Truth doesn't care about progressive or conservative.
Truth doesn't care about left or right.
Truth doesn't care.
Truth just is.
The problem is when people don't care to seek the truth, and instead they seeking an in-crowd. Then you simply have uncaring mobs.
(Of course, that’s in addition to the fact that all science is inherently flawed and biased, because we are.)
In case of politically divisive questions, as an example, these two sentences can contradict each other and be true at the same time: 1) “abortion is killing a living being”, and 2) “abortion is a free person exercising control over her own body”. The host of questions you’d need to explore in order to make a point of truth is vast and includes the definition of life, whether there is free will, whether consequentialism is better than deontology, etc.; and if you claim that this does not matter then congratulations—you have already adopted a position on some politically divisive question.
In philosophical terms, truth in absolute sense would require having some hypothetical access to underlying reality; since we can never have that (as all of our access to reality is mediated by our mind), we only have access to lossy models or maps; and because there is always more than one model or map that can be useful depending on the purpose, there is always a subset of claims where one has the opposite truth value (or no truth value) in one of the maps.
In short, not only no one “owns” the truth, but anyone who claims to actually “know” it is being delusional or misleading; the solution to alienating political divisiveness is not obtaining unobtainable objective truth but finding common ground.
To quote a favourite song, Tim Minchin's Storm: "So I resist the urge to ask Storm whether knowledge is so loose-weave of a morning when deciding whether to leave her apartment by the front door Or the window on her second floor"
To put it another way, some truths are easier to realise than others. But most quarrels are not about truth, more about what solution we want to use for an issue.
> the solution to alienating political divisiveness is not obtaining unobtainable objective truth but finding common ground.
My concern with this is that all parties need to be finding, rather than barracking for their side. Wilful ignorance deserves no mercy in my book.
This article suggests that there is a bifurcation happening:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/10/29/elon-mu...
It's 'Lo and behold'.
Also, your tone is superior, which is a flaw we normally associate with liberals, and I'm seeing this shift more. This seems related.