To live in a shared society, we require shared truth.

It is important to have shared truth, because without shared truth, we cannot live together. We need to know how to coordinate our lives, and to coordinate our lives, we need to know how it is appropriate to act, we need to know who makes decisions that affect our common welfare, and we need to know why they need to do so. Without such shared understandings of common life, the danger of violence, death and destruction of meaningful creations is real.

Today, a good example of what this shared truth feels like is democracy. In modern society, it is largely accepted that if a decision is made democratically, such decision is legitimate, even if it is one that a given citizen disagrees with. You are bound even if you hate the law.

Sometimes shared truth is even more basic. Social norms, like refraining from unnecessary violent acts, or speaking the same language provide a basis on which each individual can build things cooperatively.

The cooperative spirit of ‘shared truth’ maximises that commonly perceived as ‘good’. We have to agree on a shared set of values, because we need to justify where we’re going. If we are to have a shared compass, we need a shared destination. Importantly, the very thing that we justify as ‘good’, the very thing that we maximise, results from not a universal truth, but a shared one. Otherwise stated, our reason for agreeing to ‘shared truth’ is to maximise that perceived as ‘good’ by that very ‘shared truth’.  

So, a shared truth is required for shared lives, but a shared truth also justifies us entering into shared lives.

To arrive at such shared truth, there are three alternatives.

The first is that something is objectively true. If a given thing was proven philosophically, as a watertight fact, then that would be a shared truth. Unfortunately, there seems to be no such thing. For about 2500 years, philosophers have tried to prove anything and everything. Answers have always seemed lacking. To paraphrase the Preface to Beyond Good and Evil, the success rate of philosophers with both woman and philosophical truth is remarkably similar – zero.

A second option is ‘Rousseau’s approach’. For Rousseau, a collective body is both a collective and a body. While acknowledging the difficulties in establishing what the ‘collective’ will means, Rousseau asserts such a will must exist, because otherwise there would be no ‘collective body’ at all. In other words, if each citizen has a will, and these wills create the greater whole, society, then the greater whole must say something – even if that something is nothing.

For Rousseau, the contents of this generalised will are the boundary of acceptable political action. Although he acknowledged that the content of this will might be difficult to attain, he believed it was possible to achieve through rational reflection. For Rousseau, as everyone contributed to this ‘General Will’, everyone is theoretically able to work out what it means. The problem here is that it is very hard to say who is right and who is wrong. Anyone can claim they are rational, but without a God-like arbiter, who is to say they are right?

This is why this approach fails. Unfortunately, even in Rousseau’s world, people will continue to disagree over the truth. Not only that, but they disagree in the context of no common arbiter. The result is often violent. Dogmatists might create change, but they also create piles of dead bodies and unstable political systems.

The third approach is one advocated most famously by Jurgen Habermas. The idea is that we all contribute little bits of ourselves into a greater ‘shared truth’. Perspective from one position adds to perspective from another to create a patchwork quilt. The shared truth that results is a collation of many different compatible interpretations of the world. This third approach most closely approximates how modern society attempts to achieve a shared understanding of truth.

The idea is seductive but has some notable flaws. The first is that it assumes a degree of equality in the possibility of contributing to a shared truth. In the real world, a working-class kid won’t have the same power as Her Majesty the Queen in adding unique contributions. Speech might be free, but our right to contribute is not equal – some voices are elevated above others, and others twisted. That’s just a reality. This makes it hard to integrate perspectives in a way that actually reflects life, rather than the warped perspective of unrepresentative privilege and impersonal incentives.

Another flaw is that of compatibility. Becoming an anarchist, racist or a hardcore Muslim extremist might be mutually exclusive with abiding by shared norms. Hence, a whole bunch of potentially valuable ideas are excluded from this shared conception of shared truth. Advocating for violence, or alternatively advocating to the end of the state’s violence, both might be beyond the pale. Society, holding us together, prevents us from pulling ourselves apart. As a result, we lose some of the most meaningful sorts of perspectives. Raw perspectives, those that introduce us with those forms of freedom that necessarily involve the rejection of all social norms, are beyond the pale. This is a significant loss to our shared life – because it makes life both boring and inauthentic.

The final and most significant flaw is that this supposed ‘shared truth’ is actually not the truth. Instead, it’s a classic case of ‘just about enough’. Habermas’ conception of a shared truth is a substitute for the real thing – and this should be unnerving.

This is worrying because, essentially, our world is built off fag-ends and half-truths. We haven’t answered some very significant questions that have very important answers.

Habermas’ system reflects a liberal mainstream consensus, which seeks to reassure so the system can keep grinding on. When we go looking for some principle justifying our shared existence, we find that there’s a decent, somewhat convincing answer. We find out that we do have answers, and some quite clever people have spent a lot more time than you thinking about them. This is nice, but its not great.

History moves forward and past the task of truth-seeking. Essential, basic contradictions that root our collective existence are poorly worked out as a result.

Questions on the sustainability of global capitalism provide an example. Environmental ones, sure, but also others. One of the most perplexing is that which Marx asked – namely, how is it possibly sustainable to base our collective existence around the principle of continued exponential growth? I mean, I don’t know, and I don’t think many others do. At best, the approach is fatalistic, at worst, it’s a good way of both destroying a planet and imploding a society. Eventually some upper ceiling is going to be hit, and that’s just the nature of this type of growth. History keeps going, making its slow plod forward into the unknown, despite its shaky footing.

But questions go deeper than this. The question of ‘what is good for society?’ has never been conclusively answered. Instead, we use Habermas’ patchwork quilt to feel ourselves through to a provisional answer. This gives us considerable false security. We can appeal to the very values that underpin our society to justify why society works the way it does. Our collective compass points west because we want to go west, not because going west is the best way to go. Why do we maximise the accumulation of goods? Well, because we like goods. Such tautological reasoning is in some way lacking.  

The most telling and recent example of this process is with nuclear weapons. Dominic Cummings Golden Rule of politics “is that, given our leaders don’t take nuclear weapons seriously never assume they’re taking X seriously”. Cummings speaks from past experience – he knows a leader as fallible as Johnson can decide the fate of the world.

The attitude of most politicians for the last 30 or so years in countries that possess nuclear weapons has been fatalistic – as the state, civil society and leaders fail to take the possibility of our collective destruction seriously, because so far, we haven’t imploded. Most key actors believe no leader is insane enough to use nuclear weapons. The evidence used to justify this assertion is basically that no one has so far used nuclear weapons in conflict post-WW2. The problem: the past is ok as a guide until it isn’t. Einstein said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. Only in a world where nuclear weapons have not been used in a world war can we say that they won’t – so how are we going to know if nuclear weapons are possible weapons until they’ve been used? History moves on, because our society can’t afford to confront potential truth.

History moves forward and past truth. Events plod on, because they can’t wait for ideas to work themselves out. We come to rely on things that have plausibility but are not fact. This is a key problem of the world we live in, because if we don’t know what we are trying to achieve, we are stumbling around with a knife in the dark. Yet its one that we are unlikely to resolve. It is notable and fundamental, but not a problem with a particular solution.