by John Ellis
A resurfaced video of a TED talk given by current NPR CEO Katherine Maher has gotten conservatives – whatever that means now – all up in their feels. Titled “What Wikipedia Teaches Us About Balancing Truth and Belief,” Maher’s talk has earned condemnation and scorn. Elon Musk tweeted the dire caution that if Maher’s idea was programmed into AI “it could end civilization.” He then pivots to his big reveal that “Now, no need to imagine. It is already programmed into Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT.” Musk’s Chicken Little-ish croaking was echoed in the trembling warbling of an evolutionary behavioral scientist who shrilled, “‘Truth is subjective’ is precisely the key tenet of postmodernism. This is why I refer to it as the granddaddy of all parasitic idea pathogens.”[1] While I’m all for inserting the phrase “parasitic idea pathogens” into my lexicon, the false belief that truth being subjective is a key tenet of postmodernism is likely evidence that the speaker has never really interacted with postmodern writers or that truth is, ironically, subjective for that speaker. If anything is a parasitic idea pathogen, it’s the continuing inarticulation and fearmongering about what postmodernism is and is not. Relativism makes for a handy bogeyman, though, and Katherine Maher’s words are the strange noises under the bed of frightened conservatives cringing under their threadbare, dusty blanket of logical positivism/foundationalism.
Diving into the online conservative wormhole and it’s easy to find angry denunciations of Maher’s purported relativism. Many of them use her speech as a springboard to condemn the mainstream media as not being in the truth telling business or to denounce wokeness as a menacing evil. Even people I otherwise respect have gone in on her. Australian theologian Dr. Michael F. Bird claimed in a tweet that, “Everyone, conservative or progressive, should find this a little unsettling. In effect: ‘Seeking truth causes divisions therefore embrace your own truth.’ That’s not the method that led to the discovery of the smallpox vaccine.” Except that’s not what she said, and it’s definitely not what she meant.
Ironically, and quite sadly, many of the angriest voices condemning Katherine Maher as the mouthpiece of a relativistic wokeness intent on destroying our society would have a different spin on the positivity of vaccines than Dr. Bird does; their truth is different than his. And that was Maher’s point. In plain English, though, it is fair to ask, what is her point?
You can watch the video below. I’ve included the entire presentation and not just the short clip making the rounds on social media (the controversial clip begins around the 2:30 mark).
With her talk, Maher was attempting to put into words what she believes is a better and more helpful way for humans to engage in dialogue with those with whom they disagree. As Maher put it, “[Wikipedia’s] model pushes us to work together.” Pointing out that politics and religion are “the hard things where we are prone to disagree,” she adds, “in our normal lives, these contentious conversations tend to erupt over disagreement about what the truth actually is.” After working as the CEO of Wikimedia, she’s concluded “that perhaps, for our most tricky disagreements, seeking the truth and seeking to convince others of the truth might not be the right place to start. In fact, a reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
She then quickly adds, “Now, that is not to say that the truth doesn’t exist, nor is it to say that the truth isn’t important. Clearly the search for the truth has led us to do great things, to learn great things.” A few seconds later, though, she utters the offending phrase that “we acknowledge there are many different truths.” She goes on to tell the audience that, “in the spirit of that, I’m certain that the truth exists for you and probably for the person sitting next to you. But this may not be the same truth.” Continuing, she adds the important context, “This is because the truth of the matter is very often for many people what happens when we merge facts about the world with our beliefs about the world. So, we all have different truths. They’re based on things like where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive us.”
I’m sympathetic, to a point, to those who, after having been catechized in the belief that postmodernism is anti-truth and evil, react negatively to Maher’s words. Their response provides evidence in support of her point, in fact. However, to be fair, part of the blame lies in her imprecision; she uses the word truth in two different ways without delineating how and when. She does clarify that she’s warning about, “When we use our personal truth when we come to conversations around collective decision making on important issues we start to run into problems.” She makes the salient point that often big conversations – like arguments around things like climate change and pandemics – are more productive when we seek to find common ground. I don’t think anyone finds it controversial when she says that in these big conversations we should find “common understandings about the root of the problem and some assumptions about how we might get out of it.” Her point is that it’s problematic when “we’re focusing on what divides us instead of what we can agree upon and that allows us to have conversations about the truth in a way that focuses on what we believe rather than what can be known.” She warns that “if we use our personal truths to do this, we end up having conversations about our values and our identity. … and then we’re focusing on what divides us instead of what we can agree upon.”
For Maher, what we should do instead is focus on “the best of what can be known right now. And the good news is that we can know a lot of things. … We shift from focusing on one key truth to instead finding minimal viable truth. Minimum viable truth means getting it right enough, enough of the time to be useful enough to enough people.” Another way – a colloquial way – she could’ve put that last sentence is to be careful not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, which I believe is a helpful truism.
