Writing About Truth…and Other Lies

So, what is it to write about truth?

Many of you are familiar with the term “write what you know”. I wrote an article on Scribophile about this topic.  In it I shared some excellent advice from Literary Agent Rachelle Gardner:  “Write what you know means write with authenticity about thoughts, feelings, experiences of life. Be honest. Write from a deep place. Don't write from the surface. Whether you're writing about parenthood or cancer or anything else... be real. Don't reflect what you know from other people or the media... write what you know from your own inner life.” The advice write what you know isn’t about literal truths; it’s about what you know inside. And as SF author Marg Gilks says, “You know more than you think.”

So, what is it to write about the truth?

vote yes to Proposition 37

Here’s a bit of truth from New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom in an article on September 19^th, 2012, entitled Uneasy Allies in the Grocery Aisle: “Giant bioengineering companies like Monsanto and DuPont are spending millions of dollars to fight a California ballot initiative aimed at requiring the labeling of genetically modified foods. That surprises no one, least of all the proponents of the law, which if approved by voters would become the first of its kind in the nation.”

Let’s dig a bit deeper into this truth: “companies behind some of the biggest organic brands in the country—Kashi, Cascadian Farm, Horizon Organic—also have joined the anti-labeling effort, adding millions of dollars to defeat the initiative, known as Proposition 37.”

Strom reveals even deeper truths when she discloses that these well-known “organic” companies are owned by larger conglomerates like Kellogg, General Mills, Dean Foods, Smucker’s and Coca-Cola. Other food companies who have thrown in funds to help defeat the bill for transparency include PepsiCo., Neslé, and ConAgra Foods.

Strom reports that those who support the bill to label GMO products include Whole Foods, Nature’s Path (a Canadian company) Organic Valley, Cliff Bar and Amy’s Kitchen.

Whenever an issue of importance arises, the truth reveals itself. And sometimes in the oddest way. It often slides in through a back door in nuance, motion, color. I’m not just talking about factual truth; I’m talking about resonating hair-standing gut-grabbing truth. The kind of truth that resonates through you in a scintillating frisson that sparks of thrilling unfamiliar yet calms you with the warmth of home. The kind of truth that stops you mid-stride, like someone shouting your name. Subversive truth. The kind of truth that vibrates deep inside and radiates out in a warm flood of epiphany.  The kind of truth that stirs your heart in a relentless wave of flaming light.

At first glance it’s rather obvious why those fighting the bill are against it: they have something to lose in transparency. The question is, why do they think that way? These giant biotech food companies are feeding the entire world, after all, with revolutionary strains of super-plants. They are doing a great good, surely. Could it simply be a concern that they may lose some customers who do not wish to consume GE products but who are unwittingly doing so now? That is being dishonestly self-serving as well as short-sighted (the European Union has required biotech labeling since 1997—it’s just a matter of time).

Could it be the recent bad publicity from findings of the long-term effects of GMO products and Roundup on test animals? (See the incendiary paper by French and Italian scientists in Food Chem. Toxicol., referenced below).  Despite the barrage of bad press (wonder who’s behind most of that?), the paper’s results cannot be refuted entirely or ignored (if only from the basis of scientific inquiry and professional due diligence to do with Type II Error).

Or is it more insidious? 

There is something far more insidious than a lie; that is to dissemble with a half-lie—or half-truth—a truth that veils a festering lie beneath its candy-coated mantle of equivocation. A “truth” so delicious that we want to believe it, even when we see the lie lurking beneath. Little lies always hide bigger lies.

For more than a decade, consumers in North America have purchased cereals, snack foods, and salad dressings, among other products, blithely unaware that these products contained ingredients from plants whose DNA was manipulated in a laboratory.

Here’s my witnessed truth: The aggressive multi-million dollar campaign waged by multi-national corporations against transparency in food labeling in the USA is the culmination of self-serving protectionism in a most heinous way. Their decade-long silence and current reluctance to label their products (and all this before the Seralini et al. study) points to a far greater lie.

Since the long-term toxicity study by Seralini et al. was released in Food & Chemical Toxicology last week, a massive campaign to discredit the study has been waged on the Internet. This despite the soundness of the 2-year study, its glaringly obvious results (e.g. test animals died 2-3 times more quickly than controls among many other findings) and the fact that it sets precedent by being the longest and most detailed study ever conducted on a herbicide and a GMO to date; all previous studies by Monsanto labs and others were only 90-day trials.

