Hello, Friday, my Old Friend! There’s a fat robin shrieking outside my window, trying to get me out of my chair and into the sunlight. This is most propitious because I don’t have a plethora of rambling takes today. Instead, I am possessed of the great big happiness of having a short article appear in the Opinion section of World. This fantastic occurrence has forced all other points of interest to the periphery. What did I write about, you ask?
I wrote about Katherine Maher, whose TED Talk, as you might have seen from my blogging efforts last week, fascinated and appalled me. Here’s a bit of what I wrote in World:
They are just too committed to the truth? “In fact,” NPR’s new president and CEO, Katherine Maher, in her 2022 TED Talk said to the audience, “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.” This line, embedded in a two-minute clip, undulated across X (formerly known as Twitter) a few days after NPR whistleblower Uri Berliner was placed on unpaid leave for chronicling the hard left-ward drift of NPR since 2016. Always attracted to the word “reverence,” I watched the 15-minute talk. Drawing on her experience as head of the Wikimedia Corporation, Maher cast a vision for an approach to truth in a world suffering from an “epistemic crisis,” positioning those like National Public Radio as the voice of reasoned calm in a raging storm of misinformation.
Despite her relaxed poise, Maher’s TED Talk reveals the last gasp of postmodern relativism giving way to hard reality. “My truth” disintegrates under contact with 7.8 billion other individual truths. Recasting “truth” as personal preference, Maher laments a world divided. Seeking the truth “allows us to start having conversations about the truth in a way that focuses on what we believe rather than what can be known. And that is a definition that is deeply divisive and harmful.” Huh?
To illustrate what kind of “harm” concerns her, she turns to the subject of climate change. “Debating the truth of climate change,” she explains, “has prevented us from mitigating the harms to us of rising seas, increasingly deadly waves of heat and cold, and powerful storm systems.” We “need,” she says, “better ways to get shared understandings,” without using “one shared truth as our baseline.” What is this better way? She hopes we will embrace something called “minimum viable truth.”
Oh my goodness, go read the whole thing, as well as all the other articles over there. This is the best and fanciest day ever!
You may find me, for the rest of it, drowning slugs in my MVT and beating back the Ivy and Trumpet Vine trying to choke out my Clematis.
Maher sounds like the flip side of Rod Dreher and Solzhenitsyn. Instead of "live not by lies" and thereby opposing totalitarianism, it's "you must live by OUR lies" (totalitarian MVT).
Just read it, Anne! Well done as always.