Her remarks should be taken in their totality and not reduced to the most controversial soundbites. The fact that she uses climate change as her main example should be enough to call into question those who accuse her of relativism. Obviously, Katherine Maher resolutely believes that climate change is real and is largely a product of humanity’s actions. She also obviously and resolutely believes that we should take action to reverse climate change. That implies that she acknowledges hard and fast facts as truth. Now, important caveat, please do not become distracted by her stance on climate change if you deny that climate change is largely man-made. Don’t get hung up on your ideological and political differences with her on this point.[2] Instead, please be intellectually honest enough to focus on this: Do you believe that she is asking people to deny truths about climate change? Or, rather, is she asking people to focus on finding common ground about climate change in order to move the conversation forward profitably? And if so, do you believe that she’s encouraging this in order to better equip those who believe that climate change is real and largely a product of humanity’s actions – those who already agree with her – to be in a better dialectical position to affect change? Of course, she has the desire to convince climate change skeptics that their truth is wrong and her truth is correct. Her endgame isn’t a mushy middle of the lowest common denominator; it’s to empower humans to affect positive change. This means that for her there is a truth of the matter. Unfortunately, her shifting between definitions of the word truth obscures her point. But peeling back her comments on climate change can help us see that maybe, just maybe, Maher isn’t always defining the word truth the way Michael Bird, for example, did in his criticism of her. So, let’s look a little further at how she defines truth.
At some points, Maher uses truth as a synonym for facts. Most of the time, she uses truth as a synonym for knowledge. Note that at one point she is adamant that truth exists and is important, saying, “Clearly the search for the truth has led us to do great things, to learn great things.” Some of those great things, calling again back to Michael Bird’s criticism,[3] includes the development of vaccines. In that instance, truth and facts are synonyms for Maher. Criticizing her without interacting with her on this point may be intellectually disingenuous or lazy. However, she also says, “the truth of the matter is very often for many people what happens when we merge facts about the world with our beliefs about the world. So, we all have different truths. They’re based on things like where we come from, how we were raised, and how other people perceive us.”
“Merging facts about the world with our beliefs about the world” is a good, if not truncated, definition of knowledge. This, of course, implies that there is a distinction between facts and knowledge – or truth and knowledge, if you will. Unfortunately, this is a distinction that is a bridge too far for most people who have been epistemologically steeped in classical liberalism (the Western/Christendom worldview).
In her masterful book Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology, a book that I wish every Christian would read, philosopher Esther Lightcap Meek makes it plain that when most of us think of knowledge, “we tend to picture it as information, facts, statements, and proofs. Knowledge consists exclusively of statements, pieces of information, facts. … Knowledge is facts.”[4] The epistemological term for that is foundationalism.
In his contribution to the Foundations of Philosophy Series, Professor Richard Feldman distills foundationalism to, “There are justified basic beliefs. All justified nonbasic beliefs are justified in virtue of their relation to justified basic beliefs.”[5] Foundationalism dovetails with logical positivism that is best known via A.J. Ayer’s verification principle: a propositional truth is true if, and only if, it is an analytic truth (true by definition – all bachelors are unmarried, for example) or is empirically verifiable. Another way to put that is that the propositional statement can be falsified. For example, if I make the propositional statement that it is raining outside, that statement can be verified (or falsified) by looking out the window. It’s either raining or it’s not. It’s true or it’s not true. This is how we in Western culture, especially in conservative circles, are taught to understand knowledge and truth; facts speak for themselves, or another popular way to put it is facts over feelings.[6] In other words, similar to how Katherine Maher (unfortunately) uses the term truth at certain points, we tend to view knowledge and truth as synonymous. This is why it’s so easy to consign her to the prison of relativism; she’s unwittingly – and unhelpfully – steering us into our epistemological blind spot. I call it a blind spot because that’s not how knowledge works.
Discussing the differences between the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems, philosopher Michael Polanyi makes the point that even though humanity was dethroned from our seat at the center of the universe by Copernicus, the Copernican system is still as anthropocentric as Ptolemy’s. He notes, “the difference being merely that [the Copernican system] preferred to satisfy a different human affection.”[7] And that human affection is the desire for epistemological objectivity.
Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy by Polanyi shook the scientific community when it was first published in 1958. Taking aim at both rule-bound logic and the narrow empiricism of logical positivism, Polanyi emphasized the “personal participation of the knower in all acts of understanding [emphasis kept].”[8] For him, the logical positivist/foundational definition of objectivity and any epistemologies with that definition at its center are fool’s gold. As he put it, “as human beings, we must inevitably see the universe from a center lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the exigencies of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our picture of the world must lead to absurdity.”[9] There is no such thing as a view from nowhere.
