Felipe Fernández-Armesto
In the face of vast quantities of information and analyses about wars, floods, political jousting and so many other topics, we are often left battling to know what is true. Some just give up. For others, if a report is in The New York Times, The Guardian, on the Australian ABC, the BBC, or Fox News (?) that means it must be true. Others retreat from trying to determine what is true, saying “I know what I like, I know what I believe”, and leave it at that, ignoring most of what’s being said around them. Some attempt to find out what is true, by trying to disentangle perspectives, intentions and evidence. It’s not a hopeless task, and it is possible to reach the point where it appears something is reasonably true, that there are some facts that appear solid and can be justified. However, even if it isn’t hopeless, it is an arduous task, and it is attractive to come to a decision by setting a low bar on truth, aiming for ‘true enough’.
Is there a way to enhance access to the truth? Ryan Byerly, a UK philosopher, has reminded us one approach is to look for intellectual transparency: does a commentator offer arguments and evidence to support their assertions, so we can weigh up validity of what is being said? Those who want to help us see what is true recognise they can help only if you understand them. They need to define key words or phrases and explain how their views contrast with those of others that might be confused with them. They should ensure what they have to say is easy to follow, with the all the parts and steps of an analysis or argument laid out clearly. They have to be alert to ambiguity, as ambiguity gets in the way of understanding. As if that wasn’t enough, Byerly also warns us to look out for signs of overconfidence, the danger of commentators believing they know more than others. Some share selectively to convey the best impression of themselves, or pretend to know things they don’t, or to have stronger evidence than they do. Overconfidence misleads. Equally, transparency can be hindered by timidity. The timid often have a low opinion of their views and are fearful of being seen as ignorant. They shy away from the limelight, and refrain from contributing their ideas. Their concern to avoid criticism leaves us uninformed. Byerly’s approach sounds like hard work!
Good advice, but transparency assumes there is one truth to be determined. Or do we live in a world where truth is relative? How about the case of black swans in Australia!
“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.”
Those fighting words come from Felipe Fernández-Armesto. Born in the UK, he was appointed as a history professor at Notre Dame University, Indiana, in 2009. His father was the Spanish journalist Felipe Fernández-Armesto, and his mother was Betty Millan de Fernandez-Armesto, a British-born journalist and co-founder and editor The Diplomatist, the in-house journal of the diplomatic corps in London. A child of journalist parents, what was true must have been an everyday discussion within the family. Whether or not that is true (!), Felipe Fernández-Armesto became an historian, and has written some impressive studies, including Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years (in 1995); Reformation: Christianity & the World 1500 – 2000 (1996) (with Derek Wilson); Civilizations (2000); The Americas: A Hemispheric History (2003); Ideas That Changed the World (2003); and Humankind: A Brief History (2004). I think he’s an important, provocative thinker.
Some of his books are major works of scholarship, far too demanding for a brief blog. Others are seductively clever. In 2009 he published 1492, with the fascinating subtitle ‘The Year the World Began’. Fernández-Armesto knows how to grab the reader’s attention. He begins by talking about Behaim’s Nuremburg globe, the oldest surviving globe of the world. A rather amateurish effort, with continents and countries known at the time weakly depicted, it was an attempt at offering a picture of world as known then. In the next few chapters, Armesto looks at events that year, including the disappearance of Islam from Western Europe; the first steps of Islam into Africa; the Jewish diaspora across the Mediterranean; the travails of the church and humanism in Italy; and the steady march of Christianity into Russia. There was a lot happening, but by this stage every reader must be getting impatient. What about Columbus?
In Chapter 6, we do read about Columbus landing in the New World. It is almost a relief to come on to more familiar territory for that landmark year. However, Fernández-Armesto isn’t finished, and in the remaining three chapters he takes across to the East. First, he explores the voyages of China’s Zheng He, and the country’s decision to stop overseas trade. At the same time, Japan was focussed on internal fights among the aristocratic warlords, with little interest in the value of looking outside their country. The next chapter looks at the growing activity in the Indian Ocean, from counties along the Red Sea to Indian, Ceylon and on to Indonesia. He doesn’t confine himself to 1492, but he cleverly uses that year as a stepping-stone into changes that continued on for decades and centuries. He even manages to explore what he calls ‘The Fourth World’, the various nations of South America in particular.
