We are old enough as a nation to have collected a legion of mythical heroes, complete with the immutable mind pictures and sounds of events not witnessed by anyone living presently. We can imagine Patrick Henry, standing before the assembled burgesses in Virginia and shouting the words, “Give me liberty or give me death.” We can picture Nathan Hale reverse-mounted on a bareback horse, his hands tied behind him and a coarse rope noose looped around his neck, informing his red-coated executioners that “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.” The beauty in these myths, as opposed to the ones carried forth from earlier ages, is in the unarguable fact some attributable someone recorded the moments for posterity around the time of their occurrence. Does this fact make the accounts any more accurate or unassailable than stories about a Minotaur or Mount Olympus? No, but why would anyone want to challenge the foundations of our national belief system?
We have evolved as a species with a talent for creating lies and exaggerations in order to describe our place in the universe. We apply the word “metaphorical” to the patently ridiculous. We excuse embellishment, couching it in terms such as “artistic license” or “dramatic effect.” My favorite sofa is “to the best of one’s recollection,” which implies one has had better recollections than the one currently in question. I prefer the term “bullshit” because of its all-purpose utility. History is full of bullshit for the simple reason that our daily lives reek of it. People find the truth uncomfortable and difficult to grip; a large, leaden ball of dangerous fact poised to drop onto otherwise unsuspecting toes. By comparison, a lie is as light as a faux feather, tickling egos and cushioning blows.
Of course, as a society we must make it our official policy to discourage such dishonest behavior. It is a sin to bear false witness. It is a crime to perjure oneself. It is unethical to misrepresent. We preach the tenets of honesty and wink, simultaneously. Is it not a little ironic that we lie about being liars, and what does that say about the accepted history surrounding our nation? I suppose it depends on the audience, since the art of the lie is in its shifting colors and adjustable frame. Young George Washington chopping down a cherry tree, and then confessing to his father that he “couldn’t tell a lie,” is a wonderful fable for second-graders. I’ve heard adults swear in an unwavering faith that it was true, and maybe it is. We can’t confirm the truth of the story, but it would be remarkable that a story about not telling a lie is a lie in itself.
We prize the concept of direct testimony. An eyewitness account usually trumps a deck of conflicting circumstantial evidence presented at trial. Hearsay is rarely admissible in court because of its nature as a filtered version of the truth. Yet, history is replete with hearsay and second-hand reporting. Even more important are the elements of historical events omitted from the record for any number of reasons, including national security and personal reputation. From time to time, the historical record is subject to revision due to some new unearthed factoid or the posthumous release of his or her private correspondence. At what point do we step back and question the entirety of that historical record?
Revisionism as currently practiced is clearly a further example of the bullshit principle at work. There is an interest vested somewhere in a claim to correct historical inaccuracy, whether it’s national pride, personal vindication or a simple thumbing of one’s nose at a collection of scholarly peers. There exists no place mark in the chronicle of humanity that guarantees us a thorough and unbiased telling of a particular moment in time or of all the people enveloped within that moment. Everything we think we know is subject to debate, and a mostly poor debate at that, considering the uneven reliability of the collective human almanac.
If we accept that everything we already know is, at best, of questionable veracity and if we can convince ourselves that everything new offered to us through the news media or that we see and hear over the airwaves comes without any factual warranty, we’re ahead of the game, finally. Perhaps we can categorize information based on the depth and breadth of its sources, ultimately declaring as confirmed truths maybe 1 % of what we thought we knew, with the remaining 99 % deemed apocryphal. First-person accounts without sufficient corroboration may live on as a version of the truth, rather than the whole of it. If one treats the telling of Ben Franklin’s kite flying experiment in the same manner as the story of Icarus flying too close to the Sun, we remain aware of the nature of the scientific principles involved and lose nothing, except our innocence. What we gain is something that’s been in dispute for exactly two hundred and thirty-four years: our independence.
Freedom of thought is not truly free unless we can remove the bonds that constrain new ideas. The bonds of assumption, convention and accepted truths are products of our collective history, rather than of personal experience. If history is flawed, it makes sense that our ability to comprehend present-day issues is defective. By changing our definition of Truth to something so narrow and well formed it leaves no doubt of universal acceptance, we can label everything else, rightfully, as bullshit. There is nothing wrong in accepting that the signing of the Declaration of Independence took place in Philadelphia in July, in the year 1776. There should be nothing wrong in imagining Benjamin Franklin attending the event dressed in anticipation of a cooling dip in the Delaware River.
Abstract Invention by Charlie Accetta is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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