Intellectual Honesty in Desperate Times

It is said the truth is the first casualty of war. I believe honesty precedes it.

By intellectual honesty I mean the willingness, indeed predilection, to subject our beliefs and assumptions to rigorous repeated examination because truth can be approached no other way. I believe Socrates had this in mind when he said that the unexamined life is not worth living. The intellectual honesty I am talking about is an internal refusal to accept answers and understandings simply because they are emotionally satisfying, uttered by an unqualified authority or because we cannot deal with the internal chaos that may ensue when we suspend belief in our fundamental verities. If you google the phrase intellectual honesty you will find many references to honesty in test taking or business or science. These are public affairs. What Socrates was concerned with was honesty within the individual.

But why should such an interior discipline be important to others or to society as a whole? I do not ask this question because I assume societal effectiveness is the summum bonum of human value, but because the insistence on intellectual honesty is sometimes viewed as superfluous, especially in desperate times when many demand action not reflection. If reflection does not eventuate in action it is easily deemed to be superfluous at best and obstructionist at worst.

We live in a society and at a time when intellectual honesty is under massive assault. Our daily lives are saturated with advertising, a calculated and insidious enemy of intellectual honesty, and our politics are saturated with deviousness. In brief, we have a culture that does not value truth because, in my opinion, our affluence has made us largely indifferent to reality and hence to truth. We are more concerned with our affects upon others than our relationship to reality. Especially onerous are those that claim to be the moral majority attributing calamities such as Katrina to offenses against their god with no evidence whatsoever and for which there could be no evidence by the very fiction of which their god consists. The fact that millions of people believe this is testament to the continuing childishness of much of humanity and constitutes a continuing danger to mankind. Insanity is not limited to individuals.

Intellectual honesty and pessimism:

Intellectual honesty, especially in greatly unsettled times, looks to many people like pessimism. However, pessimism, like optimism, is an attitude. Neither has anything to do with reality or truth. Intellectual honesty is concerned to keep as close to reality and truth as possible. If the evidence is overwhelmingly against human well being, intellectual honesty will sound like pessimism. If there is good reason to believe that the human condition will be improved, to that degree intellectual honesty will sound like optimism. The basic fact is that reality drives intellectual honesty; optimism and pessimism are driven by our emotions and may or may not be warranted.

Let me give you an example of what I regard as intellectual honesty in desperate times. The poet W. H. Auden was profoundly aware of what Hitler portended for mankind. If you read his poem September 1, 1939 you will see his deep awareness of what was about to happen and its stark contrast to the behavior of ordinary people around him in the bar where he faced up to a catastrophic future with the aim of understanding and expressing the impending, unavoidable catastrophe he saw about to happen. In this poem the passage

” Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages”

articulates the fundamental role of intellectual honesty in desperate times. I have attached the full poem below.

Bob Newhard
*********************
SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.