Truth is unitary

Thank you for seeking to expand on this point. I don't agree at all with the "bracketing" of truth. I shall make a few observations that I hope are not wholly irrelevant and inapposite to your argument. Plato uses myths and metaphors, but he does so not because he believes there is no truth, but because in some spheres humans may not be in a position to grasp the truth, but may be in a position to grasp a likeness of the truth. A likeness to the truth will be completely true in parts or aspects, and false in others; we just might not be able to distinguish which parts are true and which are not. Furthermore, if Plato really believed that no truth which is simply and straightforwardly true is available to man, then I do not see why he would have devoted his life to enquiry, as he did. His life showed that he did believe in truth and that he believed that some important truth might be discovered. If this were not the case, then surely his life would have been wasted pursuing a chimera. But what, fundamentally, I think both he and I would object to in your account is this use of “truths” in the plural. The fact that there are a diversity of conflicting opinions on a given issue does not show that each of them is “true”. The postmodern use of “truths” in place of “opinions” has the effect of making everyone's opinion seem equally valid (since they are all “true”). If I am discovered to have lied, then I simply respond that what I was expressing was “my” truth. When Netanyahu says there is no starvation in Gaza, this is not “his truth”, no less valid, and no less “true”, than the experiences of the Palestinians who are being starved. On the contrary, Netanyahu's statement is false, and if the falsity is intentional, or if the belief is below some threshold of what could be reasonably and sincerely held, then it is a lie. You say that democracy requires the admission of a plurality of “truths”. I would say that it requires a plurality of opinion, not of truth, since truth is unitary, monistic. There is only one truth. You may call this "absolutism". I would regard it as a precondition for sincere enquiry and thus of intellectual integrity. A writer like Sedgwick immediately signals her total lack of the latter through both her bracketing of truth and her use of an argot which seeks not to communicate a philosophical idea, but rather to convey to the reader that she belongs to an authoritative circle who "know" that there is no such thing as truth but (at best) plural “truths”. I would not voluntarily read such a writer, because life is too short to waste on those who lack intellectual integrity and are not serious enquirers. The mistake of fascists is not to believe in the unitary nature of truth – they're completely correct about that – but rather their willingness to violently suppress contrary opinions, and their readiness to use lethal violence generally in the service of unjust domination. I feel that all this matters. When the BBC balances every report of atrocity in Gaza with an official Israeli press release, it is as though they are saying that each is an equally valid “narrative”; each side has its own “truth”. It makes an equivalence between both sides that those who really do believe in truth will find dishonest and objectionable. It allows the readers or viewers to shrug their shoulders and get on with their lives, but at the cost of airbrushing fact. And this has a real cost; fascism has real victims. The language of truths (plural) means a permanent burying of the past. For once the dead are dead, who's to say what happened except the victors? The inhabitants of Palestine who were ethnically cleansed by European Jews can be dismissed as a few primitives who never had a settled existence anyway. Against this we must insist that this is simply not true; it fails to correspond to reality. That doesn't mean that it is not true “for me” but might be true for the Israelis. It is false whoever says it. And what is true is true even if it is inexpedient, or discomforting to those in power. Omar El Akkad said that “any politics that buckles at the prospect of … resisting an ally’s genocidal intentions, will always face an uphill battle against a politics that actively embraces malice.” - and, one might add, a politics that does not call a lie a lie (and not just the equally valid “truth” of those in power) and a genocide a genocide will face an uphill battle against a politics that revels in lies and promotes genocide.