The Truth of Feeling
Ted Chiang is the author who wrote the short story, “Story of Your Life.” That story was was basis for the screenplay of the film, “Arrival.” Liking the movie led me to the story, the story to the author, and thus many other stories, including “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling.”
In this last, people are given to accept a new technology that records everything you experience– the audiovisual part –in a way that is instantly accessible to queries, something like memory.
Out of this arise two senses of the past, of memory, and of the meaning of truth. In one sense, our personal and cultural memories evolve to suit a narrative of what we aspire to for ourselves. They become our truth, the truth that feels right to us. In the other sense, what is recorded indelibly and unalterably is what is truth. The story explores in detail what it means to live by one or the other of those truths.
In the story, the technology of writing interacts with oral tradition. The technology of writing inserts a new standard of truth into the culture– the one in which what is recorded is truth. It replaces the culture in which the truth is what feels right, what serves our aspirations.
It seems obvious, self evident, even morally superior that recorded truth be superior to the truth of feeling. In the story this is not the case. There are cultural benefits to emotional truth.
Is it possible that our new media of tweets, posts, memes, and going viral are returning us to a culture of emotional truth? Is it possible that we are experiencing an adoption of technology that favors emotional truth over recorded truth? We are a species that builds our culture, our very social fabric around stories. The stories, whether they be revisionist or not, whether or not they represent what we would accept as recorded truth, are what define us. How is it illegitimate, immoral or inauthentic to favor felt truth over recorded truth in defining and communicating that which we aspire to?
There are forces in the world gaining eminence from felt truth, with little regard to recorded truth. There are forces in the world for whom this is unforgivable and dishonest. I wonder what would happen if each of those forces acknowledged the other as valuable. The felt truth shows us what we aspire to. It acknowledges feelings and desires that people who favor “right,” or recorded truth might otherwise suppress, judge immoral or at minimum regard as distasteful. Another possibility is that one dismisses the other as impossibly naive, uninformed or impractical.
The Feng and English translation of the Chuang Tsu contains these words: “What one says is wrong, the other says is right; and what one says is right, the other says is wrong. If the one is right while the other is wrong, and the other is right while the one is wrong, then the best thing to do is to look beyond right and wrong.”
What would the synthesis look like? Will there be one? Is the system dynamically stable, or will it swing more and more wildly from one side to the other until it simply flies apart? Is there an up-side to our new communications technologies? Are they best left alone or are they destabilizing, in need of moderation, regulation and censorship? As for the recorded truth faction, are they overcontrolling? Do they represent a thought police aristocracy, or worse, a theocracy?
How will it look when each moves beyond seeing the other as right or wrong?
