Temperance and Truth

I received some very interesting information in the mail yesterday from the Women's Temperance Union. That's right, the Women's Temperance Union, the very group that your great-grandmother or your spinster great aunt belonged to fueling the fire for her anti-drinking, righteous, attitude.

Fun group that I thought was long gone. Well as it turns out the group is still alive and kinda active. They have great material for a church group of 1958, so they are a little behind the times.

One particular pamphlet listed the 22 national benefits of Prohibition as compiled by E. Deets Pickett (Associate Editor, American Prohibition Yearbook). Here are some - the italics are my comments:

1. Wife beating and lack of family support decreased 82% - doubtful

2. Drunkenness was down 55.3% - maybe in churches

3. Assault was down 53.1% - was this before the St. Valentines Day Massacre?

4. Vagrancy decreased 52.85% - really?

5. Disorderly conduct decreased 51.5% - how do you measure that?

6. Many correctional institutions were closed - how many, what is the percentage?

7. Crime throughout the nation, excluding Chicago, was down 38% - guess you didn't check out Rhode Island, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, etc., etc.

8. Crime in Chicago was DOWN 25% - did you not read the above fact?

9. Families were better clothed - have you seen the outfits people wore back then?

10. Attendance at church and school improved. - Probably because they wanted the wine from the Lord's Supper

and on and on

I'm not trying to mock the idea of temperance. There are people who struggle with alcoholism and there are families who suffer because of its abuse. What irks me is this flagrant throwing around of numbers and playing them off as facts. Percentages are given, lists are made, and we are then supposed to accept them as irrefutable facts. Deets was someone who wrote during the push for Prohibition and afterwards, so he is not a neutral party. His numbers are biased (if they are based in reality).

This continues today. So many are vying for "truth" and do it with concocted facts. One of the "facts" that I love is when Christians say the crucification and resurrected must have happened because it is in the Bible and the Bible is true. That's a fact.

Wait, what?

There is a difference between truths and facts. 

Truths are statements of meaning, convictions that speak to values and ideals shared by a community.

Facts are supposed to be things that are observable and empirical.

Truths can vary, but what about facts?

What I have noticed is that facts have adopted a functionality of convenience. We believe what we want to believe and discount what we want to discount.

Then what happens to truth? If facts become subjective then truth becomes so relative to each community that any shared discourse seems unattainable.

I need a drink.