麻豆社

Good morning. On top of the bombs and having to flee their homes what is really upsetting Ukrainians is that when they ring their friends in Russia they find that Ukraine is being blamed for the war. They have been fed a very different story. So we have two totally different narratives. What makes us think that our narrative is the true one? After all, every state has its own perspective, and we share the same flawed humanity as Russians. One simple fact. In our society lies can in the end be exposed.

During the cold war I paid a number of visits to the old Soviet Union, and then again, after the wall came down, when I talked to someone who had been a senior civil servant in the old regime. I asked him what he thought could prevent such a totalitarian state arising again. He thought for a little and replied, 鈥淭he memory of what went wrong鈥�. My instinctive reaction at the time was that this was a very flimsy basis to prevent another despotism, and so sadly it has proved. The only secure bulwark against authoritarian rule are really strong public institutions, the rule of law backed by an independent judiciary, a free press, and a government accountable to a parliament that has been genuinely freely elected. These safeguard the possibility of truth in public life and that truth desperately matters.

Truth is fundamental to all life. The worst crime in the scientific community is falsifying the results of an experiment. The worst crime in journalism is making up a story that never happened. The worst crime in democratic politics is lying to parliament. Truth is essential to any kind of civilised life-more than that there could be no possibility of any human relationship without the assumption that most people, most of the time, are speaking the truth; and without that assumption there could be no rational life and therefore no homo sapiens at all.

The remarkable French intellectual Simone Weil wrote

Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go towards the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms.

No wonder Plato and Neo-Platonists down the ages have thought that Truth, along with Beauty and Goodness have a kind of life of their own, however difficult this is philosophically to make sense of. But whatever we make of the metaphysics, one thing is certain. The importance of truth in both private and public life cannot be underestimated.

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