Stephen Colbert and Philosophy - Aaron Allen Schiller [45]
Obviously, we’d all love for interpreting politics to be as easy as our ordinary judgments about whether there is a copy of I Am America on the table in front of us. If it were, we’d better be able to distinguish cases of true judgments from deluded truthy judgments. And truthy judgments would all be deluded, since one would have to deny fairly obvious truths in favor of any opposing gut feeling. So I’d claim to know my lover’s heart and deny the videotaped evidence of her affair. Or I’d have a gut feeling that Senator Larry Craig or Pastor Ted Haggard really weren’t hiding in the closet behind a door of homophobia or in self-denial, and everyone else around me would know that I’m in as much denial as those two are. There wouldn’t be any instances where my gut was the only thing, or even the primary thing, to go on. That would be a great world of clarity for those of us who bother to know what the truth is.
But our political forums are full of politicians who speak with cross-purposes, media outlets that compete for ratings and funding, and special interest groups vying for access amid the ubiquitous commercial messages. There’s far too much information from far too many sources for individual citizens to stay on top of it all. And all that information is coming from sources that are sometimes truthful, sometimes deceitful and very often full of bullshit.
So what should we do? Well, if we’re truth-oriented, we can either spend the time and energy trying to uncover the truth or rely on others and hope they are doing the hard work for us. Perhaps I can focus all my energy on an issue or two so that my view will be well informed and defensible; but I couldn’t focus my attention on every important issue. And how will I pick out reliable sources for those other issues? I’ll use my gut and heart. Because it is so difficult to wade through the mixture of truth, falsity, and bullshit, truthiness may often be what we ought or need to rely on in a democracy.
As far as assessing politicians goes, there are often very good reasons to doubt the authenticity of statements made by an office-holder or office-seeker: party pressure, placation of the constituency, response to opinion polls, lobbyists, corporate interests and more. When supporting or voting for a candidate one can only be responding to what feels true, that is, an optimistic trust in the candidate. It is not that ‘facts’ and ‘rational arguments’ aren’t considered, but that the legitimacy granted to them is a matter of gut feeling. I look at the facts of where the person grew up, the items on her resume and the statements she’s made to the press. As I look at the facts, though, I view them differently depending on what I think of the candidate’s character. If I do know one or two issues in depth, perhaps I make my decision about what she has to say about those issues and then infer that her views on other subjects (about which I know less) are also well-reasoned. I make a judgment about her heart: she really does value having informed policy! In other words, when we go out to vote for, say, Stephen Colbert in the South Carolina primary, we do so because we know Stephen’s heart.
A similar argument can be made about policies themselves. More often than not, citizens do not have the data or the expertise to interpret the data to assess which policies are most beneficial. We rely on experts, but there is a spectrum of expert opinions, and there are so many contingencies in real-world dynamics that expert opinions may often simply be educated guesses. Consider VP Dick Cheney’s March 16th, 2003, view (Meet the Press interview)90 for an invasion of Iraq since our soldiers would be embraced