We have often heard the slogan, “Speaking truth to power.” It is a phrase now slipping out of fashion, yet still used more often than good taste would prescribe, by people who have taken very few risks in their lives, and take no risk in speaking publicly—by people who have, in fact, chosen to utter some mendacious and interested half “truth” that happens also to be the received view of the mainstream media, the chattering classes, Hollywood, the Democrat and Liberal parties, and all the self-adoring progressive forces in the world, who enjoy large incomes, and have homes in gated neighbourhoods that burn a lot of electricity.
And their target—whether an elected politician, or some other symbol of “conservatism”—will be someone like George Bush or, in the old days, Brian Mulroney. That is, somebody who is at the bottom of the polls, is reduced to the condition of a lame duck, and has become the whipping-boy of the same media, chattering classes, etc.
In other words, when someone announces that he is going to “speak truth to power,” it is invariably time to brace ourselves for a scintillating display of hypocrisy and narcissism. With the possible exception of Vaclav Havel (in his jailbird days, well before he became president of then-Czechoslovakia), people living under conditions of real oppression do not announce that they will speak truth to power.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn once famously said, back when the Soviet Union existed, that if everyone in Russia would wake up one morning and agree to speak only the truth for one full day, the entire Communist system would collapse. Something like that actually happened, on the 9th of November 1989, but the point of Solzhenitsyn’s remark would be lost did we not also inwardly understand that no one can tell the truth all day. It is just too difficult.
To begin with, it requires intelligence and courage. Both, working in mutual support. We cannot even discern the truth, or any part of the truth, when we are distracted by the price we might pay for embracing it: for the deeper the truth, the more powerful and determined its worldly adversaries will be. This is something that is taught by the Church, but can also be learned from life.
My mind has been drifting back to Calcutta (“Kolkata” as it is now spelled) through the week, a city where truth walks the street in rags, and appears most starkly in contrasts and juxtapositions. It has been the 10th anniversary of the death of Mother Teresa (Sept. 5, 1997), bringing her back into the news. For me, the 10th anniversary of being sent to Calcutta by this newspaper to report her funeral, and experiencing many extraordinary things about which I wrote at that time.
In light of all the recent revelations about her interior life—the decades of secret struggle with faith and spiritual desiccation, behind daily heroic acts of charity and joy—Mother Teresa’s achievement in this world becomes clearer. She was a person who did actually speak truth to power, out of a soul commanded by courage and intelligence. With or without the “warm fuzzy feelings” that go with religious inspiration in the popular mind, she persisted in doing what she believed right and necessary, according to the Catholic teaching she had embraced, quite indifferently to personal convenience.
But in its narrowest sense, she also spoke truth, aloud, in the presence of the powerful, signally to their embarrassment rather than her own. Remember, for instance, the opening of her remarks to the U.S. National Prayer Breakfast, Feb. 3, 1994, at the White House, in the presence of President and Mrs Clinton, and Vice President Gore: “I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a war against the child, a direct killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself, and if we accept that a mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?”
This is one of many such remarks, on the topic of abortion and on several others, which showed both of the supports I have mentioned, that are required by the truth. The courage, even audacity, in the choice of venue, is plain enough. But I invite my reader also to examine the phrasing, word by word. For it is a magnificent construction of moral reasoning, a pure logical sprint from premise to conclusion.
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