Pontius Pilate made a seemingly contemporary statement almost 2,000 years ago, according to the Gospel of John. “What is truth?” is his retort to Jesus’ claim that he came as a witness to the truth. It is a world-weary, cynical reply, from a man who had been assigned the worst posting in the Roman Empire. Whereas it is not clear why Pilate was not in the good graces of the emperor, Tiberius, it would not be very long after that he ordered Pilate to go either into exile or commit suicide. The Roman Empire did not give pensions to failures.
Today the notion of truth is itself mocked. You have your truth, and I have mine, and it doesn’t matter if these “truths” contradict each other. Only those facts that can be empirically proven are allowed to be called truth, and even scientific truth has come under attack as being as much a “social construct” as other truth claims. If a social construct, then it has a history, and that history is written by those in power… you get the picture.
If some claim that “all truth is relative”, others claim there is no chance of even “relative” truth. Some who claim to “speak truth to power” do not actually believe there is an objective standard to which they are holding the powerful to account — they are merely seeking power for themselves. The comedian Steven Colbert invented the word “truthiness” for the impulse to take for fact that which one wishes to…
