Does the phrase “telling MY truth” bother you as much as it bothers me?

It bugs me, because it implies that the existence of truth is up for debate. It equates truth with opinion, and they are not the same thing.

It’s lazy. “You have your truth and I have my truth” can be (and often is) a way of avoiding the hard work of thinking through one’s own viewpoint and the contrasting viewpoint of another person. We’re not good at thinking through what another person thinks when they disagree with us. We’d rather just throw up our hands and confirm our priors.

But here’s what I have realized. It’s NOT that truth is relative, it’s that truth is COMPLICATED, and we don’t like complication.

Truth is complicated.

Think of a square, like this:

A square is flat. The rules of geometry teach us that a square has no depth, just two dimensions, height and width. Squares are simple. They present the same face to everyone. They’re easy to suss out.

TLDR: Truth is not relative, but it’s often more complicated than we want to admit.

You can make a square more complicated, at least a little. You can make the square one color or multiple colors. You can add symbols or even a message to the one surface of the square. You might even discover that your square isn’t really a square, because it’s a couple of pixels taller than it is wide.

Still, at the end of the day, when you look at it you think, “SQUARE”. And you’re correct, or mostly correct.

Some people think truth is like a square–and sometimes it is. 4+4=8; that’s a square. Easy.

But a lot of the time, truth is NOT like a square. With complicated issues, truth is more like a cube, like a child’s wooden block.

Cubes are not as easy to deal with as squares. You can never see more than three sides of a cube. Sometimes you only see two sides, if you’re on the same plane as the cube. Occasionally, you can only see one side, when you’re viewing it straight on.

Cuz sometimes cubes look like a square; it all depends on your vantage point. And it’s a terrible mistake to think you’re looking at a square when it’s really a cube.

What happens when you or I, with that limited perspective, claim to know the absolute truth about a cube while never seeing more than three (or two, or one) of its sides?

Now: there really IS a cube there. Absolute truth DOES exist. And you CAN know the cube and describe it accurately. But not from just one point of view. The only way to increase your accuracy, your knowledge of the cube, is to take the time to look at it from other perspectives.

Life is a lot more complicated than a cube. And the truth about issues like poverty or racism or faith is often complicated, too. Our perceptions and thinking in these and other areas are heavily shaped by experience, emotions and fears and hurts, unexamined prior commitments, etc.

I believe in absolute truth. I believe in universal truths, and oppose philosophical nominalism. (That makes me a realist, at least philosophically. Sorry, that’s a geek joke. Realism is the opposite of … oh, nevermind.)

But we don’t like complication, and we often don’t have the patience. Especially in a world where we’re at war with our neighbors and family members over politics etc. Culture war demands simplicity. We’re fighting for the soul of America, after all.

Anyway.

TLDR: Truth is not relative, but it’s sometimes/often more complicated than we want to admit.

So when we hear someone say, “I’m telling my truth”, we should consider the possibility that they are describing a side of the cube that we haven’t seen. I think that’s what epistemological humility demands of us.