and deliver services; global warming has been hastened by human action; a vegan diet is the best way to maintain health; and Swiss chocolate is better than any other. These are received truths because we do not have the time or the skills to dispute what we have been told, not on these nor on the thousands of other things about which we have been informed. Indeed, without received truths, it would be impossible to get on with life, and, by and large, it doesn’t appear to matter if they are true or not in any other sense of the word.
This naturally leads us to the next phase in his analysis, the truth that comes from reason. In exploring this stage in understanding truth, Fernández-Armesto contrasts two strands of Greek thinking from the classical era. One is truth found by what he calls ‘pure reason’, deductions made through exercising pure logic, as with the works of Pythagoras and Plato. On the other hand, an alternative approach is exemplified by Aristotle. He accepted the importance of logic and reasoning too, but following two prior activities: observations of facts (through the senses) and verification of observations. Then he muddled us up by invoking teleology, or purpose. But much of what we call science today was what Aristotle practiced in Greece 2,500 years ago.
Indeed, Aristotle anticipates the next stage in the history of truth, the truth that is revealed through perception, and in modern eras by scientific theory and empiricism. Facts determined by scientific observation came to be revered across the world by the end of the 19th Century. This was the way things were. So familiar is this view, that it is easy to move on to the obvious question: so why is it questioned today? Fernández-Armesto spends some time exploring the various strands in philosophical thinking from 1600 to the present, but the core of current debates about truth is most readily identified in what he calls ‘the graveyard of uncertainty’.
For him, there are three themes here. First, along came Einstein and the theory of relativity, to be combined with non-Euclidian geometries, and the eventual dis-assembling of the atom. Next came Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, about the nature of mathematical systems,[iv] all of which is quite beyond me. You know the third theme already, and this is what he calls the ‘death of truth’ in the humanities, and the rise of postmodernism and relativism. These three developments lead us to the current world, where truth is seen as illusory, relativism discounts any authoritative basis for knowing what is right, resulting, in Fernández-Armesto’s eyes, in an overwhelming disillusionment and disenchantment over the possibility of ever knowing what is true.
In looking at the arguments raging around us at present, Fernández-Armesto suggests “Historians today are the priests of the cult of truth, called to a service of a god whose existence they are doomed to doubt” [v] After such a great opening, it is not surprising that he hid for a moment, and diverted the reader on to a history of lies, charting a move away from equivocation to a world where mendacity and skepticism are rife. At the end of this by-way, he adds: “once truth has been devoured, people swallow falsehoods whole. Without confidence in the concept of truth, listeners are disarmed against lies”[vi] So true! In this final phase in the history of truth, he sees it as relative and shaped to what suits needs; in science he describes what he calls a scientific ‘counter-revolution’, a world of uncertainty, and it is here he blames (if that’s the right word) Einstein and Gödel, then throws in Heisenberg and the uncertainty principle for full measure.
Fernández-Armesto doesn’t entirely abandon us, ending with a chapter on ‘Truth is Life after Doubt’. Is truth to be abandoned? Do we have to live with relativism? He suggests three alternatives. The first is faith, fundamentalism, relying on those texts that science had set aside, finding revelation in the words of a prophet. A second, he suggests, is to abandon hard truth and follow a spiritual path, through meditation, perhaps. Finally, we can try to rescue truth, in the belief there is a reality, and we just have to find it: it’s still out there, somewhere. In the end, it all feels a bit flat. As Fernández-Armesto ends, he wonders if truth has a future. His solution is to fall back on reason and sense perception, returning, if you like, all the way back to Aristotle.
There is another way. Some years ago, three academic historians wrote Telling the Truth About History. [vii] Rather than following along with Fernández-Armesto’s desire to rescue the truth, they embraced the importance of alternative stories and perspectives. As they concluded:
“The incontrovertible existence of various interpretation of past events by no means proves the relativist’s case, but it certainly demands that everyone shed the positivist’s notion of historical truth. If the past was simply composed of material objects or recordable actions, one good ‘snapshot’ of it could capture the essential contours for all eternity. Happily, it is the human experience both in the past and the present which compels attention. Successive generations of scholars do not so much revise historical knowledge as they reinvest it with contemporary interest. Each generation’s inquiries about the past actually carry forward the implications of its predecessors’ learning. New versions of old narratives are not arbitrary exercise of historical imagination, but the consequence of the changing interest from cumulative social experience. If history did not involve a relationship with an object outside the self, it would have no capacity to extend the range of human understanding; its disclosures would only be reflections of ideas already known.” [viii]
Part of the search for truth confronts objects, subject to empirical analysis, logic and successively improved scientific theories. But we also confront events, experiences, and stories, where our understanding is informed by the beliefs and values of the time. No truths here, but adding our insights to those from other times, we create a multi-threaded tapestry illustrating the many facets of what it means to be human in a complex and ever-changing world.
[i] Civilisations, Macmillan, 200: pages 139-140
[ii] Bantam, 1997. What follows is mainly a précis of his views.
[iii] Pulse Berlin October 7, 2013. The capitalization is in the original.
[iv] You know them? His first, discomforting theorem states that there is no consistent set of axioms capable of proving all truths about the arithmetic of natural numbers (there will always be statements about natural numbers that are ‘true’, but unprovable within the system),; and the second incompleteness theorem, an extension of the first, shows that no axiomatic mathematical system can demonstrate its own consistency
[v] Op Cit, page 161
[vi] Ibid, page 165
[vii] Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History, Norton 1994
[viii] Ibid, page 265