The conclusion to 1492 is surprising. He jumps to the present era, confessing the path from 1492 to today is confusing, suggesting it is like watching a seismograph, trying to find patterns as the needle shoots one way and then the other, resulting in a confusing set of overlapping changes and contradictions. He concludes two things. First, 1492 set in train a series of developments concerned with individualism and its complex social, political and economic consequences. He concludes those “who predicted the world would end in 1492 were right: the apocalypse was postponed, but the events of the year ended the world with which people of the time were familiar … The world the prophets knew vanished and a new world, the world we are in, began to take shape”. Second, prophetically, he suggests today’s omens suggest we could be heading to another ending. Western supremacy is disappearing with the decline of the USA; pluralism is encouraging warfare; population growth is close to plateauing; and confidence about modernity is giving way to terrorism, postmodernism and environmental disaster. Written twelve years ago, this seems even more apposite today. As a historian, he won’t make predictions, but foresees a future that is both uncertain and volatile.
At the same time, Fernández-Armesto is pursuing another issue, and this is that he believes historians are beginning to abandon the search for what he calls ‘long term origins’. He suggests the search for explanations in specific events and their consequences is mistaken, but rather change is the result of a constant interaction between various factors, fluid, uncertain, shifting almost serendipitously. Grand theory is over. This isn’t surprising as he had introduced this view in Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed, in 1997.
In this guide, Fernández-Armesto set out his history of truth in five chapters, focussing on evolving notions of what was accepted in society, rather than relying on ideas from the intellectual biographies of great thinkers. The approach makes good sense, with each of the chapters packed with stories and illustrations. To add to the analysis, his history covers four major phases, but he makes it clear developments overlap, and 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, he proposes the first of these phases 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 similar to the experience Heidegger called 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? Is his ‘bracketing’ possible? 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, there are revelatory texts, oracles and divinations, truths proposed by leaders or seers, and even poetic truths. Truth is a matter of belief, revealed by some kind of authoritative source. This, too, is also very contemporary, not just about 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. 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 seldom have the time, opportunity or 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 many of these things are true or not, at least in any other sense of the word’s use.
This leads us to the third phase in his analysis, the truth that comes from reason. 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 is a front-runner in the next stage in the history of truth, the truth that is revealed through scientific theory and empiricism. Facts determined by scientific observation came to be revered across the world by the end of the 19thCentury. 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 co, with 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, 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 often 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 contemporary arguments, 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”. He 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.
Three years after Truth was released, Fernández-Armesto completed a massive work, Civilisations. Once again, his approach was unfamiliar, seeing the common theme that defined civilisations as having ‘programmes for the refashioning of nature’ rather than the more familiar but uncertain criteria of a political systems, laws, religions or some other system to give unity. His approach had two consequences: it allowed him to structure his review by environment, ranging from what he defined as ‘waste lands’, environments of ice, desert and tundra, on to grasslands, tropical environments, alluvial areas, mountains and oceans. This also allowed him to explore empires like those in Africa’s Sahel region, including Mali, Fulani and Songhay, otherwise missed in the traditional focus on European, Asian and South American civilisations. I find his approach exciting, as he helps us to think about civilisations as experiments, groups seeking to create a way to manage and understand their natural environment. It leaves him doubtful about the future, as he sees the space for experiments narrowing, creating a world in which we will all live in ‘one civilisation’.
At the end of Civilisations, Felipe Fernández-Armesto goes to visit the cottage and garden artist Derek Jarman had created in the last years of his life. Jarman had directed several biographical films, including Caravaggio, a fictionalised retelling of his life, and Wittgenstein an experimental comedy-drama film loosely based on his life story and his philosophical thinking. In the last stages of AIDS, Jarman was living in an isolated cottage in Dungeness, Kent. At first glance, it was a place of despair, bleak, dotted with flotsam, but looking closely it was possible to see he had created his own beachcomber’s world. For Fernández-Armesto it was a monument to the idea of civilisation and its transitory nature, Jarman’s refashioning doomed to disappear when he died. It provides a salutary and evocative ending.
