What is truth? March 11, 2018

John Perry Barlow had robbed his third bank in as many weeks, and with a pile of money and a gargantuan thirst, he crossed the border into Mexicali. He had been on a bender for a full week when he managed to stagger out into the blinding light of day. In the dusty unpaved street he saw a catch-colt drawing a coffin cart and nearby, a woman who might have been fifty or a hundred and fifty trying to turn a patch of scorched ground green. It was a moment that would change his life. In his later years, only a few friends knew that he was a fugitive, had once been a man of violence. The John Perry Barlow most knew was a man who constructed irrigations systems from spare parts and put a new roof on the school house, a man who would stand up to the bandits, for there were still bandits, and he knew them as he knew himself. He was the protector of that town well into the early 20th century.

Or maybe, just maybe, John Perry Barlow was the son of Wyoming Mormons who dropped acid with Timothy Leary, walked away from admission to Harvard Law and from a contract for a novel with Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, publishers of luminaries like Flannery O’Conner and Jack Kerouac. He would become a writer in another form, eventually putting his immense talent to work as a lyricist for Bob Weir and the Grateful Dead, penning hits like Mexicali Blues and Cassidy.

Or maybe, just maybe, he was a digital pioneer, connecting, in those early days, to the Whole World ‘Lectronic Link, or WELL, by dial-up modem from Sublette County, Wyoming, and eventually becoming a co-founder of the Electronic Freedom Foundation, a collection of libertarians and hackers, the world’s first real Netizens, a mash-up of citizen and Internet. In 1996, as Congress sought to clamp down on the lawless streets of Cyberspace’s Wild West, he would pen a furious manifesto, a Declaration of Independence, that would include this:

“On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather… I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us.”

Barlow was tilting at the windmills of government, but real demons would emerge late in his life, as corporate control and the loss of net neutrality creates preferred pipes for content, shoving to the sideline the creativity, entrepreneurship, and independence that has thrived on the web, shoving aside the content of community organizations like small churches, all to give maximum speed to Netflix and Facebook, to a thousand Russian trolls on Twitter. And when he died in his sleep last week, the democratic web was at risk of becoming a gated community.

Not all of these stories can be true, of course. And while Barlow did do a lot of work in irrigation and had a certain desperado personality, the first version of the story, the redeemed bank robber, is a fiction that includes lines from his Grateful Dead hit Cassidy. It is also true that he was a digital pioneer. But not everyone knows both stories. So while I love the Grateful Dead, I somehow missed the memo that the Libertarian Cyber-Space Cowboy that has been showing up in Wired magazine and tech blogs for years was the same guy that wrote lyrics that keep me bopping.

What is truth?

John Perry Barlow was different things to different people. The first narrative is clearly untrue, demonstrably untrue in the same way as pictures of a nearly empty Washington Mall on a January morning. The latter two narratives are both true, and depend completely on your point of view. Because more than one thing can be true, as we were reminded a century ago as the Enlightenment project collapsed into the trenches of Verdun, into a world of deconstruction and relativity.

On his final night, Jesus was very different things to very different people. To his disciples, he was a charismatic preacher able to perform miracles and offering hope when all seemed hopeless. To the Temple bureaucrats and Jewish elite, he was a wildcard in an unstable system, a catalyst that might provoke a populist rebellion and Roman reprisals. To the Pharisees, he was an interloper, someone who disregarded the “ways we do things around here,” who threatened all of their smug certainties. To the Romans, he was one more Jewish weirdo. What was it with this people, their prophets, the suicidal fanaticism? Couldn’t they just be flexible and pay their taxes?

Which was the real Jesus? What is truth?

And what is truth about how and why he was killed? How do we even have first hand accounts? At least in John’s gospel we get an explanation for the reporting in the trial before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish body that sent him on to Pilate, for the text claims that an unnamed disciple, presumably John, was known to the high priest, and so had access to that trial. But who is reporting on the conversation with Pilate? We can offer all sorts of theories, including the possibility that one of the Romans in the room would become a convert, but there is no explanation in the text and we have reason to suspect at least part of this narrative is a faithful fiction.

The story as given doesn’t hang together well, is of suspect historicity. The Jews hand Jesus over to Pilate because they are not permitted to put a man to death, yet in no time they are stoning Stephen in the street. Pilate is depicted as almost kind, almost passive, a leader easily influenced by the crowd, while other contemporary sources reveal him as a brutal governor , the most notorious of the lot, disgusted with the locals, who he despised. Releasing a prisoner was not a Roman custom, or a Jewish one for that matter, and a governor who released an insurrectionist might well end up with his own head on a pike. Barabbas certainly fits the profile of the Jewish bandit of the age, much like the two men flanking Jesus at the crucifixion, and Jewish bandits were half freedom fighter, half criminal, so the idea that there was an important captive fits. Josephus, the defeated Jewish general turned historian, would place the account of an insurrection with an unnamed leader just a couple of paragraphs before he mentions the execution of Jesus, and while some dispute the text, it is worth noting that Barabbas is actually two words, “bar” like “bin” being a root that indicates origin or descent in those ancient tongues, making Barabbas translate as the Son of the Father or From the Father.

