Conversations on Truth 9781441167569, 9781847064240

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Chapter 1 Conversations on Truth

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Conversations on Truth Edited by

Mick Gordon and Chris Wilkinson

Continuum The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com Editorial and this collection copyright © Mick Gordon and Chris Wilkinson, 2009. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. First published 2009. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-8470-6424-0 (paperback)

Designed and typeset by Kenneth Burnley, Wirral, Cheshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by . . .

Chapter 1

Contents

Notes on Contributors Introduction Chris Wilkinson 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

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Simon Blackburn Gregory Chaitin Noam Chomsky Nick Davies Richard J. Evans A. C. Grayling Bruce Houlder John Humphrys Dan Hind Martin Kusch Mary Midgley Peter Oborne David Livingstone Smith Mary Warnock Peter Wilby

1 14 27 39 61 74 89 102 113 128 142 155 167 182 192

Notes

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Chapter 1

Notes on Contributors

Simon Blackburn is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Until recently he was Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and from 1969 to 1990 he was a fellow and tutor at Pembroke College, Oxford. His books include Truth – A Guide for the Perplexed. Gregory Chaitin is an Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist. He is known for his contributions to Algorithmic Information Theory and Metamathematics. He is a research staff member at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York State and also a visiting professor at the Computer Science Department of the University of Auckland, and on the international committee of the Valparaíso Complex Systems Institute. Noam Chomsky is Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a well-known political activist and has published widely on subjects such as American foreign policy and the media. His books include Manufacturing Consent – the Political Economy of the Mass Media, which he co-authored with Edward S. Herman. Nick Davies has been named Journalist of the Year, Reporter of the Year and Feature Writer of the Year for his investigations into crime, drugs, poverty and other social issues. He writes regularly for the Guardian and also makes TV documentaries. His books include Flat Earth News – an investigation of falsehood and distortion in the media. Richard J. Evans is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge. He was an expert witness for the defence when David Irving unsuccessfully sued the historian Deborah Lipstadt for defamation after vii

viii Notes on Contributors she accused him of Holocaust denial. His books include In Defence of History. Mick Gordon is a theatre director and dramatist. He is the founding Artistic Director of On Theatre and was Associate Director of London’s National Theatre and Artistic Director of London’s Gate Theatre. His plays include On Love, On Death, On Ego, On Religion, On Emotion and Grace. His books include Conversations on Religion, published by Continuum. A. C. Grayling is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a supernumerary fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. He is the author of numerous philosophical books and is also a distinguished literary journalist and broadcaster. He is a contributing editor of Prospect magazine and writes a weekly column for The Times Saturday Review. His most recent book is Towards the Light. Dan Hind has worked in publishing since 1998 and is currently editorial director of The Bodley Head. He lives in London. He is the author of The Threat to Reason: How the Enlightenment was Hijacked and How We Can Reclaim it. Bruce Houlder QC is a criminal barrister. He was chairman of the Criminal Bar Association from 2001 to 2003, and has recently been appointed Director of Service Prosecutions. John Humphrys has been a presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme since 1987. In 2000 he won the Journalist of the Year award. His books include In God We Doubt. Martin Kusch is Professor of Philosophy and Sociology of Science at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University. He is currently writing a history of relativism. David Livingstone Smith is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of New England, and co-founder and director of the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology. He is the author of Why We Lie – The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind.

Notes on Contributors ix Mary Midgley is a moral philosopher and a former senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University. Her books include Evolution as a Religion: Strange Hopes and Stranger Fears and Myths We Live By. Peter Oborne is a former political editor of The Spectator and a political columnist for the Daily Mail. In April 2005 he presented a programme on Channel 4 as part of the Election Unspun series, called Why Politicians Can’t Tell The Truth. His books include The Rise of Political Lying. Mary Warnock is a British philosopher of morality, education and mind. She was made a life peer in 1985. Her books include The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics and Easeful Death. Peter Wilby is a former editor of the Independent on Sunday and The New Statesman. He currently writes a regular column on the media for the Guardian. Chris Wilkinson is an award-winning theatre director and journalist. He has written for The Financial Times, The Scotsman, Prospect magazine, and the Guardian (online). He is co-editor of Conversations on Religion. He is the associate director of On Theatre.

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Chapter 1

Introduction Chris Wilkinson

Is our society experiencing a crisis in truth? Looking at some of the arguments and scandals that have emerged into the public arena in recent years, it would be tempting to think so. The collapse of the global financial system seems to have been caused, at least in part, by a combination of false beliefs about how markets work and the deliberate lies and deceptions of some of those that work in the financial industries. The war in Iraq was justified on the basis of intelligence about weapons of mass destruction that turned out to be at best very wrong, and at worst completely fabricated. And at a domestic level, some of our most respected broadcasters, including the BBC, have been rocked by revelations about seriously misleading claims made in both their factual and entertainment programmes. Scepticism about the notion of truth seems to permeate the intellectual sphere too. At one end of the scale the rise of postmodernism is seen by some as a dangerous and aggressive assault on the fundamental notions of truth and reality. At the other end of this scale, it has been argued that the spread of such things as religious fundamentalism and ‘New Age’ alternative medicine poses a threat to the whole Enlightenment project that – with its focus on science and reason – lies at the core of Western culture. These are some of the issues that we attempt to explore in this book. Mick Gordon and I are theatre-makers by profession. We run a small theatre company called On Theatre which creates Theatre Essays. These are dramatic, theatrical presentations of the written essay form. For each one, we find a subject that fascinates us, and then spend several months sourcing as much material as we can in order better to understand the issue. Part of this process involves interviewing a range of expert thinkers on the topic at hand, and it is these conversations that are presented here. This is the second book we have produced. The first Conversations on Religion grew out of the research for the show that we created in 2006 xi

xii Introduction called On Religion. With this project, we are working the other way round. We are currently working on the best way to formulate these discussions into a piece of drama, and we hope that the responses that this book generates will help us to do this. For our approach to this subject we wanted to cast our net as widely as possible and to look anywhere where discussions about truth are, or at least should be, central. As a result we spoke to people from the fields of philosophy, journalism, science, law, history and politics. Some of the arguments put forward in this book are dizzying in their complexity, while others are gracefully simple. But we hope that they all, in their own ways, shed some light on a subject which can, at one and the same time, feel both profoundly abstract and yet intrinsically relevant to our everyday lives. Of all those whom we spoke to, Simon Blackburn is one of the people who comes closest to having a fully worked-out definition of truth. As a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and the author of Truth – A Guide for the Perplexed, he is the ideal person to give a general introduction to the various philosophical arguments that surround this troublesome concept. For him the ‘deflationist’ theory of truth is the best way to understand what the word means. He argues that to say something is true is to do little more than simply allow for certain logical inferences to be made from that statement. In terms of the wider discussion surrounding these issues, he sees a tension between how we understand the world epistemologically and morally. In epistemological terms, he is a realist and believes that the evidence of our senses can give us a pretty good understanding of the way that the world actually is. But morally he is very much an anti-realist, and he points out that we cannot attain moral knowledge in anything like the same way. Gregory Chaitin is an Argentine-American mathematician and computer scientist. The passion he displays for his extraordinarily complex subject is highly infectious and it is fortunate that he is so able at communicating his fundamental ideas to laypeople. He is fired by the work of the logician Kurt Gödel and the mathematician and father of the computer, Alan Turing. Chaitin thinks it likely that the entire philosophical underpinning of mathematics is wrong. It has often been believed that pure mathematics would one day be able to discover a set of absolute and logically provable mathematical truths. However, Chaitin argues that the discovery of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Turing’s work on uncomputable numbers shows that this cannot be done. His own work in computing builds on this and he sets forth the radical claim that mathematics may have to accept that it will not be able to prove everything logically, and that it will need to become more experimental – like physics – if it is really going to progress.

Introduction xiii Noam Chomsky is the Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he is probably most famous for his lifetime of outspoken political commentary. Chomsky is a trenchant critic of what he sees as the lies and deceptions that governments around the world engage in, and he is particularly focused on the behaviour of his own government in the USA. He believes that the media and the intellectual elite often conspire with powerful interests to disseminate these untruths to the wider public. He talks of a ‘propaganda model’ for how the US media operates where it is highly selective in what it will and won’t report, and which therefore creates a picture of the world that is significantly skewed towards the American point of view. But he is no pessimist, and he has a clear faith in the power of ordinary citizens to hold governments to account and to force them to be more honest and transparent. Nick Davies is a British journalist who shares Chomsky’s disillusionment with the media, but who feels that his analysis of why it is so dysfunctional is very wide of the mark. For Davies, the problem lies with the economics of news production and reporting. He argues that the advent of 24-hour news means that journalists are being required to produce more and more copy but with ever-shrinking resources, and so they are increasingly forced to rely on the output of PR firms and other interest groups. The effect of this ‘churnalism’ is to turn the media into a conduit for lies, propaganda and distortion on behalf of those in power. For the historian Richard Evans, the question of whether the study of history can ever really discover the truth of events in the past is a very complex one. He acknowledges that the views of individual historians will have a significant impact on the way in which they interpret the evidence before them. But he is also highly critical of the trend of post-structuralism that swept through history departments in the 1990s and which seeks to argue that it is impossible really to know anything about the past because history is simply a linguistic construct. Evans also expands on the moral component to the quest for historical truth, and he speaks engagingly about how his commitment to the principles of democracy and human rights informs his reading of historical evidence and drives his study of, for instance, subjects such as the Third Reich. For A. C. Grayling, the exploration of truth is a passionate and ongoing intellectual journey. He argues that the notion of ‘the truth’ can be an unhelpful one and that actually we are much better off talking about a range of different ‘truths’. The word ‘truth’ he says is frequently used to lump together such a large number of essentially unrelated concepts that it can become a fairly meaningless term. This does not mean, however, that he accepts any form of relativism in the way we understand the world, and he is happy to speak of there being objective moral truths and to

xiv Introduction argue that we need rigorously to guard the principles and values that we have inherited from the Enlightenment. Bruce Houlder QC is a criminal barrister whose understanding of how the law works is subtly different from simply seeing it as the pursuit of ‘the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’. The point of the legal process, he argues, is not to find ‘the truth’ in general, but rather to discover the true answers to very specific questions. He talks compellingly about how the court system aims to tease out these true answers from the diverse range of conflicting reports that are presented, and of the problems that exist both within the system and outside it which can hamper the discovery of the true facts that surround particular events and people. John Humphrys is a veteran broadcaster with many years’ experience of interviewing the country’s most senior political figures. He is sceptical of whether it is ever possible to discover any absolute or objective truth about the world. He argues that a journalist can only deal in specific facts but – as the débâcle surrounding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq shows – even that can be highly problematic. He does not, as some believe, think that all politicians are liars, but his experience has made him deeply sceptical of many of them nonetheless. He sees his job as being part of an unofficial opposition to the government of the day. By interrogating politicians in the way that he does, he aims to give his listeners, and voters generally, the best opportunity to decide for themselves what is true and what is not. The writer Dan Hind is concerned about the way in which the Enlightenment seems to be so misunderstood by some of its most vocal defenders. He attacks those who see things such as religion and alternative medicine as being the greatest threats to the Enlightenment ideal of pursuing of truth through reason. He points out that not only were many great Enlightenment thinkers themselves religious, but also that there are some fundamental problems with the political, intellectual and corporate structures within which much academic and scientific discourse currently takes place. By ignoring these problems, Hind argues, many of today’s proponents of the Enlightenment are unable to address the real threats posed to reason and truth. Unlike many of the people we spoke to, Martin Kusch, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, is proud to call himself a relativist. However, his understanding of that term is far more nuanced than many critics of relativism might assume, and he is keen to point out that his position does not mean that he believes we can simply choose to see reality in any way that we wish. He does, however, argue that the idea that science will ever be able to provide us with a complete and final understanding of the world is false. For Kusch,

Introduction xv the picture of the world that any particular branch of science gives us is inseparable from the conceptual language that is used to describe it, and so in that sense our understanding of what we are investigating will always be dependent upon the position from which we start. Like Martin Kusch, Mary Midgley is highly critical of the way that science is often currently understood. Whilst she is no relativist, she does not like what she describes as the ‘dogmatic materialism’ that pervades the language used by people such as Richard Dawkins in their presentation of science. For Midgley, it is vital that we do not let our philosophical preconceptions limit what we will accept as legitimate evidence for understanding the world around us. She also believes that it is quite possible to talk about truth in the moral sphere. There are, she says, certain statements such as ‘torture is wrong’ which can be presented as objective facts and she points out that, in fact, the oldest definition of the word truth is the moral one in relation to truth and lies. David Livingstone Smith is fascinated by lies. As both a philosopher and an evolutionary psychologist, he sees lying as a natural process which is integral to our reproductive success. But he does not limit the concept of ‘a lie’ to being simply a straightforward, conscious attempt to mislead. Rather he sees any act of deception – conscious or unconscious – as a form of lying, and he is particularly intrigued by our capacity to deceive ourselves. This does not mean, however, that he thinks lying is a good thing. But he argues that if we are fully to understand how dangerous this capacity for deception can be, then it is vital that we first acknowledge how fundamental it is both to us and to our society. Peter Oborne is also deeply concerned about lying. He is disgusted by what he sees as the rise of political lying – something which he argues has become far worse under New Labour. He also shares Nick Davies’ anger at how the press has been complicit in this, and he attacks the way in which political journalism works – with writers refusing to criticize the government or expose its deception for fear that they will lose the contacts and sources which are vital to their work. Despite being a Conservative, and therefore far removed politically from Noam Chomsky’s general point of view, he is nonetheless highly impressed by Chomsky’s critique of how the media works. Mary Warnock, like Mary Midgley, is one of the grande dames of British philosophy. She too has a profound interest in moral philosophy, and as an active member of the House of Lords frequently works to put her ideas into practice. This pragmatism also extends to her understanding of what truth is, and she is scathing about many of the attempts that philosophers have made to come up with an abstract definition of the word. She was particularly interested in talking to us about the nature of truth in an

xvi Introduction imaginative and artistic sense. She speaks passionately of her love for Jane Austen’s novels and of how, despite being works of fiction, she thinks they do contain a great deal of truth. She uses this as an example of how our understanding of the concept of truth needs to be widened beyond simply describing what is literally true. Finally, Peter Wilby has worked in journalism for 40 years. While he shares with Oborne, Chomsky and Davies a deep scepticism of how the media works, he is nonetheless clearly still very much in love with his profession. He argues that it is nonsense to believe that any journalist can simply write about the truth of any particular issue, and that instead, their interpretation of the facts will always be profoundly coloured by their own personal and political beliefs. But good journalists, he says, should be able to make their case – whatever it might be – while still presenting the facts that they are reporting in an honest manner. There is, of course, an irony in the way that these conversations about truth are being presented. They were all recorded, then transcribed and then edited for publication. In this respect, while we have made every effort to remain as faithful and true to the content and spirit of the discussions, the transcripts that appear here are not, in themselves, absolutely true or accurate representations of what was said. Some of the changes made are fairly banal – the repetitions and hesitations that are common in everyday speech have been excised. But in other areas the alterations have been more fundamental. Arguments and statements have been rephrased in order to clarify them for the reader, and the odd comment has even been left out or amended so as to prevent it from being either libellous or unduly invasive of someone’s privacy. This, of course, is de rigueur in any kind of journalism or writing, and without this editing the interviews would not have been publishable. But the act of making all these changes has demonstrated to us, at least, that any attempt to communicate the truth of something is always going to end up having to be at least a little bit fictitious.

1

Simon Blackburn

Do you have a working definition of the term ‘truth’? Well I could talk for an hour on that! The very peculiar definition that a lot of philosophers have arrived at is that truth, or what is often called ‘the truth predicate’, actually doesn’t wear its meaning on its sleeve. And the idea that’s very popular at present, and which is sometimes called ‘deflationism about truth’, is that instead it’s a logical device. It is actually a device of generalization rather than one which attributes a property to sentences. Now that probably sounds very mysterious, but let me try to explain it. A classic approach to the idea of truth is that a true statement is one that corresponds to the facts. Now everybody accepts that. But where there’s dissent among philosophers is over the issue of whether this is a definition or analysis that actually helps us with the notion, or whether it’s just a paraphrase that doesn’t get us anywhere. Critics of correspondence theories will say things like, ‘Well, if we had a robust conception of a fact, then we might be able to see correspondence to the facts in similar terms to the way we might picture a structure. It’d be rather like the way that a model of the Eiffel Tower would correspond with the Eiffel Tower. But facts are very peculiar; they’re not really things at all.’ A very nice way of understanding this is by saying that you can move a thing, but you can’t move a fact. You can move a structure – you know, if the Franco–Prussian War had happened a bit later, then the Germans might have moved the Eiffel Tower to Berlin. But they can’t move the fact that the Eiffel Tower is in Paris to Berlin – that’s not a logically possible line of thought. So facts became very suspicious – you know, philosophers ask, ‘Are there negative facts?’ Suppose it’s a fact that there’s no hippopotamus in this room. Well, what’s that made true by? An absence? Do absences amount to facts? Are there facts like, ‘Either hippopotami live in Africa, or they live in India?’ Is that a fact? And so on. So facts have their own problems. 1

2 Conversations on Truth In answer to this, a great German logician called Frege, who was working at the end of the last century, started to say things like, ‘Well, look, that a proposition is true doesn’t tell you any more than you’d learn by just asserting it.’ So, if I want to say, ‘It’s eleven o’clock here in North Carolina’, it doesn’t matter in the least whether I say, ‘It’s eleven o’clock here in North Carolina’, or, ‘It’s true that it’s eleven o’clock here in North Carolina’. Saying that ‘it’s true’ doesn’t add anything to saying it. And Frege thought that this was indicative of the fact that the truth predicate isn’t really introducing a new property – it’s not introducing a relation between a proposition and the world. So the question arises, ‘Well, what the hell is it doing, then? Is it just redundant?’ And for a while, philosophers played with the idea that it was simply redundant, and that we could do without it. But then they noticed that there are various things you need to say which you can’t say without it. For example, I might want to tell you that Johnny said two true things at breakfast, or that everything George Bush says is false. And I can’t do that without the notions of truth and falsity. I can’t generalize. So the idea took root that the truth predicate is, in some sense, a device of generalization. Now that sounds very strange, but the idea is that it’s simply there to enable this kind of indirect reference to what somebody said to take place. So, for example, I can keep up my sleeve what George Bush said, but just tell you that everything he said was false. When I do tell you what he said, you are then, if you believe me, in a position to say: ‘Ah, not-p, not-q, not-r’. So when you learn that George Bush said that the Iraqis have weapons of mass destruction, because I said that everything he said was false, you can infer that the Iraqis actually didn’t have weapons of mass destruction. So it puts you in a position to make inferences. In that sense, it’s a device of logic, rather than a robust property relating propositions to the world. This theory is called ‘deflationism’, and it’s probably the single most popular approach to truth in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition at present. It’s got its critics; it’s got its problems; but it’s certainly up and running and it’s a going position. So is that a view that you share – the deflationist theory of truth? Pretty much, yes. How do you understand the word ‘knowledge’? There are two fairly dominant approaches to knowledge which I can offer you. The first is that, roughly speaking, we can talk about knowledge when we’re confident that some kind of truth-tracking mechanism has done its stuff properly. So, for example, it’s easy to think of your visual system as, say, a mechanism for tracking the layout of the scene around you. And you

Simon Blackburn 3 might say, ‘I know that there’s a telephone on my desk, because I’ve every reason to believe my truth-tracking visual system has done its stuff properly. There’s no malfunction; there’s no distortion; there’s no trickery. So, lo and behold! There’s a telephone.’ So that is one sort of paradigm: when you’ve got a truth-tracking mechanism and you’re confident that it’s doing its stuff properly, you can then say you know something. And that works pretty well across a wide variety of contexts. Correspondingly, from the time of Plato onwards, the enemy of knowledge has always seemed to be luck. If luck gets into the picture, then knowledge flies out the window. So, imagine if you were to make a lucky guess about something. Say, for instance, you claim that ‘Henrietta is having an affair with Cedric.’ If I ask ‘How do you know?’ you might reply, ‘I just feel it’, or, ‘It was just something Susie said to me.’ Now, if I don’t trust Susie, and I don’t think she does anything except spread random gossip, then I’ll say, ‘Well, that’s ridiculous – you shouldn’t take Susie’s word for anything.’ Now if it later turns out that Henrietta is having an affair with Cedric, your belief was true – what you said was true – but I would still deny that you knew it, because I’d have said, ‘Well, it was just a lucky guess, or it was pure chance that Susie got it right on this occasion.’ So I wouldn’t deem you to have been following through on a reliable truth-tracking mechanism, because it wasn’t such a mechanism that got you into your fortunate position of believing the truth. Equally, if I was sceptical about City traders, you might say, ‘But look – Warren Buffet gets it right. He invests, and the stuff goes up. He knows what’s going to happen.’ But I would reply, ‘No, no – rubbish. Given the number of traders there are, somebody’s bound to get it right. He’s buying; others are selling; somebody’s going to be able to go away preening themselves on their success. It’s just luck, nobody knows anything.’ So that would be a scepticism about the financial services industry – which most of us probably share at present! So that’s a fairly dominant approach. Now, the problems with that approach would be apparent when it comes to things like mathematics and ethics. What takes the place of this truth-tracking mechanism here? With the visual system we think we know a lot about how it works, so it’s there as an empirical object to study. But how come we’ve got a truthtracking mechanism for mathematics? There’s nothing to correspond to our eyes or ears – there’s just what’s often called ‘intuition’. But that just christens the problem by showing that we don’t know how to think about it. Furthermore, while the fact that a telephone itself deflects photons and interrupts light and has all sorts of causal powers, it’s very difficult to see the number two as having causal powers. We have no parallel understanding. So, knowledge of abstract realms like mathematics, logic or

4 Conversations on Truth ethics seems to be a problem. None of these fit nicely into the ‘truthtracking mechanism’ story. Now that doesn’t mean they won’t fit eventually – but it means that currently it’s puzzling. The second approach to knowledge is not necessarily a straight rival to, or contradiction of, the approach that I’ve just sketched. But it prefers to think in terms of the social nature of claims to knowledge. So suppose you think of the human predicament, the human position in the world. It’s true that we’ve got our ears and eyes, and that’s great. But we also need to take information from one another. So, ‘Do you know?’ or ‘How do you know?’ are very important questions to ask a would-be informant. Take the Stone Age scenario: I’m about to go into the cave and you say, ‘Don’t go into the cave – there’s a tiger in there.’ I say, ‘How do you know?’ and you reply, ‘Well, I’ve seen it’, or some such. So you certify your status as an informant. And so the second approach takes this issue of status more seriously. It says, ‘Well, look, we need to grade and rank sources of information. We need to collect those that are, in our opinion, reliable and trustworthy. So, perhaps we should see knowledge in terms of an attribution of status. And I’ll allow that you know something if I’ll allow that you’re authoritative.’ But that might mean that you set aside the standards of the first approach – where you’ve operated a reliable mechanism which has put you in a position to be responsive to how things are. This approach would allow more easily for there to be things such as knowledge in the sphere of aesthetics, or ethics, or mathematics, or logic, because it simply reminds us that there are authoritative views about this. So, the mathematicians in Cambridge know whether Wiles’s proof of Fermat’s last theorem is valid or not. And they’re authorities – they’ve done their stuff and I’ve got confidence in them, so I allow them that status. So now let’s take a moral judgement such as, ‘You’ve got duties to your children.’ I might say, ‘I know that. And you know it’, meaning your status as an authority on this can’t really be questioned. So however difficult and tricky ethics can be in some areas, that has got to be an axiom, or it’s got to be a certainty. So, on the second approach, you’d allow things like moral knowledge slightly more easily, because you don’t actually have to find a causal mechanism, you just have to allow for authority. Now, of course, that can raise hackles, because then a Foucault, or a sceptic – you know, a Gauloise-smoking existentialist on the Left Bank – is going to say that ‘Well, authority’s cheap, you know. People claim it; it’s an exercise of power, coercion, and lots of other bad stuff. So, maybe there’s no real knowledge. There’s just human beings claiming statuses and allowing each other statuses.’ And that would be a way for scepticism to creep back into the picture.

Simon Blackburn 5 This discussion of authority is something that is particularly interesting. We spoke to Noam Chomsky and he is obviously very forthright with his opinions on the relationship between power and truth. Now he’s not coming at things from a sort of Left Bank point of view, but he does see the dangers of a reliance on authority. And equally several journalists that we’ve spoken to – from both the right and the left – have also talked about how the structures of political authority have an enormous effect on how we understand what is true about the world. Yes. This is the absolute curdle of people like Foucault, and in a wider sense, a large part of the postmodernist movement. They are all largely sceptical of notions like truth because they see the exercise of power much more readily than they see the exercise of reason, or anything that deserves calling ‘reason’. And the rather bleak postmodern view of the human condition is that we’re kind of adapted to take opinion from others if they can impose themselves on us enough. And politicians, the media and, in the old days, the priests, were the people who would do the imposing. So you get a rather pessimistic view of the human condition. I’m more optimistic than that, but I accept that that line of thought is not foolish. It’s got a very good pedigree. What do you see the postmodernist project as being? And what’s wrong with that? I think that there is both a good side and a bad side to it. I think the good side of the postmodernist project was to alert people to the possibly hidden influences that can distort and affect our overall world view. For instance, when they remind us that other people are fallible, or that people claim authority when they don’t deserve to, and so on, then they are doing something that is very, very valuable. If for instance you look at the detailed investigations of the media that have been done – I’m thinking here of Nick Davies’ work – well that can be very salutary when it warns people: ‘Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.’ So that side of it – a moderated, or ‘mitigated’, as Hume called it, scepticism – is, I think, a thoroughly good thing. And it’s something we exercise in philosophy departments. The slightly less good side, I think – and here I’m going to sound very Aristotelian, I tend to look for a mean – is the belief that it’s all absolutely irremediable and that there’s no such thing as reason, there’s no such thing as knowledge, or no such thing as truth, as far as we can get it, and that everything is just a power play. And that seems to me insupportable. Go back to the simple cases, like my seeing a telephone. I come into the room; I know there’s a telephone on the table by looking. I’m not subject to influence; I’m not subject to power plays; I’m not subject to

6 Conversations on Truth media distortion. I’m just looking and seeing that there’s a telephone there. And I can’t do very much with the thought that maybe there’s not one. I can entertain it as a philosopher, but I can’t live my life without relying on a billion certainties every day. If I’m using my bicycle, I rely on the road being there; I rely on precipices not having appeared; I rely on the mechanism to go on pulling the chain around. And in many countless ways my actions are successful, because that reliance turns out to be well placed – the bicycle gets me home. So pretending that it’s all doom and gloom seems to me fantastical. And then the question is: where do we strike the mean? How do we find a reasonable scepticism, or a mitigated scepticism, which makes us properly doubtful about even proper exercises of influence and power without making us the sort of nuisance that’s always saying, ‘Oh, don’t believe anything’ and eventually becomes rather boring. Would you describe yourself as a realist in relation to an understanding of the world? Yes, I would. I think that as far as our central, basic understandings are concerned – the understanding of myself as having an occupation in space, a spatial location, as being surrounded by objects which are reasonably stable and enduring in space, and everything else that might be considered within the common-sense view of the world – I don’t think there’s any serious option except to be a realist. By that I mean the only explanation of the fact that I’ve got all those beliefs is the fact that I am a being with a spatial and temporal location, surrounded by objects which have their own enduring powers and their own enduring locations. So in that sense, I am a card-carrying realist. So this is based on empiricism, then? That’s right – certainly, at least, in relation to fairly unambitious common sense and to what I like to call the ‘inshore waters of science’ – by which I mean science just in so far as it tells us things like the age of the Earth and the shape of the solar system, and so on. Of course, when you start talking about quarks and things, life gets a bit more complex. But yes, as far as those things go, I’m a realist. However, what I’m fairly notorious for is being an anti-realist about ethics. Could you expand upon that? I see an asymmetry in explanation. I think I know that there are trees over there because there are, actually, trees there. I’m looking out of the window at some trees, and they’re affecting my visual mechanism. Whereas I claim to know, perhaps, that there are duties – say, that you’ve

Simon Blackburn 7 got a duty to your children. I don’t think I claim to know that because you do have a duty to your children. I think I claim to know it because it represents or expresses an attitude, and this attitude has various virtues which I’ll then go on to try to detail, and which make me want to recommend the attitude. But I don’t think that things like norms and reasons and duties and values enter into the explanatory story at all. So I draw a distinction between things which we know as a result of mechanisms, and things which we claim to know, or assert, but on quite different and much more complicated grounds. So how would you define philosophical relativism, specifically in the case of how you understand the position of someone like Martin Kusch, but also more generally? I’ve only heard Martin talk. I haven’t read his latest book – although I intend to – so don’t take me as an expert on what he thinks! Relativism is most simply defined as the view that you have your truth, and I have mine. In other words, there is no such thing as the truth – there are only truths as they are asserted or believed or accepted by different classes of people. So it’s modelling truth on what we might say about etiquette. For all I know, there’s no such thing as the way to eat peas. In cultures I’m familiar with, you eat them with a fork, but maybe in other cultures you eat them with a spoon, or perhaps you even eat them with your fingers. So there’s my way of eating peas, your way of eating peas and his way of eating peas. And relativism tries to say that it’s significantly like that when we come to things like truth and knowledge. So that, I think, is the core, or curdle of the idea. And I don’t think it’s right. I think that when we meet people who’ve got different or contradictory opinions about things – like, say, ethics, or more fundamentally about science, or about empirical facts such as how far away the moon is – then it may be that they’re right and we’re wrong and we can listen to that. Or it may be that we’re right and they’re wrong and we can argue that. Then again, it may be that both of us are wrong, because it’s something else entirely, which neither of us have discovered. But it can’t be that they’re right that the moon is, say, half a million miles away, and that we’re right that it’s quarter of a million miles away, because they have their truth and we have ours. That is simply, to my mind, a contradiction: because you end up trying to say that the moon is both a half a million miles away and quarter of a million miles away. It can’t be both. So relativism quickly runs up against the problem of how it avoids falling into contradiction. Relativists have their own defence mechanisms. But for my part, I think that when it comes to beliefs which contradict one another, it’s very difficult to maintain a relativist position.

8 Conversations on Truth Well, one of the metaphors or arguments that Kusch uses to describe how a relativist might understand science has to do with map-making. He says that it used to be believed that people working in different areas of science were all drawing their bits of maps about the world and that eventually we’d be able to put all these maps together and have a complete understanding of the world. But then he points out that actually you can use that metaphor in the opposite direction to show how different discourses can never fully integrate. He uses the example of the Tube map in London, and he says, ‘That’s a fantastic map of getting around the Tube, but a terrible map if you’re trying to walk around London, or if you’re trying to work out which the richest part of London is.’ Now I’m paraphrasing, but I suspect he would argue that a relativistic approach to science is more about focusing on the languages, or the different languages, that different scientists use to describe similar things, and that in that sense, although there might be a true or accurate relationship between what they’re saying and what they’re describing, the way they describe it cannot be separated from their position in relation to it. So the position a person is in affects the way they see something. How would you respond to that? I quite like that analogy. But it’s not plain to me what it tells us about truth, as such, or whether it even deserves to be called ‘relativism’. I mean, Martin is obviously right that a geological map of London may be absolutely useless for the purposes of a taxi driver, and equally, the A to Z street map is going to be useless for the purposes of a geologist. But while you may not be able to conjoin all these maps, you can certainly have a study in which they all exist. You could have a drawer in which you put them one on top of another. And then your purposes would determine which one you would take out. Thus the maps don’t stand in contradiction – they supplement each other, but they don’t contradict each other. Relativism starts being more aggressive when it’s not talking about different languages, different theories which supplement each other, or different maps, all of which are needed but for different purposes. It becomes more dangerous, more difficult, when you say, ‘In Islamic countries it’s good to accord women only subsidiary legal rights, but in America and England it’s good to accord women equal civil rights.’ The idea that it’s true for them that women are inferior citizens while it’s true for us that they’re not, is a dangerous one. Because it’s implying that between these two contradictory opinions – which don’t supplement each other, but which contradict each other by issuing contradictory policies – there’s no right answer. It implies that we just have to shrug our shoulders and say, ‘Whatever. If it works for you, that’s fine.’ And that, I think, is very wrong.

Simon Blackburn 9 So philosophically, how do we approach that danger? We need to be careful about notions like the difference between a description of things supplementing each other – like the two maps of London, or three maps, or a hundred maps – and the issues when practical policies come into conflict. In my mind, relativism is always trying to have it both ways. Its point of application comes where there’s conflict. For instance, with the question, ‘Are you going to follow Western medicine or are you going to follow Ayurvedic medicine? Are you going to go to your GP, or are you going to go to a homeopath? Are you going to go to a priest to tell you how to behave, or are you going to go to John Stuart Mill?’ In these cases there will be conflicting advice; conflicting policies; conflicting things to do. So, in a sense, the soil is already one in which there’s a potential for conflict. But then, the relativist says, ‘Yes, but I can diffuse it. Because I just say, ‘Well, it’s true for him that Ayurvedic medicine works, and it’s true for you that it doesn’t.’ Or, ‘It’s true for him that women have inferior political rights, and it’s true for you that they don’t.’ And I want to say, ‘No, that’s not a possible situation, because these policies and plans conflict, and it’s no good saying that “That’s his truth, and this is yours”, unless you can agree to live and let live.’ But, of course, on the serious issues, you often can’t agree to live and let live. After all, the National Health Service has to decide whether to pay the homeopathic hospital. And, in fact, you’ll get a lot of people who say, ‘don’t’, and other people who say, ‘do’. You cannot say they’re both right in their own terms, or anything like that, because that is pretending that there is no conflict, where there is. So how do we decide what is better? We deploy the best resources we can muster. We soldier on, as they say. I mean, if you want me to give you a lecture on homeopathic medicine, well I guess if I boned up on it I’d find that the evidence is poor or contaminated. My view would be that if I mustered the evidence then it would come down pretty firmly one way. And I think that would be our way, the classical way. But homeopaths no doubt think they can muster the evidence that makes the issue more open, or brings it down their way. So, you know, then we can talk about that, too. You wrote a rather entertaining piece for the Times Higher Education Supplement1 some time ago where you listed ten modern myths, and one of them was the ‘myth of science’. Now obviously, that was a lighthearted article, but how useful, practically and philosophically, is science, or the scientific method, as a way of understanding truth about the world? And what are its limitations, if any?

