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 Interrogations
By
Ophelia Benson
An
eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.
Number Twenty Three: Convention
Philosophically-inclined 5th century Athenians liked to think about the difference between nomos and physis , custom and nature. By convention hot, by convention cold, Democritus said, and in the age when Socrates and Thucydides and Euripides were all likely to bump into one another in the olive-queue, everyone was talking about what was convention and what was reality, what was accepted as true and what was really true.
It's an important distinction, obviously enough. It's also one that's easily lost sight of, whether wilfully or through carelessness – carelessness aided by inclination. If we want to believe X is true, and it's conventional to believe X is true, it's easier to forget that the truth of X may be independent of both our wishes and convention. Fifty million Frenchmen can't be wrong, as the sardonic old saying had it.
And it's not only straightforward wishful thinking that promotes this failure to distinguish. It's also what one might call an overvaluation (or ‘privileging') of the social. We live in a social age. With six billion of us living jammed up against each other, rubbing elbows in the olive-queue, embedded in a lava-flow of opinion and data, we're social as inescapably as we are mammalian.
We live in a social age that values tolerance, sensitivity, compromise, agreement, forbearance, acceptance – i.e. conformity, groupthink, obedience, custom. If there is a dispute about truth, we are often encouraged to choose not a continued unimpeded search for the truth but a mutually acceptable truce. We're advised to choose silence in place of inquiry, tolerance rather than critical thinking. This is understandable in some ways: silence and tolerance are, ceteris paribus , preferable to war or massacre. But one thing tolerance and compromise will not get at, is the truth. Compromise is simply the wrong tool for that particular job – as a table saw is for a dentist, or a scalpel is for a mason. Meera Nanda puts it this way in Prophets Facing Backward (p. 132): ‘…while all people crave recognition of their heritage and culture, they also crave truth, or at least they crave a sense of progressing toward a better understanding of the world…[A]ll cultures, everywhere, seek a growth in their stock of true beliefs, and not just accepted beliefs…'
Acceptance won't do it. If there's a rickety-looking bridge over a deep ravine, we don't need to know that the whole village accepts that it won't break (because it never has, after all), we need to know that it really won't break – if we plan to use it, anyway. If we want to know whether the smallpox vaccination or the MMR vaccination is both safe and protective against deadly disease, we don't need to know what everyone accepts as true, we need to know what is true. Naturally, the two are often the same; but they often aren't. That's not to say the truth is always easy or possible to find – just that it is what we want. Agreement with our community won't do.
But we often think it will do; we often think agreement with our community is just what we do want. We often think we want that far more than we want any pesky old truth. We want to think well of ourselves, and the way to do that at present tends to be by valuing nomos more than physis.
Ophelia
Benson is editor of Butterflies and Wheels - .
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Interrogations
will next be updated end of August 2004
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