[This commentary was broadcast on KUNM radio in the summer of 2005.]

Lead in: There’s a good reason why the truth has a good reputation. Commentator Andrew Bard Schmookler says one need only look at where untruth gets us.

Growing up with a father like mine, it came naturally for me to put the honest pursuit of the truth up at the top of my hierarchy of values. He was a man who, as he put it, believed in grabbing the bull by the tail and looking the facts squarely in the face.”

Then in the 1990s, when I was re-examining a lot of my assumptions, I asked myself: Is it really true that a scrupulous regard for the truth is such a great thing?”

I’d noticed that people seemed to be helped in their lives by believing things I thought to be false. Such illusions seemed to diminish their suffering in times of tragedy, and to chase away their confusion with reassuring certainties.

Did it really matter, I wondered, if —in order to maintain what gave them a feeling of security—people ignore what the evidence says and believe instead what makes them feel better? Is there any reason, for example, to mind if half our countrymen simply reject the major organizing principle of the field of biology, the profoundly well-substantiated theory of evolution?

I’d like to think my Dad would have appreciated my testing the validity of one of the major values I’d received from him. I’m pretty sure he’d endorse the conclusion I’ve now reached on the basis of some important new evidence—the evidence of what’s been happening in America in recent years.

There may well be some falsehoods that serve us well to believe. But never in our lifetime has it been clearer that the habit of respecting the truth is a great safeguard against both folly and evil.

To see what happens when people come to their conclusions first and then fix” the evidence to support it, one need only look at the ongoing disaster in Iraq. People who assumed they knew the truth, and had no need of honest inquiry, have plunged this country into a needless quagmire at tremendous cost, and, untroubled by uncertainty, they were deaf to good counsel that could have mitigated those costs.

To see what happens when people indulge the desire to believe what they want to believe, we need only look at the misinformation that —as studies revealed—filled the minds of those who got their news from panderers like Rush Limbaugh and Fox. They re-elected this president believing that weapons of mass destruction had been found in Iraq, that the link between 9/11 and Saddam had been established, and that the world applauded the American invasion of that country. And they happily allow themselves to be assured by a White House that rewrites the science on climate change to bolster the notion that we don’t have to mend our wasteful ways.

For over a decade, I’ve regularly talked with these folks on my radio shows in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. I know them to be basically decent people. I also know them to have been taught to believe what they are told by their authorities and to insulate themselves from whatever might call into question their received wisdom and their cherished beliefs.

That gives them the strength of steadfastness and loyalty. But it also disables them from seeing when they are in error and from changing course when untrustworthy authorities are leading them toward a cliff.

The quest for truth may at times lead to confusion. But in the long run such confusion is a lot less dangerous than a disastrously false certainty.

Reality may not always be what we might wish it were. But reality doesn’t go away even when we close our eyes to it. And those who don’t grab that bull by the tail are likely to end up getting trampled by it.

I’m Andrew Bard Schmookler.