10 Conversations on Truth Well yes, that was a light-hearted piece, and I wouldn’t put my hand on my heart and stand by every word of it! But the point of my saying that, as I’m sure you’re well aware, was that you’ve got to be careful about people calling themselves ‘scientists’, when they stray about an inch away from what they’re good at. And I do think that is a danger. I think scientists are somewhat apt to pontificate even when their pontifications are outstripping their expertise. That said, of course, the scientific method – by which I mean the method of repeated experiment; of things being tested and subjected to peer review; of things being established by protocols which are designed to ward off false positives, false negatives and unconscious biases in the experiment; the gradual refinement of experimental technique and the reliance on results which those techniques seem to support rather than refute – that all seems to me to be just intelligence writ large. And thank God we are good at it, and thank God we’ve found out as much as we have about the world. You know, it’s often said that you get people who happily use cell phones and computers, and who ride around in aeroplanes to conferences where they then say that there’s nothing good about the scientific method. Well, really they should just look into the mirror! No, it seems to me there’s absolutely no alternative to science, and no doubt that it’s been a marvellous success story for the last 400 years. As for science’s limitations – well, obviously, science has come across extremely complex systems, of which we’re just one. And you get big questions which science may not realistically be able to answer, either because the questions aren’t very well formed, or because you get explosive difficulties in the way. I mean, think of a question like, ‘What is human nature?’ Now that might seem easy enough, and after all philosophers have asked it since the time of Plato. But then, we had a period of great confidence in genetics, and a belief that biology would unlock human nature, and biologists published endless books saying that one thing or the other was selfish and that we are this, that and the other kind of creature. Yet we still don’t know jack-shit about things like the way in which environment and nature interact, or the way in which epigenetic factors affect the expression of genes, or the combinatorial explosion you get when you take together all the factors that influence the route, from genes, to proteins, to brains, to behaviour. And it may be that science is just never going to find an answer. The system is so damn complicated, there are so many variables, and so many choices about which variables to concentrate on, that it may be that within the lifetime of organized science no answer will ever be found. Of course, scientists don’t like thinking in those terms – they’re brought up to believe in soluble problems. But it seems to me that modesty is often appropriate.

Simon Blackburn 11 Do you think people, in general, are truth-seeking creatures? Well, the philosopher who was most intrigued by this, though he wrote in a very unsystematic way, was Friedrich Nietzsche. Now in his work, he elevated health above everything else – it was actually the will to health, rather than the will to power, which was his big thing. And health was a sort of flourishing which required quite a lot of qualities – he wasn’t thinking of the ‘blonde beast’; rather he was interested in the healthy man who’s got a sort of integrated soul, you might say. And he found it very interesting, and in a sense almost rather difficult to understand, why truth should matter so much to us. For example, he could see why myth or selfdeception might be very convenient, but nevertheless he saw that we still had this will to truth. And he thought of this as ascetic demand. So, for example, if you’re a Scotsman, you might be very comfortable with the myth of the clans and their tartans – but then if somebody comes along and says, ‘Well, actually, the tartan was invented by Englishmen in the eighteenth century’, you may feel very uncomfortable and not want to believe this. But nevertheless, if you’re an honest Scotsman you’ll confront the issue, and perhaps sadly have to give up your belief in the romantic past. Now I think that’s very interesting. Our desire for truth is presumably, like everything else, as Nietzsche thought, one of our cognitive functions, or adaptations. Presumably it is there to preserve our success in action, and therefore our health in that sense. But nevertheless it gives us a set of standards which has a life of its own and which matters to us very greatly. And Nietzsche found that very mysterious, and rather magnificent. And I think he was probably right to see it like that. Can you relate all of this to the notion of truth in ethics, or truth in ideas of morality? I’m quite pessimistic about the prospects for a systematic ethics. It seems to me that the basic building-blocks of living well – that is, cooperating, acting with prudence, acting in the light of the needs of other people, acting so that we don’t really face a proper accusation of being selfish, and so on – are things we all know about, and we learn them pretty early, in the nursery. But if you try to systematize them, and put down a fully systematic ethics from which you can deduce answers to difficult problems, well it seems to me that you will nearly always fail. And our history of doing this is one of almost total failure. Ethics which are based on simple general principles like ‘maximize utility’ don’t seem to work, and equally, with ethics which invoke many different principles, there seems to be no authoritative way of prioritizing, or balancing them. So systemizing ethics just doesn’t seem to be on the cards. And I think that’s probably understandable in terms of our

12 Conversations on Truth practical needs which, basically, are to chop off the really bad guys and then muddle along. And perhaps our ethics are only as systematic as that requirement demands, and this may be not very much at all. But of course that’s going to leave massive areas of indeterminacy. You know, should distributive taxation, taxation for the rich in order to elevate the position of the poor, be allowed? Well, some people are going to say it’s theft; some people are going to say it’s social justice; some people are going to say it’s useful; some people are going to say it’s not. The prospects of finding one solution seem very poor. And I think that’s probably endemic to our condition – that we can’t expect there to be an authoritative structure which answers all those kind of practical problems. So in that sense, the relativist was right to say, ‘Well, maybe there’s no single truth out there – there are just wide areas of indeterminacy.’ But it doesn’t then follow that there’s your truth and my truth – it just follows that we all take up different positions within the indeterminate spectrum. Do you think that there is a moral component to the quest for truth, whether that is looking for a philosophical truth or a scientific truth? Is it good to seek truth? Yes – indeed, there is. I think that dedication to truth can have a very pronounced moral cast. There are people who sacrifice their family and their health and their God-knows-what in the pursuit of a particular historical or scientific truth. And that has an admirable side to it. Of course, it can have a slightly ridiculous side, if the truth that they’re after is, in a sense, worthless. But if the truth they’re after is how to cure cancer and they dedicate their lives to it in a hermit-like way, then, on the whole, those people are the heroes of science. Equally, the detective who won’t rest until he’s solved the crime properly, who won’t put up with the half-truths, or won’t put up with a mushed case, is a heroic figure. So, yes, I think dedication to truth has a definite moral ring to it. As I say, you’ve got to be careful, as with any dedication, but, provided the truth in question is an important one, then it can be a great moral virtue. How does your philosophical position affect the way that you live outside the lecture hall, or outside the university? In one respect, I can’t give you an authoritative answer to a counterfactual question like, ‘what would I have been like if I hadn’t spent so many years studying philosophy and writing and thinking about it?’ But I suppose that, compared to some other people, I’m slow to moralize, I’m very tolerant and I guess that I’m pretty hardworking, and all of that is in pursuit of philosophical truth, or at least it is in pursuit of better things to say philosophically than either I, or in my view, other people have managed to

Simon Blackburn 13 say. And I think that’s probably the nearest to the virtue of the dedicated researcher that I come. Now, in terms of how many of those traits I’d have had if I had gone and become a lawyer, which I nearly did, or a businessman, well that I just can’t tell you, because I don’t know. But I think my work in philosophy certainly has a lot to do with my being tolerant. I think it also (and this perhaps hasn’t such an admirable side) leads me to a certain kind of what you might call arrogance, or a certain kind of confidence when it comes to expressing myself. I mean, you mentioned that Times Higher Education Supplement article earlier, and I think you’ve got to be fairly confident of your intellectual powers in order to write something like that! Because I know that’s going to put people’s backs up, but I’m fairly confident that what I say is true. So I don’t think I could have done that without studying the theory of knowledge, without studying scepticism, without spending many years trying to come to a stable position about these things. So, to that extent, yes, my work does spill out of the study.

2

Gregory Chaitin

Do you have a working definition of the term ‘truth’? In mathematics there used to be one very precise definition. This was an idea enunciated primarily by Hilbert, which stated that there ought to be a finite set of axioms in a formal mathematical logic such that all mathematicians could agree on them as a starting-point. And then, in principle, it would be mechanically possible to grind away deducing all the consequences of these axioms using the mechanical rules of mathematical logic. It was thought that this would, at least in principle, get to all the truths of mathematics, though in practice of course this would be a very slow process. But the idea stemmed from this very formal notion of what a truth is, and from the belief that we could show that mathematics gives absolute certainty – an absolutely black-and-white notion of truth. So this is the idea of truth as being something that’s provable. This was the Holy Grail, so to speak, of mathematics. And it corresponds to the Platonic notion that mathematics is absolute truth – it comes from this idea of a world of Platonic ideas, where mathematics is absolutely sharp, crystal clear, and everything is black and white. So the Holy Grail, for Hilbert and those like him, was to find out what those axioms that underlay mathematics were, and to prove why they were those axioms. Is that the case? Yes. Mathematicians believed that they had absolute truth. Hilbert believed that by translating this into more precise terms, there would be a small set of axioms that all mathematicians could agree on, and then using the rules of formal logic, this in principle would tell you everything that was true in mathematics. So, the goal was, on the one hand, to find these axioms – which wasn’t believed to be too difficult – and then, on the other hand, to convince people that these were all the axioms. There was also 14

Gregory Chaitin 15 another stage, which was attempting to prove to people that these axioms would not lead to a contradiction. Could you just give us, in layman’s terms, an example of what such a set of axioms might be? The goal, as I said, was to have axioms for all of mathematics, and a typical example of that is Euclidean geometry which some of us learnt when we were schoolchildren, and which is 2,000 years old. Euclid gives a set of axioms for geometry, but of course he did not use the language we want to use nowadays (i.e. of formal logic); he used Ancient Greek. Some modern proposals are the axioms for what is called ‘Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory’, which uses something that is called ‘first-order logic’. And that was a serious proposal of a sort of Theory of Everything. But in fact, initially I think Hilbert and his disciples were working on something much less ambitious, which is called ‘Peano arithmetic’. This just involves numbers: zero, one, two, three, and so on, and then also addition and multiplication. And the axioms here are very simple laws about the properties of zero, one, two, three, of the unsigned integers, and of addition and multiplication. These axioms were formerly believed to capture all the properties of zero, one, two, three, addition and multiplication. So this was a project that I think most of the maths community felt was doable, because it was just a precise way to capture the intuition of the Platonic idea of mathematics as absolute truth and absolutely crystal clear. Now, the interesting thing about this project is that it imploded. It’s not that they weren’t able to carry it out – it was that it was shown that in principle it was impossible to carry it out. And this came from a very shocking piece of work, done initially by Gödel in 1931, and I believe much more convincingly, using different methods, by Turing in 1936, and in my own work I have tried to carry on with this. To see how this was done, you need to understand that there is another notion of truth in pure mathematics, according to which an argument is good if it would convince a colleague. And that, of course, is a much more traditional approach. Mathematicians do not, in practice, find formal proofs based on formal axiomatic systems of the kind that had been proposed by Hilbert. These kinds of proofs would actually be done best not by human beings but by machines that would check if they were correct. These would be proofs with all the details filled in, that don’t use English or any other natural language. Instead, they would use an artificial language, such as a computer-programming language, in order to be completely precise. The logical steps in these proofs would be extremely minute. And the idea was that if you could actually carry this out and convince people that you had succeeded in dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s,

16 Conversations on Truth then this would substantiate the Platonic, philosophical claim that mathematics gives absolute truth. It would prove that, at least in the domain of beautiful ideas, there is an absolutely black-and-white criterion for truth, which is provability based on a set of axioms that all mathematicians can agree on, using logical rules. Now, most people thought that this could be done. And the big surprise was that it couldn’t. The notion of truth, even in pure mathematics, where it seems to be least elusive, in fact turns out to be elusive. And that was quite a nasty surprise − people were very shocked. Let me put it another way: mathematicians traditionally believe that the notion of truth in pure maths is much clearer and more definite than in other domains of human activity such as the law or even physics, the discipline to which, perhaps, it is closest. Mathematics doesn’t deal with the real world; it deals with the Platonic world of ideas, or the mind of God. It deals with very simple concepts like zero, one, two, three, concepts that are much clearer, simpler and more straightforward than things in the real world, which are rather elusive. So pure maths set out to make things definite and to substantiate the claim that it provides absolute truth and that truth equals provability. But the surprise was that it can’t be done. And that has sort of left the philosophy of mathematics hanging in mid-air since the 1930s! Could you just take us through how Gödel and Turing showed that it couldn’t be done, and what you’ve taken from them and how you’ve continued that line of thought? Yes, I will do that. But first I just want to say that the generation of mathematicians and philosophers who were concerned with these ideas basically disappeared with the Second World War. What the mathematical community in general did was that it sort of brushed Gödel and Turing’s work under the carpet and just carried on as before. Human beings have a great ability not to face disagreeable things and so most pure mathematicians carried on as before and ignored all of this. It didn’t seem to have a practical impact on their daily work. In principle, yes, pure maths was left floating in the air. But in practice it looked as if the mathematicians in each individual field could sort of shrug it off and say, ‘Well in my field all of this does not apply, or not very much, not in the questions that interest me in practice. So I’ll just carry on as before and hope for the best.’ And in fact this has worked beautifully. Pure maths has progressed remarkably since 1931 and 1936 in spite of those very shocking results from a philosophical point of view. So I’m unusual and my stance is quite controversial, because I believe, though I cannot make a completely watertight case for this, that this incompleteness that Gödel found is really very serious. And I’ve carried on in the tradition of Gödel, and in partic-

Gregory Chaitin 17 ular Turing, by trying to build a case that this really is serious and that it means that you can’t just make a small change in the philosophy of mathematics. Because this little crack shatters the whole thing – it’s like a crystal goblet where just one little scratch will make the whole thing explode. So I’ve tried to build the best case I can to show that this means that mathematics is completely different from what people thought. And that the notion of absolute truth and Platonic idealism is not the whole story. I believe that my results suggest that perhaps pure mathematics is actually quasi-empirical (which is a term that Lakatos invented and which I will come to later). And by this I don’t mean to say that pure mathematics is an empirical science. I don’t say it’s the same as physics, which is the closest discipline. But maybe it’s not as different as most people think. So that’s my view, and I’ve been trying to make a case for this, and of course my ideas are very controversial, and I’m sort of in a minority of one. But I have to say that even I myself am not entirely convinced; that’s as far as I’m able to go in one lifetime of research! So could you put all of this in context for us, so we can understand Gödel’s incompleteness theory, how Turing’s work on computable numbers developed that, and then how you have championed that lineage today? Let’s start with Gödel. We will look at how Gödel shattered Hilbert’s dream and then how Turing did it. The way Gödel did it is by using a familiar paradox – the paradox of the liar, which comes from the Greek philosopher Epimenides. And the paradox of the liar can be very simply put by saying: ‘I’m lying’, or, ‘The statement I am making at this very moment is a lie’, or ‘This statement is false’, perhaps. ‘This statement is false’ might be the best way to put the paradox. And the problem with this is that it can be neither true nor false. Because it says it’s false, and so if it is false, then what it says corresponds to reality, so therefore it has to be true. But if it’s true, it has to be false, because it says it’s false. You see, you just flip back and forth because it can’t be true or false. Then Gödel does the following: he takes the paradox and instead of having the statement say, ‘This statement’s false’, he has it say, ‘This statement is unprovable’. And here ‘unprovable’ means unprovable in that wonderful Theory of Everything for mathematics which all mathematicians could agree on, and which Hilbert wished to find. So even if Hilbert could come up with this theory, Gödel, as we will see, has already found a fatal flaw. The subtle change from a statement saying ‘I’m false’ to a statement saying ‘I’m unprovable’ is really crucial. We go from a paradox to a profound meta-theorem on the power of reason. Here is how it works. There are two possibilities with the phrase ‘I’m unprovable’. It is either provable

18 Conversations on Truth or it’s unprovable. But if you can prove something that says it’s unprovable, you’re proving something that’s false. And that would be terrible because it would mean that your beautiful theory for all of mathematics in fact proves false results. So most mathematicians eliminate this as a possibility because they consider it to be just too awful − it would leave mathematics in ruins. So let’s assume that it is not the case. The only alternative left is that we cannot prove the statement: ‘I’m unprovable.’ Therefore what it says corresponds to reality: it’s true but it’s unprovable. So you have a hole, your theory is incomplete. You have a true assertion which is unprovable and so your system has not captured all the rules for deriving mathematical truths. You do not have a Theory of Everything for all of mathematics. Gödel’s basic idea is very simple, but the technical details are extremely complicated. Using only the language of Peano arithmetic, Gödel managed to make a very complicated assertion which actually does indirectly succeed in saying that it’s unprovable. And that was the really brilliant technical side to his work. So there’s a side of his proof which is very deep and very simple, and then there’s a very technical, very complicated side, which . . . . . . which will go right over our heads?! Perhaps! That is the side that people find impossible to understand, because it’s so complicated and so technical. But the basic idea is very profound and it came from the fact that Gödel dared to think that Hilbert might be wrong, which nobody did, you see. Complicated or not, the fact remains that Gödel’s method shows that any system which Hilbert could propose would have a flaw because you can construct an assertion which says that it is unprovable according to those laws or from those axioms. And this shows that those axioms or laws can’t capture all of the fundamental principles and methods of reasoning in mathematics. And so mathematics cannot really implement Hilbert’s absolutely black-andwhite, crystal-clear notion of truth as formal proof. But unfortunately Gödel’s true, unprovable assertion looks bizarre. Nonetheless, people were terribly shocked by this – people like John von Neumann and Hermann Weyl wrote essays describing how Gödel had pulled the rug out from under mathematics. But they also said, ‘Well, this assertion is just a little bit bizarre, it is not the kind of thing you normally work with.’ Yet, already in 1936 Alan Turing gave what I believe to be a much more significant proof of incompleteness. Of course he was building on Gödel’s work − the pioneer’s work is always the most difficult. How did Turing prove that there are holes? That any mathematical theory will leave out things? He got that from a deeper phenomenon, which is uncomputability – that there are things which cannot be calculated. There are lots of

Gregory Chaitin 19 things in pure mathematics that can be defined, but cannot be known well enough to calculate them. And if you can’t calculate them, this means that you cannot prove them either. That’s because a completely formal mathematical theory enables you in principle, mechanically, to deduce all the truths − by running through all the possible chains of reasoning, starting from the fundamental principles, using the mechanical rules of logic. So if you can always prove what the answer is, you can always calculate what the answer is. Turing wrote a wonderful paper about all of this called ‘On Computable Numbers’.1 The numbers he’s talking about are not zero, one, two, three, they’re not whole numbers. They’re numbers called ‘real numbers’, and that means they’re like lengths or distances. So these are numbers like π, or e, or the square root of two − numbers which you measure with infinite precision. Another example of this might be what you need in order to locate a point on a line by working out the distance from the point of origin. And what Turing asks is, ‘are such numbers computable or not? Can you calculate them digit by digit?’ If each number corresponds to a point in a line segment, say, then what if you want to calculate the numerical value digit by digit? And Turing shows that there are points on the line which you cannot calculate digit by digit. In fact, a great many real numbers are uncomputable. Indeed, as I’ll now explain, you can show that the vast majority are uncomputable. The key step is to give a definition of what a calculation is, and to be able to discriminate between real numbers which you can calculate and those that can’t be calculated. And that’s what Turing’s paper does. It turns out that some real numbers can, fortunately, be calculated digit by digit on a computer. Things go very well with numbers like π, or e, or the square root of two: you can calculate these as accurately as you wish – it is very easy to do so. But the strange thing − and this is sort of Turing’s version of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem (although he did not put it that way) − is that if you pick a real number at random, the chances are it will be uncomputable. And that begins to suggest that the problem of incompleteness is really serious. We are not just dealing with isolated cases. Almost all real numbers are uncomputable. In this domain the problem is everywhere. It’s not an isolated singularity as was the case with Gödel’s proof. So I believe that Turing’s work is a really fundamental step forward. (Although do bear in mind that I am giving you my version of Turing’s paper here and combining that with some ideas from Emile Borel.) Turing also brings the notion of a machine into all of this – because he talks about computers and so on − and that makes everything sound very physical, as if there are physical limitations to what can be done. And that’s something that modern researchers have picked up: combining ideas from physics with ideas about computation. It’s a way of uniting pure maths

20 Conversations on Truth with physics. And that’s quite a hot subject now; for example, it deals with things like quantum computing. So Turing’s paper was seminal, I think, but it’s taken a long time to see everything that was important in that paper, and Turing himself did not fully appreciate all of the consequences of his own work. OK, so what have I tried to do? Well, I’ve added another idea to the mix, which is the idea of conceptual complexity. And this idea, interestingly, can be traced back to Leibniz in 1686. Conceptual complexity means the complexity of ideas. Leibniz had a version of this, but the modern way of measuring conceptual complexity is to ask: ‘How big does a piece of computer software need to be in order to embody these ideas?’ Or, ‘How many bits of software are needed?’ You can measure software in kilobytes, or megabytes, or you can just measure it in bits. If the idea can be embodied in software, and that in general is where my interests lie, then there is an algorithm, or a computer program, which can check or calculate that idea. For example, I look at the size of the program needed to generate all the theorems in a particular field – for instance, all the consequences of the axioms using the mechanical rules of logic. Hilbert’s idea that this can be done mechanically corresponds to the fact that you can actually write out software to do it on a computer. And so I measure the complexity of a mathematical theory by measuring the size, in bits, of the program that systematically deduces all the consequences of the fundamental principles. This is a way to measure the conceptual complexity of a theory, to measure the information content of your theory, to measure, as it were, how many bits of axioms you have. We live in a world where everything is digital: photos are digital, music is digital, video is digital. Nowadays, everything is zeros and ones – everything is discrete. So, in principle, we can use this as a way to measure the complexity of an idea. We are just looking for the amount of software needed to calculate something, or to do something. So the idea is to look at how many bits of information there are in a mathematical theory and therefore how complicated it is. Set theory is a concrete example. We can measure the complexity of set theory in terms of the amount of software needed to calculate all the consequences of the axioms of set theory. OK, so once you do this, what I can show is that this measure has a certain usefulness, because you can limit, in some cases, the power of a theory by using this complexity measure I’ve just explained. So I have a way, using Turing’s ideas on computation, to measure complexity in terms of the size of an algorithm – I talk about it in terms of ‘bits of complexity’ − zeros and ones of complexity. And using this idea, I can limit the power of a mathematical theory by the number of bits of information in the theory. So this, I believe, makes incompleteness seem even

Gregory Chaitin 21 more natural than it does in Turing’s work. Because I’m sort of saying: ‘If you want to prove more things, you have to put more information, or more complexity, into your theory – even if that is your Theory of Everything for mathematics.’ So is that what you describe as ‘irreducible complexity’? Well, not quite. I will get to that in a moment. First, I want to point out that we have simultaneously, on the one hand, our mathematical theory with only a finite amount of complexity, and on the other hand, the beautiful Platonic world of mathematical ideas, which has infinite complexity. So even if you believe in the Platonic world of ideas, which I guess I do, and even if you believe that truth is black and white, well, even then, only God, so to speak, has an infinite mind and can understand everything; we cannot. What we can know, and prove, down at our level, is limited. Even if you believe in the world of absolute truth where, you know, zero, one, two, three and so on exist in some sense, and any property of these numbers will be either true or false, well, you must realize that down at our level what we can know is limited. Any mathematical theory has a finite amount of information, a finite amount of complexity; whereas the Platonic world of mathematical ideas, of pure maths, has infinite complexity, it has an infinite number of bits of information. And that’s why incompleteness is natural and inevitable. And so what my work suggests, at least to me, is that the way mathematics has to get around those astonishingly pessimistic results from Gödel and Turing is by adding new principles, by adding more complexity, by adding more information to the ground rules, by adding more axioms to your theory. I call this a ‘quasi-empirical’ view of mathematics, and it is related to a movement now called experimental maths, in which, instead of using normal proofs, you present numerical evidence for mathematical results, and this can be quite strong, even if it doesn’t amount to a traditional proof. I believe my work provides some theoretical justification for doing maths like this. But this is very controversial, and I admit that I don’t make a completely convincing case. I think my work points in this direction, but much remains to be done. So where does the concept of irreducible complexity come into all of this? How does that relate to this idea that you’ve been explaining, about constantly creating new axioms to describe things? If you have to be constantly adding complexity to your mathematical theories, then you have to accept that the notion of proof is time-dependent, because our theories would be constantly changing. We would have to accept that pure maths is a little bit more like physics, like an empirical

22 Conversations on Truth science. Because in physics, the principles you use are constantly changing; whereas the normal notion of mathematics is that truth is static and eternal. Well, even if you believe that to be the case in the Platonic heaven where mathematical concepts reside, what we can know down here would not be static. We can only know a finite amount, and if we want that to grow, we have to add new principles; we have to make our theories more complicated. And this is a bit like what physicists do, and it is what I am proposing. And I would argue, controversially, that you can find Gödel saying something along these lines. Now, in relation to irreducible complexity, one of the key points in my argument was that any mathematical theory has only a finite number of bits of information, finite complexity; whereas the world of pure maths has infinite complexity, or an infinite number of bits of mathematical information. How do I show that the world of pure maths has infinite complexity? It’s easy to see that our mathematical theories have finite complexity, because otherwise human beings wouldn’t be able to work with them. But to show that the world of pure maths has infinite complexity is harder. And the nicest way I’ve found to do this involves something that I think Alan Turing would be delighted to know about, because my idea is based on his work. Turing is particularly famous for something called the Halting Problem. In fact, Turing is known for doing simultaneously two contradictory things. On the one hand, he creates, in a way, the notion of the computer as a mathematical concept. Now we call that a ‘Turing machine’. This was before there was any computer technology, but it’s very clear that he had the idea of what a computer is. A computer is a very flexible, general-purpose digital calculating machine. You change the software, not the hardware, that’s why it’s so flexible. But simultaneously, Turing says that there are things that these machines can’t do. I talked about uncomputable numbers, but Turing also showed that there is something called the Halting Problem which cannot be settled. This is the question of whether a computer program stops eventually, or not. And he shows there is no algorithmic or mechanical way to decide this automatically. This is a very fundamental, negative result. So Turing on the one hand creates the computing industry, in a way, and on the other hand he establishes a devastating limitation, from the point of view of pure maths, on what any computer can achieve. So, on the one hand, he giveth; on the other, he taketh away! Anyway, the thing that I’ve come up with, which I’m proud of, and which I believe Turing would like, is a real number that I call the Halting Probability, which is like a pun on Turing’s Halting Problem. You write it like this: Ω. The Halting Problem is actually an infinite number of problems, because there are an infinite number of individual cases. The

Gregory Chaitin 23 Halting Probability Ω puts it all in one package, by asking: ‘What is the probability that a computer program that is picked at random will eventually come to a stop?’ We are talking about a self-contained computer program which just starts grinding away and never asks for input (because if it did ask for input, whether it stopped or not would depend upon that input). This has to be a program that just starts running and never asks for any more information; it just keeps going and then you ask whether it’ll go on forever or whether it’ll stop eventually. Now, of course, it may take a very, very, very long time. You see, this is pure maths, not a practical question. It’s a very fundamental philosophical question, but it’s not a practical question. So let’s pick a program at random and ask: ‘What is the probability that it will eventually stop?‘ This combines the answer to all individual cases of Turing’s Halting Problem in one number, one numerical value, called Ω. The Halting Probability Ω would be zero if no programs stopped, and it would be one if every program stopped. And some programs finally come to a halt, and others don’t, so the Halting Probability is actually greater than zero and less than one. The numerical value of Ω is actually rather elusive. Even though mathematically this number is very easy to define – I just defined it in words – even though it is conceptually rather straightforward, it turns out that if you wanted to know the numerical value of this number, if you actually wanted to calculate it, this would be effectively impossible. Now remember, Turing’s original paper is on computable numbers: he is interested in calculating real numbers – numbers like distances that correspond to points on a line or like my Halting Probability. And what is interesting about the Halting Probability is that it is maximally uncalculatable. Turing already knew that there were uncomputable numbers – he gives an example in his paper. But the Halting Probability is a worst case. The way I like to explain this is as follows. Imagine that the numerical value of the Halting Probability is written in binary, in base two, in zero/one bits. So there would be a binary point, a decimal point, followed by a lot of digits, which would be zeros and ones. Every one of those binary digits has got to be a zero or a one, in the same way that in a normal number, if you write it in decimal, every digit has to be a zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight or nine. But with the Halting Probability, the question of whether each bit is a zero or a one is very delicately balanced. And while in the Platonic world of ideas it will precisely be either a zero or a one, down here, on Earth, where we live, with our reasoning ability, and our computing abilities, it really just looks completely random. The best way to describe it is to say that what we can know, using mathematical methods available to human beings, using computational methods available to human beings, is that each bit of this number is

24 Conversations on Truth equally likely to be zero or one. That’s all. It is like tossing a coin: it has got to be heads or tails, but the result of each toss is a complete surprise. It has got to be one or the other, but we can never tell in advance which. The funny thing is that in pure maths, all truths should be necessary, and while they might be in the Platonic world of ideas, down here, based on our powers of reasoning, and our powers of computation, the numerical value of the Halting Probability just looks contingent. Its bits really look random, or accidental. There is no structure or pattern that we can see or appreciate, or that we can capture, with our methods of computation or methods of proof. The bits of the number Ω contain, in fact, an infinite amount of mathematical complexity, because each bit of the numerical value of the Halting Probability is an independent, irreducible mathematical fact. In other words, even if you knew the first billion bits, the next bit would still be a big surprise. It would still look equally likely to be a zero or a one. Even if you knew all the even bits, the odd bits would still be a big surprise. No matter how much computing you do, you still can’t see any structure or discern any pattern in the bits of this number. And essentially the only way of proving what the numerical value of an individual bit is, is to add that as a new axiom. That’s what I mean by irreducible complexity. The bits of this number, Ω, are logically and computationally irreducible. That means that essentially the only way to get those bits out of a mathematical theory is to put them in directly as an axiom. But you can prove anything by adding it as an axiom. And that’s useless because you are not using reasoning. So this is sort of a worst case for reasoning. This is a place where mathematical truth looks accidental or contingent. Assuming you are right about all this, then what are the metaphysical, or philosophical, or epistemological implications for our understanding of the world? That’s a good question. This Ω number does exist. The real question is, ‘How typical is it?’ There is the same problem with Gödel’s original proof, and also with Turing’s results. And so we have these highly controversial questions: ‘How much does all this impact on the normal mathematics that normal mathematicians do?’ ‘Where does it leave our traditional notion that mathematical truth is absolutely black or white, and crystal clear?’ And I’m assuming in this whole discussion that we believe in the Platonic world of ideas, and that there truth is absolutely black and white, crystal clear and static and eternal. All that I discuss in my work is what we can prove, what we can compute. So even if you agree that that ideal world is out there, you can show, using mathematical reasoning, that what we can know or prove is limited. Yet in traditional philosophy, mathematics is supposed to be the example of where reason really works. Most

Gregory Chaitin 25 philosophers would love it if their discussions could have the same degree of certitude that pure mathematics gives. Subjects are often seen as being more ‘scientific’ to the extent that they become mathematical. So theoretical physics is considered to be an extremely ‘hard’ subject, and an extremely successful subject, because it’s very, very close to pure maths. And other fields, like psychology for example, which use maths very little, are viewed as ‘soft’ sciences. But maths, the hardest of the hard sciences, proves that it is actually soft! OK, so where does this leave the notion of truth, and how does this affect epistemology? Well, I mentioned my tentative answer to this earlier. There is a beautiful term coined by a Hungarian philosopher, Imre Lakatos, who immigrated to the UK in 1956. Lakatos’ term was ‘quasiempirical’. He discussed the philosophy of mathematics, and talked about a ‘quasi-empirical’ view of mathematics. I have borrowed Lakatos’ term, but use it slightly differently. People used to think that the empirical sciences were always uncertain, because the next experiment could refute all your theories. Whereas, they thought, in pure maths, a proof – if it’s been checked by the referee, if there is no mistake – should stand for ever. Now, I’m not going to go so far as to say that we should give up this notion of proof entirely and only use an empirical kind of evidence (which would come from doing calculations and looking at the results). But perhaps we should not avoid the physicist’s approach entirely. Physicists believe something when a great many experiments support it and when it has pragmatic value, when it’s useful. Mathematicians don’t work at all this way. They want a proof. No number of cases, no amount of calculating will convince a mathematician, only a proof will. So what I suggested is that whilst a traditional proof is wonderful, maybe, sometimes, when we can’t find one, we should take a quasi-empirical approach and be prepared to use experimental evidence, as physicists do. This would be computational evidence, because a mathematical experiment is done on the computer, not in a physics laboratory. Another way to put it – and I believe that Gödel makes some remarks along these lines – is that there are things in physics, for example the Schrödinger equation, which are very important, and which no one would say were self-evident, a priori truths. Instead their justification is empirical and pragmatic. And I believe we should also allow this in pure maths. The normal notion of an axiom or a postulate in mathematics is that it has to be a self-evident truth. The pursuit of truth consists of breaking something complicated into smaller pieces until the pieces are so small that they are self-evident and don’t need to be proved. The fundamental principles of maths are normally self-evident truths. They don’t need to be demonstrated. They’re simple enough that we can see that they are

26 Conversations on Truth self-evident. If it were otherwise, a proof would never end. There would be an infinite regress if you kept trying to prove everything from something else. So I guess I’m saying that even in pure maths, you should, perhaps, be prepared to add new, complicated principles, not because they are selfevident but because they are pragmatically justified and because they help you unify and understand a great many different mathematical phenomena. This means behaving much more like a physicist – that is why the term ‘quasi-empirical’ that Lakatos came up with is so good. But then pure maths would not give absolute certainty. What was accepted would be timedependent, because you would be adding to the fundamental principles, and sometimes you might get it wrong and then have to backtrack. So this is a controversial view. I don’t see that there is such a tremendous difference between empirical science and pure mathematics. Vladimir Arnold, a Russian mathematician, put it this way: he said the only difference between pure mathematics and physics is that the maths experiments are much cheaper! If you take this view it would remove some of the certainty from mathematics, it would make maths a more human endeavour and it would mean that sometimes mathematical theories might have to be withdrawn if they were eventually proved wrong. Furthermore, mathematics might break up into separate schools accepting contradictory axioms, and this would make mathematics into a rather different kind of a game. While we might still believe in the Platonic world of ideas in principle, what we can know in the human realm will always be limited by our human capabilities. Finally, is there any kind of relationship between this idea of an incompleteness theorem and, in physics, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle? They both seem to imply that there is a fundamental impossibility at the heart of the intellectual pursuit. Is there a parallel there? That’s a very good question. A lot of us have been intrigued by that question. Heisenberg’s principle limits our capacity to measure the speed and position of a particle simultaneously, so if you measure one very precisely it makes the other one very uncertain. So I agree there is a parallel – Turing talks about there being a limit to what we can calculate, and I have tried to add to that the idea of informational limits. I do not know of a direct link between Gödel’s incompleteness theorem and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. But at a metaphorical, poetic, philosophical level there does seem to be a connection. The spirit of the time seems to be moving in the direction of limitations and randomness rather than determinism; toward unknowability and away from knowability.