So, what is it to write about the truth?

I’ve been a practicing scientist for over twenty years. I did research and wrote papers that were published in scientific peer-reviewed journals. I diligently used the scientific method, hypothesis-testing, objective observation and appropriate statistics to my work. I also write articles for magazines, blogs and places like this site. I write short stories and novels. I write how-to books and guidebooks. And I write letters. Lots of letters. In all this, I have made a point to do my research. I try always to go to the source and verify my information through cross-checking, and various other quality assurance procedures I learned over the years to best represent and communicate the truth.

For instance, in writing this article, I perused many articles that presented both sides of the several issues I covered, including the source paper by Seralini et al.  

Science is the rationale tool for the pursuit of the truth. This is why scientists are burdened to proceed under an objective protocol in their premise presentation, experimental design, methodology and interpretation and conclusions drawn. Because the introduction of error and bias is possible in each of these steps, researchers with integrity ensure through design and quality assurance protocol that these errors and biases are minimized. This includes the use of contols, sufficient sample size and statistical power, blind or even double-blind experiments and more. Experiments are reported with sufficient transparency to be replicated (an icon of good science). Once they are reported in a paper, results transform from science into politics.

Science and its close cousin “pseudo-science” are the weapons waged in this issue of GMO food labeling. But science is just a soldier. Who are the politicians behind the soldiers of science and what are their motives? That is where the truth lies.

In the end, I have found that listening to the conviction of my heart, to my inner “soul wisdom”, best serves the truth. Then again I prefer the resonating hair-standing gut-grabbing truth.  

You may be interested in a previous article I wrote here back in 2007 about the potential ecological dangers posed by GE practices, the wisdom of labelling GE products and Nature's alternatives to GE. Here is an excerpt:

While developers of genetically engineered foods (GEF) strive to produce hardier and higher-yielding plants, ecologists throughout the world eye transgenics skeptically. They fear that these genetically altered plants, may escape into the wild and displace native plants with unforeseen and potentially devastating results. Dr. Wes Jackson, director of the Land Institute in Kansas, a non-profit research facility devoted to alternative agricultural practices, warns that, if misused, biotechnology may lead to the human-induced degradation of the genomes of plant species. “What is being more or less ignored” in the rush to biotechnology, he said in an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, “is that some of the same principles and processes that govern an ecosystem, like a forest or a prairie, also operate with genomes. The genome is a miniature ecosystem.”1 Thinking along the same lines, Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists of America suggested that transgenic science practices may release a seemingly harmless gene into our food supply with life-threatening consequences.

Growing knowledge of potential risks to ecosystem and human health is prompting many to insist that GEFs be identified and segregated so that consumers can make a choice for or against them. Which brings us to the obvious question: what alternative to the use of GEFs will we find to feed our ever-growing populations? Rissler advocates an alternative vision for agriculture, one based on nature’s own balance, which she calls “sustainable agriculture” or biomimicry.

Go here to read the entire article, "Biomimicy: Nature's Alternative to Genetically Engineered Foods".

If you live in California, or even if you don't, I exhort you to support Proposition 37 this November any way you can. Our freedom--and truth--is at stake.

Reference:

Seralini, G.-E., et al. Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize. Food Chem. Toxicol. (2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fct.201208.005

Nina Munteanu is an ecologist and internationally published author of novels, short stories and essays. She coaches writers and teaches writing at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For more about Nina’s coaching & workshops visit www.ninamunteanu.me. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for more about her writing.

Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty

Love makes an object beautiful—Eliseo Lagano

Ubi amor ibi oculus est (Where there is love there is vision)—Richard of St Victor
Do you recall John Keats’ enigmatic last two lines in Ode on a Grecian Urn: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” ?

“But what on Earth did Keats mean?” asked mathematician and author, Martin Gardner (Scientific American, April 2007). Gardner went on to quote T.S. Eliot who called the lines “meaningless” and “a serious blemish on a beautiful poem”. A rather pithy remark, I thought, considering the lines spoke of beauty. Gardner further described how great theorems and great proofs, such as “Euclid’s elegant proof of infinity of primes, have about them what Bertrand Russell described as ‘a beauty cold and austere’ akin to the beauty of great works of sculpture.”

