We’re glad you’re looking for simple facts. Sadly, there aren’t any. Facts are slippery things: the more you try to hold onto them, the faster they slip away.
When I set up to write this site, I was leaning pretty hard against the tyranny of facts – I’ll have more to say about that. I was mired in the sticky quicksand of an over-fitted world, where every step forward seemed to sink deeper into the mire. I had girded myself to do battle, armored to the teeth with intellectual resources and well-considered arguments, ready to set imagination on fire once again. Then Brexit got voted through, Donald Trump won the U.S. election, and his Rasputin, Stephen Bannon, starts blathering about the destruction of the administrative state.
It’s all toxic froth, with dark parallels in 20th century history (when the Nazis took power because the socialist left looked more dangerous to those who held the reins). But the net effect for me was that, after leaning hard against the nonsense, these events made it all suddenly give way: I found myself tumbling through space, wondering what would happen when I finally and abruptly encountered another solid object.
I’m still spinning through space months later, and I’m realizing that launching these meditations takes me right back to the primal dust cloud coalescing out of the void. I need to start over, regather facts around me, redevelop some gravity, pack enough mass together to generate some new light.
The SCROTUS and his minions have blown the facts to smithereens (and, in fact, the very term SCROTUS evinces all the themes of this blog, as well laid out here). The facts will have their revenge (and perhaps, in the process, the world will be blown to smithereens, but that’s a story for later, or perhaps not at all). There is a price to pay for freely ignoring facts, or pretending that a fact is anything we want it to be. Facts are blunt objects that confine and constrain us, that counterpose themselves to our will and to our dreams. Facts say “No! Not everything is possible.”
You can’t argue with a fact, any more than you can argue with the guy holding a gun on you on a rainy street demanding the $18 in change and the can of chili you bought at the deli on the corner. It is what it is, and if there’s nothing to eat tonight, or tomorrow, or if there’s no world left to even notice… Well, it is what it is.
What you can argue with (and must, if you aspire to be, yourself, anything more than a blunt object, inflicting senseless trauma left and right that you don’t understand and perhaps are not even aware of) is the interpretation of facts, their sense and significance, the context of the fact, the human context that enables to see facts, to appreciate them as factual, to muster them in support of constructions of love, care and beauty. No, not everything is possible. But the forest of facts is not dense. It is not impassable. And in those gaps, those spaces that are not factual and yet also not delusional, lies the future, and the value of being human. Not everything is possible, but it is also true that not everything is impossible. The search for facts sets boundaries, but it also leaves openings through which everything that matters in life may eventually emerge.
Sig Hupp
Chief Research Ontologist