3

Noam Chomsky

Do you have a working definition of the term ‘truth’? There is no sensible working definition of the word truth. To say that a statement is true is to say that what it asserts is the case. In fact, in a way, the term ‘true’ is often regarded as redundant. This is what is known as the deflationary theory of truth. This means that if I say the statement ‘snow is white’ is true, well that is just another way of saying that snow is white. So is there a relationship between the idea of truth and the idea of the good? Well, there are plenty of people who think that lying is good! That is a moral judgement. If you are committed to finding out the way the world actually is, then truth is good, if you are committed to deceit and slander and control or domination, then truth is bad. That is why you have the advertising industry and political life, etc. In your life it has been important to challenge what you see as deceit. Well I have spent a lot of time on that. Would you be able to relate that to any particular ambition that you have for humanity? There are many ambitions. But in this particular domain it is to encourage people to investigate on their own, to evaluate the truth or accuracy of what is presented to them in areas that are of importance. In your book Manufacturing Consent1 you talk a great deal about the propaganda model. Could you talk a little about the way that facts about the world are presented to the public, and how that is distorted? 27

28 Conversations on Truth The propaganda model, which incidentally is mostly the work of my colleague Edward Hermann, is an analysis of the institutional factors that enter into the presentation of a picture of the world by the commercial media – the mass media. There are a number of factors that influence it, but most of the book just runs through many examples of this. So for example, we compare the treatment of crimes committed by enemies with comparable or much worse crimes committed by the USA. And as you would expect, given the institutional factors, the crimes of enemies elicit enormous outrage and denunciation and sometimes criticism of ourselves for not doing enough to stop them. There is often a great deal of lying which extends the scale of the crimes and which is then uncorrectable because anyone who tries to correct it is then denounced as an apologist for atrocities, and so on. On the other hand, if it is us committing the crimes, then either they are suppressed altogether, or they’re minimized, or attributed to someone else, or they are seen as accidental, and so on. There is also a great deal of lying but in the opposite direction, and that is uncorrectable also because if you try to correct it, then you become anti-American, or are a conspiracy theorist. Now I am exaggerating a little, but those are the very strong tendencies for which we have provided hundreds of pages of documentation. I can understand why political or business leaders at the top would want to propagate those lies, as it keeps them in power. But the mass media relies on the work of tens of thousands of journalists and other workers. Why do you think they can be so ready to collude in that? First of all I don’t think that journalists do necessarily collude in this. Many journalists are very honest and courageous. They do serious work and deserve lots of credit for what they do. But the topics that journalists are assigned to cover, the framework in which their work is presented, and so on, that is what provides the kind of picture I have described. Just look at what is going on right now: there is a big debate as to whether Iran is interfering in Iraq. These charges, incidentally, coincided with the decision to send more troops to Iraq in opposition to the will of the American public and, of course, the Iraqis. Predictably, as soon as that decision was made we started hearing stories about Iranian interference in Iraq. That sets up a framework for discussion – which is established by those in power. The discussion is ‘Is Iran really interfering in Iraq or isn’t it?’ And then you have an elaborate debate about whether the serial numbers on the roadside bombs can be traceable to Iran; was it just the revolutionary guard acting on its own or did the higher authorities know about it? And so on. Now let’s imagine this was happening say in Russia in the 1980s, when they invaded and occupied Afghanistan. Imagine then the Russian

Noam Chomsky 29 government claiming that the Americans were interfering in Afghanistan (which incidentally, they didn’t have to try to prove because the US was doing it proudly). But suppose they claimed that the Americans were interfering in Afghanistan and then a serious debate took place in Pravda about whether the Americans were really involved and whether we could trace it to a higher level or some rogue element. Well, if we saw that we would collapse in ridicule. How can you talk about someone else interfering in a country that you invaded and are occupying? It’s ludicrous. But, of course, when we do it, it’s fine. And this kind of discussion, then, can only take place on the presupposition that the USA owns the world. So therefore if we invade and occupy another country and anyone else tries to interfere with what we are doing, then they are depicted as the criminals. Now that is beyond discussion. The framework of discussion established by the government, the media and the educated classes – it’s all more or less the same – presupposes certain doctrines. It doesn’t articulate them, but it presupposes them – like, as I say, the doctrine that we own the world. Then it is only on the basis of that presupposition that you can encourage a vigorous debate, but ultimately this kind of debate only serves to instil that doctrine more fully. What is it about the structure of American or Western society that has allowed that situation to come about? Is it a result of big business or capitalism? Is it a result of something inherent in the historical development of American society? I think this kind of thing is pretty close to universal across the world, but each society has its own reasons and background. I mean when Iraq conquered Kuwait, it was said that it was being done with the noblest of objectives – all you’ve got to do is listen to Saddam’s rhetoric. And that was very widely believed by Iraqis. After all, the argument went that Kuwait had been stolen from Iraq by the British in the first place, so it had no real justification for independence; furthermore, Iraq had defended the Arab world with great courage, and at great cost, against Iranian aggression. Yet now, instead of getting compensation for that, Kuwait was trying to lower oil prices which would seriously harm Iraq. So, argued Saddam, how could we let them get away with that? Now try to find a counter-example in history where aggression and violence is carried out by some state and where it is not defended in noble terms. Let me give you one more example. About 40 years ago I wrote one of the most unpopular articles I have ever written about the Rand Corporation which is a research organization closely tied to the Pentagon. They released some Japanese documents from the 1930s which had been captured by the Americans when they conquered Japan. The documents

30 Conversations on Truth covered Japan’s counter-insurgency operations in Manchuria and North China. And I read through them and wrote an article in which I compared them with US counter-insurgency in Vietnam at the same time – pointing out that they were very similar. In fact, the Japanese documents were just full of great praise for the noble efforts of the Japanese. They talked of how they were bringing great peace and prosperity to the people of Manchuria and North China, and how they were defending the legitimate government of Manchuria from Chinese bandits. They told of how they were going to bring an earthly paradise to the region where Japan, would, in an act of self sacrifice, give its blood and money to bring about prosperity and turn this developing economy into a technical and industrial centre – they would make everything beautiful, and so on. And Japan is not part of the West. OK, well if societies and governments across the world behave in this way, do you think it is possible to be in power and not to have to lie outright every day? Sure, well not everything a government says is a lie. Governments differ, and there are cases when governments do decent things. And furthermore, governments do not act in a vacuum – especially in more free and democratic societies. The public can impose significant pressures on what a government does. And that is true even in totalitarian societies. Governments cannot just ignore their populations. Hitler’s Germany could never mobilize as properly for the war as did the Allied countries because it had to buy off its population. It’s what we a call a guns and butter war. So even the worst totalitarian state has to pay attention to the popular mood and to popular pressures. And in a free and democratic society that is even truer. It makes us much more culpable because we don’t have to tolerate this kind of behaviour. If Russians in the 1980s supported the invasion of Afghanistan they could at least plead that they were afraid. We can’t do that. Do you think that subordination to power in America or Britain is something that, generally speaking, people are happy to go along with? Are people happy being lied to? They may not be happy, but it’s easier. It is certainly easier to conform to authority and to standard doctrine than to stand up against it. And this goes back right through the earliest recorded history. Look at classical Greece. Who was it that drank the hemlock? Was it somebody who was praising official doctrine or was it someone who was corrupting the youth of Athens by his questions and criticisms? Or take, say, the Bible at roughly the same time. In the Old Testament there was a group of people whom

Noam Chomsky 31 we might call intellectuals, people who gave geopolitical analysis, criticized the crimes of the state and called for mercy for widows and orphans. They were the people whom we call prophets – basically dissident intellectuals by our standards. Were they treated nicely? No. They were imprisoned, driven into the desert, and so on. Centuries later they were honoured, of course, but not at the time. At the time the people who were honoured were the flatterers at the court. These were the ones who, in the gospels, are called the false prophets. And that is a pattern that runs through history. You have spoken very eloquently about the constraints and attacks on the people who speak truth in the face of power. That is something you have been doing throughout your life, it seems. Obviously you are not comparing yourself to people who have been killed in the pursuit of this, but it must have been a very difficult thing to do at times nonetheless. Could you tell us something about that? In a society like the USA it is not all that difficult. I mean you don’t get sent to a torture chamber, you don’t get your brains blown out. These things don’t happen. Though you do take risks. So, for example, I often have police protection when I give talks – especially if they are on the Middle East. That is less true now that it used to be, but at one time it was always the case. And of course what you constantly live with is vilification, slander and lies. But that kind of comes with the territory. It’s nothing like what people face in our dependencies. Take, say, El Salvador. Now we don’t hear much talk about this because they were our crimes, but the decade of the 1980s opened with the assassination of an archbishop while saying Mass. He was known as a voice for the voiceless, but he was assassinated by forces closely linked to the USA. Was this Oscar Romero? Yes. That was at the beginning of the decade. The decade ended in November 1989 with the brutal murder of six leading Latin American intellectuals, Jesuit priests, who had their brains blown out, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, by an elite US-trained, US-armed military force, which had already left behind it a bloody trail of tens of thousands of individuals. Now this is what happens in our domain. But suppose this had happened in Czechoslovakia? Suppose in 1980 an archbishop who was speaking up courageously for justice and freedom was assassinated while saying Mass, and then Russian-led troops had killed 70,000 people, and then at the end of the decade in 1989 Vaclav Havel and half a dozen of his associates had their brains blown out by forces armed and trained by the Russians, do you think we’d have known about it? Yes. We would

32 Conversations on Truth have probably had a nuclear war. But when we do it it’s just ignored. Actually, I have a painting in my office given to me by a Jesuit priest about 15 years ago which is a depiction of the angel of death standing over Archbishop Romero and the six Jesuit intellectuals. I sort of have it there to remind myself of the real world. But I have noticed something quite interesting over the last 15 years. When people from the USA come into my office, nobody knows what it is. People from Latin America know what it is, and maybe 10 per cent of people from Europe. But if this had happened in Czechoslovakia there would have been screaming headlines. Everyone would know what it is – we would have museums of genocide and so on. So the responsibility of intellectuals now is to always uncover discourses which are being fed to society at large by powerful voices? That is what it ought to be, not what it is. Remember, the history of intellectuals is written by intellectuals so they come out looking pretty good. On the other hand, when you look at the actual history, almost every society has a fringe of dissidents, but the major current of intellectual opinion is, even if it regards itself as critical, really subordinate to power. So, for example, many intellectuals considered themselves highly critical of, say, the war in Vietnam or the war in Iraq. But take a look at the criticism. The criticism is pretty much the way it was expressed by the leading American historian Arthur Schlesinger – a dove in the case of Vietnam. At the beginning he was strongly supportive of the war, but by the late 1960s when everybody was turning against it he too became critical. And what he wrote is considered to be at the critical extreme. He said (approximately), ‘We all pray that the hawks will be right and if we send more troops we will be able to win. And if that works we will be praising the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government [in a land which they have turned to rack and ruin], but it is not going to work.’ You can translate that almost word for word to the criticism of the war in Iraq. ‘We all pray that the hawks will be right and that the surge will work and the Americans will be successful, and if it does we will all be praising the wisdom and statesmanship of the Bush administration [even though they are leaving a land of rack and ruin], but we don’t think it is going to work.’ Isn’t that what you are hearing now from the critics? Now that is called criticism. But if you want real criticism, principled criticism, well you are not going to find much of that amongst the educated classes. For example you are not going to find – if you read say the commentary on the Vietnam War around 1970 when there really was a lot of opposition – you will not read a lot of educated people, intellectuals, writing that the war was fundamentally wrong and immoral and not just a mistake. You very

Noam Chomsky 33 rarely read that; however, it did happen to be the opinion of about 70 per cent of the public. Let’s talk about domestic issues for a moment. We hear statistics quite regularly that 50 per cent of the American public believes in the biblical account of creation, or at least has fundamental doubts about evolution. Now that seems to show that somewhere along the line someone is telling a great many lies or mistruths, yet I can’t quite see how that serves the interests of power in the same way as telling lies about Vietnam or Iraq. Where do you think those kinds of mistruths come from within American culture? Well, in this respect the USA is just off the spectrum of industrial societies and has been for a long time. I mean the level of religious extremism in the USA is quite unusual. I doubt if you will find other societies where you will find literally half the population believing that the world was created 10,000 years ago. You would have to go to some hunter-gatherer society somewhere. Typically, religious extremism declines as industrialization develops – there is a pretty close correlation. But there are a few countries that are off the curve, one of them is the USA which is at the level of undeveloped peasant societies with regard to extremism, and another one is Ireland which, obviously, Britain had a role in. But the USA is extreme and it has been a feature of US culture since the colonies. If you go back to the early seventeenth century when British colonists were coming here, say to New England where I am, they regarded themselves as the children of Israel, waving the holy book while they slaughtered the Amalekites. And that strain of religious fanaticism continues as Scottish, Irish and other English colonists came and cleansed the land of the ‘evil growth’ that was here. There were significant periods of religious revivalism – there was one in the early nineteenth century, for example, shortly after the revolution. And it continues: there was another one in the 1950s – that was a period of great religious revivalism. That is where you get things like ‘Our Nation Under God’ or ‘In God We Trust’, and so on. Actually, the support of the Diem regime in South Vietnam was to a significant extent impelled by religious revivalism in the USA. In the last 20 or 25 years, things have taken on a slightly different cast because this phenomenon of American society has been recognized by American political party managers to be a means of gaining electoral support. So the religious extremism which was always there has in the last quarter century or so been mobilized as a base for driving through domestic policies or international policies which are quite harmful to the public.

34 Conversations on Truth And so this fundamentalism interacts with and is manipulated by institutional or governmental power? It actually started with Carter. Now Carter was no doubt perfectly sincere, there’s no question of that, but he presented himself as a religious fundamentalist, a born-again Christian and so on. And I think that taught a lesson to party managers who thought ‘Well we can pick up maybe a third of the electorate by pretending to be religious extremists.’ Every president since Carter has been portrayed by party propaganda as a very devout Christian. Before that, presidents could be religious or not, and nobody paid much attention. Nobody asked whether, say, Nixon went to church every Sunday – they didn’t care. But since about 1980 it has become a drumbeat. And this is understandable from the point of view of party managers. Now remember, that the two political parties in the USA are well to the right of the population on a host of major issues. There is a huge gulf between public opinion and public policy. So if you want to ram through policies that the public is opposed to, then you’ve got to turn attention on to something else. There are several ways of doing this. One is to arouse fear – that is systematic – and another, in the USA particularly, is to arouse religious fundamentalism. So you portray yourself as antiabortion, or as being against stem cells, or whatever else. If you focus attention on those things, which are issues that people in power don’t care very much about, then you are freer to drive through your own policies that harm people. That has been very cynically manipulated for the last 30 years. This idea of cynical manipulation is very interesting. In terms of the behaviour of various elites – business, or government, or whatever – do you think that most of the deception is deliberate and calculated, or is there a great deal of non-deliberate deception that goes on as a result of assumptions that those people in power also have about the world? It probably varies. So if you go back to those Japanese documents I was talking about, well did the people who wrote them really believe that they were bringing an earthly paradise to the people they were massacring in Manchuria and northern China? My guess is they probably did believe it. Remember, these were internal documents – they were only talking to each other – so there was no reason to think that they were lying. The same is true of, say, the Russian archives. We now have a lot of material from the Russian archives – the Russians are selling off almost everything, including the archives. So if you go back to the late 1940s and read the internal discussions, you see the worst Stalinist thugs talking to each other very earnestly about how we have to defend democracy in Eastern Europe

Noam Chomsky 35 from the fascist assault of the West and so on. Well, these were internal discussions, so I see no reason to think that they were dissimulating – they probably meant it. Or take Hitler, maybe the worst monster in history, and look at his proclamations. When he took over the Sudetenland it was with the noblest of objectives. He was going to end ethnic and sectarian conflict; he was going to bring peace and harmony to the region; everyone would benefit from being absorbed within the German sphere – the centre of culture, of technology and science, etc. Did he mean it? Maybe he did. I’m interested in the rise of postmodernism among the educated classes in Western society. You talk of how the media create a view of the world that is significantly disconnected from how things are on the ground, and in some ways Jean Baudrillard seems to say similar things, though I would assume that you and he would fall into quite different camps philosophically? Well you will have to tell me what he says because I don’t understand a word of it, quite frankly! OK, well more generally then, what do you think is going on in terms of the rise of postmodernism? Do you see yourself as an inheritor of the Enlightenment tradition in relation to truth – in that there are facts which are discernible and that we can understand the world, broadly speaking, as it is? I would regard myself as, or at least I try to be, a child of the Enlightenment. Though of course not all of it – the Enlightenment is a complicated thing. But there were developments within the Enlightenment, the Scottish Enlightenment for example, or parts of the French Enlightenment which I think are very valuable. It was recognized during the eighteenth century in the sciences – after the crisis of scepticism that emerged in connection with Descartes, and especially after Newton – that we cannot really gain an absolutely certain knowledge of the world. Even the world of physics is not really intelligible to us: all we can do is devise the best possible theories that we can, and then try to confirm and test them – we can’t do better than that. Would you say that postmodernism as a tradition of philosophical thought actually tries to exploit that uncertainty to say that actually there is no reality that is attainable? Well I would accept the word ‘exploit’ because I don’t consider it a serious development from this point of view. Because what was understood in the post-Cartesian, post-Newtonian period is that although we cannot be confident of ever getting certain truth, we can improve our understanding

36 Conversations on Truth of the world through serious, honest effort, and we can get closer to the truth. This is totally different from postmodernism which, in my view, is just a vulgarization of the valuable parts of the Enlightenment. A critical attitude towards certainty comes from the Enlightenment – the postNewtonian, post-Cartesian period. But that was a serious tradition – it is the core of modern science and serious historical work. The postmodern tradition throws out the central part – namely that we can, by serious, dedicated, honest effort achieve a greater understanding of the world and discover more verifiable truths and better confirmed truths. We will never reach certainty; we know that – there is no foundationalism. But we can do better if we work hard and honestly. That is the part that postmodernism, in its worst forms, eliminates. For you, what is the basis of the moral and ethical component of truthseeking? Of exposing deceit? The answer seems to me to be self-evident. If I have a child, do I want to tell that child lies and distortions? Or do I want the child to be able to understand the world as best we can? That example of the relationship between parent and child is an interesting one in terms of what it says about our relationship to authority. Obviously people lead busy lives and one of the reasons, it seems to me, why the mass media succeeds in propagating its viewpoint is that people don’t have time to question things too deeply. In that context, how do you think normal people should approach the way they understand the world? If we all need to trust certain kinds of authority, how do we make those decisions about who to trust and who not to trust if we cannot do all the in-depth forensic research ourselves? Even in one’s own professional field, when I read articles on technical areas I’m working on, it would be impossible to trace every statement back to its source. So you do have to take things on trust, but with an open mind and a questioning mind. We must recognize that if there seems to be something that is not quite right then we can investigate. But in human affairs it is much easier than in the sciences, as there is no need for deep or highly complex understanding of particular things. A lot of work has to be done, but it is quite possible for people who want to, to put the effort into it. Individually, this is, in fact, hard to do, but collectively it is a lot easier. This is one of the reasons why, say, labour unions have been such a significant force for democratization and the improvement of social welfare – they provide the means by which isolated individuals can join together and interact to develop ideas and learn more. That, of course, is the way science works too. So it is never perfect, but there is a lot you can

Noam Chomsky 37 do. And in the world of human affairs there is no need for an explanatory depth – what we need to understand is more or less all there on the surface, it just takes a lot of work to develop an intelligent framework for looking at it – but it certainly can be done, particularly in organizations and in groups. Now that does not mean you will always be right, we must be particularly sceptical about our own views, but it is possible to make progress. And in fact, if you look at the USA where public opinion is closely studied, it is rather striking in my view that public opinion on many issues seems to be much more sober, sane and considered on many issues than elite opinion. I have written about this, and others have as well. Furthermore, public opinion tends to be quite consistent over time. Not on every issue of course, but on many major issues this is true. Now I don’t like to talk in generalities, so let’s look at Iran. There is a threat now of attacking Iran, and this could be a total catastrophe. So how does public opinion feel about this? Well public opinion has been studied by Western polling agencies both in the USA and in Iran, and it turns out that there is a very broad consensus among Iranians and Americans on how to deal with the issue. There is a consensus of large majorities that Iran should not have nuclear weapons – this is true of both countries – but that it should be able to develop nuclear energy in accordance with what it is permitted to do under the non-proliferation treaty. There is a very large majority supporting a nuclear weapons free zone throughout the whole area – meaning Iran, Israel and US forces deployed throughout the region. There is a huge majority that is in favour of eliminating nuclear weapons all together. Some 75 per cent of all Americans are in favour of eliminating threats against Iran and moving toward diplomatic recognition and negotiations. So 75 per cent of Americans agree with the leading Iranian reformers and the Iranian labour movement. If policies were established on the basis of public opinion, well in this case we would very likely avoid a major catastrophe. And there are many other examples of this. Let’s take one domestic example. For Americans, one of the leading domestic concerns – in poll after poll over the years – is the health-care system. And there are good reasons for that. The health-care system is a disaster – it costs about twice that of other industrial societies, and it has some of the worst outcomes. Health-care is essentially rationed by wealth – there are close to 50 million uninsured people, but even those with insurance often can’t afford prescriptions or medical care. And furthermore the public overwhelmingly has a solution – national health-care along the lines of other industrial societies. Now there has been a huge majority on this for decades, but it is not high on the political agenda. No political candidate, or virtually none, speaks for this. And when it is occasionally mentioned in the media it is described as being ‘politically

38 Conversations on Truth impossible’, or ‘lacking political support’. And this means that the insurance companies are against it, the pharmaceutical corporations are against, it and so on. In fact, interestingly, now, for the first time it is moving toward the political agenda, and the reason why is because a large sector of concentrated American power is becoming in favour of it – namely the manufacturing industry. The inefficiency of the health system, which is basically related to the fact that it is a privatized system, is costing them a lot of money. So now they are coming out in favour of some kind of national health system – maybe extending Medicare to the general population. So it is only then that it becomes politically possible. So this is another case where I happen to think that public opinion is right on target as opposed to elite opinion. So it seems to me that there is a gulf in understanding that exists between the elite and the rest of world in terms of what people believe and how things are. And it is from this gulf that both the self-deception and the deliberate deception emanate. Can you give me a sense of a society wherein that gulf could be minimized? What kind of power structure would there need to be for a more honest and fruitful discussion to take place? We would need more of a functioning democracy. We need to overcome what we call a ‘democratic deficit’ – a system in which there are formal democratic institutions but which don’t function well. We can overcome that, and in fact it has been done repeatedly in the past. That is why there has been progress. Just take the last several decades – there has been quite substantial progress towards a more civilized world in the West – both in the USA and elsewhere too. Look, for example, at minority rights and women’s rights, or the concern for the environment (which means concern for future generations); and then, of course, there is the opposition to aggression through international solidarity movements. These are all new things which have developed substantially in recent years because of public pressure, public organization and public education. And there are no limits to where that could go. I mean we should, I think, look even further and ask whether these hierarchical and authoritarian institutions have any justification at all. Take any form of authority and domination, and it really should be questioned wherever it is – whether it is in the family or international society or anything in between. Power should always be questioned, it is not self-justifying: it carries a burden of proof. It has to show that it is justified and if it’s not it should be dismantled. I don’t see any particular limits to this, over the centuries it has been done in case after case, but there is a long way to go.

4

Nick Davies

Do you have a working definition of the term ‘truth’? Truth means any human representation of reality. So a sculpture can be true, or a novel can be true, in so far as they accurately reflect reality. Though I expect that’s completely off-beam compared to everybody else’s definition! Not at all! And in the context of your work as a journalist, what does the idea of truth mean? It means the same thing – I try to represent reality accurately. But that begs a whole series of questions about what’s involved in the process and about some of the surrounding concepts, and so on. So, as I say in my book Flat Earth News,1 I have a lot of problems with the concept of objectivity as having any kind of important or helpful light to reflect on truth. For me, there is this distinction between reality which is ‘out there’ – that is, ‘the world’ – and truth, which is only the way in which we try to represent that accurately. Reality exists objectively – truth never does. Truth is always selective. Now a lot of people would say, ‘Oh, well the opposite of objective is subjective’, but that’s not what I mean. I’m not saying, ‘Oh, we’re all tugged along by our prejudices and perspectives and therefore it’s impossible to see the world objectively.’ I’m saying: the opposite of objective is selective. So any time any human being tries to capture any part of that reality, necessarily, unavoidably, always, they have to make a sequence of selective judgements to take this particular subject within this vast reality, and then, to say this particular thing about that part of the reality. And in fact the more you look at it, the more you see these selective judgements. So there are multiple truths. For example, the idea of mathematical truth is interesting in this regard. Some people would say, ‘Well, the notion that one plus one is two is surely objectively true.’ And this is true, 39

40 Conversations on Truth but it’s equally true that two plus two is four. So in so far as I’m offering you one plus one is two, that’s selective. There are an infinite number of additional equations which we could cite, but we select one from all the others. But there are also falsehoods. If you say ‘one plus one is three’, then so far as we know, that’s wrong. So it’s very complex and interesting. But in the field of journalism, if you think that there is such a thing as an objective truth, then what tends to happen is that you get sucked into something very, very different, which is a consensus version of the world. You end up thinking that because you’re saying what everybody else is saying, you’re being objective. And that is lethally dangerous for the journalistic process or any other attempt to get at the truth. That distinction between objectivity and selectivity is really interesting. Do you think that’s something that the majority of journalists or people in the media share? Or are you in a minority in acknowledging that? Well there are two points here. A lot of senior journalists don’t like the concept of objectivity. If you look at people like George Orwell, James Cameron, Martha Gellhorn – the great names in journalism – they all attack the idea of objectivity. But most of them attack it – and this is the second point – from a different point of view. And this is the point of view that Martin Bell – he of the white suit, the war correspondent – attacks it from, which is that the notion of objectivity appears to preclude emotion. And they want to be able to express emotion about the events that they’re reporting. The great journalists, the experienced journalists say, ‘don’t get sucked into all this bullshit about being objective, because all it means is you’re never allowed to express anything’. So for example, Martin Bell’s there in former Yugoslavia, where there is one group of people who are systematically ethnically cleansing, raping and murdering the other group. And he says, ‘This is fucking outrageous. And if I don’t express the anger that this makes me feel, then I’m distorting the story. Don’t tell me I’ve got to stand here like some soldier, like some robot, and not express the emotion.’ And so that attack on objectivity I think is quite well recognized by senior journalists. Junior journalists don’t recognize it because they come out of the training system like little sort of robotic people, and they’re terrified of expressing any kind of point of view or emotion. So my particular attack on objectivity, which is that there never has been, will be or could be an objective news story, is rarer. But to the extent that I put it to journalists, whether I’m training them or the more senior people, I think an awful lot of them get the point. And I would argue that if you don’t get the point then you can’t do your job properly, because you will get sucked into producing the consensus account of the world.

Nick Davies 41 So with the Martin Bell approach of expressing emotion . . . . . . which he calls the ‘journalism of attachment’. Right. An important component of that, then, is being emotionally truthful about your view as an observer as well as being truthful in your representation of what’s happening? Yes, and it comes from a slightly different understanding of the word ‘objectivity’. The notion that the senior journalists are attacking is the idea of being neutral or emotionally absent. And they’re saying that in some powerful stories, if you refuse to allow that there is a side to be taken, or an emotion to be expressed, then that is a sort of distortion. Another clear example might be if you’re covering the trial of a paedophile who has been abducting and raping and murdering young children. If you’re reporting the background to the case – all about how this man’s been doing this for years, to masses of children – and there would be something inherent in that which is emotional and that needs to be expressed. If you stood back and simply didn’t allow that emotion to come through, if you didn’t deliberately set out to make the emotion come through, then you’d be distorting it. In your book you are very critical of the Daily Mail for being more driven by anger than it is by anything else. Isn’t there a risk that the emotional viewpoint can just push reporting into an extreme subjectivity? Yes, there’s a danger of that. And I describe the Daily Mail as being brilliant but corrupt, precisely because it doesn’t limit itself to what would be naïvely described as ‘facts’. I mean we have to recognize facts and we have to recognize them and respect them and stick within them. It’s all about evidence. But you have to understand that nonetheless there are multiple choices and selections going on. So the one great thing that’s wrong with the Daily Mail, at the end of the day, is that because it leads with its emotions, perspectives, politics – by which I mean the emotions, perspectives and politics of its market, its readers – it then rearranges alleged facts in order to fit that point of view. Well, that’s breaking the rules, that’s shit journalism. As soon as you stop trying to tell the truth, you’re no longer a journalist – you’re a fantasist, a fiction writer. There are people out there who don’t give a damn about the truth. But I think the absolute beating heart of journalism is the attempt to tell the truth – honesty. And you can make mistakes – that’s why we have this expression, ‘honest mistakes’. If you say ‘I was trying to tell you the truth, but I screwed up’, well that’s okay. But the attempt has to be there consistently and without exception.

42 Conversations on Truth As soon as you stop trying to tell the truth, you’re no longer a journalist, you’re somebody else masquerading as a journalist. That’s absolutely unmovable. This idea of objectivity being problematic is interesting. How do you see this in relation to an organization such as the BBC which has at the core of its charter a mission to be objective or impartial? Well these are different words: ‘objective’ and ‘impartial’. The idea of objectivity is built into the foundations of a lot of ethical thinking about journalism – misleadingly so. I don’t actually know whether the BBC charter does say ‘objective’ – maybe it says ‘impartial’. But ‘impartial’ means you’re not taking any particular and consistent point of view. So in making these selective judgements you are free to make whatever judgement seems to you appropriate, story by story. What you’re not doing is to say: ‘Because I am a Christian or because I am a Marxist or because I support the Conservative Party, I will always make the selective judgement which supports that point of view.’ You’re impartial. And I think that’s right. It actually makes everything more interesting, because if you’re not going to be partial, then story by story, almost sentence by sentence, you have this freedom to make choices, which is exciting and dangerous – well, it’s just exhausting, in fact, if you’re actually going to do that. Do you think that kind of impartiality is possible? Or specifically, do you think the BBC actually is impartial? Because in terms of what you were saying earlier, impartiality might be not saying ‘I am a Christian or I am a Marxist’, and so on, but presumably we all have these kinds of positions whether we are aware of them or not? Well, the best way to aim for it in concrete terms is story by story. So the BBC journalist may be a Christian, but – working story by story – if they’re going to be impartial, they need to be willing to take a non-Christian point of view. So the Christian might cover the subject of euthanasia, and they might think, ‘Well, personally I think God doesn’t approve of euthanasia, so I’m going to write a really negative story here.’ And I know one particular Christian journalist at the BBC who has done that, and who I think is extremely bad at her job, because she consistently pushes her Christian line – she even sprinkles holy water in the studio where she does interviews! So that is partial, and it’s bad journalism. So she needs to be willing to make other selective judgements, story by story. And then you say, ‘On what basis are we supposed to make those judgements?’ And my answer would be, ‘Well, a journalistic basis’. But it’s a funny expression, the idea of journalistic judgement, because the emptier it is the better it is. So it can get rather exciting and challenging because you don’t know what you’re going to say.

