Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense - and What We Can Do About It. - book reviews

Reason, April, 1996 by Nick Gillespie

One of my oldest friends is a rat-commie bastard. We cross paths a few times a year and whenever we do, we argue incessantly about everything under the sun. Other than the fact that we are friends - that we seek out and enjoy one another's company - we have just about nothing in common. After a few minutes of catching up, we start slugging it out with little style and less poise, two flat-footed boxers pounding away at each other. He says the government spends too little on education; I say that the government spends far too much and shouldn't be involved in the first place. He thinks that the minimum wage should be raised; I think that it should be abolished. He claims that corporations own the government; I claim the government owns the corporations - and the rest of us, too. You get the picture.

We have a ritual that ends each session, one designed to congratulate ourselves on our civility and to mollify inflamed passions while yielding not one inch of ideological ground. "Well," one of us invariably says when it's time to hang up the phone or get some sleep, "I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree." My rat-commie bastard of a friend then invokes Voltaire: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." I point out that Voltaire was no commie and turn to F.A. Hayek: "To live and work successfully with others...requires an intellectual commitment to a type of order in which, even on issues which to one are fundamental, others are allowed to pursue different ends." My friend notes that compared to Voltaire, Hayek was no wordsmith and the discussion is over.

But what does it mean - really - to agree to disagree? Can a free and open society tolerate all beliefs, all ideas, all speech? By definition, one assumes, it must. But Lynne Cheney, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and current fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says no way. In fact, she opens her lively, engaging, and sometimes ridiculous polemic Telling the Truth: Why Our Culture and Our Country Have Stopped Making Sense - and What We Can Do About It, with an interesting quote on the matter from George Orwell, patron saint of freedom of thought: "Any attack on intellectual liberty, and on the concept of objective truth, threatens in the long run every department of thought."

Even while espousing absolute intellectual freedom, Orwell immediately places a condition on it: You can't attack "the concept of objective truth." So what if, in exercising your intellectual liberty, you begin to entertain doubts about the "concept of objective truth"? This is similar to puzzling over the limits of free speech. The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech - including speech advocating the repeal of the First Amendment. Hence, a policy of free speech inherently gives a platform to its precise opposite. But if such subversive speech is disallowed, then what's the value of free Speech? Questions like these are not easy nuts to crack and they are worth puzzling over in a liberal order.

Cheney, a Ph.D. in English, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a current fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, doesn't think so, especially regarding the "truth," a term much easier to invoke than it is to describe with any great clarity. Again using the Englishman as an authority, Cheney writes, "As George Orwell showed in 1984, in a world where objective truth is denied, definitions become exceedingly slippery; and anything can mean almost anything else." The result of the "postmodern" rejection of objective truth is the breakdown of "culture" and "country" alluded to in her subtitle, writes Cheney, who calls for nothing less than the intellectual equivalent of total war in the battle for "truth." "The virtues that we have increasingly come to believe we must nurture if we are to be successful as a culture simply make no sense if we turn away from reason and reality. Thus, whether we as a society find the will to live in truth is more than a matter for idle speculation. The answer may very well determine whether we survive."

Telling the Truth casts a wide net and, to a degree, benefits from such tactics. The approach allows her to tackle such issues as grammar school curricula, political correctness, Oliver Stone's films, and critical legal studies. Whatever the topic, her basic refrain is that what we know to be true is becoming hopelessly mingled with what we want to be true. Once that happens, she argues, "The idea of responSibility - of being accountable for one's actions - has no meaning in a world where there is neither truth nor reality, but only endless interpretation."

Cheney is at her best when engaging specific figures and texts rather than making broad, facile pronouncements about the state of American culture. In the chapter "From Truth to Transformation" for instance, she does a close reading of some writings by Michel Foucault, the French scholar whom Cheney rightly identifies as one of the very most influential post-modern thinkers.