Anthropologists say, ‘Truth is thinking in our own terms,
Locked in our culture’s belief-system true:
The rainmaker’s unlikely to be impressed by isotherms,
Scientists don’t inhabit the same world as Bantu.’
But is scientific truth not the verifiable cast
Of reality that the rainmaker fails to account for?
He’s a psychic condition that will sadly be surpassed -
And such relativism, too, will go out of favour.
Technologists assert, ‘Truth is destiny,
The faith in progress that is our confidence’: -
But is it progress, when they build our futurity
From our past and present - to be despised hence?
Historians say, ‘Truth is a player in the pageant,
Not aloof, too inconstant to give value to the present’: -
So if Renaissance ideals are only ‘significant’,
Not ‘valid’, then history will never be pleasant!
‘Truth is a myth,’ as philosophers explain it,
‘For we cannot know what reality is
Independent of ideas about it, which strain it;
No claims to truth can be trusted’; - Except this?
‘The secret of truth is commitment,’ say all,
‘It’s a matter of preference, not rational engagement:
To -ologies and -isms our minds are in thrall,
To non-empiric habits of mutual disengagement.