As Esther Lightcap Meek helpfully elucidates, “Knower and known are two persons in a relationship.”[10] Since there is no such thing as a view from nowhere, we always interact with facts within a context – a context of time and place, social settings, shared values and beliefs, etc. Knowledge is relational, ergo knowledge is socially constructed. This means that Katherine Maher is correct that people have different truths, if we’re defining truth as knowledge. The thing is, we shouldn’t conflate truth and knowledge. Viewing truth and knowledge as distinct (yet related) allows us to claim that knowledge is socially constructed while truth is not. Maher should have said that we have different relationships with the truth, because that’s what she meant.
As an Uber driver, I experience (gain knowledge of) the fact (the truth) that people have different relationships with the truth on a nearly daily basis. A wide range of people climb into my backseat, and a large percentage of them are happy to share their “truths” with me. Often, my “truth” is vastly different than their “truth.” Profitable interpersonal communication would be undermined before it even really got going if I were to tackle their “truth” with bare facts. As Cornelius Van Til wisely pointed out, there are no uninterpreted facts. Instead, and assuming I’m interested in having a profitable dialogue and not merely just nodding my head along in hopes of securing a tip and a five-star rating, it’s imperative for me to deconstruct, if you will and as best I can in a too short period of time, their experiences from the facts in discussion.
Maybe this example will help: I have a family member who insists that the Jim Crow era wasn’t that bad. From his perspective – from his “truth” – that’s a fact. Society worked in ways that benefited him and those who looked like him. Life was all apple pie, fireworks, and home-made ice cream. Except, as I’ve fruitlessly attempted to explain to him, his relationship with the facts was not the same as the relationship with the facts of Black people who toiled and suffered under the racist, oppressive Jim Crow laws. Whose truth, if we’re going to use one of Maher’s usages of the term, is correct? And this is where the muddying of the terms can enter if we’re not careful, it’s true – a fact – that my relative’s experience under Jim Crow was good. Likewise, it’s true – a fact – that Black people suffered bad experiences under Jim Crow.
My family member’s experience has shaped his relationship with the facts of Jim Crow. Likewise, the experience of Black people under Jim Crow have shaped their relationship with the facts. When discussing the problems and potential solutions, whose truth should be centered? If truth is understood as relational knowledge instead of facts, it changes the rubric for dialogue, which was Katherine Maher’s point.
Saying that people have different truths isn’t relativistic if we understand that truth is being used as a synonym for relational knowledge and not facts. Unfortunately, Katherine Maher isn’t the first person, and she won’t be the last, set up as a deceitful straw man so that defenders of classical liberalism (the Western/Christendom worldview) can knock it over while gleefully chortling that liberals – whatever that means now – want to destroy civilization.
In his book Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelical’s Looming Catastrophe, Voddie Baucham[11] gives the dire warning that “Critical Theory denies objective truth.”[12] As proof he pivots to quoting a college text book by scholars Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo in which they write (Baucham includes this quote in Fault Lines), “An approach based on critical theory calls into question that objectivity is desirable or even possible.”[13] But Baucham isn’t being honest. Sensoy and DiAngelo aren’t talking about truth in that quote; they’re discussing knowledge. In the very next sentence, they explain, “The term used to describe this way of thinking about knowledge is that knowledge is socially constructed.” They then add, “When we refer to knowledge as socially constructed we mean that knowledge is reflective of the values and interests of those who produce it. This concept captures the understanding that all knowledge and all means of knowing are connected to a social context.” Farther down the page – page 29, please read it for yourself, I’ll loan you my copy of the book if you live near me – we read that, “For this reason the concept of positionality has become a key tool in analyzing knowledge construction. Positionality asserts that knowledge is dependent upon a complex web of cultural values, beliefs, experiences, and social positions.”[14]
If you’re wondering what Sensoy and DiAngelo believe about truth, later in that same chapter in their textbook teaching critical theory as a positive analytic tool for engaging social justice they affirm that, “It is important to distinguish between opinions, which are often based in commonsense understandings, and critical thinking, which is based on expertise through study. Unfortunately, popular culture promotes the idea that all opinions are equal.”[15]
Did you catch that? Students attending “woke” universities teaching critical theory are being taught that not all opinions are equal. And this is because critical theory – and postmodernism, in general – does believe that truth exists. Instead, those students are being epistemically challenged because they, as do we, “live in a culture that teaches us that human objectivity (or independence from socialization) is not only possible, but that it can be readily attained through simple choice.” Sensoy and DiAngelo then provide the counterculture attack on the outworking of our culture’s idol of objectivity that deceitfully coos to us that, “if I want to be an individual who is not influenced by the forces of socialization around me, then I can just decide that I am an individual who is not influenced by those forces.”[16]
An irony that should not be lost in all this is that the supposed forces of evil – critical theory, CRT, postmodernism, etc. – are systems that actually challenge the Western creation of expressive, autonomous individualism. The Western/Christendom worldview is the system holding out the attractive fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil telling us that we, too, can be like God – we can have objective knowledge.[17] I understand that that is the exact opposite of what the fearmongers like Voddie Bauchman, Neil Shenvi, Christopher Rufo, James Lindsay, Alisa Childers, and Elon Musk are saying. And this is my point (and please forgive my use of caps lock): YOU ARE BEING LIED TO!
