"Truth in the Service of Our Lies"

I was fully expecting to disagree, possibly violently, with Steve Brust's Philcon speech about the philosophical approach to truth as it pertains to fiction. I'm glad now that I actually read the transcript rather than simply relying on Cory Doctorow's summary on BoingBoing. The problem I had wasn't with Cory's summary, of course: it was with my reading of it. I probably need to be better about paying attention...

Anyway, even though I profess to belong to the school of a good story, well told, I found a lot to think about in Brust's text and will perhaps try again to wrap my poor brain around philosophy. Once it's recovered from my last attempt to understand Existentialism. That did not end well.

On one point I might disagree with Brust―a point of historical fact, rather than interpretation. I've always been fascinated, in a horrified way, in the role anti-intellectualism plays in American life. My recent reading on the seventeenth century leads me to believe that this approach did not originate in the US, and certainly not in the period following ratification of the constitution.

I've found plenty of evidence of opposition to intellectuals and experts in the United Kingdom of the early seventeenth century: puritan Protestantism is, among other things, a wholesale rejection of any potential role to be played by expert mediation in anyone's affairs.

But that, as Mr. Brust says, is a tale for another time.