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Our (Flawed) Experiments with Truth

Posted on September 30, 2021 | Leave a comment

Recently, rereading some personal journals I wrote nearly forty years ago, I came across a reference to the English-language version of a famous autobiography I was then reading, Mohandas Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth. I’ve since lost my copy, and didn’t journal much of the content. Skimming a current online summary, I learned that Gandhi first published the work in his native language, Gujarati, in weekly installments in his newsletter in India during the latter 1920’s. Then, he was actively engaged in the struggle for Indian independence from Great Britain. In his work, he described the first forty some years of his life, with emphasis on the evolution of his concept of satyagraha, often rendered in English as “non-violent passive resistance.” The book has been translated into 15 regional Indian languages and at least a dozen European ones.

The title of the work has stuck with me. While Gandhi’s definition of “truth” has a strong spiritual component, somewhat different from many Western perspectives, the gist of his argument seems to me to be that one may approach “truth” but cannot codify it or force it into any set system. To a Westerner, his search sounds something like our use (and misuse) of the method of scientific inquiry. My understanding of scientific method is that we can only approximate “whole truth,” never totally pin it down. Nevertheless, we conduct successive experiments to align our understanding more closely with expanding portions of truth. Sometimes old explanations are disproved. No theory or explanation is ever final, but only as good as its ability to describe and predict actual phenomena.

The current rancor about multiple cultural and political issues seems to me to be partly due to a misguided attempt to force “truth” to remain static. We watch coverage of the evolving covid-19 pandemic as if there must be one definitive solution to the burgeoning number of infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. We want to reduce a complex set of public health issues to simple “good guys/bad guys” scenarios.

“Tell us the answer,” we demand.

We may frame successive revisions in advice from the CDC or the WHO as evidence of unreliability, rather than as responses to changes in viral variants, levels of contagion and community spread, and mortality/morbidity rates. We may try to assign blame for the initial spread of the virus, as if calling the pandemic the “kung flu” could impact the pandemic’s current global trajectory or destruction. We may try to discount scientists wrestling with a hugely complicated global health challenge as “elitist,” preferring to believe whichever online media pundit best fits our preexisting biases. None of these reductionist ploys coincides with the “truth of covid-19” as we know it so far.

One of my more recent reads touched on the equally divisive issue of climate change. In A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism, historian-author Patrick Allitt quoted former climate scientist and member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Stephen Schneider. Schneider, until his death in 2010, was for many years a professor of biology at Stanford University. An early advocate of reforming public policies to mitigate and adapt to human-induced climate change, Schneider nonetheless recoiled from efforts to pin down exact consequences or remedies or to demonize climate skeptics. Schneider tried to explain, using terms that got and can get quoted out of context to support a variety of views:

“As scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but—which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. …This ‘double ethical bind’ we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope this means being both.” (A lengthier version of Schneider’s views is available online at https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Mediarology/mediarology.html.)

As I try to shield myself and my loved ones from the worst impacts of either potentially deadly viruses or equally deadly weather events and climate shifts, I take some solace in imagining Gandhi and Schneider in a vibrant afterlife, sharing insights and learning from each other’s experiments with truth.

The Mixed Legacies of 9/11

Posted on September 11, 2019 | Leave a comment

The Mixed Legacies of 9/11 —by Jinny Batterson

Recently I had a chance to host a set of international guests—three generations whose eldest member had grown up in newly-independent India as a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi. As she was about to leave our house, Ms. Mehta gave me a small booklet entitled “Hope or Terror: Gandhi and the other 9/11.” According to the booklet, on an earlier September 11, in 1906, Gandhi had launched the “satyagraha” movement that eventually helped lead to India’s independence in 1947.

The booklet’s author, long term American peace activist Michael Nagler, spends most of the pamphlet giving examples of non-violent movements that have achieved worthwhile social aims with a minimum of bloodshed. His pamphlet was published in 2006, just five years after the 2001 terrorist airplane hijackings, destruction and loss of life that have created lingering unhealed physical and psychic wounds in so many Americans, both military and civilian. Nagler points to traits needed to participate more fully in satyagraha-like efforts, to use “integrative power” rather than “threat power.” So what can we learn from previous satyagraha struggles that may be relevant in 2019?

First, we can become familiar with the term “satyagraha,” which has several English translations—it can be rendered as “soul force,” as “love in action,” as “clinging to truth.” Many of us who have heard the term associate it primarily with Gandhi and his “salt march,” a long-distance 1930 walk to publicize and challenge the unfairness of British taxes on salt, a necessary nutrient that washes up freely on some of India’s beaches. Americans may be more familiar with the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose commitment to the related concept of non-violence was partially inspired by his study of Gandhi’s life and methods.

Nagler points out that there are two prongs to satyagraha efforts—one a resistance to coercion, the other a creation of alternative forms of organization that are freer and less coercive. Most of us are likely to be more attuned to one prong than the other, so we need to partner with individuals and groups that are more highly skilled in the other prong. Otherwise, we can too often confuse tactics and methods with strategies and longer-term goals.

The passage in Nagler’s booklet that I found most heartening and persuasive concerns the way that satyagraha/nonviolence works: “Nonviolence sometimes ‘works’ and always works, while by contrast, violence sometimes ‘works’ and never works.”

He explains his use of terminology this way: an action succeeds, or “works” based on its short-term, obvious effects, while it works (without quotes) in how it impacts situations and participants under the surface, producing longer-term effects that are not always obvious at the time.

I’m not sure what commemorations will occur on September 11, 2019. The lingering war in Afghanistan seems no closer to resolution; gun violence in the U.S. claims or maims too many lives; organized violence in many parts of the world dominate our headlines and media reports. Climate change can pose global challenges we often seem powerless to respond to. However, there are other actions going on, other factors at play. One was a last-minute decision to open our home for a night to a family of strangers who are strangers no longer, with an aging Indian matriarch who replanted a seed of hope.