The Truth will set you free and piss you off
Posted: May 17th, 2009 | Author: John | Filed under: True Stuff | Tags: philosophy, pop culture, story, truth | 3 Comments »“The truth will set you free. Not: the truth will make you happy. Not: the truth will please you. Not: the truth will confirm your prejudices. The truth will liberate you; set you free; …the truth will set you free and piss you off; you will be freed and angered…for no other reason than that your notion of freedom is so tiny, so limited, so restricted and cramped. Do you think “freedom” is about making choices? Or about “choosing options”? Really?”
This quote from an unfinished homily by Fr. Philip Neri Powell was brought to my attention by the good folks over at The Guild Review. I choose not to engage religious themes on this blog, however I was struck by the zeal and eloquence of Fr. Powell and I liked the above passage. I like that it blasts the idea of “choice” as being freedom. I think that an excellent story reveals how our choices actually lead us to greater or lesser experience of freedom.
I’d like to juxtapose this with another quote that struck me as equally zealous and eloquent in Dave Egger’s new book You Shall Know Your Velocity.
“I wanted synthesis and the plain truth– without the formalities of debate. There was nothing left to debate, no heated discussion that seemed to progress toward any healing solution. I wanted only truth, as simple as you could serve it, straight down the middle, not the product of dialectic but sui generis: Truth! We all knew the truth but we insisted on distorting things to make it seem like we were all, with each other, in such profound disagreement about everything– that first and foremost there were two sides to everything, when of course there were not; there was one side only, one side always: Just as this earth is round, the truth is round, not two-sided but round and–” – Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Your Velocity.
Perhaps this is why the Truth can piss you off – because it is so slippery, multivariate, three-dimensional and subjectively perceived.
In response to comments on recent posts about the shallowing of Hollywood stories, I would claim that it’s better to have a purely entertaining story than a story that tries to communicate “truth.” I say this because preachy stories ring hollow, which is worse than shallow. Having no doctrinal religious convictions myself, I can understand how some people are turned off by a story that ultimately communicates “truth” as religious doctrine. Everybody experiences truth in different ways, with different vocabularies of experience and metaphor. If your Catholic stories and vocabulary communicate truth very well for you, then that is very well and good. If your Hindu vocabulary of myth and ceremony communicates truth very well for you, then good. However, to try to teach a new vocabulary of religion and a new belief about the world is too much to communicate in a movie. For this reason, for a story to communicate to a wider audience, it must speak with the vocabulary of the audience’s common experience. Universally human stories set within a realm of experience shared by most everyone in our culture have much more impact and truth-revealing power than the vocabulary of a specific religious tradition.
Some people bemoan the lack of “purpose” in Hollywood’s latest stories – and this is indeed a symptom of trying to appeal to the greatest common desire: to feel. But for the majority of people who have not cultivated an intellectual discipline for investigating philosophical matters, feeling is the primary avenue to understanding what life is all about. And maybe this is the most human avenue to Truth; Hinduism calls the path of loving devotion bhakti. Catholic mystics have tried to communicate divine revelation through poetry and allegory. An unmediated, immediate feeling about truth is perhaps better than trying to express inevitably half truths in black and white syllogisms. By taking us into the life of a character, we can experience vicariously the confusion, the exhilaration, the catharsis. Stories have the ability to shake our preconceptions of how the world works. A good story operates on an intellectual level and an emotional level – it can change our worldview and adjusts how we feel about certain things. If it is well told (good script and production quality) it enhances the effect, hitting us with the Aristotelian rhetorical trifecta of logos, ethos and pathos.
There is such a fine line between making a truth-claim while keeping a sense of wonder. A good story allows us to warm ourselves near the glow of something beautiful without trying to possess it, thus limiting it within our own capacity. It’s not easy to courageously make a truth claim while still being in Keatsian “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable grasping after fact and reason.”
I’m not so quick to turn my nose up at pop culture. Perhaps there are a lot of things going on beneath the surface of a pop song or a blockbuster movie – simply dive into the “why” of its popularity. Things have widespread appeal because they hit at something universal (and yes, sex and violence are universal human experiences as well). I don’t like to take sides against stories that hit at the sensitive nerve of society and stir controversy. They are not necesarily more true or untrue. I believe that they are valuable in that they spur dialogue and thought. Even Dan Brown. Any thoughts on Angels and Demons?
Only one comment to share on Dan Brown, and that relates to conspiracy theories generally.
I am extremely skeptical of stories which center around conspiracy theories. Not because they're not fun – oh, they most definitely are! – but because they're dishonest. It seems to me that, nine times out of ten, conspiracy theories appeal to man's desire to cut corners, to find an easier way, to avoid work and avoid responsibility. The basic lesson of most conspiracy theories is that things are not really your fault, but the fault of some shadowy person or organization.
This paradigm can be seen at work not only in novels and films, but also in pop psychology – "It's not your fault; the world around you is oppressing you because you are XYZ, something that you can't change" – and in false religion, which offers easy answers to difficult questions – "Just say these magic words, recite this secret formula…"
This is not to say that all stories involving conspiracy theories are bad. I particularly enjoyed Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, but it is a critique of the conspiracy genre, rather than typical of it. Moreover, I enjoyed National Treasure as well. While this might engender a bit of naivety that around every corner are clues leading to great treasures, it is the kind of conspiracy which does not lead to victimhood: if I work hard I may find a treasure, but there is no shadowy organization I can blame for my problems.
Though I don't fully agree with it, for those interested, Eco has written a critique (partly) about Dan Brown: http://www.umbertoeco.com/en/about-god-and-dan-br...
Man, Umberto Eco is right on. And I agree with your take on conspiracies – they simplify things. How do people imagine that there exist such coordinated, organized methods of control? A great quote from the Eco article:
"We are supposed to live in a sceptical age. In fact, we live in an age of outrageous credulity. "
Thanks for the link.
I also enjoyed the Eco essay.
John, I grant many of your points. I especially agree that a moralistic film is invariably a bad one: worse than a popcorn action movie. But it is also true the the more universals a film is able to touch, the more harmoniously the chord resounds with an audience. And this extends to the deepest universal of human experience: the desire to identify our greatest purpose (in the context of death). This is not to say that every hero must actually fight this dragon, so long as he is either making his way toward it (comedy) or learning from his failure to do so (tragedy).
Without that great Orientation a film lacks believability. I find this trend in movies like the Coens' recent Burn After Reading: At the end we ask, what happened? who did good? who did bad? do natural consequences exist? and ultimately, does anything matter? The film's deliberately disoriented view of human purpose rings false to me. It has some very funny scenes and lines, and it even raises some interesting questions: but it lives in a vacuum without orientation to good and evil which are inherent in the sane human experience. It therefore lacks pertinence to my life: a good story wasted.
A body must have a skeleton or it will not stand. In the same way a story must have some moral orientation or it will not agree with our common human experience (or at least the vast majority of the paying audience's experience). It can be propped up with humor, with glamor, with sex, with violence– with emotion– but no surrogate will last. And I see more propping today than ever before.