Beyond Up and Down

The false equivalency between Left and Right is a comfort for those who don’t want to pay very much attention to politics.

The Republicans will do something outrageous, and the reaction of these self-described centrists will usually be “But both sides do it, don’t they?”

The mainstream media helps further this view of things. If there is no way to draw a false equivalency, then news doesn’t get reported.

I agree, “beyond” doesn’t seem to make much sense. The way I like to look at it is to think of “the truth” as being however many facts it happens to take to add up to the shortest distance between two points — not enough = falling short, and too many = getting lost along the way. Going “beyond” is just another way of confusing things.

The problem is with the word “fact”. There is empirical fact,and then there is everything else.

What I mean is that there are things that are true when held up to any scrutiny and there are things that have only a surface truth. When you dig deeper you discover that the “truth” was merely a carefully fabricated deception.

There are very few issues in our country fitting the former description. Every issue is staged. Presented with a slant either left or right. There is no center. The imaginary “middle” is populated by non-voters and idiots.

Everyone has a preset bias whether they acknowledge it or not. A logical idiosyncrasy that politicians have learned to exploit. So speeches, news casts, blog sites, set themselves up to tune into those idiosyncrasies in a subtle way.

There is no moving “beyond left and right”. You can try. Good luck to ya.

I once heard it said that Independents, or centrists if you will, are the same people who create things like 4 way stop signs.

My short answer, I’m afraid is no more helpful but makes sense to me, everything in moderation. Truth is a value judgment, facts seem to hold more water but to a colorblind man the sky is not blue. One of my favorite cliches is people want blood and chocolate, that’s where the money is, and it’s hard to blame any commercial interest for pandering. I loved Murrow but the dude chain smoked and didn’t work well as a personal role model.

In his book “Stranger in a Strange Land,” Robert Heinlein (a rabid Libertarian, from what I could ever glean, not that it matters to me, really)incorporated into the story the concept of a “Fair Witness.”

A Fair Witness was a trained professional witness for hire who had an eidetic memory, and whose credentials or testimony could not be questioned. In one scene, a character asks a Fair Witness in a professional capacity “What color is that house on the hill over there?” She replies “It’s white on this side.”

The idea was that she would never assume anything, but would only report fact, as far as she could witness it, when asked anything as a professional.

All our lives, we make an assumption that facts are simply that… facts. Unassailable. But recently, we have had that assumption shaken by a deluge of people that look at anything and come up with their own ‘facts.’ Some of those new ‘facts’ may even be correct in the sense that the house is ‘white on this side.’ But there is no context, no larger question, and stringing a set of ‘facts’ that are unrelated to one another to come out with a pre-determined conclusion for selfish or political purposes is becoming more and more prevalent.

It is difficult to argue when confronted by this phenomenon. After all, facts are facts, right? All else is opinion. I have my set of facts, you have yours, and even if they are ALL facts in the strict sense of the word, relevence is ignored in many cases. It is headache-making.

I propose that logic (a slippery tool in itself), experience (a subjective tool), and intuition (an even more ephemeral tool) are all essential tools to apply to any set of facts to come away with an opinion that frames our arguments. It is a fool’s game to simply state facts and say they are an argument.

The media these days is claiming to be a “Fair Witness” by supposedly stating facts and leaving argument and opinion to the consumer of those facts. Then, when walking away from the disaster they instigated, claim they are being neither left or right, as if that is a principled position. But they are leaving out half the equation. Facts must be accompanied by experience, logic, and intuition or they mean little or nothing, frame nothing, expose nothing.

I said in another post in a different section that I can be correctly accused of speaking out of my butt because I am not ‘on the inside’ in many of the situations that are so important to society and do not have the inside skinny. That applies to most of us in most situations. So how do we become so sure of ourselves and our positions? We use ALL the tools we have, not just some.

All I ask of the Fourth Estate is that they, once again, do the same, instead of claiming to be the Fair Witnesses they are not.

Caru, you bring up an interesting issue. I would begin by saying that truth is self evident. When I hear the phrase, “beyond left and right,” it tells me that the only way to do that is to report events as they happen, by using facts obtained either as a witness to said events, or honest research.
What has created this call for going beyond left and right, is basically, the advent of 24/7 cable news. These networks have blended journalism with entertainment. This results in allowing far too much personal opinion by the anchors of these shows. It creates an enviroment of ideological gladiators. Doing battle in a huge, national coliseum.
Many years ago, Walter Chronkite talked about the dangers of mixing journalisn and entertainment. That, as a result, journalistic integrity would be degraded and corrupted.
The reporting of facts should be just that. The facts and nothing but the facts.