Truth through the ages
Truth has always been considered desirable by most people. However, the ways of looking at truth have been changing over the ages. In the ancient or pre-modern age, the most common way to discover truth was through personal experience. You knew the Sun arose in the East because you could see it with your own eyes, provided you were an early riser. The other way to discover the truth was by hearing it from a person that you trusted. Things said by one’s elders, who had seen more of the world, were mostly taken as truths. Similarly, priests were believed because they were seen as being close to God. Other sources of truth were reading it in a book or hearing it from the ruler. During the Kurukshetra War, when Bhima told a shocked Dronacharya that his son Asvatthama had been killed, Drona refused to believe it. He then asked a trustworthy person, Yudhishthira, who had a reputation for always speaking the truth. Only when he confirmed it, did Drona believe it.
In the modern age, the development of science provided another means of determining the truth—through the scientific method of observation, hypothesis and proof. After proof, an assertion would be called a ‘law’, which would be believed true until it was disproven; again, through the scientific system. Using logic and science, anybody could observe things like a neutral observer, and arrive at “the truth” which holds for everyone. This scientific truth is a distillation of evidence, so the quality of truth depends on the quality of evidence. The modern judicial system is geared towards arriving at “the truth” based on hard evidence.
Post-modernism is a reaction against modernism. It says that there is no universal truth because there are no neutral observers. Everybody sees the truth through their own “glasses”. So, there can be “my truth” and “your truth”, but there can’t be “the truth”. The rise of newer technological innovations like social media has disrupted the modernist mechanisms of arriving at the truth. Long ago, scientists “proved” that the earth is round. But, on social media, there are conspiracy theorists, with large followings, who claim it is a lie and the earth is actually flat.
They refuse to be convinced by scientific arguments. Similarly, many from the side that lost the 2020 US election continue to push forward claims that they had actually won. Facts are countered with “alternative facts”. What some call news is called “fake news” by others. Sometimes a post-modern society is also called a “post-truth” society, truth is whatever the algorithm recommends. The path of truth through the ages has been hard, and the path forward looks harder still.