One of my highlights of 2023¹ was an open air live concert by Cat Stevens / Yusuf at Stadtpark Hamburg. After the concert, my son and I played many of his songs for a couple of weeks, and one whose lyrics stuck with me was “In the end” where each verse starts with: “You can’t bargain with the truth”². Of course not, we’ll all say and nod, it’s the truth. But then, being truthful: We all cover small blunders with pretty little lies; we all package unpleasant feedback in ornate narrations; we all push the big inconvenient truths of sickness, old age, death, or climate collapse to the margins of our minds. All these non-truths helps us function in the world, and we rightly call them smart, kind, or practical. But the truth within doesn’t go away – just like in that other famous song fragment: There is a truth in everything, that’s how the light gets in³.

In Europe, for a long time, truth was owned by the Catholic church. Of course, there were the Greek philosophers before with their varied views on truth, and there always were the pragmatic day-to-day truths of sowing seeds, harvesting grains, baking bread, brewing beer, or building houses and towns. But the big truth was faith in God, as interpreted by his representatives on this earth, and closely entertwined with a fear of wrath in case of wrongdoings⁴. With the Protestan reformation of the 16th century and with the technical, scientific, and political revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries, truth was extracted from the religious realm and instead placed into the seemingly objective space of laws of nature. The new masters of truth were those who understood such laws – including, by the way, the man-made varieties of law. In the Western bourgeois world of the 19th century, faith and fear were more elegantly dressed up as rational understanding and civil obedience. And, already starting in the late 15th century, this concoction of powerful tools, credible theories on pretty much everything, and dutiful deference to their expounders and executioners, was ruthlessly exported as truth on a global scale.

Today, truth is under fire. Internationally, the once-colonized fight the truths of their once-colonizers. Nationally, discontented citizens fight the truths of their struggling statesmen and -women. Individually, each of us fights the truths of those we disagree with. What is lost on the way is the insight that truth is absolutely useless if it is pulverized into separatist singularities. Unless we have some shared agreement on what to call “black”, “blue”, “white”, or “gold”, there’s no way to tell whether the dress is black and blue, or white and gold⁵. It’s okay to grapple and wrestle with the truth – but it’s futile unless we somehow align on the criteria for what makes our truths true.

Once again, Buddhist concepts can help, especially because – like the Greek philosophers’ thoughts on truth – they predate our Christian legacy of faith and fear. Truth, as the Buddha explained, come in three flavours: Absolute truth which can only be conceived by fully enlightened beings, valid relative truth which is what works in the world, and invalid relative truth which is a mistake. The classic example⁶ is of a striped rope in a dimly lit room which is mistaken for a snake: Seeing the rope as a snake is invalid relative truth, seeing the rope as a rope is valid relativ truth, and understanding that ultimately the rope neither exists nor doesn’t exist nor both nor neither is the intellectual approxmiation of absolute truth. In the end, it’s the absolute truth that cannot be bargained with. But what we’re missing today is a solid shared view of valid relative truth: We either see all ropes as snakes – or argue endlessly about the rope’s existence or non-existence.

So my sixth wish for 2024 is: Truth.

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1. This is the sixth and last of six posts in a micro-series on wishes for the new year. The posts are neither scientific nor fictional, so anything written here could be completely wrong or absolutely real. The photos illustrating the posts are taken at the coast of the Baltic Sea, in or near the small village of Ahrenshoop where I happen to spend a short winter vacation. They have nothing whatsoever to do with the content of the posts. ↩︎
2. On Spotify, the song from 2006 is here: https://open.spotify.com/track/5ZHeV3JtbpAKJemeNSTn1E?si=57b0e666070b4165 [retrieved Jan 3rd, 2024]. ↩︎
3. For truths-lovers: Of course, the line reads “There is a crack in everything…”, and it’s from Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” (1992), on Spotify here: https://open.spotify.com/track/7aAE5KL20Uycf3dswsaHjp?si=568c0df9edf64b8d [retrieved Jan 3rd, 2024]. ↩︎
4. Slightly off-tangent, but relevant in this context: There’s a wonderful book on “Fear” by Robert Peckham (2023). ↩︎
5. See the article on Wikipedia for this internet phenomenon of 2015 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress [retrieved Jan 3rd, 2024]. ↩︎
6. On this, the classical reference text is Chandrakirti’s “Introduction to the Middle Way”, the Madhyamakāvatāra (ca. 600-650 AD). ↩︎