All of which leaves us where we started, with a question placed to a man in a story we choose to tell ourselves: What is truth?

Some, possibly driven by fundamentalist atheism, argue that pretty much all biblical figures are fabricated, but we know David existed, and we know Jesus existed. Even the most deconstructed and apostate Bible scholars agree that he was real. The Hebrew religion was a hothouse for prophecy and religious innovation, belying the long told tale that it was this immutable set of laws carved into stone. Their religious innovation made them the first to arrive at ethical monotheism, the first to arrive at universalism. The notion of one divine mystery for all of human kind, one divine self that is good, is their, whether you name that mystery as Yahweh, God, or Great Spirit.

Jesus lived in an age of manic street preachers and wanna-be messiahs, in an age always on the cusp of bloodshed in the street and on Golgotha, so it makes perfect sense that this prophet from Galilee, this rabbi for the riff-raff, would end up dead.

What is truth?

Will the real John Parry Barlow please stand up?

Will the real Jesus please stand up?

What is truth? Who knows? On a good day we seem to barely know ourselves, each a swirling cauldron of lived experience, acquired knowledge, and fleshy desire and fear, icebergs of self where little is on the surface. If, as traditional theology insists, Jesus was fully human, then we must assume that when questioned about his identity, even he could not provide a full answer, especially after being up all night, being assaulted in the chief priest’s home even before being dragged to the Roman governor in the early morning.

We all land somewhere on a continuum between fact and fabrication, but maybe when it comes to the metaphysical, we could all do with a little less certainty.

When I was a child I was taught that this man standing before Pilate was one thing, virgin birth, sacrificial lamb, every point in the creed, and if I asked for an explanation of how one being can be three person, I was told it was mystery. For me, that story doesn’t work anymore. The truth, for me at least, is not nailed down quite so easily, and stripping layer after layer of theological paint, the accumulated colors of the centuries, is excruciating back-breaking work. When I finally managed to strip it away and meet Jesus in the gospels, what I found was beautiful, and inconsistent, like natural wood revealed after ages obscured.

I’ve had to unlearn a lot of things about our nation’s history. I’ve had to unlearn a lot of things about myself.

What is truth? Funny you should ask, governor.

When Pilate asks “What is truth?,” we receive no reply.

During this Lenten season of repentance, might we need to repent of some of our truths? Might we benefit from a little unlearning? For certainty paves the wide and easy road to hubris.

Albert Einstein famously said “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” We can join the meaningless debate about whether the great physicist was or was not a theist at any particular point in his life, another truth we won’t really know, though just as there are few atheists in a foxhole, there appear to be fewer and fewer at a particle accelerator.

What is truth? It is a box with no air holes. It is a place of suffocation.

John Perry Barlow was not content to stay in a box. He was a Dead show at the Fillmore and irrigation in Wyoming and a Netizen Cyberspace, free and beyond one single definition. Jesus, standing before Pilate. Are you a king? Not in the way you would understand. He doesn’t fit into a box, in this story. In this version, in this story, Pilate doesn’t know what to do with him. He wouldn’t fit in another kind of box either.

Not knowing is hard and humbling, and it is the path to God. It requires courage and fortitude and love and trust. It is called, in classical theology, the via negativa or apophatic theology, the willingness to let God out of our boxes, to admit that God will always be beyond our conceptual capacity.

This is not some new fangled post-modern thing, a Frankenstein cobbled together from bits and pieces of postmodernism and historical critical scholarship. Letting go of the question “What is truth?”, at least when it comes to the divine, is celebrated, among other places, in the 14th century text “the Cloud of Unknowing,” a call to contemplation and love.

“For God can well be loved,” the author writes, “but God cannot be thought. By love God can be grasped and held, but by thought, neither grasped nor held. And therefore, though it may be good at times to think specifically of the kindness and excellence of God, and though this may be a light and a part of contemplation, all the same, in the work of contemplation itself, it must be cast down and covered with a cloud of forgetting.”

Empirical truth is empirical truth, subject to our interpretation, alas, but even Reince Priebus can’t interpret a crowd on the Mall that didn’t exist. And when it comes to God?

What is truth? Did Jesus think he was going to go to Jerusalem to trigger an apocalyptic Day of the Lord and a restoration of the Hebrew kingdom? Was he the sacrificial lamb, a spiritual suicide? Was he a victim of bickering within the religious community and a Roman tendency to kill first and not bother to ask questions later?

Unknown. Unknowable.

What knowing must you unknown? What certainty is suffocating you?

I close with these words, also from the anonymous author of “The Cloud of Unknowing,”

“And so I urge you, go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest.”

Amen.