When Convention Takes the Place of Truth

There are moments when I find myself wondering not so much about the rules that govern our lives, but about the very nature of those rules. It is a doubt that almost always arises from small, seemingly insignificant circumstances, yet ends up opening onto much larger questions: where does what possesses an intrinsic necessity come to an end, and where does what we have merely decided to regard as necessary begin? In other words, when is a rule truly a rule, and when is it simply a convention that, through repetition, has acquired the appearance of truth?

There is nothing inherently troubling about conventions. Quite the opposite: without them, living together would be impossible. Language itself is, to a large extent, an immense system of conventions. We call things by certain names because, at some distant point in time, a community began to call them that, and subsequent generations continued to do so. The same is true of countless social behaviours, customs, and codes through which we organise work, education, and relationships. Convention is one of the ways in which human beings impose order upon the disorder of the world.

The problem begins when we lose awareness of its conventional nature.

A shared choice may be reasonable, necessary for the functioning of a community, even preferable to other possible solutions; but that does not make it a law inscribed in the nature of things. There is a profound difference between saying that something must be done in a certain way because otherwise it could not work, and saying that we have chosen to do it that way because it seemed the most useful, the simplest, or the easiest to understand. Both statements may be perfectly legitimate. But they are not the same statement.

It is a distinction I have found myself thinking about more and more since becoming a father.

To educate a child inevitably means placing an enormous number of rules in his hands. Some concern safety, others respect for other people, others still language, behaviour, school, and social life. Yet while teaching him these rules, we also repeat something that appears almost to contradict them: that he must learn to think for himself, to observe, to ask questions, and not to accept passively everything he is told.

It is here that an educational contradiction emerges, one that perhaps deserves far greater attention.

We ask children to think independently, yet we often assess them according to their ability to recognise the answer we were expecting. We tell them that reasoning matters, but when their reasoning leads them to a conclusion different from the one anticipated, we tend to regard that difference as a mistake before we have even asked ourselves what path brought them there.

It is a subtle distinction. Yet it contains an enormous question.

There is no insignificant distance between searching for the correct answer and searching for the expected one.

The first belongs to knowledge; the second, in many cases, belongs to adaptation.

Of course, all learning requires a certain degree of adaptation. A child must learn that a linguistic community has rules, that mathematics has others, and that shared procedures exist without which mutual understanding would be impossible. Critical thinking does not consist in rejecting everything established before us, as though intelligence were synonymous with permanent opposition. That would be a caricature of critical thought, not its expression.

To think critically means, rather, learning to recognise the nature of what is being presented to us. It means distinguishing what is necessary from what is conventional, what can be demonstrated from what can be interpreted, what is true from what is merely shared. It means understanding that a rule may be entirely valid without being absolute, and that a convention may be extraordinarily useful without thereby becoming a truth.

Perhaps it is precisely this ability to distinguish that we are gradually losing.

We live in a time that seems to have multiplied the possible interpretations of the world. In many respects, this is an achievement: we have learned to distrust oversimplification, to acknowledge complexity, to understand that the same phenomenon may be observed from different perspectives. Yet the plurality of interpretations carries with it an opposite danger: that of forgetting that not everything belongs to the same degree of disputability.

A fact is not an opinion. An interpretation is not a demonstration. A custom is not a law of nature. A rule is not necessarily a universal truth. And a different answer is not necessarily a wrong one.

When these categories begin to overlap, our relationship with reality inevitably becomes more fragile. We may find ourselves treating as relative what has an objective foundation while, at the same time, defending as absolute what is merely the result of a collective choice. It is a peculiar inversion: what ought to be open to discussion becomes indisputable, while what ought to provide the common ground from which discussion begins is continually called into question.

I do not believe that social change itself is the problem. Change is the very condition of history. Words change, customs change, educational systems change; the boundaries of what we regard as acceptable shift, as do those of what we define as normal. It would be naïve to long for an immobile past which, in any case, never existed.

What unsettles me, rather, is the possibility that in our desire to embrace complexity we may have begun to surrender clarity.

Complexity is not confusion. Recognising multiple interpretations does not mean claiming that every interpretation carries the same value. Accepting that conventions change does not mean surrendering the right to ask upon what foundations they were built. Above all, it does not mean abandoning that elementary question which accompanies every genuine form of knowledge: why?

It is a question children ask incessantly, often to the point of exhausting the adults around them. And perhaps it is no coincidence that this single word accompanies those years in which the world is being discovered for the first time.

Why?

There is almost nothing more profoundly philosophical.

And yet, as we grow older, we gradually learn to ask it less. Sometimes because we have found the answers, but at other times simply because we have understood that certain questions disturb the established order of things. “That’s just the way it is” then becomes a kind of full stop, the formula by which a conversation is closed before reasoning has truly begun.

Perhaps this is where education and authority ought to meet differently.

Authority should not be afraid of questions. On the contrary, it should know how to welcome them precisely because it understands the difference between what can be explained and what must simply be acknowledged as convention. A teacher, a parent, anyone entrusted with an educational responsibility, does not lose authority by saying, “This is the solution we adopt, but it is not the only conceivable one.” They gain it.

Because within such a sentence lies something more important than certainty: intellectual honesty.

Perhaps we have too often associated authority with the need always to possess a definitive answer. But education does not mean presenting someone with a world already perfectly ordered. It means giving them the tools to find their way when that order is no longer evident.

For this reason, it seems increasingly important to me that we teach our children not merely answers, but a hierarchy of answers. We should show them that some things we know, while others we suppose; some we demonstrate, while others we interpret; some we do because they could not reasonably be done otherwise, while others we do simply because, for reasons of convenience or tradition, we have decided to do them that way.

These distinctions may sound sophisticated. In truth, they belong to the most elementary form of honesty.

Not everything new is better, just as not everything inherited from the past deserves to be preserved. Not everything widely shared is true, just as not everything held by a minority is therefore more intelligent. Not everything that appears strange is wrong, just as mere familiarity with something is not enough to make it right.

Between these extremes lies a space far less reassuring, but infinitely more fertile: the space of judgement.

And judgement requires criteria.

Perhaps this is the most delicate responsibility we have towards our children: not to hand them a catalogue of certainties, but to give them a mental structure solid enough to carry them through uncertainty. Not to teach them that everything is relative, but neither to teach them that everything handed down by authority must necessarily be absolute. Rather, to help them recognise the differences.

One day we will no longer be beside them to explain which answer seems correct to us. And if we have done our job well, perhaps they will not need us to be.

They will have learned to ask upon what reasons a statement rests, which part belongs to fact and which to interpretation, which rule is genuinely necessary and which is merely the result of a human agreement.

Conventions will continue to change. Words will change, behaviours will change, schools will change, shared values will change, and even many of the things that seem self-evident to us today will change.

I do not know whether this should reassure us or concern us.

But I do know that, amid everything that changes, there is at least one thing I would like to remain: the right to ask why.

And, together with that right, the responsibility to seek an answer that amounts to something more than a simple “that’s just the way it is.”