Nick Davies 43 So, for example, the last story that I’ve written for the Guardian is about a man who has been cruising around Europe for the last 30 years, attacking and killing women. He’s attacked more than 50 women, and he’s got away with it. And the reason he does that is that he wants to wank in their hair – he’s obsessed with hair, he wants to wank in women’s hair. Quite logically, they’re not going to allow him to do that, so he has to kill them so that he can, or at least strangle them into unconsciousness. Now, you can write that story from the point of view of the women victims – ‘This is a bad guy.’ You could write it from the point of view of the boy who first played with his sisters’ dolls and had an orgasm while he was stroking the dolls’ hair, and therefore became addicted, because he kept wanking and stroking the dolls’ hair, and he liked it more and more. So you could write that portrait deeply sympathetically – ‘this man is a victim of his own obsession.’ Or you can say, ‘This is a story about police failure – how could you cruise round a modern and sophisticated continent for 30 years killing women with nobody even trying to catch you?’ There are numerous points of view. And what I’m saying is exciting and challenging: you could well say, ‘Let’s do the serial killer from inside his head. Let’s be sympathetic to him.’ Or, ‘Let’s feel sorry for the paedophile’. It’s all legitimate journalism to do that, as long as you stick within the facts. But that’s when it gets exciting. So how do you make those decisions about which angle to take? Almost whimsically! But rightly so, because by deciding things almost whimsically, you are adhering to this journalistic criterion which says that your approach is best when it’s emptiest – when it has less to say about itself. ‘Almost whimsically’ means, ‘story by story’. It says that ‘having looked at these facts, it seems to me that within the range of true statements, this is the way into this thing, this is what needs to be said – this is what I think should be said.’ And a lot of these kinds of judgements are moral. Harry [Harold] Evans, who was probably the best newspaper editor in this country since the war, edited The Sunday Times. And he did all these great campaigning stories in that paper. He exposed the scandal of the Thalidomide children; he exposed the truth about Kim Philby; he exposed truth about the aeroplane that had been made by McDonnell Douglas which they marketed knowing that it would crash on take-off, and which killed hundreds of people around the world. These were great stories. And he said, ‘All these stories I did can be reduced to one of three statements’, and these are moral statements, you see – moral selective judgements. They are (1) ‘We name the guilty man!’; (2) ‘The arrow points to the defective part!’ (Or the plane or car that’s going to crash); and (3) ‘Stop these evil practices now!’ So this is Harry almost caricaturing

44 Conversations on Truth himself, but what he’s reflecting there, and what he explicitly talked about as an editor is moral judgements. ‘I’m here to make the world a better place. If I think something is wrong, I’m going to go out and expose it.’ And that’s the angle: it’s wrong that a man should be cruising around Europe killing women, so that’s what I’m going to write; or it’s wrong that a man should suffer all his life just because he wanked on a doll. These are moral judgements. And then there are also political judgements, which are close to moral ones, where you’re allowed to say, ‘What this government is doing is wrong. Therefore, I’m going to set out to expose it.’ It’s that watchdog role of journalism, and it’s very judgemental. Or you could be, for want of a better word, philosophical. For example, years ago I started looking at the richest man in Britain. And I found him very interesting. So what am I going to say when I’m writing about the richest man in Britain? As it happened, I ended up doing an extremely tedious but kind of important story about how he wasn’t paying very much tax. It was tedious, because there were so many numbers in the story, but ultimately it was important, because it forced a debate about changing the law. But there was a moment where I thought, ‘Well, what I’m actually going to do is a very different sort of story, which is that old one that money doesn’t make you happy.’ Because it was clear that although he had an income of a million pounds a day, he was a miserable old git. So that’s more like a sort of philosophical ‘ho-hum, what’s life about?’ sort of judgement. What are the pressures that are exerted, deliberately or unconsciously, on a journalist in terms of how those legitimate judgements are made? I mean, obviously if you’re writing for the Daily Mail, the judgement you’re going to make would be very different to that which you would make if you were writing for the Guardian. Well, there are two different things. One is the intensity of the pressure that can be brought to bear, and the other is the direction of the pressure. But all of that, actually, is to do with commercialism. So, at the Guardian and the BBC, there is far less pressure on the individual journalist making the selective judgement, because they’re owned by trusts, not by companies, and therefore the commercial pressure is somewhat mitigated – you’ve got more freedom of manoeuvre. The Daily Mail is the most commercially successful newspaper in the country, I think it’s fair to say – its circulation has certainly held up better than any other – and therefore the pressure is intense each day to produce a newspaper that will sell. As to the direction, again, that’s complex actually. The first layer of explanation is a simple one: we are writing for a market, and in order to get this thing to sell, we’re going to tend to adopt positions which will be approved of by

Nick Davies 45 that market. So that’s certainly there. But there are also all those pressures I tried to describe in the book in the chapter called ‘The Rules of Production’ which are really quite subtle things: as we try to make these selective judgements, we tend to go for safety – safe facts. Now these safe facts may not be true, but they are what will be accepted by the consensus. History may look back on what were regarded as safe facts, and be appalled, but they’re safe now, so we’ll recycle them. I use the example in the book of cuttings from American newspapers in the late-nineteenth century, reporting lynchings – black men being publicly murdered for looking at white women – with deep approval, because that was a safe idea at the time. So it is important to be aware of safe facts and safe ideas that go with the consensus. There are all sorts of other funny little pressures. There’s a thing I call in the book ‘Ninja Turtle syndrome’, which is a funny way of describing the pressure on newspapers to cover the stories that everybody else is covering, for fear that our readers will be pissed off if they go down the pub and don’t know what everybody else is talking about. So that means that even if the story that everybody else is running is trivial, and therefore shouldn’t be covered, and/or is clearly untrue, there is still a real pressure on us to run it. And you’ll find these pressures at work in the BBC, and the Guardian, and everywhere else, as well as that basic commercial marketing pressure to satisfy the readers. But I would say that you see these things slightly less in the non-commercial outfits. One thing that really interested me in the book was that you draw a distinction between accuracy and truth. So a news agency might report what someone has said accurately, without trying to assess whether what that person said is at all true. And then you link that to this idea of balance, whereby a newspaper will try to show it is impartial by saying ‘the government said this and the opposition said that’. And you’re quite critical of that thing of a paper playing one quote off against another in order to protect themselves from getting anything wrong. But in your chapter on The Observer, you make a number of allegations about the journalist Kamal Ahmed. And yet you also say in the book that Ahmed denies it all. Are you not running the risk of doing the same thing you criticize in others? Well here’s the thing. Our job is to tell the truth, or at least to try – it’s all about honesty. So the aim should be to test statements that are made to us, and to gather evidence so that we can arrive at the point when we can say, ‘this happened’. If, with the best will in the world, we haven’t been able to get to that point, then the honest, fall-back position is to say, ‘Oh, reader. I’ve got this bit of evidence here, I’ve got this quote here, and here’s this other bloke saying a different thing. Today, in respect of this particular

46 Conversations on Truth sentence, this is the best I can do with my evidence. But it doesn’t quite get to the finishing-line of actually establishing the truth.’ So I’m applying that now to the Observer chapter. There are points there where I say, because I know and because I’ve checked and gathered the evidence, ‘this is what happened’. And there are other points where I can’t be sure. For example, it was said that Kamal was in the habit of calling Alastair Campbell on a Saturday afternoon and reading out the news list, so Downing Street was alerted to anything that The Observer might be about to do that could cause them trouble. Now, lots of people in the newsroom believed that, but that’s not quite good enough, because it’s second-hand. So then I talk to those people and say, ‘But who actually saw and heard this happening?’ And I get passed to two other people, and I speak to them, and they say, ‘There is no doubt about it. No doubt about it.’ And I push them: ‘Are you sure he was speaking to Alastair? Are you sure you heard him say this. Did this happen just once?’ ‘No, it happened repeatedly. I couldn’t believe he was doing it.’ And the second bloke says the same thing. And I had them on tape, also, so there is a sense in which that’s evidence. So then I put all this to Kamal and he says, ‘Bullshit, bullshit, it isn’t true. It isn’t true.’ And my feeling in that sort of situation is that my witness is almost certainly right, and Kamal is almost certainly wrong. But the ‘almost certainly’ gives me a bubble of doubt, and so in deference to my reader with whom I have this pact to be honest, I’ll say Ahmed denies this. The other factor here, of course, is libel law – and if Ahmed is going to sue, then my position is somewhat stronger if I’ve reflected his denial. He hasn’t sued. Speaking more generally, how often can a journalist be really sure about their facts? Presumably when you have to base much of what you report on witness testimony it means that you can never quite get there? Yes. There are two points. The first is that in the book2 I quoted David Broder who was a very good political columnist on the Washington Post. Broder made a speech in which he said, ‘if we were really honest about what we put in newspapers, we would say at the top: OK, readers, look. This isn’t necessarily accurate. This is the best we could do in the time, and we’ll be back tomorrow to give you a better version.’ And so you might think of this as a sort of ‘Broder line’, which says there is a level of inaccuracy, falsehood and distortion which is just unavoidable because of the speed with which we put this thing together. As for witness testimony, well witnesses get it wrong. Take, for instance, the Stockwell shooting of Jean-Charles De Menezes. In the aftermath of that, Ian Blair and the Metropolitan Police took a huge kicking for misleading the public. And there were some things which Blair said at the press conference that evening which appeared to be misleading. But

Nick Davies 47 what’s most interesting is that the bulk of the misinformation came from eye-witnesses – from members of the public who were interviewed within minutes of the shooting and who were wrong about what they thought they had seen. So, for example, the early news report said that De Menezes had run into the Underground station and vaulted the ticket barrier and run down the escalator. Now this looks like slightly guilty behaviour: that’s not your normal way of entering a train. It also said that he was wearing a heavily padded jacket. Guess what? He’s got a bomb in there. Now, all of that was wrong, because the people who they were seeing, who’d done that and were wearing the jackets, were police officers. It wasn’t De Menezes they’d seen – the eye-witnesses were talking about the wrong people. And in the compartment when he was killed, there was an eye-witness who described him being shot seven times. It was a very striking thing, these seven bullets fired at a single man. And he described how the victim was standing there, and bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, he was shot down. Now all of that turned out to be wrong. In the shock of the incident, the man had simply, so to speak, ‘mis-seen’. So part of that Broder line, the inherent fallibility of our work, is not just the time constraints, but also the fact that ordinary human beings aren’t reliable witnesses. So we have to try to do lots of checking. And number one, in principle it is possible to check any story. So there are some people who said, ‘ah, well with weapons of mass destruction that would just be too complicated’. Bullshit. In principle, that’s checkable and doable with journalistic technique. So there is that Broder line which says that we aren’t going to be able to do enough checks to check everything we’ve put in the paper. But what I’m arguing is that because of the commercial pressures on journalism and all the rest of it, the line of distortion and falsehood and inaccuracy is currently way higher than the Broder line. The Broder line is inevitable inaccuracy. We are functioning way above that in terms of inaccuracy. You have been talking about how you ‘make a pact’ with your reader. You say very clearly at the beginning of your book, ‘it’s likely there are mistakes in this book’, and so you set up a pact there. Does that mean, effectively, from a news consumer’s point of view, that they have to base their judgement about what is true on their understanding and trust of the journalist, or more likely of the newspaper? Otherwise how do you make that judgement? How do I decide as a layperson . . . . . . Whether or not what I’m telling you is true? Well first of all, knowing the newspaper and the journalist isn’t necessarily going to help you very much. It will help you with knowing the way in which the selective judgements have been made, because the Guardian is going to be disposed to

48 Conversations on Truth make a different sort of judgement than the Daily Mail. But that is all working on the assumption that what they’re saying is true, within this framework of multiple truths. But whether or not you can ‘trust me’ to be telling you the truth is difficult. Well, to put it another way, what is my responsibility as a reader? How ought I to read or consume the news? Well, it’s very difficult for you. And it’s going to be even more difficult in the future, because the internet produces more sources of information and therefore of potential misinformation. I’m not one of those who says ‘the internet will solve all our problems. Citizen journalists, bloggers, don’t worry – it’s all going to be all right.’ I think that’s naïve. The internet can be a major source of misinformation; there are so many variables which have not yet formed into place. But more generally, it will, of course, help you if you are in the fortunate set of circumstances of having direct contact with the facts or reality which is being reported. So anybody who’s ever been at a rock concert, or a pop festival, or a political demonstration that has been reported in the papers, will consistently tell you, ‘that’s not what happened’. And they’re probably right. It’s not just that the journalist is taking a fragment – it’s that they actually are being misreported. But apart from that – apart from your having a direct relationship with the truth – the only thing to do is to go out and act like a journalist. Take the story out of the newspaper, and say, ‘well, I’m not quite sure that that’s true, therefore I’m going to go out and find human sources and documentary sources and put it all together and see whether or not that newspaper story stands up to scrutiny’. But who’s got the time to do that? A few people, but not many, not routinely. So does all of this mean that we can never really be sure – that we can only ever get an approximation of reality? I don’t want to say ‘we never can be sure; we can only ever get an approximation’. I don’t think that’s right. It’s the corollary that’s correct, I think, that people who think they’re telling the truth may be mistaken. So that’s true, but it doesn’t mean to say that all people who attempt to tell the truth always are mistaken. If I say, ‘you are sitting on the chair in my dining room’, that’s accurate, isn’t it? There are accurate witnesses. Really all we’re saying, in a sense, is that if the bloke comes running out of a tube station and says, ‘the policemen has just shot the Brazilian man seven times’, well let’s talk to other witnesses. In an ideal world, let’s talk to the doctors who were working on his body. Let’s check. And the Broder line is about the fact that we don’t always have the time to check, but that’s what we should be doing. But, partly, this is a very familiar point nowadays, the speed of

Nick Davies 49 24-hour news means the BBC reporter is there with a camera, and there is enormous pressure to bang this out on air now, so that even if that reporter seriously wanted to go and check, he wouldn’t be expected to. And even if he has doubts, he may have no choice but to report something. Yes – because he’s under so much time pressure. Are you familiar at all with Jean Baudrillard’s writing? He was a French postmodernist who wrote a book famously entitled The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,3 and he argues that basically the media as it is now creates a simulacrum of the world which bears no real relation to the world as it is. He uses one particular example of a CNN reporter during the first Gulf War who was reporting on a certain event, before it was revealed that she was getting her information from CNN. So he was saying this is a good example of how the media creates a fiction. Now, there are elements in your book that kind of imply that that can happen. But presumably you wouldn’t go that extra step and actually claim that the world the media creates is completely divorced from reality? It isn’t completely divorced, but there is something artificial, unreal or unreliable about it. And also, it’s formative, because it plays back into the real world, or the way that people think, and the way that governments construct policies or allocate public money. So I think there is something frightening about the scale on which media misreporting occurs, but if he’s arguing it is entirely fictitious, that doesn’t sound right, does it? How do you respond to the critique Chomsky gives of the media? Well, I’m a bit of a fan of Chomsky, but I think that his work on the media is crap. He doesn’t understand it. He can see that there is a problem – he can see that the old left analysis, that it is all about newspaper proprietors, does not explain the problem as a whole and that you have got to go 4 further than that. But in his book Manufacturing Consent that he wrote with Edward Herman there is a complete absence of evidence from journalists themselves – from inside the news organizations. So he is looking at it from the outside and is trying to guess what goes on. He gives a role to advertisers and advertising for instance, but that is nonsense. He is trying to explain the same thing as me – the way I put this in the book was by asking ‘How do you explain the way that constitutionally free newspapers in a country like the USA would toe a government line as if they were functioning in a totalitarian state like the Soviet Union where there was crude censorship?’ For example, how do you explain the grotesque

50 Conversations on Truth misreporting of the Sandinista–Contra conflict in Nicaragua led by the New York Times? Now there, Manufacturing Consent is good in terms of how it digs down and says ‘look how terrible this reporting is’. But they can’t answer the question as to what these mechanisms are. So they then say, ‘Well it must be something to do with ideology, so they must be hiring people who have internalized a particular ideology and therefore they see the world in particular terms and therefore they reproduce it. Or else it is something to do with the fact that journalists know that advertisers will not like it if certain things are published.’ But this is just not right. They’ve got it wrong and it’s because they haven’t got inside things, they haven’t investigated, they haven’t gone out and got evidence, so they are not going to get to the truth. So I think they have rather let themselves down there. It’s terribly disappointing, because I read their book thinking initially ‘this is exciting, this is going to be really good’, but it wasn’t. Though I do think Chomsky himself is very bright and very brave. But I don’t think you will find anyone in the world of journalism who would sign up to his propaganda model. How did you come to view the media in the way you do now? Was it something that you’d always felt? Or did you gradually realize during your career that the media was all like this? Do you feel that it’s got worse since you started? Well, I think it has got worse. And I think it was probably in the course of researching the book that I finally came to the conclusion that we were structurally likely to produce falsehoods and distortion and propaganda. Though ‘structurally likely’ isn’t the same as saying that we ‘always produce fictions’. But I think that story of the weapons of mass destruction is a very important one for us – it’s the defining story of our era. It’s the most important thing we’ve written about, and we did get it wrong. But then we walked away, and with very few exceptions didn’t consider, ‘well, why? Does that tell us anything about the way we operate?’ And when I tried to answer that question in relation to the WMD, ‘Does it tell us anything about our internal mechanics?’ That’s when everything started to be very worrying. Because it’s in answering that that you see that we are structurally prone to producing falsehood, distortion, propaganda, because of the churnalism and all the distorting internal logic that I called rules of production. This is the sense in which we are structurally vulnerable to being manipulated by the PR industry into serving particular commercial or political interests. And I think I hadn’t got a clear picture of that structural weakness until I did the research for the book.

Nick Davies 51 I was really interested in what you wrote about the articles Ed Vulliamy was writing which were based on his source in the CIA that completely undermined the case for WMD, but which The Observer consistently refused to publish. Why, in that case, didn’t he just send them to the Guardian? Why didn’t he leak the story to someone else who would have run it? What stopped him from going all out to get that story in the public realm? Well, you would have to ask Ed, but he’s really pissed off about it. Because he kept filing – which is unusual. On the whole, you file a story, it doesn’t get in, you think: ‘Oh well’, and you get on to the next week’s work. But he filed that seven times over the period of six or seven months, and I went out to Washington and met the guy, Mel Goodman, from the CIA, who was his source, and he remembers both of their frustration at not being able to get this published. But it would be a very unusual and destructive move to be on the staff of one newspaper and leak your work to another – it would almost be professional suicide. And it’s not as if you could leak it without it being recognized, because if he’d given it to The Sunday Times, and they’d run it with his by-line, then I think he would have lost his job. And if they had taken the raw material and done it themselves, The Observer would still have said: ‘Hang on a moment, how did The Sunday Times get that stuff? Ed, weren’t you working on it?’ And he would then have had the choice about whether or not to lie. And Ed’s not a liar – because he’s quite an emotional bloke, he would probably have told them the truth. I don’t know what went through his head. He certainly realized that there was a significant story that needed to be published. It seems to me there that in your interpretation of what might have motivated him, that what trumped getting the story out was, quite understandably, self-preservation. Well no. I mean, Ed’s not a particularly selfish person. And the other thing is, that when it’s in the middle of that sequence of events, each time he files a story, he’s doing so in the hope that this time he’s going to succeed. So he doesn’t know finally he’s going to fail until it is too late because the invasion takes place. Do you think if that story had got filed, and if the press had been more vigilant about not buying the stuff that was coming out of Downing Street, then that genuinely could have stopped the war? You seem to imply that in your book. That’s a very, very, difficult one isn’t it? I think if you put it on a more micro-level, one of the things that Downing Street was very concerned

52 Conversations on Truth about was getting the House of Commons to vote in favour of going to war. In constitutional terms, it was a very risky and, you might say, an unusually brave move for them to go to the House of Commons and ask for a vote. And The Observer was very important in that because it’s the sort of newspaper that’s read by an awful lot of backbench MPs, who are the ones who are likely to rebel. And I think if Ed’s story had been run and followed up, then it might have had a very serious impact. Perhaps it could have had the sort of impact that you saw a few months ago, when the CIA released a National Intelligence Estimate [NIE], where they said that they did not believe that the Iranians were trying to build a nuclear weapon. Now that really took the wind out of the sails of the anti-Iranian lobby for several months. Though of course, that is now rebuilding, interestingly enough, and the press are following the line. The Guardian and other newspapers are running stories saying that various neo-cons are demanding an invasion of Iran and demanding sanctions around Iran, and they’re not, now, referring back to the NIE report. That report seems to have got lost in the briefings. So, I think Vulliamy’s story would have had a political impact, certainly on the backbench MPs, which could have meant that the vote didn’t go the way Blair wanted it. But I don’t think, ultimately, that would have stopped the war. The Americans would have gone charging ahead anyway. I mean the Americans went ahead without their Second Resolution, which was much more significant than the House of Commons vote. The other story that’s there in The Observer is the one about the American spying agency, the NSA, intercepting the phone calls of the nations on the Security Council who were the swing voters on the Second Resolution. The journalists who were pushing that story, and who were frustrated by not being able to run it for a couple of weeks, wonder whether, if it had run earlier, it might have had even more of an impact on the global political perception of events than it did. Why is it so easy for these massive stories, like the CIA’s report on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, to be forgotten? It’s because the sources of news which we’re recycling in this churnalism aren’t picking those stories up and pushing them. The big government agencies who are providing the raw material for, let’s say, the Iran stories now, the big right-wing think-tanks, the big lobby groups, like the Israeli lobby, are not interested in reminding us of the NIE report, because that acts against their political interest. They want to put pressure on the Iranian regime for lots and lots of reasons – the idea that they may be manufacturing a nuclear weapon is only one. So, they have their own political agenda, and that’s reflected in their briefing. Well, who’s briefing against those organizations that might say, ‘hang on, what about the NIE

Nick Davies 53 report?’ The Iranian government would, but they are not considered a reliable source. We have no reason for thinking that the Iranian government is more likely to engage in falsehood and distortion than the American government – the American government does frequently. But the American government has ‘safe’ written on it, whereas the Iranian government is branded as ‘dangerous’ and ‘unreliable’. This is the really rather subtle way in which the mechanics of journalism work. And apart from the Iranian government, you might have lefty peace groups, who might say, ‘what about the NIE report?’ But they also have ‘unsafe’ written on them. So the big, safe, consensus, mainstream sources are pushing their line that tends to get picked up by the news agencies and therefore by the newsrooms. And the voices who would still be talking about the NIE report are relatively weak and marginalized. That’s the structure of news. Over and over again you find conservative points of view coming through more powerfully – because they’re seen as inherently safe. It’s also important to note that PR is expensive, and so it tends to be the big corporations and the wealthy individuals and the governments who can afford to crank up the PR machine and make it work for them. It has been suggested in some reviews that you are much harsher in your book on the right-wing press than you are on the left-wing press. Is that because you genuinely think the right-wing press is more prone to distortion, lies and propaganda than the left? Or might it be fair to say that you’re not examining your own house because you identify with the left? Well firstly, The Observer is a left-wing newspaper, in British Fleet Street terms, and I’m attacking it, so I’m not reserving my big attacks just for the conservative newspapers. And secondly, what various reviewers wrongly assumed was that I was anti-war. But I was pro-war. I wanted the invasion to take place, because I wanted to get rid of the dictator. So, Peter Preston, for example, completely lost his marbles in his review of my book in the Guardian. He was just sort of frothy-mouthed with hostility and he said, ‘Oh, just because Nick Davies disagrees with The Observer line on the war, he goes and attacks their newsroom.’ It isn’t true – I agreed with their line on the war. I was taking the right-wing line. This left-wing newspaper was taking a right-wing line on the war, and so was I. My objections to what went on in The Observer’s newsroom have nothing to do with their political position, they have to do with whether or not they got to the truth, and whether or not they became a vehicle for propaganda, which they clearly did – from the CIA and Downing Street. But I really don’t think I did attack the right more than the left – after all, Peter Oborne wrote a very good review of the book in The Spectator.

54 Conversations on Truth Well he too is very critical of the way the media works isn’t he? He’s terrific – he’s a really good bloke. It’s such a shame he works for the Daily Mail! But he’s an honest, brave, bloke, I think. Though he thought I was too easy on the Guardian, and I just don’t think that holds up. There are only three newspapers I looked at in detail – The Observer, the Daily Mail and The Sunday Times. And I focused on those three just because that’s where the material led me. When I started to write the book I didn’t have it structured in that way at all – I wasn’t intending to cover any particular newsrooms – but I just stumbled onto so much material that I had to do chapters on those three. But on the way through, in the bulk of the book, the Guardian gets embarrassed, so to speak, just as often as The Times or the Independent or the Telegraph. Aside from the reviews, what’s been the response to you personally and professionally from other journalists? Either those you’ve criticized or others? In the early days of the book coming out, I think maybe 40 per cent of the reaction was hostile. And that came from two primary sources: from a small group of senior journalists, like Peter Preston, who just can’t face the fact that they spent most of their lives running organizations which failed in their central task, which is to tell the truth. And the other hostility came from some of the individuals who feel they’ve come out badly from the book. But as time’s gone by, they tended to do hit-and-run, they’ve gone away. And what I had not expected to happen has happened, which is that there has been this massive surge of support from journalists in this country and around the world, working in local and national print and broadcast media of all kinds. They have come along to me in one way or another, saying, ‘Thank God you said that – in my place it’s even worse.’ I think that I’ve been contacted from journalists in every single country in Western and Eastern Europe, and Australia and New Zealand and Canada and the USA, and various other parts of the developing world as well – all saying the same thing. Partly they’re contacting me to say, ‘it’s even worse here’, partly they’re getting on to me to do interviews with me, and I’ve also been invited to speak all over the place. Now this is a book that’s only published in this country – but I’ve been to Australia and Germany to speak about it, I’m due to go to Denmark and Sweden, I’ve been invited to the Democratic National Convention in the USA and so on. It’s extraordinary. And so, proportionally, the hostility now is down to maybe 1 per cent.

Nick Davies 55 When you were writing passages in the book which were critical of the Guardian – the paper you write for – did you ever perhaps feel Alan Rusbridger, the editor, looking over your shoulder? Or were you absolutely confident that you could write that and then it wouldn’t affect your job with that paper? Well there are two things. First of all: Alan is (a) an absolutely straight man, and (b) my friend. And so I’ve never had a worry about him. But beyond that there’s a strange thing that goes on, which is that I sit in my study, and I’ve got the transcripts of interviews with real people that I’ve done and I’ve got piles of documents that come from the real world. But once you get into writing, the subjective experience of me sitting there with my keyboard and my screen is that I’m in an imaginary world. It’s not that I’m making it up, but the subjective experience, when you are sitting there, is that it’s not quite real. I’m in my study, looking at a screen. And so you write what’s happened without considering that these people are real. And then it’s rather frightening when you get sent a copy of a book which is about to go into shops – and you suddenly think, ‘Christ! Paul Dacre! He’s real! He’s going to read it!’ And you pop out of the bubble. And that can be quite alarming. Do you know Paul Dacre at all? Has he responded? No, and he – for better or worse, I think for better, actually – has just ignored it. So he hasn’t reacted at all. The Observer people were the ones who got most hopping mad. I mean the bad guys of the Observer, not the good ones. But it’s terribly ironic: you write a book about falsehood and distortion in Fleet Street, and what does Fleet Street do? It reports the book with falsehood and distortion! So months before the book even came out there were stories in the Mail on Sunday and The Sunday Times saying that the book contains an aggressive chapter about The Observer because the Guardian had commissioned me to try to get rid of the editor of The Observer, Roger Alton. And this is fiction – it’s real, real bullshit. The claim was that this was all part of a feud between the Guardian and The Observer. And you only have to be a journalist for about ten minutes to read that chapter and say, ‘Ah, well, hang on, that can’t be true’ – the information which I’m using must have come from Observer journalists, not Guardian journalists. It’s The Observer’s own staff who are giving me that material. And so, you know, there were some people at The Observer who were bad guys, but the rest of the staff were absolutely sick of what was going on. And it is as you would hope, if you are a journalist, researching any organization, whether it’s a police force, or a local council, or a government department – you can find the good guys in there who will help you to expose what the bad guys are doing.

56 Conversations on Truth Are there ever times, as a journalist, when it is acceptable, or even morally or ethically required, either to be dishonest, or to suppress something? There was an issue, a few years ago, where one senior political figure’s child attempted suicide and it never got reported – what are the ethical issues surrounding that? Well, you used two different words there: ‘suppressed’ and ‘dishonest’. Now, dishonesty is where I run a story which I know is untrue. That’s one thing, but suppression is different. And the model here is the kidnap: so the child of the wealthy family is kidnapped, and the kidnappers say to the family, ‘If you go to the police, we kill your child.’ But the family do go to the police. So then the police call in the reporters. They say, ‘Here’s what’s happening. Here’s the whole truth. But we want you to suppress this story, because if you run anything, the child gets killed.’ And we say yes – and we’re right to say yes. Because if I’m right that all journalism is constructed out of these selective judgements, the corollary of that is, you can make the selective judgement to suppress information. At the end of the day, it’s only a story, and so I think we would be right to suppress in the case of the kidnap. But then you get these shades-of-grey cases, and the issue of that child you mentioned is a very interesting example. It makes complete sense from the child’s point of view, or for her protection, that it should not be reported. But that situation is also going to have a massive psychological impact on the parent, and so you could argue there’s a strong public interest because it could impair his capacity to do his job. Well, you’ve got to look at that particular event in two stages. The first stage is the time when the child actually tried to commit suicide – twice, as I understand it – the initial argument then was relatively simple: if we had run that story, exposing her to publicity, we might have put such pressure on her that she would try again and succeed. And you don’t want a dead child on your hands. So, let’s suppose we’re right in our judgement to suppress it. The question still needs to be asked as to whether we would have done that if the parent hadn’t been a powerful person. What would have happened if, for example, we were talking about the child of a Big Brother contestant who was old enough to have a daughter of that age? This is somebody with no power, but with a celebrity profile. And in that scenario I’m not sure that we would have suppressed the story. So even if we were right, we might have done it for the wrong reasons. The second stage comes some time later when the child is no longer likely to be in any immediate danger and when the political circumstances surrounding the parent have changed significantly. Now, then, it’s arguable that the

Nick Davies 57 balance which said, initially, that we should have suppressed it last time has tipped the other way. And yet it still went unreported. And that is more problematic. But you could take a different example – for instance, when Prince Harry was sent to Afghanistan. Now, I was phoned by the Today programme on the Sunday night that the story broke about him being out there. And they asked me if I would go on the programme to talk about this. And fortunately I was too hung-over, so I said no! Because if I had gone on the programme the next morning, I would have said, ‘We were right to suppress the story because if you run that then you may bring down fire on Harry and his comrades, making life more dangerous for them, and, as with the kidnap parallel, that’s not fair, that’s not OK.’ But then as I sobered up and thought about it over the next few days, I thought, ‘No, hang on, this is not quite right’, because the parallel is not really there. With a kidnap, it is an event which has happened suddenly – the awkward reality has occurred and we’ve just got to deal with the fact that the child is in jeopardy. But with Prince Harry it was different because what had happened was that the Palace and the army put their heads together and came to Fleet Street and said, ‘We’re thinking of sending Harry there. It would help us to help keep him safe if you would keep quiet.’ And we should have said ‘no’. If the reality has already occurred, and there’s no alternative, well that may be all right – we may have to suppress the story. But in this case they were asking us to create a reality. Or, to put it another way, if they, army and Palace, want to send Harry to Afghanistan, then it’s up to them to keep him safe. That’s not for us to do. And if they can’t do that, then they shouldn’t send him. And this is not just as a matter of principle. Because there was a huge PR pay-off for the Palace here with all the ‘Harry the hero’ stuff. But Harry wasn’t a hero – Harry was being given special protection, you see. So we actually not only colluded in the suppression of the story, but we colluded in the production of a PR story. These arguments about the suppression of stories are interesting. But we should also look at the way in which commercialism will keep coming through and interfering with or polluting the moral–political arguments. So take this Big Brother example again where a Big Brother contestant’s child is attempting suicide. The reason why the press would go for it, in that case, is because it would sell papers. It’s an exclusive. And if one paper goes for it, the others will all come crashing in on the Ninja Turtle basis that they can’t afford, financially, to be left out. And it can be very awkward if you do try to take the high ground. Take, for example, the second time David Blunkett resigned. I am not talking about when he pulled strings to help the nanny whose employer he happened to be

58 Conversations on Truth sleeping with, but rather when he came back, and was caught supposedly with his leg over a blonde estate agent whom he’d met. Now the Guardian made the judgement, a moral, non-commercial judgement, that this was nobody’s business but Blunkett’s. And therefore we didn’t report, or rather we certainly didn’t report on any scale, that so-called tabloid sex scandal around Blunkett. The difficulty then occurred – because we decided effectively to suppress the story, arguably quite rightly – a couple of weeks later, when it turned out that the man who introduced Blunkett to this woman, ran a company which had contracts with the Home Office. And then we no longer had a trivial leg-over story, we had got a political scandal – a conflict of interest. So we then had to start reporting it, having not previously done so. And therefore there’s this secondary danger: even if you make the right decision, the story can suddenly take a different route. These are really the interesting and difficult questions that journalists face – but on the whole, they’re short-cut, they’re not considered. Most journalists don’t think about the meaning of objectivity, the difference between truth and accuracy, or the meaning of impartiality: they don’t consider what judgements need to be made. These decisions are made for them, because the whole industry is like this enormous machine, run on commercial grounds, with those rules of production which just go: bang! bang! bang! bang! And nobody really thinks about it. .

You are very pessimistic at the end of your book about the prospects for journalism. But given that you say you have had a very positive response from other journalists to it, have you changed that attitude at all? Well, at a micro-level there are still lots of good journalists around. And from time to time they will win battles in the newsroom so that they do get the space they need to do their work or to write their stories, even if they are not necessarily going to sell papers. So at that micro-level there are still lots of battles to be fought and won. The pessimism is about the big structural question: how will we fund serious news-gathering for the future? Because the old, what you would call ‘dead-tree’ model, no longer works – we can’t generate enough money from circulation and from advertising in order to sustain the huge editorial operation that is required – so it is being cut, our quality is going down, our readers are deserting even faster and our financial problems get even worse. Now the optimists say the solution lies in the internet. I suppose my position on that would be ‘well maybe’. But actually the cleverest people in the media still don’t know what shape that will take. So, for example, the Guardian and The Observer are planning a merger to become a great global 24/7 news-gathering operation. And the assumption is that in the next decade or two they will cease to produce a

Nick Davies 59 ‘dead-tree’ version of the news – it will all be on the internet. And you can see why people might think this is the way forward – with no printing and distribution costs there will be massive savings. But that still begs the question, where does the money come from to pay for this? The eighteen million users of the Guardian’s website get it for free. They are not paying the cover price that they would at a news-stand. So then how much advertising can we carry on the website? Will that pay for the whole operation? And the answer appears to be no. So what they are now considering is what Alan Rusbridger calls a ‘cross-subsidy model’, whereby the Guardian, with its electronic newspaper, continues to own other businesses which make a profit and which then gets ploughed back into the paper. So the idea is that because the Guardian is owned by a trust, it can run a lossmaking operation with the paper and own other companies to make up that loss elsewhere. So the Guardian may wriggle through because it’s a trust, but how does that model make sense for the Rupert Murdochs of this world? Why would they run a loss-making business simply so that they can take the profit from other businesses and lose it in a black hole? The argument might be that the paper provides prestige. Well, possibly. It might get you prestige and political power, but why do you want that prestige and political power? So you can make money. And if that is costing you a hundred million a year then that is pointless – you might as well just keep the profit-making businesses and screw the media. So what will actually happen is that if the commercialized corporate media can’t get enough income to support the editorial operations, then they will find other ways of cutting costs. Nowadays masses of people get their news from places like Yahoo and Google news. And those websites are produced without journalists – they use computer programs called news aggregators which go out and hunt through other news-sites and pull up the stories that are being read most frequently. But where is the truth in that? Where is the editorial judgement or the fact-checking? There is none. I think it won’t be very long before we see local newspapers being put together in the same way. The local newspaper will sack all their journalists and replace them with news aggregators that trawl the internet for references to a local town and then will pool them all on a particular website. So there will be some kind of news coverage going on, but the quality will be rock-bottom. And then you have bloggers and citizen journalists all hammering away. Some of them will produce gems, but a lot of it will be absolute drivel. We were talking earlier about the difficulties that a newspaper reader has now of discriminating and decoding and getting to the point where they can say ‘this story is true and that one isn’t’. That is hard enough with

60 Conversations on Truth newspapers that you have been reading for 15 years and with by-lines that are very familiar. But how you are supposed to do that if you are working with the huge proliferation of sources on the internet I don’t know. So I think that there is a real risk of going into an age of information chaos just at the time when, because of globalization, we need information more than ever before. I don’t want to be 100 per cent pessimistic and say that it is all over. But at the moment it is very hard to see where reliable news is going to come from in the future.