Ian Stewart, a distinguished mathematician at the University of Warwick in England and author of Why Beauty is Truth: a History of Symmetry, suggested that symmetry lay at the heart of beauty. He concluded his book with two maxims: 1) in physics, beauty does not automatically ensure truth, but it helps; and 2) in mathematics beauty must be true—because everything false is ugly.

I really don’t think these guys get it.

Blog Action Day--Truth

In honor of Blog Action Day on the Environment, I submit my issue here and now…My issue is TRUTH: Living with it and acting upon it for the environment.

This post is dedicated to the spirit of what Al Gore has been so courageously and tenaciously doing: presenting the “truth” on Climate Change and the health and future of our beloved planet Earth, and providing numerous key solutions that we can embrace.

Many skeptics, naysayers, and self-motivated individuals have criticized Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth” as alarmist myth, perpetuated by a bitter man with ambitious motivations for office…or at the least a man who was terribly misinformed and who presented a case that was replete with inaccuracies and hence useless and untrue. Scientists and politicians and various others have cited many inaccuracies in the movie, so much so that various educational institutions have removed the film from their scholastic libraries. I find this appalling and am dismayed by the shallowness of their actions.

I submit that the hardest (actually the easiest) lesson one can learn is that a greater truth can embrace many smaller untruths—and still be true. This is the paradox of life on Earth. One we must embrace if we are going to prevail as a species on this ever-changing planet (yes, global warming being part of it). What am I talking about, you may very well ask?

I’m suggesting that we all strip down and consider our hearts in these matters, even—nay, particularly—when science is involved. The heart is where the truth really lies within each and every one of us, whether or not we are educated, informed or intelligent. The truth does not reside in your pocket book. Not in your neighbor’s opinion or in the newspaper. Not in your pride or your insecurity. Not in your knowledge, even. Don’t let ten…heck…thirty, forty, fifty “experts” persuade you or dissuade you. If your heart tells you that it’s wrong or right, then listen to it. Your heart is your true compass to the truth.

Albert Einstein, in discussions with Max Wertheimer (1959) about the theory of relativity and his thinking which led to it, said:

…during all those years there was the feeling of direction, of going straight toward something concrete. It is, of course, very hard to express that feeling in words; but it was decidedly the case, and clearly to be distinguished from later considerations about the rational form of the solution.

In 1913, the French scientist, Henri Poincaré stated that “it may be surprising to see emotional sensibility invoked a propos of mathematical demonstrations which, it would seem, can interest only the intellect. This would be to forget the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true esthetic feeling that all real mathematicians know, and surely it belongs to emotional sensibility.” Poincaré also suggested that “pure logic would never lead us to anything but tautologies. It is by logic that we prove. It is by intuition that we discover.”

Rosenblueth and Wiener (1945) emphasized that:

An intuitive flair for what will turn out to be the most important general question gives a basis for selecting some of the significant among the indefinite number of trivial experiments which could be carried out at that stage. Quite vague and tacit generalizations thus influence the selection of data at the start.
What Rosenblueth and Wiener were saying is that when scientists (like me) report on the “truth” we are using our scientific judgment, along with our tools in scientific method and logic. We are using our sensibilities and our feelings (whether we like to admit it or not). In the end, science is often just the tool to prove a truth you already know through intuition. Al Gore knows. And so do you.

So, while it might be ignorant to discount the very real effects of extra-planetary and solar cycles in the current global warming phenomenon, what is it to ignore the cumulative role of 6.5 billion people and associated industry in what is happening to our planet's ecosystems on a global scale? Who are we kidding?

So, my challenge is the truth…the LARGER TRUTH. I exhort us all to seek it in our own way. Watch the movie. Make up your own mind. From the heart. Because, with truth comes conviction. With conviction comes responsibility and action. With action comes change. And each of us can change the world. In our own small but not insignificant way.

Recommended Reading/Watching:
“An Inconvenient Truth” by Al Gore.

Shavinina, Larisa & Michel Ferrari (eds). 2004. Beyond Knowledge, extracognitive aspects of developing high ability. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, London.