No. 10: Truth in between howls
Truth, briefly.
It is an hour mired in the uncertainty of night and the coyotes have started up. I could tell the exact human time by managing the precise button procedure required to light up my smart watch.
But that is not what time it is. It is time to howl.
My dog Axle and I have an agreement. When the coyotes howl, we howl back.
From our comfortable bed he starts with barks and groans.; he seems to need to work up to the howl. I rear back and start with a high note. He joins me up high then lowers his call to a grumble.
The song dogs in the night respond. I don’t know what they are saying or if Axle gets a message from them. I know that it is very different for us here on our bed than for them out there. We have walls and fences and the idea of property ownership.
It is a good break for me to howl at the wild.These days I am stressing about a water leak on my property. Somewhere nearly 400 gallons a day is disappearing. I need to locate this leak because it is costing me money and it is weighing on my conscience as wasteful.
This is true, but it is a different true than the true that coyotes experience. Every day for a coyote is death, either given, witnessed, or received. Between 50 and 70 percent of their pups die in the first year.1
And every day is play. They ramble freely, experiment with their world, vocalize in a way that I find engrossing and befuddling.
I am listening and trying to parse how to write about truth in 2025.
Timothy Snyder’s 10th lesson On Tyranny is
Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
And so as Leo and I are alternating our way through the lessons, I have to write about truth.
And I have. Over the last few days, I have drafted 20 pages on truth. For it to be useful in this format, I need to give you much less than that. The truth is that my last post was terrifically short and got a lot of positive feedback. I think that if I write more brief articles, more of you will read them, and I want you to read them so that I feel useful in this world.
Looking through the 20 pages of draft copy, I see lots of topics that are complex, nuanced, and interesting.
Timber policy as seen through the eyes of an Oregon boy growing up in the 80s and 90s
Jacques Derrida’s complications of truth through his academic concept of deconstruction
Elon Musk and other broligarch’s perversion of classical ethics and philosophy in their boiled down idea of “first principles.”
The surrender you make when you ask someone to “boil it down for me.”
The misnomers and awkwardness in the 2017 March for Science.
Fly fishing and writing (because I am me).
How dumb you look when you say “all cops are bastards.”
I could carry on about any of these topics for eons. Should you ever want to share a beverage hot or cold with me I would be very interested to hear what you think about any of them as well.
Until you say, “that is your truth.” or “this is my truth.” Then I am stepping away.2
Truth is hard, but the goal must be OUR truth in community. We can find the overlaps. We can interrogate definitions, the origins of beliefs, our facts, our therefores. I like to use the big word “epistemology.”3 If we love each other we can be dilligent about this. Truth is not easy, but it is not relative either.
A practice, if you can be fearless
Consider a question that you have a deeply held belief about. That taxing the rich will repair our society, or that immigration must be staunched at all costs.
1. Open a browser to a search engine. Perhaps use one less inclined to track you and try to influence you, such as Kagi or DuckDuckGo.
Write the counter argument to your belief.
Sincerely search for material to support that counter argument.
I can almost guarantee that you will not change your own mind. These are topics that are not easy and clear. They do not boil down. But, you can understand that there is a point of view different than yours.
There will always be a point of view different than yours.
Truth to a coyote
The water is leaking quietly, somewhere on my property.. I only have a web service from my water company to know it is happening. My truth is deferred. It is conceptual, it is built on trust.. The outcomes are delayed and I can not even be confident that effects are connected to the causes I am assigning to them.
A coyote’s truth is immediate. They react immediately. They live or die on what is true. Our task is to thrive in a vast complex of information and perspectives that does not boil down, that does not follow a first principle, that is never mastered. We need each other to do it. I need you to hold onto truth.
I wish I could have been briefer to hold your attention, and I wish I could have poured everything in my mind out for you here. That is true.
Contribute a little to the author.
https://projectcoyote.org/act/learning-hub/coyote-profile/ . There are better sources than this and some variation in the numbers people come up with, but it is very likely that over half of all coyote pups die before their first birthday. That is some sorrowful parenting.
This dumb idea of surrendering to relative truth is, I believe, a curious perversion and boiled down populist version of Derrida’s deconstruction framework. We can talk about that over coffee if you like. Something stronger might serve the topic better, though.
Epistemology is the infinite answers to the simple question “how do we know what we know.”