PONTIUS PILATE MIGHT have been the first postmodernist. Quid est veritas? — “What is truth?” — he asked the Truth Incarnate, before washing his hands and acceding to the baying mob’s demand for blood in order to keep his grip on power. Pilate’s question has been read numerous ways through the centuries, but has rarely been more relevant than today. Our society has a problem with the truth, though no one seems to agree on just what that problem is.
We’ve been here before — or at least somewhere rather like it. The meanings of “truth”, “fact”, “knowledge”, and related concepts are not timeless absolutes, nor has freedom of speech always been seen as the best way of arriving at truth, nor indeed as a self-evident good at all. Rather, our present assumptions about the meaning of truth and the way to obtain it arose relatively recently in historical terms, during what we over-enthusiastically call the Enlightenment.
While René Descartes’s search for indubitable truth is often credited with unwittingly ushering in the Age of Reason, the first wave of rationalism really began in late seventeenth-century England. Deists such as John Toland and Matthew Tindal argued that revelation was superfluous, since the essential part of Christianity, its ethics, was clearly apparent to natural reason.
God became no longer the transcendent Creator and ultimate source of Truth, but merely another object in the universe about which truths could be derived by the application of human reason. All was to be subordinated
