Facts Be Damned and Then What?

The evidence is in.  The facts seem incontrovertible.  I mean, we have the evidence and let us for a moment suspend if we might the legalities, fraud, evasion, and bullshit.  Can we?  Not rhetorical.  'Cause if we can't, we're in trouble.  Are we in trouble?  You betcha.  Can we agree on what the evidence before us is telling us?  To be able to read the evidence is to able to make an argument.  Most people are not very skilled at this process.  Who are we kidding?  

It's about to get worse.  You see, when people tell you who they are and then they do what they say they are going to do, what more does it take to believe what we need to do?  Is it not plain to the meanest mind?  Not always.  People say all sorts of stuff that they mean but don't do and stuff that they do but don't mean.  People are nothing like perfectly predictable but nothing else is either.  Those imperfect people like the imperfect unpredictability must not stop us from trying to make sense what we can do, indeed what we need to do and even must do.   Anarchy ensues when we can't agree to the essential need to agree to the facts, at least as we say we (think we) know them.

 

Facts need to stay facts until they are not and then we replace them with better facts.  We must interpret the meaning of facts, consider their purpose, assess their value, imagine their possibilities but we must also agree to live a world of facts.  Facts are things that are true that we can share in common.

What makes them true is that we are compelled to agree by not only what we sense in common but by common sense.  What we sense in common is the plainest evidence, or we should like to think so.  What is common sense depends on having a sense of the common, that is, the common as valuable, as requisite, as important to being sane.  In other words, we need to be able to agree because that’s all common sense really is: agreements implicit, explicit, proven or not, the conventions of shared experience leading us to facts.  We can also think of facts as the outcome of arguments.  Please?  Please, more of that.

Arguments are a process, not a quarrel; arguments are reasoned opinions that involve assumptions, evidence, reasons, and conclusions.  We can know if we’re dealing with facts when we become skilled in argument---science does this routinely, and maybe that’s exactly what science does, it produces arguments so that we can understand how arguments are sound, that means true.  And maybe, just maybe (but really) when an argument is sound and so true those are the facts.  

Facts evolve and facts may be revealed.  So the arguments change, as do the facts as we know them.  We’re in pandemic and it’s hard to keep abreast of the facts.  We need to be wise enough to know how facts are created from our arguments, how facts operate in a world of human comprehension.  But let us be clear: without the facts all we have are feelings, beliefs, impressions, opinions, and bullshit.  We must do better than all of those things no matter how we regard them or value them or use them: facts matter.

 

When people refuse the facts or refuse to participate in argument, which is really the only way we can all share experiences, we’re in trouble.  You can say you believe in God. Fine. I have to say in reply that your belief does not make it true for all of us.  If your evidence is your faith, good for you.  But why should I share that faith? On what grounds? Where’s the beef?  I am not obliged to agree to your facts.  I am only obliged to take your beliefs seriously whether or not I would consider those beliefs to be true, to be facts shared.  

 

I once said to the Pope on Easter Sunday.  “Easter is cancelled.  We found the body.”  If you are offended, meh.  The point is that the Pope isn’t going to change his mind in the face of the facts no matter what we present as the evidence.  This is important because it tells us that the facts may not matter when it come to what humans believe or want to believe or say they believe because saying otherwise would get them in trouble they don’t want.

I’ve always doubted whether Barack Obama really believes the Christian story as fact.  If resurrection isn’t symbolic but literal, claimed to be factual and not “just” symbolic then I am going to have a really hard time taking you seriously, trusting your judgments, and even leaving you with my dog.  So I’m betting that BO doesn’t want to dispute the facts of the JC argument---he being a very smart lawyer who knows the rules of evidence and argument.

If BO were to say that this is a matter of faith and not argument then I would say, good for you, but what you are saying needs to have no bearing on my life because your faith is not my truth any more than it should be my problem.   To the religious I say, I am impacted everyday by your faith claims and that often pisses me off aplenty.  As Jefferson put it, your religion should not pick my pocket or break my leg and I’m pretty adamant that I don’t want your claims of faith to compel me when we are not sharing the same facts.  Keep your faith outta my life, please.  I am content that we merely share facts.  Can we at least do that?

Here’s the rub in this fucked up pandemic.  A significant portion of our population refuses to share the facts much less “believe” in science.  That significant portion is mostly but not exclusively Republicans.  The unicorn crowd of so-called lefties may make me even angrier because I want to think better of people than that their refusal of shared facts makes me doubt their intelligence and integrity.   But yeah, I do doubt both when people cannot “believe in the science.”

No one said the science is perfect.  Science makes a point of telling you that it is not perfect, that it is in fact incomplete, provisional, and conditional.  As are the facts.  But that does not make them less true.  What is true is the best argument we can make given what we can know, what we think we do know, what the evidence presents that we can share, that we vet, that we argue.

 

Kant wanted us to think that the best argument provides a moral imperative.  That it is a moral necessity to agree to the best argument we can make.  What a nice idea.  I mean, wouldn’t it be swell if we thought it was goodness itself that motivates us to do the right thing based on the best evidence before us?  But that’s not gonna happen because people suck at argument but, more to the point, some people just suck.  That is, they refuse to play nice with the truth because they want something more selfish than a shared human experience.