What is a Fact
1/6/2021
In 1965, in my first week of doctoral program, one of my professors asked me us to write an essay on what we believed at the time was a very easy question: What is Reality? I can’t remember my answer at the time but I can assure you in was naïve and uninformed. Since then, I have learned that reality is differentiated from many other human experiences by the frequency of brain waves, the acuity of our senses, our capacities for long and short term memory, the context in which our lives happen AND the words we use to describe our reality. There is so much more but suffice it to say that, for most people, reality is probably defined as I probably defined it in that paper 55 years ago: reality is what is real and not what is imagined. Reality is tangible and not abstract. Reality is what is true. But reality is none of that and all of that.
Today, we are repeatedly confronted with the meme that people are welcome to their own opinions but not to their own facts. On the face of it, like my prof’s question those many years ago, it is a statement that seems to make sense and be obvious. Facts are facts, opinions are opinions. Facts are things that are true and exist independent of our mind while opinions are based on the meanings we create in our own minds. Right?
I fear not. Like “reality” the definition of what constitutes a fact is quite elusive and slippery. And it turns out that today, the definition of a “fact” is merely someone’s opinion of what constitutes a fact. Apparently, we can have CNN facts, MSNBC facts, Fox facts, internet facts, liberal facts, conservative facts, and our own set of facts that may agree or disagree with everyone else’s facts.
Is it a fact that James Clapper lied before Congress? Or that James Comey lied? Is it a fact that Hillary Clinton, in violation of the law, kept classified information on a server and lied about doing so? Is it a fact that none of them has experienced any consequences for violating the law? Are these facts? Because today, “facts” are supposedly “real” and are presumed to be “proof” in support of opinion. Facts are alleged to be unq
What is the difference between a fact and a disputed fact? If I dispute someone else’s facts, am I simply expressing an opinion while their facts carry the argument? Have human beings faced this problem of what constitutes a Truth, a Reality, a Fact before this very confusing era in our history? Well, of course. In civilized societies, when people have disputes, those disputes are measured against a law or a rule. The solution to disputes is to have the facts of the dispute, the evidence, tested against the law to see if it conforms to the law or does not. And the process is simple because the law is always crystal clear and well defined, right? Well, sometimes but not most times.
There is the law and there is interpretation and application of the law. So sometimes, the law itself or its interpretation is in dispute. What then? In the United States, we turn to our fundamental laws as they exist in the Constitution. But, as we know, the interpretation of the words of the Constitution itself can be disputed.
The way Americans resolve issues of facts in dispute is to have trials, present all the evidence (evidence is NOT just facts) and then allow a jury to debate this evidence and come to a conclusion about the charges. And, in most cases, their decision must be unanimous.
The “fact” is that the way we resolve disputes in America is to hand the dispute over to a panel of people, Supreme Court Justices, juries, etc. The “fact” is that the way we decide what’s true or real or a fact is that we pose the problem and all the information available about that problem to a group of people capable of sifting through it to come to a decision. We do this on all manner of issues great and small from legal proceedings to determining whether a person is sane or not.
That process is called the “order” part of law and order. The order is a defined process for determining truth, reality, and facts. The process usually involves a selected panel of disinterested parties hearing all the information about a dispute from all parties in the dispute and rendering, oh my goodness, an “opinion”. This is the orderly process that generations of people in America have grown accustomed to accepting as the legitimate method of determining facts and differentiating them from opinion.
We are in a very dangerous time now. We are being told that there are systemic biases in the order part of the judicial system. We are led to believe that the system can only be trusted if the opinions of the jury or judges are untainted by bias. And then we are told that no judge or jury can be free of bias.
This is not a new complaint about a flawed system. It is a much older idea wearing new clothes. It is the progressive claim, born in the academy and now embedded in journalism, education, and law, that true neutrality has never existed and never can. If no juror, no judge, no reporter, no institution can ever be free of bias, then objectivity itself is exposed as a myth, a story the powerful tell to make their version of events look inevitable rather than chosen. Once that idea takes hold, the conclusion follows on its own: there is no such thing as an unbiased process, only competing biases, and therefore no verdict, no ruling, no reported story can claim any special authority over any other.
This sounds like humility. It is actually the end of adjudication. A process does not have to be perfect to be trusted. It has to be good enough, and agreed upon, and better than the alternative, which is no process at all. That is what a jury has always been: not a guarantee of perfect objectivity but a shared agreement to accept an imperfect process as legitimate anyway. Progressive relativism does not offer a better process. It only insists that no process can ever be legitimate. And once people believe that, they stop believing the outcome of any trial, any ruling, any story is worth accepting simply because it came through the proper channel.
These conditions result in the breakdown of the order part of law and order. No longer do people agree to accept the opinions and authority of the panel, and without that agreement, disputes cannot be settled. Well, they can be settled, but usually that other way is through violence. This is precisely the opening the anarchist exploits. He does not have to argue that courts and juries and editors should be abolished. Relativism has already done that work for him by convincing enough people that these institutions were never legitimate to begin with. The anarchist does not create the vacuum. He simply moves into it once relativism has emptied the room of any authority he would otherwise have to answer to.
Individuals or small groups of individuals are declaring themselves to be arbiters of the facts, refusing to hear contradictory evidence, and acting as prosecutor, judge and jury outside of the judicial process. They do this in ways great and small. Young men were being accused of rape on college campuses but denied their right to a defense. People are being fired from their jobs for their political beliefs, people are being “cancelled” and their livelihoods destroyed because of their religious beliefs.
You may not have any idea how dangerous this is but I hope you do. This is no less than the destruction of the order part of law and order. The “order” is the orderly process of settling disputes among people. That is precisely where the facts are measured against the LAW and not against the opinions of the mob. That is the greatest danger America is facing today. The orderly process has been corrupted and fallen into the hands of a few. And the facts are not being measured against the law but against the opinions of a mob.
This is not a partisan issue. Without Law and Order, our nation descends into factions of lynch mobs and kangaroo courts. There is an element in society that want to see that process destroyed. There is an element that want to control through mob violence. They are not Democrats or Republicans. Regardless of what name they ago by, they are anarchists who seek to destroy the foundation of Constitutional order. And they have hoodwinked people, smart people, into believing they are fighting for the “common good”……as defined by them. They are the greatest danger America faces today.
The danger is not your neighbor who is a Democrat or a Republican. The danger is the anarchist who acts to sow mistrust in a system that requires trust but offers no alternative to that system except their own biased opinions. And as we argue as a country over what the facts are, there are people working very hard to undermine our trust in each other. The more they can divide us on the issues, the more we see each other as “not like me” and consequently, create greater mistrust. And while we argue about whose interpretation of the “facts” we should believe, we are contributing to the undermining of the orderly resolution of disputes. The less we talk to each other and reason together, the more we undermine the nations order. And notice, that the “cancel culture’s” whole purpose is to stifle dissent. To get us to stop talking to each other. The danger does not lie in our differences. People have differed on issues since the beginning of time. The danger lies in destroying the orderly process of resolving those disputes and differences.