5

Richard J. Evans

Do you have a working definition of the term ‘truth’? There is the classic philosophical definition which is: a statement is true if and only if it corresponds to reality, if it corresponds to the thing it refers to. But that definition of truth is circular – and philosophers have never actually come up with any other satisfactory definition of the word. But as a historian I have to approach these things in a different way. So I would say that an historical statement – that’s to say, a statement about the past – is true if it is supported by sufficient evidence and if the evidence that contradicts it is either nonexistent or can be explained in some other way. I think historians are very uneasy about using the concept of truth because we’re aware of the fact that everything we say is really more a question of probability or plausibility than absolute truth. With a historian there’s always a niggling little element of doubt in the back of your mind as to whether the statements you make in a history book are really, really true or not. It’s not like being in a courtroom, in a criminal trial, in the witness box. If you make a statement under an oath in a witness box then it’s all treated as if it’s completely, absolutely true. But in the end, however, the historical approach to truth is more akin to the approach taken in a civil action such as a libel trial, where the idea of what is true is based on probability – it’s based on piling up evidence and saying, for instance, that the overwhelming probability is that there were gas chambers in Auschwitz which killed hundreds of thousands of people, and all attempts to deny this rest on an obvious and easily demonstrable falsification of the evidence. History is in a process of constant revision and constant argument. So as a historian you are aware of the fact that what you write will be challenged, and there’s an odd sort of way in which it’s a fundamental convention of historical writing that you have to provide your critics with 61

62 Conversations on Truth the means to challenge what you’re saying, namely through footnotes which provide the evidence on which you’re basing your claim, so then other historians can go and check them up and see if your claim is plausible. Of course, there are different levels of truth. So it’s a kind of banal truth to say that the Battle of Waterloo happened in 1815, and nobody’s is going to say that it happened in 1814 or 1816. And it’s an irrelevance to say, as some have: ‘Well, this is not a true statement because it’s based on an arbitrary system of counting the years.’ No matter how you count the years, whether it’s Jewish or Muslim or Christian or whatever, that’s the year it happened and not the year before or the year after. But that’s a very commonplace kind of truth. What’s more interesting for the historian is when you get into larger statements such as ‘Germany was the country mainly responsible for the outbreak of the First World War.’ And that is much, much more difficult to establish. And by and large, the larger the statement, the larger the scope, the more difficult it is to prove that it’s true. So you’ve got a kind of irritating paradox in history – the smaller and more banal the statement, the easier it is to prove it’s true, and the larger and more interesting and more significant the statement, the more difficult it is. Could you outline broadly the various approaches to writing history? And could you relate that to the notions of relativism and postmodernism in history? There is an old view that is now actually very unfashionable and out-ofdate because it’s excessively simplistic. And that is: in order to find out the truth about the past, you simply have to remove all your preconceptions from your mind, go into the archive, and read all the papers thoroughly. So let’s say you want to know about the English Reformation and Henry VIII and his policy, and so on. Then you just go to the archives, you read all the papers relating to Henry VIII and his policy and you come up with an answer because it will be there. But I think historians now all accept that there is a strong element of subjectivity in all of this, in a dual sense. Firstly, what you yourself believe and think, your political stance, your personal experiences, what you’re like as a historian, what’s driving you – all of that will affect your conclusions. And secondly, the general cultural, intellectual, atmosphere in which you work – the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, will have an effect. So that traditional view of how you find out about history was the one that the great Tudor historian Sir Geoffrey Elton took when he wrote his major works about Henry VIII’s England. But Elton was a refugee from central Europe who saw England, as many people like that did, as a haven of order and stability. For him, democracy, parlia-

Richard J. Evans 63 mentarism, etc. were very central to it all. And you can see that his work is an attempt to explore and in many ways celebrate that sense of order and stability in British life. He argued that all of this just reflected what he found in the archives. But I think his critics would say that he strongly overestimated these elements as a result of his beliefs and because of what was driving him; he found in the archives, in a sense, what he was looking for. So the stance of the observer affects what is observed. I think historians would broadly accept that. However, I have, for example, written about the history of capital punishment in Germany. Now, I’m strongly opposed to capital punishment, but nevertheless, if I come across arguments by past individuals against capital punishment which are clearly untenable, then I still have to say that they are untenable. I can’t simply pick out all the arguments and say, ‘Well, these are the arguments: one to ten, and they all show that the death penalty is wrong.’ I have to say, ‘three, four and six have been shown not to be correct’, however disappointing I may find that for the overall case against the death penalty. I think that any historian must have a sort of ‘super-ego’ that will tell you, ‘No, look, you can’t push this idea, if this idea is put up against the evidence and is wrecked by it then you’ll have to rethink.’ One of my favourite quotes in this respect comes from the great French historian Fernand Braudel, who says that historical theory and interpretation is like a kind of boat you send back down the river of time: it has to negotiate the rapids and rocks of evidence, and eventually it will founder at some point, and that is when you have pushed your interpretation as far as it will go. Whenever you do any research, you always find there are bits and pieces you have to deal with that don’t fit in, and the aim is to get an interpretation, an argument that will encompass as much of the evidence as possible. But there will always be bits that don’t fit. And then you have to explain them away or change your argument. What you can’t do is ignore them. Could you unpack a little bit what the word ‘evidence’ means, and alongside that what a ‘fact’ is? Evidence for a historian is essentially the remains left behind by a past that is now gone, that we use in the furtherance of our attempt to understand that past. So evidence becomes evidence when we link it to an argument or an interpretation. It’s evidence for or against that particular interpretation. But what contitutes a ‘fact’ is a much more difficult question to grapple with. I take an absolutist view that there are things that happened in the past and which are therefore facts, but which we may never know about. Most things that happened in the past, we forget. And while there’s

64 Conversations on Truth no evidence for the argument that they happened, they still happened. A lack of evidence doesn’t mean that they didn’t happen. But presumably, by definition, we will never know what they were? Exactly. We’ll never know 99 per cent of what happened in the past because there’s no evidence for it. For example, the invention of the telephone was the worst thing that ever happened to historians because before then everybody wrote letters, notes, and so on. Then they started phoning each other up, and that was disastrous, because no record is left of their conversations. And now there’s email, and if somebody deletes their email account then no record is left of that either. There’s been an international campaign by EU archivists to try to force civil servants to keep copies of emails because otherwise so much gets lost. But enormous quantities of information get lost when private individuals delete their emails. So we will never know what they thought, or what they said to each other. But isn’t the logical conclusion of that that if we don’t have evidence, it didn’t happen? I think you have to make certain leaps of faith as a historian, starting with the leap of faith that we exist. As you know, philosophers have never really been able to prove that we exist, but because they can’t prove it it doesn’t mean we don’t! So as I say, it is not legitimate to conclude that something did not happen just because we don’t know it happened. What does empiricism mean in an historical context? Well, in the context of history I think it has a quite different meaning to the one it has in philosophy. The concept in history has usually meant that a historian works from the materials left by the past to build up a picture or an interpretation of that past, on the basis of the facts to which those materials refer. So it is seen as a bottom-up process. And that kind of historical empiricist would say: ‘I don’t ask questions of the evidence. I just go and read it, and a picture emerges.’ Whereas I think most of us now, including myself, would say, ‘No, no, that material doesn’t say anything of itself, you have to ask questions about it.’ You question and you interrogate the material – you interrogate the documents, the pictures, buildings, whatever it is you’re using as evidence. If you think as an empiricist that you’re simply building up a picture of the past with no preconceptions, then you’re deluding yourself, and your own preconceptions come into it unconsciously, as indeed with Elton in the example I gave.

Richard J. Evans 65 So this is why someone like E. H. Carr would say you need to study the historian as well as the history in order to get an understanding of why they’re asking those particular questions or looking at that particular evidence? Yes. Carr was wrong about almost everything in history, but about that he was absolutely right! Could you say something about the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity in relation to all of this? Obviously what you mustn’t do as a historian is to just plunder the past for evidence that supports a preconceived idea. If you do that you’re not a historian, you’re just a propagandist. And just as how in your footnotes you have to provide evidence for your critics to refute your arguments, so when you’re looking at the evidence you actively have to look for things that go against what you’re trying to argue. And you have to continue this process, following the law of diminishing returns, until all the conceivable evidence that goes against your arguments has been dealt with, and all that’s coming up is stuff that supports it. Then you know that you’re on the right lines – then you can leave the archive and start writing a book. So in my view, an objective historian is one whose arguments and interpretations and use of the evidence are bound by, or restricted by, that evidence. It’s not the same as neutrality – it’s not the same as saying, ‘I have no view one way or the other.’ It is simply that what you’re saying is done within the limits of the evidence, and with a respect for the integrity of the evidence – for the ‘object’, in other words. Subjectivity is when you bring your own views, prejudices and beliefs to bear. And of course in all history there should be a productive interaction between the two. As a historian I’m driven by a passion for things like equality, justice, democracy, human rights and all that sort of thing. So I do have an agenda, and in that sense I am subjective. But when I go to the evidence, when I go to the archives, I then pour that subjectivity into the mould which is formed by the material that I’m studying. So you’re finding your interpretation and your angle, but within the context of the material that exists. Yes, and you have to chuck your own pet ideas out the window all the time.

66 Conversations on Truth You were an expert witness for the defence when David Irving unsuccessfully sued Deborah Lipstadt for accusing him of being a Holocaust denier. Could you talk about these notions of subjectivity and interpretation in relation to that? If you read the Irving judgement – it’s online – the judge slightly alarmingly, I think, is constantly laying down the law about what a good historian should do, and what an objective historian should do and should not do. And because he is a lawyer he puts it in very black and white terms, whereas we historians would like things to be seen in a slightly fuzzier way. But he’s essentially right – what the court found was that Irving manipulated the material in order to fit preconceived ideas, so he added words into a quotation to make it support his view, or he took words out, changed the order of statements, and so on. So it was a very conscious manipulation? The clinching argument there was that if a historian is simply careless, or sloppy, or transcribes things wrongly – and this can happen, if the handwriting in the original document is bad or if a word is obscure – then the effect of the sloppiness will be random. Sometimes it will tell against the historian’s argument, sometimes it will go in favour. But in Irving’s case every single mistake went in favour of his argument. And so that, for the court, created a very strong presumption that it was deliberate. But as one of the reviewers of my book on the case pointed out, showing that a historian like Irving is making statements that are untrue, and are demonstrably untrue because the evidence has been manipulated and falsified, is not the same thing as saying that it therefore follows that certain things are true. Disproving something doesn’t amount to proving the opposite. It’s much more difficult to prove something that’s true. It’s actually relatively easy to prove that a statement’s untrue. You were talking earlier about how you are motivated by your belief in human rights and so on. So does that mean that there is a kind of moral component to your search for historical truth? Is there a virtue in doing what you do? I think it’s a question of my values, rather than a moral judgement. What I find slightly unnecessary is when historians, as some often do, constantly reiterate ‘Hitler was a wicked man’, or ‘the Nazis were criminals’, and so on. That’s unnecessary and gets in the way of understanding – the historian’s main task is to understand and explain. So I always apply the Genghis Khan test – would you say these things about Genghis Khan? ‘Genghis Khan was wicked’, and so on. And on the whole most of us don’t. I do have

Richard J. Evans 67 values and I try to make these explicit in my work. But I hope that while my values will guide what topics I select and how I approach them, in the end, I’ll come up with another set of arguments and interpretations that will be acceptable to people who don’t share those values. Because ultimately, what it’s all about, is convincing people to agree with you, and the only way you can do that is to make it objectively convincing by piling up all the evidence and dealing with, in one way or another, the evidence that goes against your arguments – either by modifying your arguments, or arguing them out of the way in some manner that’s convincing. So the job of the historian is to persuade people who have one view of the past, or part of it, that there is a better view of it that is based on more substantial evidence? Yes. Why did you think it was necessary to write a book called In Defence of History?1 It came from six lectures that I gave at Birkbeck on historical epistemology, as part of a very high-powered course on politics, philosophy and history, in which the philosophers gave six lectures on epistemology, and then there were six from social scientists, and then I did the six on history. And as I was preparing these lectures I was very struck by the fact that, since the days, decades ago, when I’d first confronted the question of historical knowledge and how we create it, the whole landscape had changed. And in fact the dominant strand in writing about historical knowledge was now post-structuralist – where people actually believed we can’t know about the past, because they saw history as a linguistic construct. There is this idea that we put into any text that we read the meanings that we create – the text has no intrinsic meaning itself. This position is stated rather wonderfully in one of David Lodge’s novels, where an old duffer of a fellow from an English department encounters a thrusting young postmodernist graduate student, and he asks the inevitable question, ‘What are you working on?’ And the graduate student says, ‘I’m doing a thesis on the influence of Dickens on Shakespeare.’ And the old duffer says, ‘Wait a minute – didn’t Dickens live after Shakespeare?’ And the student replies: ‘The point is, because we’ve all read Dickens, and we’ve all read Shakespeare, we cannot now read Shakespeare except through the lens of Dickens, and indeed through the lens of all the other people we’ve read. We are creating our own meanings for Shakespeare.’ So, by analogy, in the historical context, post-structuralism says that when you go to a piece of evidence about the past – a document, a charter,

68 Conversations on Truth a chronicle, parliamentary proceedings, whatever it might be, then you always end up putting your own meaning on it, you are creating the meaning as a historian. There is no intrinsic meaning in the evidence; it’s all the historian’s invention. I thought this was profoundly destructive of historical knowledge. And this kind of approach was becoming increasingly prevalent in universities all over the place. So history departments were either dominated by two completely outdated texts, Elton and Carr, or they were full of all this much more recent stuff which is deeply corrosive of the historical enterprise. Of course, I wasn’t unique in discovering this situation – the debate about this assault on the possibility of historical knowledge began in the 1990s in the historical journals. So in my lectures I tried to deal with the arguments that the post-structuralists put up, while at the same time advancing my own views about history. And I had some extremely fierce disputes with philosophy students, but I was sort of more or less able to hold my own – though I do recall a few very sticky moments! So the book was based on those lectures. It was called In Defence of History because it was an attempt to defend the possibility of knowing about the past, against extreme hyper-relativists and sceptics who said you could know nothing about the past. The post-structuralist would say that there is a fundamental problem about knowing about the past – because it’s not there, we can’t see it, we can’t feel it, we can’t touch it with our senses, it’s disappeared. So, our knowledge of it is entirely secondary, through the medium of writing and other sources. But I think you can say there is a counter-argument to that, which is that, in fact, everything we know about is known at a remove – we have mechanisms in our eyes and our brain, for instance, which process the impressions we get of the world. And so ultimately I don’t think it’s really in principle very different. So it sounds as if the post-structuralist might agree with you to the extent that you say you bring yourself to the evidence, and that you pour your own subjectivity into a mould, but where they disagree is that there is actually a mould. Yes, that’s right. They say that you can’t know about a past event, because the meaning is put into a text by the people who read it, not by the people who write it. And then, of course, what happened was I wrote the book and published the book, and I got these furious reviews by postmodernists saying I misinterpreted what they were saying, which is entirely selfcontradictory. From their point of view, I inevitably must read into their text any meaning that I want to. Their claim that they have fixed in their own texts a particular meaning undermines their entire argument.

Richard J. Evans 69 The postmodernist view initially came from architecture, where it abolished linear time – so postmodernist architecture characteristically mixes up different styles from different epochs in a new and creative way. But then there is some postmodernist writing about history which claims the same thing. And there’s a wonderful book which ends up with the ineffably selfcontradictory statement ‘so therefore, linear time is a thing of the past’! In my book, In Defence of History, I also talk about the fact that there are differences between talking about something, describing it using words, and then doing that thing in reality. But not everyone agrees with that. So if you take Catherine McKinnon’s work on rape – she is a radical feminist lawyer in the USA – she’s argued very strongly that pornography is indistinguishable from rape, and therefore should be prosecuted along the same lines. But I would say, actually, there is a distinction. Committing a physical rape is something different from just writing about it, however violent and offensive the writing might be. In a similar way, there have been post-structuralists who have argued that fictional representations of executions and murder are indistinguishable from the real thing. But of course, if somebody says ‘I want to cut your head off ’, and then somebody does cut your head off, these are two different things! So you can distinguish between a text that describes something happening, and the thing itself happening. Historians have great problems with the idea of ‘postmodernism’ as a term, because historians have their own definition of ‘modernism’. Can you define from an historian’s point of view ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’? I guess what’s fundamental to the idea of modernism is the idea of progress – progress and change. So modernism is a cultural ideology, really, that gives primacy to the new, and that envisages us as being in a process of constant cultural innovation in which there is progress. So, the more recent something is the better it is. And postmodernism says, I think quite rightly, that this has a limited time value, and that the time is over, as it were. So, we live in a postmodern age in the sense that we do not any longer have this idea of progress that sustained humanity – Western civilization, at any rate – from, say, the late-eighteenth century until the mid- to late-twentieth century. And, in a sense, of course, you can then point to many historical phenomena that undermined the whole notion of progress such as Nazism and Stalinism. So postmodernism dispenses with this idea of progress and change, and looks at time in a rather different way. In that sense linear time is something we don’t think of now, we don’t think of ourselves as necessarily being better than the ancient Greeks, or the medieval Spaniards, or whatever.

70 Conversations on Truth So does that aspect of the postmodern critique provide something positive to the study of history? I think it’s less arrogant than modernism. But then this idea is not new to historians. It comes in with Leopold von Ranke in the nineteenth century, who said famously that every epoch is equal in the eyes of God. Because God is all-knowing and eternal, he doesn’t make any distinction between the Middle Ages and the present. And so therefore the historian has to take the same view and take each epoch on its own terms. You don’t do history as the classic modernist historian Carr did it, for example, by looking at each epoch in terms of what it’s contributed to the movement of progress up to and beyond the present. But postmodernism is a general phenomenon, and I think post-structuralism is the particular set of literary and linguistic doctrines that you’re really dealing with in terms of arguments about truth and writing about history. Postmodernism is a very general, generic label. How do you deal with aspects of history which can be highly charged emotionally? It has been argued, for instance, that the idea that six million Jews died in the Holocaust is not quite true and that the number might be slightly closer to something like five million. Yet the idea of ‘the six million’ has taken on such weight that to try to alter this can be very upsetting for many people. The worst thing you can do as a historian is to pay any attention to political correctness. You have to put those considerations aside. The ultimate politically correct treatment of that whole question you’ve just mentioned is what you find in a number of American Holocaust memorials, which say: ‘A memorial to the 11 million people who died in the Holocaust.’ So they do include other groups – prisoners of war, Slavs, homosexuals, gypsies, civilians of one sort or another, but they make sure that they’re five million, because there were six million Jews, and so that gives a sense of the relative degree of importance of each group. Eleven million is a pretty arbitrary figure, really. But basically, you just have to do calculations. Historians have been working on this for a very long time. For a while, the most authoritative figure was 5.4 million Jews, which was Raul Hilberg’s figure. It was Hannah Arendt in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem who popularized the figure of six million. And recent archival discoveries in post-Soviet archives in Eastern Europe have moved the figure posited by Hilberg up to nearer six million. If you look at the other victims of Nazism, you know, you can conclude that about 3.3 million Soviet prisoners were killed deliberately by the Nazis, plus 200,000 German mentally handicapped and mentally ill, and smaller but still significant numbers of

Richard J. Evans 71 German homosexuals, petty criminals and ‘asocials’, Communists and Social Democrats, and scores (perhaps hundreds) of thousands of gypsies from many different European countries. At least 13 million Red Army troops were killed in the fighting on the Eastern Front. Nobody knows how many Soviet civilians were killed by the Germans, but the figure was certainly very large indeed – it may be as many as 20 million, and the Nazis were planning in the long run to kill up to 45 million. But the figures are only a part of the picture. Let’s look at this issue in more general terms. My view is that the Nazis’ mass murder of groups like the mentally handicapped, gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, Soviet civilians, homosexuals, so-called asocials, petty criminals and many others, was all because they were, in the Nazi view, either dispensable – as they were seen as unnecessary for the German Nazi future – or they were seen as a long-term eugenic threat to Nazism because they could produce degeneracy among the Germans, as it were, by reproducing. But the Jews were entirely different: they were seen not as a regional obstacle, or a local obstacle, but as a global threat engaged in an international conspiracy to destroy Germany and the Germans. You can see this very clearly in German propaganda, which portrayed Churchill and Stalin as under Jewish influence. So the Nazis’ aim was to eliminate them entirely, and during the war Hitler even went to Finland, where there’s only a handful of Jews, to try to get them sent to the extermination camps – even though they presented no threat at all, in terms of the larger picture of things. So there was an obsessiveness, and a visceral, sadistic quality to the Nazi treatment of the Jews which, by and large, you don’t find in their treatment of Slavs. So there was a desire to humiliate Jews, in one way or another. You don’t find German troops or the SS forcing Slavs to do gymnastics on the streets, or setting light to their beards, pulling out their hair, making them clean out toilets with their clothes, and things like that. All of these things they did to Jews in the areas of Eastern Europe where they came across them. This behaviour comes down to the whole way in which anti-Semitism infused Nazi ideology, which blamed the Jews in particular for Germany’s defeat and humiliation in the First World War. So the approach, in other words, is not just to look at the numbers – you also have to ask the ‘why’ question. What is the value of writing and studying history? Obviously there are many different values and it has many different functions. So all I can say is what I think the value of it is for me. History is fundamentally the study of human beings in the past who are different from us in many, often very radical, ways. And learning to understand them, and understand why they behaved as they did, and what kind of

72 Conversations on Truth people they were, what they believed, and so on, is above all a way of understanding the human condition better, because it enlarges our view of what human beings are and what they’re capable of. Do you think the post-structuralist view of history is something that will disappear, or do you think that approach is going to persist? In In Defence of History, I take George Melly’s quote about the Rolling Stones where he says they have ‘turned revolt into a style’. There is a way in which post-structuralism in history, which began by proclaiming that it would transform the whole practice of history, has indeed turned into a style. It’s gone exactly the way I said it would go: it’s formed its own academic journal, it has its own societies, it has its own little area of study, teaching and research, and in these niches the post-structuralist historical theorists talk to each other – they don’t talk to the larger historical community. But there is a distinction between radical and, as it were, moderate poststructuralism. And radical postmodernism, with its scepticism about whether we can know anything about the past at all, has disappeared, really. Its proponents now deny that that’s what they were ever arguing, but if you go back and look at what they actually wrote then it is clear that that was what they were arguing. So there’s been a retreat of that kind of thing. More moderate post-structuralism has left its mark on history in many ways. There has been a turn from social to cultural history, which has had good and bad effects. There has been, also, a much greater willingness of historians to acknowledge their own subjectivity, and that I think has empowered historians to play a bigger role in the public arena. We write books that are more accessible now – in the 1970s everyone was trying to write desperately objective books packed with statistics and social science theory that nobody would ever read, because we thought we could pin it all down once and for all. Now I think we’re more relaxed about that, and while we still manage to maintain a good standard of scholarship, you will find a stronger literary element to historical writing. And that has been hugely successful in terms of popularizing history. This has all been fuelled by a change in the way in which history is presented in the media. So if you look at the television history programmes in the 1970s and 1980s, nearly all of them consisted of stills and pictures, with an anonymous voice-over, in BBC received pronunciation, which created a sense of authority and objectivity. Nowadays, you have some highly individualistic person in front of the camera, like David Starkey or Simon Schama, who gives his own pungently expressed personal view. But when David Starkey’s talking about Henry VIII and his wives, you know

Richard J. Evans 73 that although it’s personal, it’s based on a profound knowledge of the subject – he is the world’s greatest expert on the subject. So, there is this greater willingness to allow for that sort of subjectivity. And that works when it’s combined with real scholarship. So in a way, I suppose, without Jacques Derrida there’d be no David Starkey.

6

A. C. Grayling

Do you have a working definition of ‘truth’? It’s hard to give one, because the assumption that lies behind asking, ‘Have you got a working definition of “truth”?’ is that the concept of truth is univocal – that there’s a single meaning to the word ‘truth’. And the framework of my approach to this question is to say this: that instead of looking for a definition of ‘truth’, you have to understand how the predicate ‘is true’ works. When we say of something – a theory, an assertion, a proposition, a belief – that it is true, what do we mean by that? And it’s of the essence of my approach to this that there are many different things that could be meant by saying of something that it ‘is true’, depending on what that something is. Another way of putting this is to say that the predicate expression ‘is true’ is, in fact, a dummy – it’s a place-holder. It’s a very overgeneral term that, when you’re being much more specific and careful, you should take out and replace with something more precise. And the real, deep philosophical difficulty is to know which more precise predicates you should put in place of the predicate ‘is true’. Historically, some of the candidates for replacement predicates have been: in the case of assertions about the external world, ‘is verified’ or ‘verifiable’; in the case of mathematics, ‘is constructible’ or ‘is provable’; or in the case of morality, ‘is approved’ or ‘is desirable’. So, these are slightly more precise predicates than the predicate ‘is true’. But to say something like, ‘“one plus one equals two” is true’; that ‘there is a chair in this room is true’; that ‘telling lies is, generally speaking, a bad thing, is true’; is to be using ‘is true’ in very different ways, because how each is determined depends on the subject-matter. So this immediately suggests that talk of truth is not univocal: there are many different kinds of truth. You should never talk about truth singular, but about truths and the way that truth works in different domains. So that’s the first point. 74

A. C. Grayling 75 The second point is that in the philosophical debate about truth, there are those who think that truth, or the family of things that are truths, are substantial concepts – there is something rich and deep there, and something you can unpack to explain what truth is. And then there are those people, on the other side, who say that actually there is no truth or truths – there is just the use of the predicate ‘is true’ to perform certain semantic and logical functions. This is an insight that comes from noticing that if a given sentence ‘S’ is true, then the sentence ‘S’ and the sentence ‘S is true’ say the same thing. So the predicate ‘is true’ is, strictly speaking, redundant. Is that the deflationist theory? It is one version of the deflationist theory. But then other people noticed that to say ‘S is true’ has certain sorts of rhetorical functions – to confirm, to assert, to emphasize, and so on. These are very familiar distinctions. But in the argument about truth being a substantial rather than a merely semantic or logical device, there are different ways of thinking about what substantiality consists in, and how we are to understand it. One heroic move has been the Donald Davidson move – to say that truth is indefinable; that it’s such an important and general notion, that although the word ‘truth’ denotes something substantial, we can’t say anything about what it is, we can only use the notion. Now it seems to me that that is an entirely over-permissive view; if you have a very big, rich and important concept that you can’t define, then anything whatever can follow from that. And in that case, the concept of truth would then function like the concept of God, and if you’ve got that concept, then anything whatever follows – for example, the laws of nature can be arbitrarily subverted – and so on. So you’ve really got to try to tackle that concept and make better sense of it. And the way to do that is with the view I’ve just suggested, about there being different kinds of truths understood by subject-matter with more precise ways of articulating what we want. And this then gives us a family of substantial notions for that subject-matter. By the way, I think that this way of looking at the concept of truth is characteristic of the big problems in philosophy. The big problems concern concepts which are actually many concepts. Goodness and beauty are likewise big concepts – truth, goodness and beauty are the three ultimate values. And the reason why they’re so problematic is that so many things are packed in there, so many things are squirming around inside there, that of course you’re never going to get a decent unitary, univocal account of these things. So you’ve really got to be a splitter rather than a lumper about these things, and go for a very careful case-by-case or discourse-by-discourse analysis.

76 Conversations on Truth Now let’s just set all that aside for one moment and notice something else. It may very well be the case that when we look at some of these subjects or discourses, that the work done by the more precise concept which you put in the place of truth – again the unhappy historical examples of this include notions like verification and constructability – will be constitutive or regulative. So let’s say, for example, in science, when you’re working towards the truth, you’re specifically working towards verification or proof. This is an ideal of enquiry which, in fact, is never attainable, but which governs the way you behave in pursuit of that aim. Now if one thinks that all of the different values that we use this general term ‘truth’ to denote are regulative or are idealizations which organize and marshal our endeavours to try to get as close as we can to them, then that suggests something very interesting. It suggests that what these concepts actually do is place a demand on us to be truthful. This is because truthfulness, sincerity, authenticity, are notions that apply to our practice and to all these things that we are trying to do, such as being disciplined and rigorous and meticulous and controlled by evidence. So concepts of epistemological sincerity, or authenticity, or truthfulness, may turn out to be the things that are really important about our endeavours. Because that is what we aim for when we are trying to reach this unreachable ideal of arriving at the truth about some subject-matter. Now, if there is such a thing as truthfulness or sincerity in our endeavours, in our thinking and reasoning, and in our disciplining ourselves to the evidence, then this shows why an approach like relativism is false. Relativism often formulates itself as the view that truth is unattainable, except for very obvious and relatively trivial examples like, ‘it’s true that I’m here now’, or ‘one plus one equals two’, which is true simply because of how we define the concepts ‘one’, ‘plus’, ‘equals’ and ‘two’. So it only allows for truth in these rather formulaic circumstances. But it is with situations of dilemma where we’re eager for the truth and can’t find it or recognize it in relation to the really big, important questions about things like the origin of the universe, or the fundamental nature of moral values, where the wish for relativism can creep in. But what blocks relativism is this demand for truthfulness or sincerity. So, ultimately the statements ‘truth is an ideal’, ‘truth is a regulative principle’, or ‘truth is a goal’, means something about our practice, about the nature of our thinking and enquiry, and says something very important about it. You spoke about Donald Davidson making a heroic leap in saying that truth is indefinable – and by contrast you say that the idea of truth needs to be replaced by the idea of truths. Now, it might sound as if

A. C. Grayling 77 you’re almost agreeing, because you’re both saying that the notion of truth in the abstract is problematic and ungraspable in and of itself. So could you unpack the differences between you and him then in that regard? The differences are very big. He says, ‘There is this thing called “truth”, but you can’t define it, you can’t really say very much about it.’ But not being able to define it is not the same thing as not being able to say a lot of things about it. And he in fact does say some things about it, but not very much, because the more you say, the closer you get to a definition. Whereas I say that there is no such thing as truth, but there are lots and lots of different properties of our theories, our assertions, our beliefs, and so on, which we use this very general term ‘truth’ to denote, but which should be described by more precise property-introducing expressions. I’ll give you an example. Instead of talking about truth in the case of the external, ordinary, empirical world, we should rather talk about ‘verification’ or ‘warrant’ or something like that. We should use some epistemic notion, which relates to how we find out whether or not something is true when we, for instance, lift the lid of the pot to see – or verify – whether the statement ‘There is a chicken in the pot’ is true or not. So the question of which precise notions we use, instead of just talking about ‘truth’, will be related to the ways in which we find out how to apply those predicates, or what justifies us in applying those predicates. To take another example: in the case of mathematics, to say that some mathematical proposition is true is, depending upon your theory of mathematical objects, to talk about something like provability, constructability, or theoremhood in a given axiomatic system. So it could be that when you say of some given mathematical statement that it is true, that you mean that it is a formula of a given system or a theorem. And that is a very different thing from how you determine that it’s true that there’s a chicken in the pot. And those are both very different from the question of how you can tell that the statement ‘She is a beautiful woman’ is a true remark about that woman. You always have to ask what goes into making that true? Isn’t there something else that you should be saying there, that in a much more explicit and much clearer way tells you what it is that you’re saying in that claim? So my thesis is that there’s no single such thing as truth – there is not just one such property. And instead of talking about ‘truth’ we should talk rather about the predicate ‘is true’, and we should recognize that there are other predicate expressions which we should be using instead. And that those predicates are very much dependent on the discourse, because the discourse tells us how we go about justifying the claim.

78 Conversations on Truth In some ways, this sounds kind of similar to what the relativist philosopher Martin Kusch might say. In discussing his relativistic understanding of science, he uses the example of maps. He points out that you can have very different maps of the same place, but that these maps will never be able to relate to each other. So a map of the London Underground, or a street map, or a map of the distribution of wealth in London might all be true in their own terms, but there is no continuity between them. Likewise with science: different sciences chart things in different ways and this means that there will not necessarily be any continuation between them. How is that different from your idea of there being different truths and different predicates such as ‘is verifiable’ which we should use instead of ‘is true’? The map analogy is an interesting one, because it seems to me actually to controvert the conclusion Kusch draws from it. I would argue that maps of that kind – about streets, Tube lines, wealth-distribution in the city – can ultimately be related to a fourth map, which maps the three maps onto one another. And very often the mapping of the three maps onto a fourth map, or of two maps onto one another, can be extraordinarily interesting. For example, I live in a poor part of London which doesn’t have a Tube line. So there is a direct connection between the poverty of the part of London I live in and the fact that it doesn’t have the right kind of transport infrastructure. And that is an informative, intelligible connection between two different maps, which, because they were drawn up for different purposes, might look incommensurable but actually are not. These kinds of interesting connections happen very often in science – one arena can often illuminate another. So, for example, computational science can illuminate our thinking about brain function, yet you’d think that the vocabularies and the conceptual structure of these two endeavours are quite distinct. Or the relationship between the views of Malthus and Darwin is another great case in point. Could you expand on that example? Well, look at Malthus’ study of the way population growth relates to means of subsistence. He argued that if families at subsistence level acquire more income, they have more children, which reduces them to subsistence level again. Now, that view is actually incorrect in the socioeconomic case, but nonetheless Darwin saw in this idea of how the dynamic of population and resource levels work that there is an analogy that can be applied in the biological case, in terms of competition for resources, as Darwin put it: variations in a plant or animal population favourable to the circumstances in which competition for resources occurs would be preserved; unfavourable ones would fail.

