Truth vs. Opinion

I was recently reading the works of contemporary scholars such as Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Jacques Derrida who argue that there is no such thing as objective truth and that all knowledge, all values, all morality, and all ideas of right and wrong, good or bad, are merely the products of an ongoing “community narrative” or social dialogue within a “global village.” They say that truth is a construct not a precept. It is a conversation not a conclusion. Truth is really not true you know. It’s all relative. It’s all a matter of opinion.

We need to ask ourselves: Do we really believe this and are we willing to live with the consequences of such ideas?

Martin Luther King, Jr., was once asked why he believed it was right to break the law of the land in his effort to promote civil rights and social justice. In his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” he said the following.  “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others? The answer lies in the fact that there are two kinds of laws: just laws . . . and unjust laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” And what is a just law? King responded “A just law squares with the moral law or the law of God.”

King understood something that perhaps we would all do well to remember. Opinions can be dangerous, self-centered and cruel. They indeed are used to justify all kinds of unjust things. Only that which rises above the selfish constructs of the human mind can set the stage for freedom and dignity, liberty and justice. King knew that there was a revelatory truth, i.e., a natural law, which served as the only solid foundation for human value, civil rights, justice, freedom, and racial liberation. He also understood very well that man’s opinion is inevitably clouded by selfishness and deception, and, thus, sets the stage for the powerful to construct systems of oppression over the powerless.  

Maybe what is right and wrong, good and bad, pure and profane is ultimately measured by degrees of truth rather than degrees of opinion after all.

–Excerpt from The Wrong Side of the Door: Why Ideas Matter by Everett Piper, Ph.D.