I’ve been banging this drum for years now. In article after article, I’ve leaned on Foucault’s “power is knowledge” and Charles Taylor’s thesis in Sources of the Self that “Selfhood and the good, or in another way selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes.”[18] And I’ve done so because professing Christians are blindly following the pied pipers of classical liberalism. With her TED talk, Katherine Maher, even if unwittingly, challenged the song of those pied pipers. It’s no wonder that conservatives have dog-piled her on social media; they’re frightened by what she said because they can see their position of power and prestige being taken from them. Defending the belief that fallen, finite humans can have objective knowledge is of tantamount importance for them. So important, in fact, that misrepresenting and even lying about what she said are tactics they willingly employ. As Jesus made clear in John 8:44, the devil “is a liar and the father of lies.”
God created us as relational beings. This includes knowledge. As Esther Lightcap Meek helpfully points out, “[Our] defective default epistemic setting we inherit actually goes against the grain of our humanness.”[19] Understanding this, as Katherine Maher was attempting to make clear, enables us to better love our neighbors and affect positive change.
[1] The evolutionary behavioral scientist’s name is Gad Saad, if you want to look him up on Twitter to confirm that I’ve quoted him correctly.
[2] I suspect that some of the negative responses come from people who used her mention of climate change as a dialectical off ramp straight into a condemnation of her purported relativism. With climate change being a trigger word for some, their emotional response may have been too big of an obstacle for them to get past in order to hear what she was actually communicating in her TED talk.
[3] I’m not trying to pick on Michael Bird, but I’d be lying if I said that his comments didn’t disappoint me.
[4] Esther Lightcap Meek, Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2011), 7.
[5] Richard Feldman, Epistemology (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 52.
[6] An interesting point that is often lost is that we respond to facts emotionally before we respond rationally. This means that our rationality/reason is always framed by what we feel. It is non-sensical to argue for facts over feelings because that’s only possible for a non-sentient being.
[7] Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 4.
[8] Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, xxvii.
[9] Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 3.
[10] Meek, Loving to Know, 41.
[11] Because of my articles on CRT, Fault Lines is recommended to me more than any other book. What those concerned about my wokeness and Marxism (I’m not a Marxist, for the record) do not know is that I practically have Baucham’s book memorized. It is, without question, one of the worst, most deceitful books I’ve ever read. Going all the way back to when it was first published in 2021, friends – different friends than the ones who believe I’m a Marxist trying to smuggle heresies into the church – have asked me to write a review of the book. So far, I’ve resisted because there is soooo much wrong with Fault Lines that I’m afraid my review would be a 12-part series, and I don’t have time to write a book refuting Voddie Baucham as much as I may want to.
[12] Voddie Baucham, Fault Lines: The Social Justice Movement and Evangelical’s Looming Catastrophe (Washington, D.C.: Salem Books, 2021), xiv.
[13] Ozlem Sensoy and Robin DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal? An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2017), 29.
[14] Sensoy and DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal?, 29.
[15] Sensoy and DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal?, 33.
[16] Sensoy and DiAngelo, Is Everyone Really Equal?, 40.
[17] One of the problems in this discussion is that it’s easy to find self-professed liberals who give credence to the warnings from the anti-woke crowd. The thing is, the words and statements are almost always uttered by someone – usually someone famous – who doesn’t understand critical theory, CRT, or poststructuralism any better than the critics. While they believe that they are “progressive” – whatever that means – they are still a product of classical liberalism and their language reflects that while incorrectly using the language of postmodernism, for lack of a better term. In other words, LeBron’s tweets should not be viewed as epistemologically representative of CRT. Likewise, Alyssa Milano’s tweets should not be viewed as epistemologically representative of critical feminist theory. I hope this makes sense.
[18] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 3.
[19] Meek, Loving to Know, 7.
Practically Known Theology 