A. C. Grayling 79 But to get back to relativism: a relativist in the sociological or anthropological sense – and this is really where the idea first stems from, though it then gets applied, and sometimes misapplied, in Kuhnian-type models of scientific development – says that what counts as true in a given setting is manufactured by the conditions of that setting – the beliefs, the traditions, the agreements and the resolved negotiations within that setting. So something can count as true, even indeed as a kind of ultimate truth, for a given community, which looks as if it is contradicted by something that counts as true in just such an absolute way for some other community. And the relativist’s point is that there is no way of adjudicating between the two settings. This is something which just on the face of it seems to be straightforwardly untrue, because if there was a community which thought it could make rain fall by dancing round a pole, and another people who thought that you could make rain fall by seeding the clouds with silver-iodide from an aeroplane – then one of them, if you really put it to the test, is going to turn out to be right and the other wrong. So, it’s not always the case that these are incommensurable. But in things like religious beliefs and certain moral beliefs, there do seem to be sharp contrasts between the things that are held as fundamental by different communities. So there the idea is that if you have a meta-theoretical commitment to saying that all communities should be equally respected, or they should be allowed to cherish their own values, you’ll arrive at the relativistic conclusion that they are as good as one another, there’s no way of comparing them, there’s no way of subordinating one to another in some hierarchy. That’s classical relativism. Now let’s go back to the scientific case. Science is a huge jigsaw puzzle. There are lots of different pieces and there are lots of specialists working on the individual pieces. And they are making use of every conceptual, experimental and theoretical tool that they can to make sense of things. So, for example, there are areas of physics, like low temperature physics, where models are sometimes used that gloss over what is hypothesized in fundamental particle physics: for example, liquid helium is conceptualized as consisting of little billiard balls which behave in very odd ways at very low temperatures. And whatever model works, whatever model can be used to make testable predictions, is fine by people working in the field. But then there’s a separate question, and a legitimate one, of how those accounts they’re giving of the behaviour of matter under those conditions can be reconciled with the behaviour of matter under other conditions. In other words, there is a natural methodological impulse towards effecting a reduction of one explanatory framework to another, and looking for an ultimate explanatory framework. That may be, like our earlier talk of a regulative or epistemological ideal end-state, just part of the encouragement

80 Conversations on Truth to try to map as much science from one arena into as much science of another arena – it may just be regulative in that way. But the auguries for it being more than that are very good. In the fundamental sciences, chemistry and physics, a huge amount can come out of trying to explain some chemical phenomenon in physical terms, or of being forced to look for different things in physics because it seems very hard to explain the chemistry in terms of what we currently know. So the ways that these different arenas of science drive one another and inform one another suggest that science is onto something. And this is why science has these two great satisfying criteria. One is a sense of progress – a sense that we really are incrementally gaining more understanding. And the second can be seen in terms of the power of its application via technology to the world; science makes a huge practical difference to the world. For example, you can kill millions with one bomb. Now, that’s an outcome of science (albeit a terrible one). But if that doesn’t prove that they’ve got something right about the structure of matter, then I don’t know what does. So in these sorts of ways it appears that there are definite constraints and definite limitations, on how relativistic you can be. To understand this, let’s look at the views of Paul Feyarabend. Feyarabend says that a change in the way you measure something, such as a change in the way, for example, you calibrate temperature, means that what you mean by temperature, when you’ve got a much finer instrument for doing it, is different from what you meant when you had a much cruder way of doing it. And it’s astonishing that clever philosophers of science like Feyarabend could say such a thing. Because it just seems so palpably incorrect to think that you can’t make sense of the notion that we’re refining or improving a method of calibration, or that we’re finding out that we are wrong, or that we are understanding a better way of fitting something into a bigger picture – all these things are absolutely characteristic of science. And this – to use the general notion for which we should find more precise formulations – is to say that science is on the road to truth. Could you talk a little bit about how we understand the notion of truth in an ethical context. Are there such things as moral truths? Well, firstly, let me just remind you that to see the predicate expression ‘is true’ as a dummy or place-holder for more precise expressions individuated by subject-matter, is of course not to say that there’s no such thing as those more particular expressions. And if there are those more particular expressions, and they are better (in the sense of more informative) substitutes for the expression ‘is true’, then it follows that there is such a thing as truth in the moral case. And I think that there are some very fundamental moral truths, and one can immediately connect them to basic facts

A. C. Grayling 81 about what it is to be a human being in the world, such as: not wanting to be cold, or hungry, or in pain, or frightened, or prevented from satisfying our deep need for social connections. And then there are other facts, which are slightly more complicated and which have to do with the fact that we are very intelligent apes – even the stupidest of us are highly intelligent relative to macaques and baboons – and which mean that we therefore need stimulation, creativity and the possibility to learn, and so on. So there are lots of natural, biological and psychological facts about human beings which are immediately relevant to the question of how to treat them and what’s in their interests. This is why it seems to me possible to have these extremely well-intentioned collections of generalizations like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Because they really do latch on to something that demonstrates the minimum set of circumstances that individuals need, if they have the energy and nous, to make good lives for themselves. So it is quite wrong to say that there are no fundamental truths that are morally relevant, or that you can’t get an ethics which has its roots in truth. It may be that there is lots of room to debate the nuances and the finer things higher up in the superstructure of a moral outlook, but the infrastructure of morality itself is rooted in truths about human beings. So, there are definitely moral truths. This is a reason for being combative about relativism, particularly on important issues like the position of women in society. This is absolutely fundamental because the future of the world depends on what happens to women. The question of whether women can be educated and brought into the political process in parts of the world where they’re excluded and diminished and kept in an infantilized status is crucial to the possibility of progressive development in those parts of the world. So, it really matters that beliefs about one man being worth two women or women not being educable, or whatever, are strongly contested. Relativism about those issues is just not an option. So we must take up the cudgels and really get on with it. That’s where truth bites in the moral case. And it’s more vividly important in the moral case than it is in other spheres. You could argue that we are currently facing a crisis of truth in the world. The global economic system seems to have collapsed because it was based on a mixture of false beliefs and outright lies; we have seen various scandals over the last year or two where television documentaries on channels such as the BBC have been faked; and some of the journalists we have spoken to have said that the whole basis for the Iraq War – weapons of mass destruction – was just one big lie that the media bought hook, line and sinker. It could be concluded from this that

82 Conversations on Truth many people just aren’t particularly interested in truth. Do you think that is the case, or do you think that we are truth-seeking creatures? Firstly, it’s important to remember that each one of us individually is many people, and we live our lives on many different planes. So the banker who is lying to the investors in the hedge fund that he’s managing still wants the teacher at his children’s school to tell him the truth about their progress. He values the truth in some respects, and he’s going to be prepared to bend the truth or not be a good servant of the truth in other respects. And that’s true of all of us. In fact it’s a kind of reflex value – thankfully so – for people think that being truthful, being sincere, being trustworthy, is both right and worthwhile. The notions of trust and truth are related to one another. Our Anglo-Saxon word ‘truth’, or ‘true’, comes from the description of how an arrow flies – it flies in a straight line to the target if it is ‘true’. People want others to be straight. And the fact that a big city like London works more or less – with the buses running and the electricity supply going OK, and the sewage disposal functioning – is because people are stepping up to the required level of trust – they’re doing what we expect of them, they’re doing their job and so things tend to work. So the trust, truth, truthfulness and sincerity, which we all rely on, does seem to function. There’s good empirical evidence that the reason why people value it is because if we didn’t, if everybody lied, then of course everything would be unreliable. In parts of the world where there’s a lot of corruption and bribery – perhaps due to poverty – or in places where there’s deep mutual mistrust between people – between tribes or between people of different political orientations or religions – society doesn’t function because there’s no trust there and no general sense that things are straight. But now, at the level of high complexity in politics, or in military and international affairs, we have situations where all parties involved are alert to the possibility that a lot of what they’re being told is not completely straight or true – they are aware that part of the truth may be being withheld, or that others may be telling outright lies and this fact is something which is taken into account and discounted in diplomacy and international affairs, and to some extent also in our thinking about such matters as the financial crisis. The financial crisis can be analogized as follows: suppose we, all of us, kept our food in a kind of centralized pantry and refrigerator area. And the people who ran the centralized pantry and refrigerator area were incredibly obese. It would be pretty obvious that they were helping themselves to a big slice of the food that people were putting in the pantry. And this is exactly what has happened to the financial system. We all put our money in the bank; the banks play with our money, investing in hedge funds and the like; and they make vast sums in profits and bonuses while the good times last – there was so much money

A. C. Grayling 83 slopping around that they just helped themselves to it by the bucketful. And a lot of what they’ve been doing has been well over the edge. A lot of it hasn’t actually been illegal, but it hasn’t been right either, it hasn’t been responsible (which is tantamount to saying it hasn’t been moral) and it hasn’t been truthful. But even here, things like trust and truthfulness still have their place – it’s the ‘honour among thieves’ thing. This comes from the fact that if you don’t trust somebody when you’re taking a punt on something, then you’re not going to go in for it. But people are greedy and so will be happy to trust someone if they know them personally, or if they have had good returns from them in the past. But when that trust breaks down, fear overtakes greed and then we have the mess we are in now which comes from the fact that no one will lend to or invest in each other because they don’t trust each other anymore. Look at this recent case of the multi-billion-pound fraudster Bernie Madoff. He was trusted by everybody; he was consistently giving people large returns on their money and so everyone trusted him because their self-interest encouraged them to do so. But now they have found out what he was up to, they’re actually not very surprised. And in fact, we now know that a lot of people were perfectly conscious of all of this, because of this thing called the IBG or I’ll Be Gone culture. The logic of it runs: ‘Once I’ve packaged this stuff, sold it, made my profit, I can get out, and it’s somebody else’s problem.’ And that’s why some of these banks are going to be sued now, because they were quite conscious of this when it was happening. So in the financial arena, people are aware of the fact that not everything will be quite true; not everybody is quite trustworthy; not everybody is being sincere. But you’re prepared to take certain risks on that, because there are game-theoretical considerations which lead you to say: ‘I can rely on that person on this occasion for this reason, because I can see a payoff for him, too, so I’m going to trust him for that, even though I wouldn’t let him drive my mother-in-law to the railway station.’ So it’s a very mixed alloy, this thing about truth and society. That banker, who knows that he’s been ripping people off, will, as I say, want his children’s school-teacher to speak the truth to him, and he’ll want his doctor to speak the truth to him, and he’ll want people to be reliable, and when his tests go off to the laboratory, he will want the lab technician to do a good job. So he will have lots of expectations about truth and sincerity, even thought he himself won’t observe them at a different level. What are the ethics surrounding lying and deception? To put it bluntly, is it right ever to tell lies, or to deceive in another way? Of course it is, and we all do this all the time. If your wife says ‘Does my bum look big in this?’ and you say, ‘No, darling, it looks absolutely

84 Conversations on Truth wonderful’ in order to keep the peace, and make her happy, then that’s an ethical lie – you make the world a better place by lying. When the patient asks the doctor, ‘Am I dying?’ and the doctor says, ‘No, no’, and reassures the patient, then there is an element of deception in that. The doctor himself may not know whether the patient will pull through or not, but he’s going to put the best spin that he can on it. And so there are lots of cases where to tell the truth is not the right thing. The Church of Scotland has a principle which says, ‘It is a sin to tell an untimely truth.’ And that’s a very good point. But the point is that we have to be able to rely on ourselves and others, if they’re going to lie to us, to do it constructively – in order to serve a higher truth or a better end. And perhaps the greatest example of where lying, deception and falsehood really does serve much higher truths and much higher goods, is with the whole of literature and theatre. What’s happening on stage, unless it is word-for-word transcript of something that really did happen, has an element of deception in it. That’s why Plato wanted to banish the poets, because they didn’t tell the literal truth. What he failed to see was that by not telling the literal truth they told a better truth – a higher, more insightful truth. And so that is a perfect example of how one has to be very careful about being too austere in one’s conception of the morality of truth. So what, in our world, are the greatest or most dangerous sources of untruth? What organizations or ideas, pose the biggest threat to our understanding of truths and those other words that you might use to replace them in different contexts? I suppose the most sensitive area is the political and governmental one. We know that all political careers inevitably end in failure. Even Barack Obama will probably end in trouble, being unpopular, a disappointment, because his election proves not to be quite the Second Coming. When people go into government, they find that in any society of any size there are so many competing interests, so many competing needs and so few resources to meet all those needs, that being in government is like herding a very large number of cats. It’s a near impossibility. And so you end up trying to keep everybody happy as far as possible by prevaricating, by uttering half-truths, by keeping the real truth back, by putting the best spin on things. You end up speaking propaganda rather than speaking fact. Now to some extent, people know that politicians have to be prevaricators, deceivers, spinners and sometimes outright liars. It’s an expectation we have of them. And so we’re not that surprised when it so turns out. But the happy fact is that although we’re not surprised by something, we can still be outraged by it. So we’re not surprised that the government lied to us about the reasons for going into the Iraq War, but we’re still

A. C. Grayling 85 outraged. And our outrage is completely justified, because so many principles were trodden on there, and the truth wasn’t told. But suppose that Blair had gone to war simply because he wanted to depose Saddam Hussein. Imagine if had gone to the British public and had said, ‘Look. There aren’t any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein is not a threat to world peace. But he is a very bad dictator. And he’s one of the few bad people that we could actually take out. We can’t do it in Korea, we can’t do it in Burma, but we could do it here.’ Then people would have just said ‘no’. Or take the other reason that has been suggested for him going in with America. It has been argued that Blair believed that if America acted unilaterally – which it would have done – then that would have been an even bigger disaster in the long term than if it had acted alongside allies. And before the war, Blair went round the world and got 15 other (mainly tiny) countries to join up with Britain and the USA, to be a coalition, and to prevent this mad plan of Bush and his neocons from being an act of unilateralism. Now I don’t know whether this was a motivation for Blair, but if it was, then it does him credit to recognize that it would have been an even bigger disaster if it had happened unilaterally. But if he had put that argument to parliament and the country, it would have been too nuanced, complex and long-term a reason for people to grasp. People want something which is simpler and more immediate – if they think ‘Oh my god! Saddam Hussein’s going to drop a bomb on my head!’ then they will be more prepared to go to war. So Blair might have thought that that was a lie similar to the kind that Plato’s poets were telling, that it served a greater truth. Now personally I don’t think that it did. I don’t think that either of these two possible reasons, although they were a hell of a lot better than WMD, were reasons enough. But nonetheless there is the example of how the truth backfires, and of how the truth can become an obstacle in the political and governmental arena just as it does in other arenas. Dan Hind, in his book The Threat To Reason,1 argues that some of the most forthright defenders of the Enlightenment, people like Richard Dawkins, are often targeting the wrong things. He says that actually religion and alternative medicine, whatever you think of those things, are not the biggest threat to reason and the pursuit of truth. Rather he talks of things like the modern corporation – with all its institutional assumptions and biases – as being a much bigger threat. What is your response to that? And what are your responses to his attitude towards how notions of reason, truth and Enlightenment are discussed in our society?

86 Conversations on Truth Well, firstly, I think that he’s right to say that international corporations, which are not responsible to any one government or legal regime, can be a bigger problem than we imagine, and that we sometimes fix attention in the wrong direction. But where I disagree with him is that I don’t think that because some things that we don’t normally think of as problems are, that that means that other things that we think of as problems aren’t. They’re all problems. And actually I think the debate which has arisen in recent years over religion, and the attack on Enlightenment values from other forces as well, is the right one. And I’ll tell you why. I’ve just finished writing a book about civil liberties. The first half of it is on civil liberties and the second half of it is an engagement with people who attack Enlightenment values. I felt that I had to put these two arguments together because all of these things like individual autonomy, privacy, conceptions of rights, the rule of law and pluralism in society, which are central to the idea of an Enlightenment settlement, have been opposed, right from the eighteenth century and all the way through to today, by a variety of counter-Enlightenment movements. The leading ones among them are all those traditional monolithic outlooks which say, ‘There’s one big truth you’ve got to sign up to. If you don’t, you’re in trouble.’ Historically, it happened that those monoliths were religious monoliths, but other counter-Enlightenment movements in the nineteenth and twentieth century have come from nationalism, Stalinism and Nazism. All of these have got this one big truth that you’ve got to sign up to and if you don’t, you’re in trouble. Structurally they are all similar. So it’s not just religion or a Louis XIV-style absolute monarchy that is the problem, it is the monolithic, top-down control of everybody which is the major counterEnlightenment threat. And we often forget, because we’ve read the Romantic poets, and we know about Romantic music, that there are aspects of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism which are absolutely toxic. Romanticism is a counter-Enlightenment movement as well. Because the Romantic says that the source of authority over our actions and our hearts and our minds must be the tribe, or our nation, or some mystical illumination – anything other than reason, science and enquiry. And this is why Jihadism in the extremist version of Islamism is a Romantic movement. John Gray makes a similar argument about jihadism in Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern.2 Yes, but his way of doing it is appalling. Gray strikes a pose – the pose of pessimism. And he does it by assimilating a lot of very incongruous things to one another. So, for example, he says, ‘Stalinism is a religion. Modern secularism is a religion. There are secular religions, political religions, and

A. C. Grayling 87 then there are religious religions’! And what he’s failing to notice is that if you lump them all into the same category, you’re going to obscure the things that make them really different. And the real difference between them, is that the secular, humanistic Enlightenment is about the dispersion and diffusion of autonomy, of individual responsibility and of rights. Whereas all the other kinds of ‘religion’ as he calls them – like Stalinism, or ‘religious religion’ – are all lumpers rather than splitters. They all want to bring everything together under one heading, and make everybody’s choices beholden to that. It’s so characteristic of religions in particular that the great sin is pride – that is, trying to be independent and thinking for yourself. This attitude is summarized in the biblical saying that ‘the wise will be confounded in their wisdom’. There is this idea that you’ve got to submit – ‘Islam’ means ‘submission’ – you’ve got to subordinate yourself to something else, you’ve got to rely and depend on a higher authority: you have to be heteronymous. Whereas the Enlightenment view is all about autonomy – about taking responsibility for yourself and your thoughts. As Kant says: Enlightenment is the process in which people begin to take responsibility for their own choices, their own thinking and their own understanding of things. So you couldn’t have two more contrasting views of the world. The Enlightenment view is a very recent, very modern outcome from a long struggle against the hegemonic view. And it doesn’t matter what that hegemony is. Any hegemony of thought that says ‘your thoughts, your beliefs, your outlook and your actions have got to toe a line, and the line comes to you from the authority at the top’ is counter-Enlightenment. So that is the struggle, and that is why I get so exercised about the attack on civil liberties. Because the curtailment of our autonomy on the basis that it is for our own good and protection is just another back-door counterEnlightenment move against something that was so hard won. Finally, how does your lifetime of studying and thinking about the idea of truth, impact on your day-to-day life outside your office and outside the lecture hall? How do the ideas of the philosopher Anthony Grayling relate to Anthony Grayling the father, or Anthony Grayling the husband, or Anthony Grayling the citizen? Well, in two ways. First, I try to live in as principled a way as possible. The result is of course mainly a series of failures to do so – for I should greatly like to be a much better man and a much better father and a much better citizen, and all the rest, than I am! And also those principles are not always conventional ones, which requires explanation and defence. When in preaching mode, I say – and this covers one’s back somewhat – that it’s the endeavour that counts and not the success. So the fact that one doesn’t

88 Conversations on Truth always succeed in improving in these desirable ways doesn’t mean that one doesn’t try to. But for me really, gnosis has to issue in praxis. There is no point in thinking about these things, trying to work through these theories and trying to do philosophy, unless there is a point and a place where it bears on one’s individual life, on society and on the world. Pythagoras said there are three kinds of people: those who go to the games to participate, those who go to watch and those who go to buy and sell under the stands. And those who go to watch, of course, are the philosophers. But I do think that there is a contribution such people can make. And that is to be a responsible party to the great conversation of mankind, the great conversation that society has to have with itself. Because if you can just drop into it a few things that you’ve learned from the study of the philosophical tradition, or a few thoughts that you’ve worked out with some difficulty which could be of use to others, then you’ve made a net contribution. And to be able to think on your deathbed that you’ve made a net contribution to the conversation of mankind would be a great thing.

7

Bruce Houlder

Do you have a working definition of the term ‘truth’? Well, in terms of my work as a lawyer, and specifically in relation to things like the trial process, it is important to realize that we are not actually engaged in a search for ‘the truth’. Rather, we are searching for the answer to a particular question that is posed in relation to a charge. And this means that people along the way have to discover what is true for them about what they are hearing. So, an accusation is made, and they have to decide, is that accusation true? Did it actually happen? And so we are searching for agreement on an acceptable level of fact upon which we can then proceed to a conclusion. Those facts may be seen differently by different people, but nonetheless we try to reach the same conclusion. And so that’s what trial process is all about, it is the search for the true answer to a specific question, rather than the truth in general. In the context of Great Britain’s legal system, can you talk about the notion of truth in relation to ideas like justice and proof? Well, we talk about those terms all the time, but I think people do mean different things by them. I mean, if you’re representing the prosecution, you will maintain that your witnesses are telling the truth, because that’s the position you’re required to take, even though it may actually be that they’re not telling the truth. And the defence will equally, because it’s an adversarial process, take the position that their witnesses are telling the truth. But this is what the trial process is all about – the jury is in the middle of it all, and has to ascertain what is true and what is false. And it may be that they do this by taking a mixture of part of one person’s evidence along with part of another person’s evidence. And so from this they try to come to a truth which is sufficient to provide them with a conclusion. Now, judges will often remind the jury that even if witnesses are 89

90 Conversations on Truth giving very different stories, they may all be telling the truth in so far as they see it. Despite differences, it may be that no one is telling a lie, or knowingly telling any falsehood. People might still swear blind that they saw something happen, even if you were able to play a film of that same incident which showed that it didn’t. But then, of course, you can show the same people the same film, and they might still see different things because they will see it in different ways! Now, imagine you have four witnesses to an alleged crime, all of whom saw the event from a different place. You have one person standing at his window, witnessing it happen down the street; there is one person standing on the pavement witnessing it; there is a person on a railway platform witnessing it; and there is a person in a car, coming down the road and seeing the same thing. You can bet your life that you’ll get four very different accounts of what happened, none of which are actually false, but all of which are perceived from very different points of view. The person who is standing there on the pavement might be terrified because of the proximity of the event to him or her, and therefore that will enter the equation in terms of how it’s expressed. The person driving down the road is at a greater distance, and so may misunderstand what is happening. He might be quite convinced there’s an indecent assault going on – even though there may not be – but by the time he’s spoken to somebody else who also thinks he’s seen something untoward happening, then this idea will become even more true in his own mind. So you can get situations where you do see honest witnesses approaching events from different angles and different perspectives and with their own emotions loaded on to it, and which then results in different truths. So the trial process is a question of making judgements, and using logic and the power of the human brain to decide whether people are getting things wrong, or overreacting, or whether they are becoming overcome with emotion, or are putting on a stage performance in court, and so on. And I think that being a court lawyer is quite humbling in the end, because you do see that there is more than one way seeing something, and that people are often very genuine in their answers. Now I know the business of the lawyer is to say, ‘Well, you’re a liar, aren’t you? The other six witnesses give a different account.’ But that may not actually be true at all. People just see different things. Could you define what a ‘fact’ is in a legal context? Well I suppose it would be something that is undisputed, like a person’s date of birth, or their height, and so on. Whereas the moment we begin to talk of the evidence of one’s ears or eyes or any other sense, then there is

Bruce Houlder 91 room for error. Though, of course, you could get more philosophical and say, ‘We can have two facts which are equally true, even though they are different or contradictory.’ You might see this in relation to an emotional response to an event: something could be described by a witness as ‘shocking’, which may not actually be shocking to somebody else – yet both would be true, or factual, expressions of a response to an event. Or think of somebody making a fist and holding it up in the air – that may be a wave for one person, but the prelude to a blow for another, even though they’re both describing the same action. Both are factual descriptions of the action, but they’re seen in different ways. You said earlier that the point of the trial is to find the true answer to a particular question. But how are those questions framed? Presumably the question you ask could affect the whole context within which the trial will take place? Well that’s obviously true. And it is quite possible, particularly with witnesses who are very malleable, to lead them down a path to their own destruction in terms of their credibility. But the law has rules to deal with that. You’re not, for instance, allowed to ask leading questions. So you can’t ask: ‘Is your name John Smith?’ You have to say: ‘Could you tell the jury your name?’ You can’t make assumptions – you don’t ask ‘And how long have you been married?’ You ask ‘Are you married?’, and so on. So everything has to be grounded in empirical fact, and you get to each next point in the narrative by piggy-backing off of the last question. You might say to a witness: ‘So you say you were standing in the street. In which direction were you facing?’ ‘East.’ ‘And were you wearing any glasses?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are those for reading or for long-distance vision?’ ‘Long-distance.’ ‘Were you able to see what was down the street?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well, tell us what you saw.’ So, none of those questions suggest the answer, and therefore the witness is not being led in any way. Presumably it is quite easy for an inexperienced barrister to ask leading questions without realizing that that’s what they’re doing? Yes, it can be very easy. Though of course, if there are some facts that everyone is agreed on, then you do not need to go through all of this process. So you might start by saying: ‘Your name is John Smith, you live at 43 Lark Court, and you were, on the 14th of January, in Little St Leonards and you were facing in the direction of the platform?’ And if those are all agreed facts, you can then proceed from there, and move into the non-agreed areas.

92 Conversations on Truth And so does the legal system, in terms of how the process of the courts work, try to give maximum space for people to describe the events as they saw them, as they know to be true? Well ‘maximum space’ is not quite how to put it in a legal setting. As an advocate your job is to keep control of your witness, otherwise they will run away and tell you what they think about a defendant’s guilt or innocence, and that is not the role of the witness, it is the role of the jury. So you have to keep them focused on answering the specific question that they’re asked. The question you ask must not be, ‘When did you stop beating your wife?’ But rather: ‘Do you have a wife?’ and then ‘Have you ever touched her or laid a finger on her?’ So you have to keep control of the witness – you have to control their answers with the questions that you ask. Presumably, as a barrister, you’re trying to prove your case, and so your aim, within the rules that the court gives you, is to maximize the possibility of convincing the jury of one particular set of events, or of understanding how a particular set of events came to be? Yes. But at the same time, if you’re prosecuting a case, you would have to give the defence any material of any kind that is relevant to your witness, and which they might be able to use to attack that witness. So you will give the defence the witness’s story in advance – in terms of how they say things happened – and then the defence can nail the prosecutor with all sorts of flaws that a witness’s evidence might possess. So if you know that your witness has been trying to get this man convicted for years, you would have to tell them, and so then they might be able say in court ‘Well she’d tell any old story to get him down.’ So you give all material you have to the other side, so that they are then able to expose any problems with it. And you’re legally obliged to pass on all the material? Yes. Does the defence have to do a similar thing? No, because the burden of proof lies with the prosecution. In more personal terms, how do you go about defending somebody who has told you that they are guilty of a crime, but is intent on pleading not guilty? How, as an individual, do you cope, morally and psychologically, with going into a court and making a case that you know to be false?

Bruce Houlder 93 Well you don’t, and I would be committing a criminal offence to do so. But this is what is often misunderstood. The lawyer is not there to get a chap off with an invented defence. If someone tells me they are guilty, then I will say that as far as I’m concerned, they should plead guilty. But if they won’t, though this has never happened, then all I can do is test the evidence of the prosecution and hope that it doesn’t pass muster. So if insufficient evidence is called by the prosecution to establish guilt upon the charge – for example if they can’t prove an essential ingredient of the offence – well I can ask questions relative to that, but I can’t suggest a positive defence, nor can I suggest that he’s not guilty in any of my questions, and nor can I make a speech for him that suggests he’s not guilty. All I can do is examine the specific evidence that is given. So I might say: ‘How do you know that’s what you saw? The lighting was rather poor wasn’t it? Are you sure it was a blue coat? Could it not have been some other colour?’ So I can just test the prosecution’s assertions, I am not allowed to put any alternate positive assertions because my client has not given me any. However, the strict legal answer is that a defendant is entitled to have the prosecution prove their case against him, and you, as the defence lawyer, are entitled to test it, so long as – and this is terribly important – you don’t mislead the court that you have a defence. So, if at the end of my crossexamination of the prosecution’s witness a judge says to me: ‘Well, I don’t understand, Mr Houlder, are you suggesting that this witness is mistaken, or blind?’ I would say: ‘I put the only questions that I can.’ I would back off. There’s nothing I could say to suggest that I had a defence in that context. Whereas, if I did actually have a positive defence, I could then say ‘Oh yes, actually, I am suggesting he’s lying and mistaken.’ Could you explain to us a little more about the notion of the burden of proof and how that works? Well, the burden of proof is such that the burden is wholly on the prosecution to prove guilt, and this guilt must be demonstrated to such an extent that we can be sure that what is alleged has been proved beyond all reasonable doubt. So the burden is on the prosecution, to establish guilt to that degree. And so that is why the prosecution must yield all evidence that they are going to use? Yes. They must first of all serve all evidence in advance of the case going to court, so that a defence can be prepared. And they must also disclose anything which may weaken the strength of that evidence in any way, or cast doubt upon its reliability, or anything which may assist the defence in any other area. You have to give it all away to the defence. There’s a very

94 Conversations on Truth powerful duty of disclosure, and cases can get overturned on appeal when the prosecution does not disclose everything. All the cards should be on the table, so long as they are relevant. And is it true that the barrister’s duty is to the law, the court and his client? In criminal cases it is actually a slightly different situation if you are prosecuting rather than defending. A prosecuting lawyer, to put it rather pompously, is a sort of ‘minister of justice’. He is not there to secure a victory, or to win, to get the client convicted. He is there to prosecute robustly and fairly on behalf of the state. So he must disclose everything to the defence, but then robustly make his accusation and make all the arguments that could work in favour of that accusation. So the prosecution’s first duty is really to the court – who represent, if you like, the state – to be fair and open in the way he conducts things. Now it is different for the defence. Obviously they are going to have to look fair if they want to persuade everybody of the strength of their arguments. But they can actually play a very closed hand. They don’t have to call the defendant to give evidence. They don’t even have to call witnesses if they don’t want to, and there may well be dangers in calling some witnesses – there very often are. And they do not have to reveal things they might know which may be useful to the prosecution. Do you think this is a good way of doing things? Oh gosh! Well, I suppose I have not found a better way of testing the truth of a witness, than in the fire of cross-examination. As long as you have rules in place to make sure that everything is conducted courteously and fairly, and as long as the judge is in charge, I think the adversarial system is the best way of exposing who is trying to mislead the court, and who is trying his best to tell the truth. Interestingly though, there have been quite a few studies done now on the personal demeanour of witnesses, and this is an area of some difficulty in court. Lawyers and judges will often say to juries, ‘Well, you saw that witness shifting from foot to foot in the witness box, you saw them grinning and giggling inappropriately.’ And they will try to get the jury to make judgements about the witness’s reliability on the basis of their demeanour. However, there is plenty of evidence now to show that witnesses can, very often, give a completely false impression of themselves in the witness box. For instance, there are some things which people really might not want to talk about, but if eventually, they’re made to say it anyway, it could look as if it was never true in the first place, and that they just can’t get away with not mentioning it. Now this might make the witness seem very shifty, but it actually just comes down to pure

Bruce Houlder 95 embarrassment on the witness’s behalf. This can particularly be the case in relation to sexual crimes, when you are taking a woman through events that have happened to her. Some women just will not say what happened, and then it can look, to begin with, as if none of it ever actually happened, because they won’t actually say it now. Yet it may be that whilst they know they’ve got to come out with it, they find it extremely hard to do, and eventually, when they do, they might have led people to think that they are lying. That example I just mentioned of people giggling, or laughing inappropriately, is what people often actually do in these situations. But it’s a nervous reaction, it’s not because they find anything remotely funny. And do you think that this behaviour arises as a direct result of the adversarial nature of the system? It does. The court is a public forum, and that can bring nerves, embarrassment, and uneasy human interaction. People can often look as though they are putting on an act, even when they’re trying to tell the truth, because they know that there is a judge there, and they’ve been told ‘he can do you for contempt’, and so on, and they have all these perceptions and fears about authority. The whole nature of the court process can be intimidating with the wigs and the gowns, and so on. That’s why they try to assist evidence-giving for children or witnesses who are in some other way vulnerable. But all those factors I have illustrated could give a false impression to the ill-informed observer, of the way a witness is feeling, and therefore whether that witness is telling the truth or not. And judgement does get affected by that. This question of observers being ill-informed brings us onto the issue of the jury. From your point of view, how effective are juries at making an accurate or truthful assessment of the facts? Are there ever times when a case can be too complex for a jury of normal people? When the former Home Secretary Jack Straw tried to remove trial by jury for certain cases, he argued that some juries, for instance, just would not be able to understand the finance involved in complex fraud. Is that legitimate? No, it isn’t. He had no evidence for that statement, and such evidence that there is would only show the contrary. The academic research into jurors who work on court cases shows the contrary. There was one fraud case not so long ago that took 18 months to try, and it was a disgrace that it took so long, and so eventually the trial was stopped. Now one of the reasons given for this was precisely that argument about it being too complicated, but some of the jury went to the press afterwards, and said that was absolute nonsense. They said that they had followed the case perfectly

96 Conversations on Truth well, they had understood it, and they were ready to make their decision, but that what was wrong was all these delays for no good reason. I have never worked on a case where I could honestly say that a decision on the facts was outside the jury’s capability. It’s the job of a lawyer, after all, to explain these things. But in the end it usually just comes down to a couple of pieces of paper, or to whether someone’s telling the truth about something or not. And that’s ultimately what all court cases come down to. Now the process that surrounds this will be wrapped up in huge complications by one side or other to suit their own purposes, but in the end they are not complicated. They may be about issues which are unusual, but there are always ways of explaining these things. Well how do you correct a jury legitimately but falsely misreading somebody’s demeanour, or making the inferences from what they said? Well, usually, it’s done by advocacy. So if I’m prosecuting in a rape case I might give a speech on behalf of the victim who has given evidence, in an attempt to level the impression she might have given. Obviously I can’t stoop to giving evidence – I can’t become my own psychologist – but I can talk in terms that people will understand. I could say that people react in entirely different ways, I could say: ‘Remember, this is a court room, if this did happen, it was a terrible experience which must have been extremely painful for her to relive. No wonder she paused; no wonder she broke down and cried and ran out of the court.’ So you can say all those things. Though of course, from the other side, you could put a different spin on all of that, couldn’t you? That would be very easy. So that’s not using psychology; that’s just saying, ‘This is her experience, this is my take. And I’d invite you to go along with it.’ Now, of course, there are some situations where you do need specialist input. And you can get it from psychologists, and so on. The issue is basically whether the judgement that you’re inviting the court to make is one outside ordinary human experience, or whether some specialist knowledge is required to make that judgement. Therefore, if someone involved in the case has got an IQ of 62, or is dyslexic and couldn’t read a road sign, or suffers from Attention Deficit Disorder, or something, and therefore might give a strange response, well all those things can be the subject of expert evidence. Usually expert witnesses are only called by the defence. The prosecution aren’t normally allowed to call expert witnesses to speak about the reliability, or deficiencies, of their own witnesses. Though occasionally, in specific situations, they are. I had a case where the main prosecution witness had two plates inserted in his head because of what the defendant had done to him. So here the jury were allowed to hear medical evidence as to what they might expect to happen when he gave his account of what had happened. But the

