Imagine yourself standing on the deck of a 16th century sailing vessel out on the open sea. You know that if you were to go off course there are countless ways that something could go wrong. So, in order to combat those dangers you’ve brought along various tools to help you navigate along your way. You have your charts and a quadrant, but most importantly you have your compass. While most of the other navigation tools rely on fair weather, the compass does not. Whether it’s day or night, rain or shine, the compass is the most reliable tool available to guide you along your way. Then, just as you are thinking about all of this, a random sailor comes up, takes the compass, tosses it into the ocean, and declares that you should be sailing the opposite direction because he “has a good feeling about it.”
Now compare that scenario to the way people approach cultural problems that we face today. Our ability to use logical reasoning and wisdom has long served as the most reliable means to learn from the past and lead society towards truth. But instead of utilizing these tools, people have chosen to abandon them in favor of popular opinion and their feelings. They sail through life with nothing but their intuition guiding them. But the rejection of reason comes at a cost. If you’ve ever wondered how our culture got to the point where it can claim that men can be women, that the unborn babies aren’t human, and that there is no God, it all boils down to this: without logic, we can never find truth.
It is important to clarify what exactly I mean when I speak about truth. The most common definition of truth is that which is in accord with fact or reality. And funny enough, everyone actually agrees that truth does exist. If a person says something is false, they are making a claim of objectivity. They are saying that they have measured some piece of information that they have against the statements that the other person made and determined that the claim does not reflect what they believe to be reality. With that in mind, the question becomes less focused on the existence of truth, and more about where truth comes from.
Even though being in accord with reality is the dictionary definition of truth, the wider culture doesn’t really believe that. Whether it be for self-serving or ideological reasons, people have begun to claim that truth can originate from places that are subject to human minds. There are people that claim their feelings are a valid source for truth. Others turn to society, saying that whatever we decide is true becomes so. Or some even posit that truth is simply our ability to observe whatever is most evolutionarily beneficial to us as a species. But all these sources have a host of problems.
First, feelings change constantly. A person may believe that an action is immoral, but then through more research and conversations come to the conclusion the action is moral. But that means the truth itself would change, which would make it not really truth at all (as we define it.) If we want to make claims of objective truth that apply for all of time, it means that truth can’t change simply because one individual has changed their mind. Not only can a person’s feelings change from one moment to the next, but their feelings can also be the exact opposite of another person’s. There are plenty of topics where people argue that an action or idea is moral or immoral, but no matter which side you take in that debate, everyone agrees that someone in that situation is wrong. It is nonsensical to say that both sides can be 100% correct, because contradictory things cannot reflect reality.
Secondly, society as a source of truth is no better. Just because a large group of people believe something does not make it correct. If culture decides what is right and wrong, all the things in the past we generally consider atrocities would be justified. All the slavery, persecution, genocide etc. would be considered permissible because those societies believed they were. But instead, we look back at those events in horror and declare that those actions were just as wrong back then as they would be today. But in order to do so you must acknowledge truth as something universal, that applies to all times, regardless of what the culture believes. In the same vein, if truth is decided by the prevailing culture, we could deny historical events altogether. If the events of the past are inconvenient or embarrassing, then they would simply deny its existence. But most reasonable people would agree that just because a society can collectively deny an event and make it seem like it never happened, doesn't mean that the past event never occurred.
Finally, truth as something that is evolutionarily beneficial also falls short. True north exists whether we believe it to be beneficial or not. Our ability to recognize it or decide how beneficial it is has no bearing on its actual existence. We could deny this fact all we want, but that does not change what is in accord with reality. This also faces the same problem as truth from feelings. Every issue has people advocating for both sides. But if we all share the same evolutionary sense, why do people disagree on what is best for us? Shouldn’t we all be in agreement since we share some innate sense of truth? This would demonstrate that our ability to see what is evolutionarily beneficial is at best unreliable, at worst made up. And to top it all off, we simply don’t think of it that way. We don’t believe that the direction of north exists because we want the species to continue, we believe that it exists because that makes our view in accord with reality, meaning it’s true.
Truth must be objective, outside of ourselves, and universal. If it is not, then we cannot make any claims about things like right vs. wrong or reality vs. fiction. If truth is subjective, then nothing in life could possibly be relied upon, and we would have nothing to help guide us along our way.
With all that said, we now return to the compass. Much like true north, truth is ever present. Our question then becomes less focused on if truth exists but rather on how to find it. Just as the compass helps the sailor find north, logic helps the knowledge seeker to find truth. Logic is the reasoning that allows us to measure and balance the evidence and consistency of the world and compile a coherent worldview through it. Without an ability to reason, we would be just as lost as someone stuck on a ship in a storm. Christopher Columbus even spoke to this very idea, saying that the compass “always seeks the truth.”
But people are quick to criticize Columbus’s wisdom and point out that the compass does not in fact point to true north, but instead points to magnetic north. But even with this knowledge, the statement remains accurate. Even if the compass does not point true north, it is still seeking it. There was a reason the compass was used for so long: because it got about as close to north as you could hope for. Logic acts the same way. Humans are flawed creatures. It is easy to allow our feelings and let our biases skew our reading of the world. But even with this setback, logic still helps us to seek the truth better than any other method.
Unfortunately, the uses of truth and logic in our culture are scarce. People now demand that society conforms to their every opinion and preference; however invalid it proves to be. They forego the use of reason so that they can justify whatever action and lifestyle they so choose. But one way or another, this cannot last forever. A ship can only sail blindly so long before it finds itself dashed upon the rocks.
The path forward seems very clear to me: we can’t sit idly by and watch the culture be capsized. Every person is left with the same choice: to act or to stay silent. We can speak out against evil and lies in the world, or we can let the cultural tide batter us into submission and hope that as it sweeps us away, it will have mercy if we just comply. We can do nothing, or we can use the tools we have to get as close to the truth as possible. Just as a compass seeks north so we must seek truth, despite the backlash that speaking the truth often brings. Because in the end, north doesn’t change, and truth doesn’t either.