Post Truth.
When it’s wrong that both can't be right.
A long time ago I was hopelessly in love. I loved feeling the deep melancholia of unfulfilled longing, so my hopelessness was carefully curated to give my heart ache a longevity it would have lacked had I done anything about it. Was I in love or only pretending? What’s the difference?
All of this occurs at a point in the earth’s movement around the sun when telephones exist but are still screwed to a wall. They are still blind plastic boxes that ring when tickled by the fingers of distant strangers but as yet give no indication which stranger is attempting to attract your attention. This is also a point in history when the now wildly unacceptable act of doxing was actively encouraged by the publication and distribution of the names, addresses and contact numbers of literally everyone on the network in a big fat book; as if each year Twitter published the home address of every user. So I was home alone with a telephone directory and the uncomfortable knowledge that if I wanted to resolve my deep deep potentially fictional desire I could, very easily, call her family telephone and put words in her head. No. Just. No. Impossible. Never. But. Oh. What if?
Not, what if I could find the courage to have a conversation with another human, I was not asking for a miracle. No, what if, this other human actually potentially maybe did have some feelings for me? She’d given no outward indication of this but to be fair, neither had I. If my apparent complete and total public indifference hid such depths of emotion then surely so could hers. Perhaps she too was at this very moment poised by a telephone directory, her perfect finger mere moments away from dialling. T’was a consummation devoutly to be wish’d.
And suddenly the telephone started ringing and I finally understood quantum mechanics.
What has only more recently started suggesting itself to me is what this might mean for Plato, Hegel, Marx and all the the other fans of dialectics. Indeed what it might mean for Trump, Johnson and their new breed of anti-dialectic thinkers. We live in an age where there no longer is a need to reconcile opposing concepts with a synthesis in order to propel arguments forward in logical motion. Dialectics is the steam engine of thought but the steam age is long since past.
My first lockdown hummed to the comfortable leather sofa voice of David Runciman attempting to navigate the conflicting theories that describe the democratic state in his podcast The History Of Ideas. It’s a brilliantly lucid account of conflicting historical narratives that always refuses to take sides, drawing out some central truth whether that was in Marx or Friedman. Runciman clearly hoped to reconcile the dichotomy of statehood, does the state exist to ensure individual freedom or group identity, is society bettered when one of these is preferred? However he ends with a half disappointed half jubilant sort of sigh that he can find no resolution between the opposing ideas he has examined. For him the state offers protection whilst being the thing we most need protecting from, it ensures individual liberty but only to those who surrender theirs to it. It exists in a constant state of tension, and to me that feels like truth. More than truth, it felt like quantum mechanics.
The problem with quantum mechanics is that it doesn’t make sense, at least not the sort of sense the more easily observable universe around us teaches us to look for. The pattern we expect from existence, the rational thing, is for entities to be final. Sure stuff can change but at least it has the decency to change from one thing into another. What’s hot becomes cold. Even if there’s a mushy bit in the middle eventually what once was a mountain has now become sand. However what the quantum physicists began to suggest was that at the smallest level things refuse to behave like this. At the smallest level things exist in multiple contradictory states - as if a beach was also a cliff face at the same time as still being a beach.
This is the tension that underpins Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment about a cat in a box which, until observed, is both alive and dead. For me this was the tension in a telephone that, until answered, was both my crush ringing to confess her desire for me and also was not her ringing because she did not desire me or even especially remember who I was.
Tension is compelling, tension is drama, tension is romance. I loved being in love, I loved the way it multiplied my existences. It’s not, she loves me, she loves me not, or even, in love or pretending to be, all of this is there all the time in love, a gut wrenching, heart fluttering all being feeling of both yes and no, to be and not to be, wave and particle, dead cat and living cat all at once. The simultaneous occurrence of two contradictory states of being is the erotic tension that so many of us find both overwhelming and utterly intoxicating. Is this the whole truth or is it something beyond truth? Is this post-truth as more than a just polite way of describing a lie? The acceptance of tension as the engine of our lives, the need to be as multiple as reality, is the most positive description I’ve been able to imagine for the ever increasingly important concept of post-truth that has already redefined the political systems under which we live and love.
And yes dear reader, I did ring her.
But she was engaged.
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