Bruce Houlder 97 need for expert witnesses can be very important for the defence who, very often, are dealing with individuals from strata of our society who do have very severe psychological problems. That does need to be explained. For example, if during the police interview someone can be shown to be highly suggestible and compliant in psychological terms, well, the jury need to be told that. Because in court the defendant might say, ‘I said these things but I didn’t mean them. That wasn’t the truth.’ And so the jury need to know what kind of person they’re dealing with. You are speaking about the importance of barristers, particularly those representing the prosecution, trying to be as objective and fair as they can be in relation to a case. But is there, nonetheless, a personal sense of winning and losing being important? Yes, in a macho profession such as ours, people can think in those terms. But I think if you catch people in a more reflective moment, then they don’t actually think like that. So we can get over that ‘machoness’. Ideally, the prosecutor will say: ‘The prosecution wins no victories and suffers no defeats – we are above all this, we are ministers of justice.’ Now that might sound rather pompous, but it is absolutely true. But the trouble with adversarial advocacy is that you actually do want to win. To win by the rules, but nonetheless to win. So if you want to win, but you have suspicions that your client is guilty, how do you deal with that? I mean, if your client caused someone to have two metal plates put in their head then they’ve obviously done something pretty extreme. When you’re defending that client, do you feel a sense of the dissonance between wanting them to win and knowing they shouldn’t? Yes, you do. But I don’t think it actually affects the way you do your work. In my personal case, it can make for difficulties sometimes between the client and me, because it’s much more difficult to sit across a table in a cell with a client whom you suspect to be guilty and say, ‘Well he’s saying this and that about you, but don’t you worry, we’ll sort all that out.’ You find yourself not doing that – you find yourself saying, ‘All I want from you is what you say happened.’ And he’s looking into your eyes as if to say, ‘You don’t believe me, do you? You’re judging me – you’re just like the rest of them.’ So yes, there is a kind of emotional dissonance there. But when you get into court, you have to play the part. You have to do for him what he can’t do for himself because he hasn’t got the skills to be his own advocate. You can’t stand up and look unconvinced about what you’re asking, because that’s doing him a great disservice, and therefore it’s important that you do play the part. And when you look at the witness and say,

98 Conversations on Truth ‘You’re not telling the truth’, you look at them right in the eyes – ‘You’re not telling the truth, are you?’ You don’t say, ‘Well I have to put it to you that you’re not telling the truth.’ You’ve got to do the job for him. And so when you go home in the evening, are there times when you regret having won a case? And if so, how do you deal with that over the long term of your career? I don’t think that, usually, I would regret having won a case. Because the system is there, and if you’ve played it fair – if you’ve presented all the facts which your defendant wants you to put forward on his behalf, and you haven’t made a dishonest argument – and if the case has been prosecuted by somebody who has done their job properly, then ultimately, you are not making the decision, the jury are making it. After all, you weren’t there when the crime was committed either, so you cannot be sure what actually happened. For instance, I had a case which I always talk about, where the defendant was a woman who was accused of being the gangster’s moll for a gang of robbers who used to break into old people’s homes and hotels in the middle of the night, and tie people up, and rob them of their jewels. She was the girlfriend of the undoubtedly guilty main offender. There was no question of his guilt, and this woman featured at a number of moments in this story, and she was separately picked out by different victims, who didn’t know each other, in identification parades. And she also gave a very unconvincing interview, and there were one or two other details which, whilst not being proof in themselves of her guilt, were certainly suggestive of it. When I read the case, I was pretty convinced that she was guilty because it all fitted, but nonetheless I defended her. It was a two-month trial, because there were a lot of defendants, and a month into the trial she started to get very nervy and weepy. I said, ‘Well, what’s going on?’, and she said, ‘I think I know who did it. I think I know who they’re talking about, and it’s not me.’ She eventually revealed that what she’d heard, different bits here and there, suggested that it was her older sister. Anyway, I said, ‘You don’t have to do this, because it could backfire, but if you know it’s true, we can have the prosecution investigate it, if you want. We can put your allegation in writing, we can serve it on the prosecution and we can say: “investigate that.”’ And she did, and they did. The next morning, they came back with a full confession from her older sister, who broke down in floods of tears, because she’d been living with this for a long time. So that all goes to show that you don’t judge your client, because in the end, you may be wrong – they’re the judges, not you. This is actually a very important value to bear in mind. I mean, imagine all of those people who are accused of rape, or of some other vile offence, a particularly unpleasant murder, contract killers, terrorists – how bad would

Bruce Houlder 99 our civilization be if we didn’t have a system where any lawyer, not just the bent lawyer on the high street, who always represents villains, but all criminal barristers did not have a professional obligation to protect that individual? It would be very shabby. And we wouldn’t have true justice, would we? If it was the case that people said, ‘Oh, well, it’s just Mr McSlime defending and we know he always defends guilty people because no one else is prepared to’, then that would not be justice. And that’s why you see very respectable lawyers regularly appearing in these big cases representing people who are honestly quite vile in many cases. Many people raised an eyebrow over Michael Mansfield defending Mohammed Al-Fayed. That is a slightly different case, and you could question that in other ways, I think. Now, I like Michael – I wouldn’t dream of criticizing him. But he actually had a choice in the matter – he wasn’t necessarily obliged to take that case. Do things like racism, sexism or classism, for instance, get in the way of the legal system discovering the truth? Or more generally, would you say that there are any biases or prejudices, within the court system as it operates, or within the law as it’s written? Well, I’m absolutely certain there are. The way our laws are made, or the choices that are made sometimes over charges, must reflect certain prejudices, though I can’t think of an example off the top of my head. But if you think back to the old days, to take the crudest example, think of the old Suss laws – which were laws that were brought in to regulate the behaviour of troops returning from the Napoleonic Wars. Many people thought they were used, in my time as a young barrister, for ten years or so, as a tool to attack the black population. So there was the law being used for a purpose for which it wasn’t intended, but which proved to be useful for a certain type of police officer. But I think that the world has actually changed enormously. The law is very introspective now in the way it deals with people – there is a much greater emphasis on recognizing the rights of victims of crime, protecting them from unjust treatment, making sure that the most appropriate means of giving evidence is available to them – such as through video recording in a decent environment for instance. Children’s evidence is often given in that way, so then they only have to face cross-examination on a video link. People who have disabilities can have intermediaries in certain situations to assist them. Foreigners in court used to be required to some extent to stumble through their evidence with only lip-service being played to their understanding, whereas now, anybody, if they say they want an interpreter, can have one. Judges

100 Conversations on Truth receive equal-opportunities training, as do barristers. They receive specialist training on how to treat victims of sexual crime – how they might respond, how they might react – and so there’s a lot more evidence-based information in relation to all of this, which assists the training. But it’s like any scientific or human endeavour – you learn more every year, so therefore I’m quite sure that there’s institutionalized racism still lurking in some corners here and there. Certainly, there are still prejudices around. I don’t particularly want to be quoted on this, but some judges, not necessarily in the High Court, but some other judges – are among the most incredibly prejudiced people. I would be horrified if we got rid of juries and required those judges to try the facts. It’s something that’s very difficult to say, but it’s true, in my experience. You wrote an article some time ago about the idea of putting cameras in court rooms. Do you think that we live in a culture whereby the capacity for the law to do its job – which is finding the truthful answers to questions that are asked – is being eroded by the media culture in which we live? This might seem to be the case if you look at the Madeleine McCann case with Robert Murat. That, I think, was a shameful example of one of the worst aspects of the press. It was quite appalling what went on there. But I think actually, if any of those things had come to trial, there would have been a very different atmosphere, and Murat and the McCanns would probably have had a fair trial, so I’m not sure any of that pre-publicity in the end would have mattered. People are much better educated now than they were. For instance, as part of my preparation to become the Director of Service Prosecutions, I went, today, to the training school for the RAF, where they train everybody who isn’t training as an officer. The officers go to Cranwell; everyone else goes to RAF Halton – a huge establishment – to train. Now, the kids there often come from very poor backgrounds – that’s why they’ve gone into the service: it offers them some direction, some security. But they can be very challenging to their superiors, because they are better informed than kids ever were. So, for instance, they were asked to put some stuff in their hair for camouflage, and then later they were given some Fullers earth to clean it off. The officer in charge told them to do this, but one of them asked: ‘Excuse me, Sir, by what chemical reaction is that achieved? How do I know what effect it’s going to have on me if I don’t know what chemicals are in that thing? If they’re mixed together on my hand, then this could be a bit dangerous – I might lose my hair!’ Now that question would never have been asked in the past, so that is an example of how people are actually very savvy, now. They read the papers, they watch the television, and they’re so much better informed.

Bruce Houlder 101 So imagine if Murat had gone to trial over Madeleine McCann’s disappearance. Would you say that the system of jury selection would have been strong enough to find 12 people who, despite having read much of the media coverage of the event, could be trusted to exclude that from their consideration of the trial. Is the system strong enough to stand up to that? Well I do think in some notorious cases it really is actually rather difficult to do that. I mean, think of the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992 that Colin Stagg was accused of. Remember the public atmosphere at the time of that trial. So there is inevitably going to be the pressure on the jury. If that man had been acquitted at that time, by that jury – well some jury members would have had to go down to the pub in the evening, where they’d be drinking with their mates, and ‘’fess up’ to the fact that they’d just let him off. And so the social pressures, I think, would have been huge. So sometimes there will be problems. But I don’t know how else you’d do it, actually. I don’t know how you’d get a better system. What now are your ambitions for the law? I think my ambition for the criminal justice system is that we stop making offences which are responses to political imperatives arising on the spur of moment, or in response to a series of press articles. I think we’ve made huge social mistakes, for instance, by using ASBOs [Anti-Social Behaviour Orders] against kids. We have criminalized a generation of young people who could have been treated in a much more appropriate way than by slapping an order on them which results in an automatic sentence at the end of it, and which is often treated as a badge of honour. But just legislating for everything that arises, when in fact you don’t need to, is a problem. Most of the legislation is already there – but it keeps getting relabelled to make it look fresh and bright. And I would also like politicians to trust judges a little more than they do – or rather to trust courts a little more than they do, both judges and the jury – rather than trying to micro-manage legislation. If you compare Acts of Parliament now with Acts of Parliament 30, 40 years ago, everything is managed; every stage of the judge’s decision is set against a bank of criteria that parliament has laid out. And some of this is very artificial, so ordinary human judgements about what is fair and what is right get distorted by a series of unnecessary hurdles. So in answer to your question, I’d like to see the law simplified: first of all, so that people can understand it rather more readily than they do at the moment, and secondly so that we can actually deal with it more easily rather than watch it become increasingly slippery.

8

John Humphrys

Can you give us a working definition of the term ‘truth’? It can’t be done, it seems to me, because there is no absolute truth and often, there is no objective truth. Now, of course, you could argue that this is a chair I’m sitting on – and you could probably prove that. So you can prove things that are already concrete, but once things stop being concrete, then you cannot prove the truth of anything absolutely – it all becomes relative, from then on. So no sensible journalist is prepared to talk about ‘The Truth’. We might talk about facts, but even that’s dodgy. The obvious example of this is something like Iraq: we were presented with a series of facts by the government which then turned out not to be facts after all. I suppose Blair believed them at the time to be true – and so the truth for him then was that the invasion would be justified because of the existence of weapons of mass destruction. But, of course, we then discovered later that there were no weapons of mass destruction. So we went to war on the basis of what Blair thought was ‘the truth’, but it turned out later that it was not true, and the facts turned out not to be facts. So more generally, what journalists should deal in are facts: you present somebody with a set of the facts in so far as you’re able to verify and establish them, and then you let people decide for themselves what the truth is. For instance, take a highly political issue like the setting of interest rates. If the Bank of England says they’re going to increase interest rates by 1 per cent, that decision will then often be presented by the media as dreadful news. And I can remember when I was an even less competent hack than I am now, doing stuff on the nine o’clock news without any economic background, and I would buy the accepted notion that an increase in interest rates was a ‘bad thing’ full stop. Because it meant that mortgages were higher, and you had to pay more on borrowing, and all that kind of thing. And I thought that was true, and so was therefore a bad thing. Except it isn’t always a bad thing, because there are a lot of older people 102

John Humphrys 103 who have modest sums of money on which they draw interest and they rely on that interest to supplement their pension. So for them an increase in interest rates is a good thing. It’s also a good thing if ultimately it brings down the price of houses, so then youngsters can then buy homes. So true facts become, in the political sphere in which I operate, extremely difficult. Is there a moral component to the idea of truth? Yes, in one respect, of course there is – that’s to say, it’s incumbent on us morally to tell the truth. But I was a foreign correspondent and covered a lot of wars over quite a long period of time, and of course politicians and military commanders don’t tell the truth in time of war. Sometimes they will when it’s expedient, when it’s going to benefit their position. But mostly, overwhelmingly, they won’t. And even if there’s a victory, and therefore they have to tell you about the victory, they will spice it up – I’d be surprised if they didn’t. But Churchill told us things during the course of the Second World War which were not true, but where it was essential that people believed them to be true – if he’d have told people the truth in 1941, we’d probably have lost the war, or at least it would have significantly damaged morale, and there’s no question that morale matters enormously in times of war. Iraq, again, is a classic example of that. If the soldiers who are manning the front line – in so far as you’ve got a front line in somewhere like Iraq – believe a certain set of truths, they will operate in a way that makes victory – if you accept that victory is possible in a war like Iraq – more likely than if they don’t. It’s a fairly obvious thing to say, but if for instance they believe that the insurgents are actually agents of al-Qaeda, terrorists who could bring about another 9/11, then they will behave in a certain way. If, on the other hand, they believe ‘they’re just a bunch of towel-heads who are kicking the shit out of one another because that’s what they do, because they’re savages’, then they’ll behave in another way. And if they believe that there’s a good cause to fight for, such as the establishment of the rule of law and democracy and to make Iraq safer in the long run, then they’ll behave another way. So these things matter enormously. But what is the truth in that situation? Can you pick the truth out of that? It’s impossible. Is there a moral imperative for a commander or a politician to tell the truth in terms of war? If national survival is at stake, or indeed the survival of people fighting the war, then no, clearly there isn’t. Or look at it another way: are you morally impelled to tell your child the truth when you get those immensely difficult questions? No, of course you’re not – it would be self-indulgent to do so. I have a 6-year-old boy, and he sometimes talks about God. I think pretty much all 6-year-olds

104 Conversations on Truth tend to be brought up to believe in God, though I’ve never told him there is a God, or that Jesus was the son of God, but he picks it up nonetheless, and therefore he believes it. So he says to me, ‘Jesus was the son of God’, and I say, ‘Oh, right, OK.’ I don’t say, ‘Come on, look, for God’s sake, please, study the theology of this!’ Obviously I don’t – (a) because it would confuse him, and (b) because even though I happen to believe Jesus was not the son of God, it’s no good for me to say, ‘I believe one thing and other people might believe something else.’ That doesn’t work with children. Children deal in absolutes until they get quite a lot older. So you’ve got to shade the truths, and that is what we all do. So I would say that the moral imperative comes in only when we are talking about the big truths. How would you define ‘the big truths’? That’s the tricky bit, isn’t it? On a personal level, the question ‘Do you love me?’ is a big one, if – and it’s a very big if – you understand what the hell is meant by love. But in that case there is a moral obligation to tell the truth. But what are the other big questions that demand the truth? I’m not sure. Dealing with truth is not necessarily about answering questions, it’s about behaviour. what matters is behaving honourably and according to a set of moral precepts that you believe to be true in the sense that they are right for the benefit of society and – if you happen to believe in it – your eternal soul. But it’s awfully difficult: what is a question that absolutely demands the truth? Dunno! So your understanding of the concept of truth is more pragmatic or rhetorical rather than empirical? That’s almost exactly right, yes. So is the empirical nature of truth not relevant then? Well what is the empirical nature of truth? Is there an empirical nature of truth? I’m not at all sure there is. Can you define something that is a lie and then maybe talk a little bit about political lying? Politicians lie, in one form or another, all the time. I got into frightful trouble some time ago because the appalling Tim Allen, who took over as Blair’s director of communications when Campbell went, and who then left No. 10 to work for – surprise, surprise – a PR company, got hold of the tape of a Q & A session I did with a bunch of fat cats on a ship. He leaked it to The Times, and misrepresented grotesquely what I had said. What

John Humphrys 105 he’d quoted me as saying, and what The Times quoted me as saying was ‘all Labour ministers are liars’. I didn’t actually say that. What I said was that to succeed, to get to the top, in politics, you have to be prepared to lie. It wouldn’t work if you were in the cabinet and you told nothing but the truth. Apart from anything else, you have a collective cabinet responsibility, so therefore if you ask a cabinet minister whether he agrees with a particular cabinet decision, he will say yes. It’s either that, or resign – as Robin Cook and eventually Clare Short both did over Iraq. So what I said was that there are some politicians who do always tell the truth as they see it. Dennis Skinner is a good example – but he will always be on the back benches, he would never get into government, because he says he’s only prepared to tell the truth. So that’s one group of politicians – those who protest that they will only tell the truth and nothing but the truth. The next set up is those who will lie occasionally, if they absolutely must – and if they accept the doctrine of collective cabinet responsibility they must. And there is another group of politicians, probably a smaller one, who couldn’t care less whether they tell the truth or not. Those are the three categories of politicians as far as I’m concerned: those who absolutely won’t lie publicly; those who will lie for reasons of expediency; and those who don’t give a bugger whether they tell the truth or not about anything. And I know who I think falls into each group. But I’m not going to tell you who, for obvious reasons! But in terms of this issue of expediency let’s look, again, at the economy. I interviewed a Chancellor of the Exchequer once, in the days when Chancellors of the Exchequer set exchange rates, and at a quarter-past eight in the morning I got him to say something about interest rates, which left the clear impression that interest rates were going to have to go up. Now in those days, the stock market opened at half-past eight. And that morning, when the stock market opened – boom! The shares dropped like a stone. That was the result of that single, frank admission. I subsequently spoke to another Chancellor of the Exchequer about the whole issue of telling the truth about the economy and he said, ‘Come on, don’t be silly. You can’t, in this particular job.’ And you can’t. Even though you think the economy’s going down, you can’t say so, because that will accelerate the speed with which it falls. But what would a political lie be? Well it would be if Blair had not believed that there were weapons of mass destruction. And we’ll probably never know the answer to that question. But that would be a big, immoral lie of the worst kind. That would be utterly unconscionable – to lie with the consequence that you take a nation to war, and lots of people die. That is immoral at the highest possible level.

106 Conversations on Truth You could argue that the neoconservatives in the American administration did just that. You hear these stories where someone says ‘WMD was the reason we could agree on, but we were going to go to war anyway.’ You could. And you could say that all they wanted was to get rid of Saddam Hussein. But again, I don’t know that they lied – though a lot of people assume they did, as you say. But if they did, then of course that was immoral in a big way – in the most profound way. Peter Oborne, in his book The Rise of Political Lying,1 talks about a shift with New Labour, where lying became much more mainstream. He argues that Margaret Thatcher only ever told two lies that he can prove. Do you agree with that? It sounds as if you’re saying that lying is endemic throughout history. Of course it is endemic. I mean Peter is a bit more ideological than I am. I tend to be more pragmatic. Did Thatcher only lie twice? I have no idea, and there is no way that anybody could know that. You might be able to prove that somebody lied about something, twice, but that does not mean that they didn’t lie elsewhere too. So maybe Labour is just less good at hiding their lies! It could be that. But there is a difference between spinning and lying – though one shades into the other, obviously. Can you expand on that? Spinning is about exaggerating. Now, is exaggerating a lie? Well it can be. But an example of spinning that is not a lie, for instance, might be: the Education Secretary announces extra spending on schools and hospitals in March 2001. And then everybody forgets about it. A year later they then announce it again – now, it has already been announced, and the money has been allocated, but nothing was done about it. So they then announce it again, but they don’t tell you that they announced it earlier, because that would somehow weaken the impact of it, and it would rather suggest that the first time they announced it nothing had happened. And what they then do is they add together the two sums of money – so they add the ten million that they had announced the year before, to the new amount of ten million that they are announcing now. So now it’s become 20 million. So this programme that still hasn’t happened has grown from being worth ten million to 20 million, and it makes the government look good. And this is something that New Labour has done probably more than any other government. Then you get into things like crime statistics. And this

John Humphrys 107 area is an utter nightmare. The fact is that most statistics, in one way or another, are lies. I noticed this morning that Tony Blair has written in the Telegraph that it is a fact that his is the first government in modern history under which crime has steadily fallen. And I’m sure you could prove that, if you took a certain set of statistics; but if you took another set of statistics, then you could prove the opposite. You can also break down those statistics into big crimes and little crimes. So it is true that burglaries have fallen – because that kind of crime occurs more during a time of economic downturn than during a time of economic prosperity. It is also true that car crime has fallen – the reason that car crime has fallen, by and large, is because car security is better. And that has nothing to do with the government. However, the figures are absolutely clear, that what has been increasing is violent crime – muggings, and so on. And I would argue that that has a much greater impact on people’s lives than the kind of thing we have just been talking about. Now you can read a great deal of what Tony Blair had to say this morning and you won’t find that fact anywhere. So does that count as concealment? Maybe. It’s probably true that this government has done more of that kind of spinning than any other government. I remember interviewing Ruth Kelly about something or other, when she was Education Secretary, and I quoted at her something from the Office of National Statistics, and she strongly implied that the ONS was cooking the books or had got it wrong. But the ONS doesn’t get it wrong; it’s a very reliable organization. But that’s just called standard political spinning, I suppose. And all governments do that kind of thing to a degree. But this government has done far more than that, I think, and this is because of Alastair Campbell – though things have actually got much better since he left. Campbell was amoral as far as the presentation of policy was concerned – I don’t think he had a moral bone in his body, I don’t think he cared at all about the truth. He was intensely loyal to the people he worked for and that was his strength and his great moral weakness really. And, specifically, New Labour has used the parcelling-out of information as an enormously powerful weapon. If you sidle up to some young guy who writes for the Daily Express or something, which is favourable to New Labour, and say, ‘Didn’t like your piece yesterday, old son – shame about that’, and then you sidle off again, he will think: ‘Shit! I better be kinder next time or I won’t get access to the important information.’ For political correspondents, you see, information is income. If you don’t get it, in the end you don’t hold on to your job. And most of the really good stuff comes from government sources. If you’re cut off, without that information, then you can’t pay your mortgage ultimately. And New Labour exploited that, certainly in the early days under Campbell, more than any government has ever done, as far as I can tell.

108 Conversations on Truth So if lying is built into the political system, and if you can’t be a successful politician unless you’re prepared to engage in that, then what do you think your job as a journalist is in relation to that system? My job is very straightforward: it’s to present the politician with a set of facts, or what are generally agreed to be the facts of the situation, and to ask them to justify their position in the light of those facts. I have to take a policy and then present the politician with the reasons why that policy either won’t work or hasn’t worked, and I do this by producing as much evidence as I can. At its core, a journalist is prosecuting a case – this tends to be the case with most of the important interviews that one does. I recently did two long interviews with Blair – and the second one was almost entirely on Iraq. I present a case to Blair, I produce an awful lot of stuff which I then put to him, and he then tries to deny it. That’s my job. In the end, I’ve got to give the listener – the voter – enough information to make a decision. If people like me do our jobs properly, the intelligent and interested voter will have enough information to be able to make an intelligent choice at the ballot box. That may sound a bit high-falutin, but when everything else is stripped away, that is my job. If you listen to the Today programme and Newsnight and one or two other programmes like that, then you should be able to exercise your vote responsibly and sensibly and intelligently. But actually, the first job of journalism is to inform people about things – to tell them what’s going on. Testing those in power is only the second job. After all, if something important is going on in the world that people might not be aware of, then the first thing to do is to tell them what’s happened. So the job of the reporter – which I was for a very long time – is even more important than the job of the interviewer, because you’ve got to have the facts first – you’ve got to understand the reality of what has happened first. For instance, I covered Watergate right from the very beginning. I arrived in the States, by coincidence, a fortnight before the first Watergate break-in happened. I went there first for three months and ended up there for six years because of what happened and the way that the story developed. And it was perfectly obvious that people were lying right from the very beginning, and kept lying right until the end. But it was my job as a reporter, in those days, simply to present people with the facts of what was going on. In other words: ‘Nixon said this, somebody else said that – now you decide’. It was the job of whoever was presenting the Today programme in London to do the interviews. So there were two separate roles: reporter and interviewer. This has become a bit blurred over the years, but they’re still fairly distinct.

John Humphrys 109 These twin roles can help the public in exercising their own judgement. Because actually (and this is not meant to sound patronizing) it can often be quite difficult for them to do that. For example, your particular school might be a shit-heap, or your particular hospital might have people dying like flies, but 300 other hospitals and schools might work much better. So anecdotal evidence can be very dangerous in politics. Even personal evidence can be dangerous. I was involved in the setting-up of the polling organization YouGov, and what’s terribly interesting is that if you ask people individually for their opinions on the health service, they will say things like ‘it’s falling apart; the government ought to be ashamed of itself ’. But if you then ask them a separate set of questions about their own personal experience of the health service, they’ll say, ‘Oh, it’s actually nice. I was quite surprised. I took my granny in and they really looked after her’, and so on. And this is one of the things that frustrates governments, of course. So you’ve got to be awfully careful about the distinction between experience and perception. But what is my role? It’s to give people the wider picture so that they can overcome that particular problem. And it is to hold the politician to account as best I can with the information, the facts, that I’ve got at my disposal. So do you see it as your job then to be the enemy of the politicians who lie or, more generally, of the whole process of spin? Yes, absolutely. We have to be the enemy of that. There should be open warfare between us doing what we’re trying to do and them doing what they’re trying to do. I regarded Campbell, certainly towards the end, as the enemy. There’s no question about that. Something that you and Jeremy Paxman are lauded for and criticized for in equal manner is your forthright and aggressive interview style. Do you employ that tactic because you’re trying to trip politicians up? Sometimes. But it depends on the politician. But that’s just a matter of technique really. It’s a rather inevitable question: ‘Why are you so aggressive?’ But I’m not, actually, all the time. Sometimes I am, but it depends. For instance, if you’re interviewing John Reid, you will adopt a very different approach from the one you would adopt with Gordon Brown, which in turn would be very different from the approach you would adopt with Tony Blair, which would be very different from the one you would adopt with Patricia Hewitt, and so on. It’s immensely simplistic (and mildly offensive) to say that I am just out to trip people up. I prefer to describe what I do as ‘catching out a lie if they are telling a lie’, or as ‘exposing the weakness of their argument’ – that’s what it’s about.

110 Conversations on Truth You must have been in situations when you’re interviewing a politician on the Today programme and they’re saying something which either you know from private sources is wrong, or, even more, which contradicts stuff that is well known in the public domain. Can you tell us a little bit about how in your experience politicians in that situation behave? How do they deny something that either seems undeniable or that you know to be undeniable? That’s a good question, but again it depends on the politician. There might even be politicians who say ‘we have got it wrong’. David Blunkett, for example, for all his weaknesses, would occasionally say, ‘yes, they were right, and we were wrong’, or even, ‘we are wrong about this’. But that is rare. I remember one candidate whom I was speaking to privately about something (though I can’t now remember what), over lunch, and I said, ‘Come on, look, you know this isn’t working, why don’t you just bloody well tell me? Come on the programme tomorrow morning and admit that it’s a pig’s ear.’ And he said, ‘I’d love to do that. Because you’re right, we know it’s not working. I’d really, really love to do that. But you know what would happen, I’d go to the House of Commons and they would tear me to shreds.’ The fact is, we have an adversarial system of politics – they even sit opposite each other, for that very reason. It’s one of the last chambers in the world where politicians confront each other as they do in this country. So they simply cannot do that. They can’t ’fess up. Often, they’d love to. And sometimes, with the decent ones, of whom there are plenty, you can see they’re agonizing. And you can see that they would love to be able to tell you how it was. But they can’t, and they know they can’t. Why is your job important to you personally? Am I required to be honest here? Because the honest answer is just: I love it! I just get a huge buzz out of it. I like interviewing politicians; I like talking to politicians; the whole thing fascinates me. I don’t have to do it any longer to earn money because I’ve earned enough now. But I’ve just signed up to another two-year contract when I thought initially that I wasn’t going to, because I thought ‘Oh shit, I’m going to be lying there at eight in the morning, listening to an interview and going “aargh!”’ So I get a huge amount of pleasure out of doing it, and I’d like to think that you probably do get better at it for quite a long time. I mean, I’ll go ga-ga soon (if I’m not already), and then I’ll be bloody hopeless at it. But at the moment, personally I think I’m playing near the top of my game. When I think about my original, early interviews I squirm with embarrassment, partly because I didn’t know anything. It does take quite a long time to get sufficiently well-informed to be confident. I’ve also stopped being scared

John Humphrys 111 now. In the early days, I remember my first interviews with Thatcher, which were terrifying beyond belief, and I still come out in a sweat when I think about them. She made mincemeat out of me! She was the most powerful woman in the world, and I was a callow young bloke who had had hardly any experience of domestic politics, because I’d been based abroad. She tore me apart, and she knew she could tear me apart. Whereas now, even though I may know absolutely nothing about a particular subject, and I have absolutely no background in it, the politicians won’t know that. But I now have, like Paxman and one or two others, a reputation, and they’re aware of that reputation and they’re aware that the audience is aware of that reputation. So that plays hugely to my benefit. So if I were so inclined – and God forbid that I should ever do it – but if I was so inclined to assert something even though I knew it probably wasn’t true, just to get a reaction from them, I could probably do it, and maybe get away with it, because they’d be a little bit nervous about challenging me. And this is partly because of who I am, and all that, and partly because they might think ‘well, maybe he does know’, whereas 20 years ago no one would have been bothered by me. So you get a number of things from doing this job for a long time, and one of them is this perceived authority. The other is that you instil an uneasiness in less experienced politicians, and even in some at the top of the tree. So if we have senior politicians who are powerful people, then we need senior reporters and senior interviewers. I think you do. But it depends on how the system works. One of the things that we had under Thatcher – and it wasn’t something she necessarily set out to create, though knowing Thatcher she probably did – was a kind of elected dictatorship. That’s to say, she’d got such a huge majority in the House of Commons, and she was so in charge of that majority, and was so completely the mistress of all she surveyed that she could do what she wanted. Now the effect of that is that parliamentary scrutiny is massively weakened; nobody cares about the opposition. In the last 25 or 30 years in this country – since Thatcher came to power, probably – we’ve gone through a very difficult time for oppositions, and this therefore makes it very difficult for the kind of adversarial democratic system that we have to work at its best. It hasn’t been working well now for a very long time. The capacity to pursue the truth, if that’s what you want to call it, has been damaged because the parliamentary process has been damaged. Now, various things have been done to try to correct that. We’ve more or less given up on the idea of having the kind of debate on the floor of the House of Commons that will result in holding the government properly to account – and that is for the obvious reason that one side having a

112 Conversations on Truth huge majority will prevent this. So what they did a generation ago was to set up the system of select committees, which are meant to do precisely that – hold the government to account. And they work reasonably well. Though, of course, if you want to see these kinds of things really working properly, then you need to go to the USA and look at the Senate committees, where senators are immensely powerful people and have all sorts of powers – like the power of subpoena – that we don’t have in the British parliament. The committee system works much better there. And I don’t know whether there is a direct connection here or not, but what you don’t have in the USA are people like Paxman and me. You do have bloody good journalists, and some of them do a very good job of interviewing, but they don’t get the opportunity very often to do what Paxman and I do, because American politicians aren’t up for it. If you look at the big American political chat shows such as Meet the Press or Face the Nation, you haven’t got a one-on-one situation; you’ve got three journalists doing the interviewing. And while each of them might be brilliant and well informed, if you’ve got three people interviewing a politician, then they will get walked all over because they can’t keep following up questions. So, I don’t know whether there is a connection between the fact that while the politician in the USA does get held to account in the Senate, and particularly in Senate committees, they’re not being held to account in the radio and television studios, but over here we’ve got the reverse situation. I think that probably the American system is better. I would, as a citizen as opposed to a practitioner, prefer the American system where elected senators, or whatever you want to call them, do the job of holding the politician to account – trying to establish the facts. It’s healthier for democracy than what we do. I’m not suggesting that I think that we’re doing any great disservice, but our system does give people the chance to say that people like Paxman and me have got a disproportionate amount of power, and to argue that nobody elected us to do it, which of course is true. But in the States, that issue doesn’t arise – the people elected the senators to do it. Now, obviously, there are problems within that system too. But when it works, it is a brilliant system. I can’t think, off the top of my head, of a single case where a British prime minister has wanted to appoint somebody to a senior post, and has been unable to do so. I can think of cases where they’ve been appointed, something ghastly has happened, and they’ve had to resign. But in the USA, if the senators don’t think Joe Bloggs is up to that particular job, they can stop it. We can’t stop it here. And they can stop it by exposing the truth and the facts.

