Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [39]
The first quote links truthiness to wishful thinking, or perhaps self-delusion: I believe it’s true because I want it to be true. The second quote makes it clearer that I take something to be true with either a lack of evidence for it being true, or even in light of direct evidence of its falsity. I then become entrenched such that no one disagreeing with me could possibly be right.
But it’s at this point that I think the way Colbert defines truthiness in character diverges significantly from how he defines it out of character. From here on, I’ll refer to the out-of-character satirist as Colbert and the on-air character as Stephen to help keep us straight. First let’s look at what Stephen has to say about truthiness. Stephen says truthiness is trusting in yourself (in your gut) and trusting in people who’ve proven reliable (following the heart, or knowing their heart). Colbert, on the other hand, sees truthiness as an abandoning of truth and fact in preference for a self-indulgent ideology. The problem I see, however, is that anyone who buys into the truthiness as Stephen defines it is allegedly engaging in the truthiness that Colbert loathes. The satire can cloud the issue here, since the character of Stephen definitely engages in the truthiness the way Colbert views it. We need to keep Stephen’s concept of truthiness separate from his own behavior in light of it.
The Gut and the Heart
In character, Stephen defines truthiness in terms of rejecting external authorities (like dictionaries and reference books) in favor of relying on one’s gut intuitions and experience. After all, we are supposed to think Harriet Miers’s is an absurd nomination based on standards of competence set up by powerful know-it-alls, but Bush knows her heart. Apparently Bush is less interested in whether she meets formal qualifications set up by others and is satisfied that her character is sufficient to qualify her.
Bush and his ilk are obviously the target of Colbert’s satire and he hits his target dead on. But does this mean that every time I go with my heart or gut over my head I am wrong? Maybe not. For one thing, it’s not quite clear what ‘going with my heart’ even means. Colbert implies this means going against the facts, both in the comments above and in his roasting of Bush during the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner: “Now I know there’s some polls out there saying this man has a thirty-two-percent approval rating. But guys like us, we don’t pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking ‘in reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias.”84 Bush seems to be an irresponsible figure because his political rhetoric and activities dismiss relevant and inconvenient facts. Okay, that’s bad. But nothing prevents me from paying attention to facts while still valuing my gut and my heart.
Think of it this way. I have had to make decisions about applicants for jobs based on the pieces of paper that represent them. When it comes time to interview a set of applicants, I’ve found that the people I met are very different than the people on paper. Applications list all sorts of qualifications and accomplishments, which are facts. But they do not fill in other sorts of information that would be important to make the decision. There’s another set of facts that the interview is supposed to help provide. What’s their character? How well do they work with others? Will they thrive in the actual work environment that I and my colleagues face everyday? But answers to such questions are not opposed to facts. They’re just different kinds of facts discovered by different kinds of methods.
When I say I know someone’s heart, I probably have evidence for my claim. I’ve seen them in hard situations; I’ve talked to them about their most personal opinions and prejudices. Of course, sometimes people think they know someone