9

Dan Hind

Do you have a working definition of the term ‘truth’? I wouldn’t say that I have a definition, but there are working assumptions that I bring to it. Giving an adequate account of truth is a longstanding and unresolved problem in philosophy. That isn’t something in which I can claim any great expertise. But it is kind of funny. Some English and American philosophers, working in the analytic tradition, get very steamed up about postmodernism, you know, this subversive French insistence that there is no such thing as truth. But arguably the most influential Anglo-American philosopher of the postwar era, Willard Quine, had no problems talking about ‘the myth of physical objects’. He insisted that physical objects are like the gods of Homer in this sense – they aren’t discovered by experience but are instead ‘irreducible posits’. Quine concedes that physical objects have more going for them than Homeric gods, in some ways – relying on their existence won’t get you in trouble in the way that faith in Homeric gods will, perhaps. But he thinks they are fundamentally the same sort of thing. So there are some impeccably Anglo-Saxon grounds for feeling nervous when philosophers get too commonsensical and insist that the truth is the truth and anyone who disagrees is engaged in some form of Gallic backsliding. This is where I become nervous when I stumble on those polemics about how wicked postmodernism is, and how we should insist on the unity and simplicity of truth. There are good as well as bad reasons for handling the idea of truth with care, with suspicion, even. So, definitions are difficult. In terms of working assumptions, well, then I try to be as commonsensical as the next person. I assume that descriptions of reality can be more or less accurate, and that we can make appeals to notions of truth that are reasonable and sensible. These appeals might be problematic in philosophical terms, but like most people I paddle on the surface of deep water, when it comes to it. 113

114 Conversations on Truth So, some claims are more true than others, some claims are flat-out untrue. That’s good enough to go with. Now, that doesn’t mean that the truth is self-evident, that it is a simple matter to develop an accurate account of reality. Far from it, in fact. What is obvious and apparently selfevident can be part of an attempt to deceive, or it can emerge from our own preconceptions about the world. So, you could say that I don’t tend towards anything like ‘deep’ scepticism – that doesn’t concern me very much. I mean I don’t want to insist in a melodramatic way that there can be no foundations for truth as if that matters terribly. Nor do I want to deny the deep philosophical difficulties with the concept of truth. My scepticism is more limited than that – shallower, if you like. I am sceptical about a lot of claims that purport to be as simply true as any claim can be, and that are demonstrably false. So I try to work like this: I acknowledge the conceptual complexity of truth, but I concentrate on the ways in which simply false claims – claims that should be refutable in light of the evidence – can proliferate in the culture. The surface is where we spend most of our time; it’s where the action is. I leave the rest to those who can dive deeper, hold their breath for longer. In your work on the Enlightenment, what are the core values that matter to you? What are the core values of the Enlightenment? That is a tricky one. What do I take to be most important about the Enlightenment, what do I think the Enlightenment can tell us that is useful, that is still news? I think it’s in the Enlightenment idea that there is a moral value in knowing things and there’s a moral value in honest communication. It is good to know and it is good to share knowledge. That’s the element in Enlightenment thought that I find most interesting – it isn’t core to Enlightenment in the sense that it was universally agreed on by the major Enlightenment thinkers, but it is core to what I think matters about the Enlightenment. Now, if we take these two quite simple ideas – that it is good to know and it is good to share our knowledge, what follows from that? What animated me to write The Threat to Reason,1 in part, was the sense that people weren’t getting to grips with the implications of these two ideas. When I looked across the intellectual terrain what I saw was a tremendous amount of energy and animation going into discussions about truth and falsity that seemed to me to be misconceived or marginal in their significance. So one of the classic areas in which a form of supposedly enlightened agitation is going on, is in this discussion of the existence or non-existence of God. This seems to be precisely an area where claims about truth really break down. I’m not a theologian, but my

Dan Hind 115 understanding is that God can do anything. So, God can exist and he can not exist. That’s fine, that’s what God does – it’s a paradox. So, to fuss about the existence God seems to me to be kind of a pointless thing to do. And it can also be politically dangerous, because it splits people into opposing camps in quite an arbitrary way. People who believe in God and people who don’t are taken to be fundamentally at odds because of their views on religion. When I started the book, Obama was a local politician in Illinois, and his presidential campaign, which did a lot to build a coalition between liberals and evangelicals, was inconceivable, I would guess, to a lot of atheist polemicists. But of course being religious doesn’t make you right-wing and being secular doesn’t give you a monopoly on civic virtue, or a better grasp of reality. So I was revolted by the insistence on atheism as a passport to enlightened citizenship. It seemed kind of weird philosophically. And it seemed flat-out wrong in an historical sense. Why is it historically wrong? In two ways. Firstly and simply, the great figures of the Enlightenment, those people who are invoked so often, had a very, very wide variety of attitudes towards religion and towards Christianity. Some of them were quite orthodox Christians and some of them were deists. And I don’t think that meant they were deists as a cover for really being atheists, or anything – I think that they really thought there was some sort of immanent force in the universe that had a relationship with human activity, and human aims and so on. Voltaire is a good example of this, he had stripped his religious sense of sectarian content, but nonetheless he talked quite uncynically and quite naturally about the idea of a divine being. Of course, there were much more thoroughgoing atheists as well – people like David Hume and Spinoza. But it’s just not true to say that the Enlightenment was an atheist project. And so historically that notion is very offensive. And what is compounding that historical error is that we now have a certain kind of enlightened agitator who is effectively conniving with evangelical Christians. These two groups seem to have agreed that there is this huge, world-historically significant split between what they would both say is the properly understood Christian mindset, and the secular liberal mindset, and that these two camps could never in any way be reconciled. And so you should immediately ask questions as to what they’re getting out of it, and I think that everyone was flattering themselves with their choice of enemy. Dawkins and Pat Robertson would square up to each other and both sides would become elevated by that comparison in terms of their respective constituencies – they both ended up looking heroic.

116 Conversations on Truth And that makes sense in entrepreneurial terms – the leaders of both factions seemed more heroic and important because they faced down these wholly implacable enemies It is historically wrong in another sense, a more complicated sense. The Enlightenment considered religion to be a problem when it got in the way of truth. The Catholic Church was a problem for Voltaire, not for elevated metaphysical reasons, but because it insisted on untrue claims and had the muscle to make life very uncomfortable if you disagreed with it. The Catholic Church doesn’t have much power these days, in terms of being able to impose inaccurate descriptions on us. There are institutions and individuals with much more power – but they impose these inaccurate descriptions while insisting that they are acting scientifically, or that they are only presenting the best evidence. Power today rests on claims about material reality and illegitimate power relies heavily on untrue or misleading claims about material reality. So what are the values which you think matter more, but from which we are being distracted? Well, if you read even a little about the period it soon becomes clear that the Enlightenment is a very complicated composite of projects and processes, some of which continue to work through the culture in positive ways, some of which work through the culture in negative ways. What we take from the Enlightenment is a matter of choice. There is no one Enlightenment that one can appeal to. But we should expect to be judged on how we relate to the Enlightenment. If you treat it as a kind of historical re-enactment, where you just attack the same enemies as Voltaire and Hume, or whatever seems similar, then I think you should be criticized for that. I think that’s a mistake and a dereliction of duty by those who claim to honour the Enlightenment. What I found most resonant in what I read of the Enlightenment writers was Kant’s essay: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ It becomes clear there that, for him, the Enlightenment consists in people giving an account of reality without fear or prejudice. The thing that would make one enlightened would be the capacity to speak entirely freely about the constitution of reality. Now that makes us think about scientists. But more generally it seems like an interesting point of departure for asking what it would mean to be enlightened now. What would it mean to understand and describe the world accurately? And rather than just announcing, ‘The Enlightenment’s about the progressive elimination of God from the public sphere, and therefore, my job is to wear a black polo-neck and arm-wrestle with theologians’, it seemed much more interesting to ask what exactly stands in the way of a clear

Dan Hind 117 understanding of reality now. And once you start to think of the Enlightenment in those terms, then you have to pay attention to the sources of deception and self-deception, and the sources of misunderstanding and mis-description with which we operate. And you can list those things to some extent. They can be forms of deliberate deception, examples of what the Germans called ‘world-view warfare’, what we call propaganda. Communication that seeks to secure compliance often makes untrue claims in pursuit of that compliance. There are more subtle ways that honest description can be deferred or prevented. Self-interest and institutional interests can work against it. There are various kinds of more or less openly stated corporate consensus, when people agree not to say certain things, not to follow the implications of certain things. Expertise and authority can depend on certain kinds of silence, an agreement not to discuss the blindingly obvious in some cases. If you have an institutional agreement that ‘our job is to look at this’, it’s very easy to see how that institutional project could settle on descriptions of reality, assumptions about the world, that are convenient but at odds with the observable facts. And one can see how individuals and groups could come to focus on matters that outsiders might consider marginal, with very significant implications. Could you give an example? Well, one of the areas I talk about in the book is the conduct of medical science. There is a tacit agreement about what medical science is and what it’s for, that really pervades both elite and popular discussions of medicine. So ‘medicine is about healing sick people and it is about finding cures, whether surgical or chemical, for what ails people’. So everything – from the casual, popular, understanding, right up to the assumptions that pervade the big institutions – tends towards a definition of medicine that is really very narrow – restricted to certain clinical techniques. And from that, a whole set of assumptions flow. But that is actually only one model of what medical science is, and it’s interesting what that leaves out: it leaves out preventative and precautionary medicine of various kinds – it de-emphasizes them. Now, doctors will say, ‘Oh, no, of course we do vaccines as well.’ But if you say to them, ‘Well, isn’t the form of life itself an area of medical interest?’, 99 doctors out of 100 will say, ‘No, we don’t do that, that’s politics, or its economics, it’s not medicine.’ But it is an arbitrary decision to say ‘we stop at vaccination’, or ‘we stop at giving vague advice about diet’. It is arbitrary to refuse go into the public sphere and take a view on, say, junk food. Why don’t more doctors campaign publicly against junk food advertising? Why don’t researchers spend more time looking at the effects of poor diet? Or at the impact of environmental pollutants of various kinds?

118 Conversations on Truth If the fundamental aim of medical science is to investigate the world in order to promote human health, then it seems that there are a whole range of issues where medical science has something to say, but has largely decided to remain silent. There are many exceptions, of course. But still, a decision has been made to limit the kinds of enquiry that are properly medical, that are the province of doctors. And why would you say that decision has been made? Does it come down to an unconscious kowtowing to an agenda that’s set by certain corporate interests? It’s very complicated, and we should be careful not to generalize. One interesting approach is to look at how complex problems which are intellectually interesting and challenging tend, naturally, to draw the attention of intelligent people. So you find elite scientists being drawn towards certain kinds of problems. The cure for cancer is a more interesting intellectual problem than the cause of cancer. Finding the cause of cancer means going through actuarial databases, finding out what people died of, where they lived, what job they did, and so on – it’s all a bit yawny. Whereas the idea that you could find a magic bullet that would kill tumours – well that’s rock star stuff. So, in part, it is a story about what people are drawn to – what kinds of investigation people find more interesting. And one of the things I wanted to try to get across in my book was, ‘look – what’s publicly important might not be the most intellectually interesting thing’. So if we’re taking these Enlightenment ideas seriously, then our job, as members of the public, is partly to drag expert attention away from things that might be really fascinatingly intricate, and towards things that we actually want to have looked at. There are also, clearly, in the case of medicine, very strong market forces that are pushing a certain kind of curiosity. And that’s always been there – it’s not simply that evil corporations have come along and have lured doctors away from the true path. Plenty of doctors wanted to see what happens when you give a patient a particular chemical compound, and some of them wanted to get rich, too. But the focus on marketable chemical compounds – marketable because you can take out a patent on them – this focus makes all of us think about medicine in quite narrow ways. And that is a major problem, I think. What kinds of accurate description are we missing out on as a consequence?

Dan Hind 119 Given the current financial crisis, do you think there are parallels between how big pharmaceutical companies behave and how large financial organizations operate? Of course there are similarities. And that is in some ways predictable. They are, after all, the same kinds of institutions. They are vehicles for delivering financial returns to their shareholders, and so they behave accordingly – not necessarily in ways that benefit those shareholders over the long term, quite the opposite in fact, as we have seen. But they act to maximize profits, and they lie in furtherance of that when they need to, and they call these lies ‘public relations’ – which is another lie. They don’t want a relationship with the public. They want the public to give them more and more money. There is some very good literature on this – Joel Bakan’s book The Corporation2 and Ted Nace’s Gangs of America.3 There are more specific analogies in this case. There is kind of a dance of the seven veils going on with expertise in both of these areas. In both sectors there was a sense that experts within them are qualified to decide what’s safe, what’s in the public interest, and that critics from outside are kind of disqualified because they don’t have the expert knowledge required. No one likes to have outsiders trampling all over their area of expertise, where they’ve been spending a lot of time working. So when you talk to medical scientists, or financiers, and you ask them questions, you will see a sort of dance of both real and pretend expertise coming into play. Some of what they’re saying is justified. For instance, derivatives are extremely complex things. They’re not kidding when they say that the best mathematicians in the world spend their time cooking these things up – they are, by all accounts, ludicrously complicated. Equally, the pursuit of a cure for particular disease is likely to be incredibly complicated and technically difficult. These things require a huge amount of skill. But there are certain simple question I think non-experts can ask, which would be of the order, ‘Does it make sense to put so much of our resources into trying to find a cure for cancer, and so little into trying to stop it in the first place?’ That’s a question that a non-expert is at least entitled to ask. Similarly, you can say, ‘Well, yes, fine – I don’t understand derivatives. But is it all right that these things are essentially unregulated?’ That also seems to me to be a reasonable question for a non-expert to ask. But in both cases, the expert will huff and puff and say, ‘No, no, you don’t understand this and so you’re not entitled to that kind of curiosity. And we’d really rather that kind of curiosity doesn’t spread because it complicates things if people are trying to regulate us, or drag us away from what we find interesting or lucrative.’ So I think there’s a parallel here in the way that particular interests will try

120 Conversations on Truth to insulate themselves from enquiry through appeals to specialist knowledge. Our job is to sift through what are technical matters and what are matters that we can take a view on immediately. And where technical knowledge is necessary, we need to fund people to acquire that knowledge and make an assessment in the public interest. There’s a sense I think that in the last few years the intellectual culture became thoroughly corrupted by the claims of the finance sector. They used mathematics as a kind of bludgeon to silence their critics. There were only a very few economists with the technical expertise and the willingness to say, ‘Wait a minute, these numbers are all so much nonsense’ – one thinks of Stiglitz in this context. He was saying for years, you’re going to get into trouble, but there weren’t many like him around. Meanwhile, in 2004 Greenspan is merrily telling people that derivatives, of all things, had made the global economy more resilient, less crisis-prone. Claims based on supposedly privileged information should be treated with extreme caution, wherever they come from – economics, medicine, whatever. In some ways they threaten an enlightened public sphere in the way that claims based on supposedly divine revelation used to do. The state has its own special province of privileged information, of expertise that is very difficult to challenge in real time. For example, in 2002 Cheney was talking to the then majority leader of Congress, I think it was, and there were these rumours floating around about weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein’s biological armoury, and so on. And Cheney took this guy behind closed doors, and said something like, ‘We can’t tell the public this stuff, but we know that Saddam Hussein’s got suitcase nuclear weapons. You have to support us because otherwise, a nuclear bomb’s going to go off in America.’ Now, that’s a classic use, it seems to me, of an illegitimate claim to expertise. He didn’t have any evidence, he had made it up. But he secured support by lying. And at the time, it would have been very hard for anyone to say, ‘No, you’re just lying now, you’re just making this up’ because he had the armature of high-level security clearance. Cheney could get away easily with saying: ‘You don’t understand. You’re not a grown-up. You’re not living in the real world.’ When we spoke to Simon Blackburn he argued that one of the ways you could decide what was true was by deferring to authority. So, if somebody has an authority on a subject then you have to accept the accuracy or truth of what they are saying. Now that makes sense, in lots of ways, because none of us are authorities on everything. But it seems to me that what you’re saying is that there can be a dangerous flip-side to this trust in authority.

Dan Hind 121 One of the themes in the Enlightenment is suspicion of authority. If the Americans had listened to the British authorities in the eighteenth century, not only would they never have revolted – it would never have occurred to them that they could revolt. So there’s a very interesting theme in the American Enlightenment, with people like Thomas Jefferson, of suspicion of authority. This came as a reaction to the fact that they were used to having plausible representatives of the Crown come over and explain to them why, actually, subordination to the Crown was the only possible, natural order of things that could be. So, there’s a kind of antiauthoritarianism, first in the scientific institutions of the English Enlightenment, and later in the political institutions of the American Enlightenment. Now, of course, we do rely on authority. It is a matter of fact and of necessity that we rely on it. It’s almost as if we use authoritative sources as a kind of stepping-stone to negotiate the raging torrent of things we don’t know about. But the danger is that we can be manipulated. We come back here to the Gulf War. What do we make of the manipulation of authority in the run up to that? The temptation might be to say, ‘Well, they made an honest mistake.’ But to my mind that just seems kind of childish. They clearly were just lying in order to get what they wanted. Now, there’s a whole other question about what they wanted to do, and why they wanted to do it. But they were lying to us about things like WMD, Iraq’s links to al-Qaeda, and so on. There was a whole set of lies that were told, and they could lie to you in any register that you liked. Now how do you keep authorities honest? What forms of political and social organization might do that? The separation of powers that the Americans developed is an attempt to answer that question. Given Iraq, given the economic crisis, you’d have to be pretty relaxed to think that the authorities are reliable in some straightforward sense. In the USA the separation of powers has broken down. It has been eroded here. You’ll hear a lot of intellectuals asking what can be done to restore public trust in authority – as if it’s a problem in animal husbandry. That’s exactly the wrong question – how do we restore public trust? The question is, how do we make the authorities trustworthy? The journalist Nick Davies talks quite a lot in his book, Flat Earth News,4 about how the government and the media colluded to disseminate these ideas about WMDs, and so on. Sure. But again, one of the responses of the media is going to be to say, ‘We were had. This is never going to happen again, because we’re going to try harder next time.’ But then, in the day-to-day run of things, the media relies on governments for news, and because governments are normally reliable, they print what the governments tell them. And they get lulled

122 Conversations on Truth into a sense that ‘this time it’s different’. So their job is, as it were, to be wrong when it matters. But this issue of authority is an interesting one to me. Obviously you can’t always be mindlessly iconoclastic and refuse to take authoritative sources seriously and still hope to negotiate the world. But then how do you maintain a sense of intellectual autonomy and a sense of being an intellectual adult? And I think what Kant says in his essay is very interesting. Because he says that in the day-to-day run of things, we do have to go on the claims made on our behalf by authority. But there is a sphere in which we nonetheless can operate as free individuals. And so our duty is not to dismiss out of hand everything that politicians say all the time, and just resort to empty cynicism. Rather, to take an example like the Iraq War, we should ask: ‘What does this actually tell us about the nature and the complexion of the American state, the Anglo-American system, the British state and states in general?’ And that’s a conversation, it seems to me, that non-experts can have. You don’t need any expertise to figure out what it means for Dick Cheney to sit down and just come up with a lot of rubbish. You don’t need any special expertise to analyse what was said and done in that period. Of course, there are more or less pertinent things that one can say, and there are more or less convincing forms of reasoning that one can use. And I think that part of what one needs to do is work with others to try to figure out what one can learn. But this is not the province of experts. It seems completely accessible to laypeople. And it seems reasonable to ask professional journalists to join this discussion, to try to work out how to make the media more resilient in the face of mendacity from powerful interests. How does all of this relate to the notion of honesty? I think one of the dogmas we live with is that, somehow, if we speak with truth and if we speak honestly then all will be well, we’ll be garlanded with praise and die in our sleep, old and happy. But the fact of the matter is that in order to flourish in many institutional contexts then you have to become very sensitive about what can and can’t be said. And I think one of the ways in which we’re immature is that we don’t really look that in the face, and aren’t honest either with ourselves, or with each other, both about that and also about the other ways in which we’re bounded by our institutional roles. And that seems to me one of the very important ways in which we’re still fumbling around in the dark. In your book you say that one of the arguments often used to fend off claims about government deception is that in order for the government to have got away with certain lies, thousands of people would have had to be complicit in telling those lies, and that that is just not

Dan Hind 123 plausible. Now you argue that actually it is plausible that thousands of people could be complicit in some deceptions. But does that not potentially open the door to a lot of off-the-wall conspiracy theories? After all it seems quite a compelling argument that 9/11 could not have been an inside job precisely because it would have required the complicity of thousands of people to keep it secret were that the case. Well, look. Is it possible for thousands of people to know about something and keep it from the public? Yes, broadly. Yes. To take a specific example, look at the Bay of Tonkin incident. This event was the official reason for escalation in Vietnam. It was an attack by North Vietnamese warships on an American destroyer. But there is a whole context that’s missing from the official account. The official account has it that the Americans were trundling along in international water, blamelessly, and were then attacked by North Vietnamese in ‘a shocking act of unprovoked violence’, etc., etc. Actually, they were launching South Vietnamese commandos in raids on the North Vietnamese coast. And they weren’t attacked at the time that they were said to have been attacked; rather, they were attacked at a different time and in a different place. But the details were manipulated for public consumption, and were presented to the Senate and the House of Representatives, in order to secure the passing of what was famously called the ‘Bay of Tonkin Resolution’, which allowed for an escalation of a number of ground troops in Vietnam. So they lied about the details, and a very large proportion of the bureaucracy in the Pentagon knew about this, and, in fact, had known for many years – I think it was 30 or 40 years before it came out that they’d made up or manipulated a lot of details. At various points, when they were challenged, officials said, how could we possibly have been lying? Thousands of people would have to have been in a conspiracy of silence. In fact thousands of people had known about this, and had covered it up. Now, what does this have to do with 9/11? It doesn’t prove anything, except that large-scale conspiracies are possible and that a lot of the dogmas about governments being incompetent are just that, dogmas, assertions of faith. One of the things that I think is incredibly important is that we recognize mysteries for what they are. We shouldn’t presume to a level of understanding that we don’t, in fact, have. There’s a fake maturity that comes from saying, ‘Oh, well, the world is pretty much as it appears. Things happen through inadvertence and error, but mostly things are what they look like.’ There are huge areas of our political life and our economic life where we just don’t know enough, and we don’t understand the dynamics that lie behind events. I am not arguing for a conspiracy in any particular instance. We should be honest about what we are ignorant about, and try

124 Conversations on Truth to do something about it. Assess the implications of what you know, assess the implications of what you don’t know. Try not to get vertigo. To go back to your question – does this open doors for off-the-wall conspiracy theories about 9/11, and so on? That’s just one of those things. People will come up with off-the-wall theories, they’ll come up with interesting insights, perhaps. I don’t understand 9/11, and I don’t think many people do. I don’t think it is a good idea to pronounce on it too confidently given how much we don’t know about it. But notice how nervous that position makes some people. That’s kind of interesting. In general we should be suspicious of things we don’t understand. And I think you should be particularly suspicious when one’s knowledge is being deliberately curtailed. What did Stevie Wonder say? If you lend credence to things that you don’t fully comprehend, you are a sucker. Could you give a specific example of something which you would say is an area that we don’t know about, but which people might not recognize as such? Ha! There are huge areas where we know almost nothing, areas that touch on our lives very directly. We know almost nothing about offshore finance, for example. Most of us don’t know that London is a major offshore centre, arguably the capital of a parallel world of unregulated and untaxed finance that runs parallel to, and feeds on, the daylight world of democratic government. Most of us don’t know how the free movement of capital prevents governments from acting in the interests of the majority of their populations. Related to that, we don’t really understand organized crime, although we think we do. We have this cops and robbers idea of it that we like, that we’re comfortable with, and that’s just a load of old nonsense. But part of the problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know. And this explains something of the appeal of the conspiracy theory in its less legitimate forms – it promises a short cut to a complete understanding of a world that is in many ways plunged in darkness. Donald Rumsfeld is widely mocked for his comment that ‘there are known knowns . . . there are known unknowns . . . and there are unknown unknowns’, but actually there is quite a lot of truth in it. Rumsfeld and his unknown unknowns! There were a lot of things they should have known and could have found out, weren’t there. There didn’t have to be quite so many unknown unknowns when they invaded Iraq. But going back, for a moment, to those things which we don’t know, those things that are mysteries, I do think that it’s a very important question. And I think this does go back to the issue of expertise. I think

Dan Hind 125 that when one looks at the global economy as a non-expert, it becomes very clear that we often make decisions about our lives on the basis of radically incomplete information, and that most of us are not in a position to make rational decisions about matters like when to purchase a house, and so on. Now there are any number of people on hand who will tell you that it’s not difficult – it’s not a mystery – it’s very straightforward. In fact, for the last decade, people were overwhelmingly telling non-experts that it is ‘always a good time to buy property. Always! You can’t lose with property’, and so on. But now, that has turned out to be based on a complete misunderstanding that they had about the nature of the housing market. But it was a misunderstanding that was very, very widely shared – this idea that you couldn’t lose with property was almost unanimous, or univocal, in our culture. It was a misunderstanding that derives from our ignorance of finance more generally, the success of finance in dazzling us with technical complexity and flim flam. So it’s important not to be sucked into thinking that you understand more than you do. Partially this is for prudent reasons – because that’s how you get in real trouble. And partly it’s because, if you think that being intellectually autonomous is worthwhile, then being clear about the limits of one’s knowledge seems to me the first step towards that ideal of autonomy. And I think more generally, that we can be tempted into thinking in various ways that we understand things that we actually don’t understand. Or we can end up thinking that things are safe and that they don’t need investigation, because they’re being taken care of by very clever people. And I suppose that, if it’s a choice between looking presumptuous but just being curious, and looking wise but just being passive, it’s better to look presumptuous in the execution of one’s curiosity. Although there might be costs. You tend to get on by going with the flow. If you don’t get too hung-up about truth, you’re more likely to do well in this world. Is that a disappointment to you? I think it’s something that you need to look at very squarely in the face. It’s something that just seems to me to be a fact of life. There’s an interesting relationship between the dogmatic pursuit of truth, if you like, and the tendency towards unsociability, or failing to get on with people. People who like to tell the truth, and tell it as they see it, don’t tend to be very likeable. And we warm to people who aren’t confrontational in that way – actually we like people who tell us what we want to hear. Flattery works even when we know were are being flattered. So what kind of people are we likely to find at the top of competitive institutions? You’d certainly expect to see people who are described as

126 Conversations on Truth being fierce pursuers of truth, mavericks, all that. That’s a given, of course people will say that. But the likelihood is that they’ll be likeable, they’ll be sensitive to what others want and seek to ingratiate themselves – if only when they are dealing with people who can help them. Now this is in some ways just how it is. The question is, how do you make the world safer for honesty? How do you ensure that debate is open and honest, and that people don’t just try to figure out what the important people want to hear? In a sense, if one’s serious about trying to align what we do with the material facts of the case, then the better and more intimately we understand how human institutions operate, the more likely we are, practically, to be able to do something. So, for example, there is a very natural revulsion against the person in the auditorium who stands up and starts ranting on, apparently at crosspurposes to what the panel on the stage is talking about. There is that awkwardness in public meetings, when someone stands up and starts talking off-topic. But perhaps we should resist that impulse, and wonder about what passion makes someone behave socially inappropriately. There might be something driving it that’s not mental illness – they might actually be on to something. Our temptation is to think that they should shut up now, because it’s embarrassing. And we should let the nice people on the stage talk, because they’re the people we’re supposed to be hearing from. So, there’s a whole set of ways in which we need to be more wary of our impulses, if we want to find out the facts. To get back to this question of values: does the notion of truth matter to you in itself, or are you more concerned with the uncovering lies? I suppose in The Threat to Reason I am more interested in untruth. I am interested in the ways in which untrue claims can escape scrutiny and permeate the culture. I am interested in the ways in which we collaborate in attempts to deceive us. I’d say that tracing untrue claims, finding their outlines, finding what it is about them that allows them to take the form that they do and to have the influence they have, seems to me to a good job for thinking people. It can contribute to attempts to understand the world, and to change it. In what way do the principles that drive your intellectual enquiry affect the rest of your life? Well, I certainly wouldn’t claim to have solved the problem of Enlightenment as a lived experience. I think part of the point of my book is really to make it clear just how exotic an actually enlightened world would be. And in a sense, in current conditions, Enlightenment is just a problem that you live with – how do you achieve intellectual autonomy, how do

Dan Hind 127 you balance intellectual autonomy with the demands of the world? There is no really satisfactory answer. But being conscious of the problem of Enlightenment seems to me at least a step forward from where we have been, which is to think that we’ve solved the problem of Enlightenment, and that it’s a matter of defending it and of protecting it from its enemies. I think that’s precisely wrong. I think that we have to live with the Enlightenment as a problem. What kind of a response has your book had? Either from critics in general or from some of the figures, such as Richard Dawkins, with whom you have directly engaged? There has been a mixture of reactions. One review boiled down to saying: ‘This is very interesting. Why can’t someone else say it?’ The problem was, apparently, that I wasn’t an obvious authority. And so there is a sort of enactment, of another one of the problems of Enlightenment – the problem of authority. It’s as if someone is asking: ‘Who do you think you are, coming round here with your facts and your arguments?’ Another response was very aggressive and said that I was proposing a mixture of Maoism and Calvinism in talking about the Enlightenment in the way that I did. But in terms of the bigger figures that I go after, I’ve not heard anything back yet. There is something of a prize-fighter logic to much intellectual debate. So if you’re the champ, you’re not going to get into the ring with any old challenger. It’s not surprising that they wouldn’t have heard of the book, or would have heard of it but wouldn’t want to comment on it publicly. I mean, I am saying that they are absurd, after all. What would they have to gain from replying publicly? But the book was noticed. People did take the time and the effort to look at it and comment on it in public, which is more than a lot of first-time writers can hope for. I use a metaphor in the book of playing a tune with different lyrics. When people announce that they are defending the Enlightenment and start going on about homeopaths or Christians or whatever, I call that a Folk Enlightenment, you know, traditional tune arranged by Dawkins, or Wheen, or whoever. And if my book achieved anything, I hope that I made that kind of intellectual mood music a bit more difficult to perform in public without someone saying, ‘Get off! We’ve heard that one!’ So it would be great, if it’s had that effect.

10

Martin Kusch

Do you have a working definition of the word ‘truth’? The philosophical tradition I am most influenced by maintains that there is no one single definition of the words ‘truth’ or ‘true’. First of all, in order to understand truth we can do no better than to study how we use the word ‘true’ in everyday life. And such study quickly reveals that we use ‘true’ in many different ways. Sometimes we say ‘that’s true’ in order to signal our agreement with our interlocutors. Sometimes we employ the word ‘true’ to indicate the high quality of something; think of expressions like ‘he is a true friend’ or ‘that is a true Spanish wine’. On other occasions ‘x is true’ means something like ‘x fits with the facts or with someone’s report’ (such ‘fit’ can take many different forms). The important point to note is that there isn’t one idea or meaning that all these different uses of the word ‘true’ have in common. This insight has important implications for some of the ‘big’ questions about truth. For instance, when someone asks ‘is there truth?’, or ‘are we able to get at the truth?’, it is not at all clear which of the many different uses of ‘true’ she is appealing to. But without such further specification, the questions are not meaningful. Could you put yourself in the context of that philosophical tradition that you mentioned? Could you tell us a little bit more about it, perhaps in terms of how it relates to other traditions with different or opposed definitions of truth? The mentioned tradition is strongly influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). One of his central aims was – to use his famous image – to condense ‘a whole cloud of philosophy . . . into a drop of grammar’. In other words, he tried to show that some of the grand old philosophical questions and anxieties about truth, for example, could be dissolved by focusing on how we use ‘true’ in everyday life. He used the same strategy for many other important philosophical categories like 128

Martin Kusch 129 ‘freedom of the will’, ‘meaning’, or ‘knowledge’. Although Wittgenstein influenced many directions in recent philosophy, the philosophical mainstream has not followed him in his attempts to ‘deflate’ or ‘diffuse’ philosophical concepts and questions. Many philosophers believe that there are meaningful questions to be asked about truth, knowledge and beauty, and that such questions go beyond Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigations. Some of the roots of this belief go back many centuries, indeed all the way to antiquity, when enquiring after truth, knowledge and beauty was inseparable from theological concerns. So could you set the mainstream understanding of the word ‘truth’ in the context of contemporary scientific discourse? How does the average scientist see the concept of truth, and how do you differ from that? I doubt that the average scientist has a ‘concept’ of truth if by that you mean a ‘theory’ or ‘philosophy’ of truth. The average scientist knows as much, or as little, about philosophy as does the average artist, teacher or carpenter. But many scientists have adopted certain catchphrases from philosophy. They might say things like ‘science gets ever closer to the truth’. And they might take this expression to indicate what scientific progress consists of. In philosophy of science, this view is defended under the title ‘scientific realism’. Scientific realism has its critics, however. They argue that we do not understand what ‘getting ever closer to the truth’ really means: does it make sense to think of truth like an object that we can approach? Does the truth stand still? How do we measure getting closer to the truth? Critics of scientific realism have therefore tried to conceptualize scientific progress differently. Thomas Kuhn for example insisted that we should conceptualize scientific progress as a movement away from our old views rather than a movement towards the truth. Would you say that someone like the scientist Alan Sokal exists within that tradition of scientific realism? Sokal certainly has strong sympathies for scientific realism. But his position is not worked out in any detail. Sokal is a physicist who has studied little philosophy or sociology of science. I see your point that most working scientists don’t have a worked-out understanding of the philosophy of science – but what is interesting is that nonetheless they will work on a series of assumptions about the world, even if they are not acknowledged, which lead them to see themselves as participating in a process that is getting ever closer to the truth. Could you elucidate on what some of those assumptions that underlie the scientific discourse are?

130 Conversations on Truth I am not sure that there is such a thing as ‘scientific discourse’; there are many and varied scientific discourses, with little unity or commonality. It is one of the most important results of the history of science of the past 50-odd years to have pressed home this point. The idea of a single scientific discourse was underwritten by an image of science as a kind of homogenous map-making: scientific disciplines are like different cartographers who ‘bring home’ maps of different parts of the one world. And all of their partial maps fit together – they form part of the one ‘super-map’ that science allegedly aims to produce. Of course the map-making metaphor also supports the idea that science is getting ever closer to the truth: just as a map can give an ever more detailed picture of reality, so can science. Over the last few decades, this line of thought has increasingly been challenged. We can follow Philip Kitcher and stick to the map-making metaphor to explain the criticism. Maps are made for many different purposes; and the information contained in one map need not be compatible with the information contained in another. Think of the map of the London Underground. It does not give you accurate information concerning the distances between the subway stations. Compare this with another map that indicates the strength of support for Boris Johnson in different parts of London. Each map serves its users; each map seeks to satisfy various personal, social or political interests; but no one thinks these maps are stages on the way towards a single super-map. The map analogy is very interesting. It makes complete sense to say that the London Underground map just does not map onto a political map. So I can see the problems with the idea that the different bits of science will one day coalesce. But in terms of specific kinds of scientific pursuit – whether it is quantum physics or biology, or whatever – and in relation to that metaphor of the Underground map, you could still say that each map, or each kind of science, is still relating to something that is objectively true about the real world – station B is, factually speaking, between station A and station C. So do you think that in terms of those separate individual approaches that you could say that those processes are getting towards something that is true? One can of course say that the map of the London Underground is true in various senses: for instance, the number of coloured lines on the map corresponds to paths that certain Underground trains regularly take through the Underground system of rails; the order of dots depicting stations fits with the order of stations in the physical world; the names adjacent to the dots are the names of tube stations ‘out there’, and so on. It is important to remember, however, that the possibility to speak of

Martin Kusch 131 such truths depends on conventions we have laid down. We decide what counts as a station, as a subway line, as ‘out there’ or ‘in here’, as ‘correspondence’ or as ‘the physical world’. These conventions are made by us, not imposed upon us by the world, or by the truth. Do you have a working definition of the word or term ‘knowledge’? No. I’m not sure what such a ‘working definition’ would look like. I am (I hope) competent in how I use words like ‘knows’ or ‘knowledge’, but like you, and most other native speakers of English, I am able to do so without having a ready definition of these words. Here I am repeating what I previously said about ‘truth’ and ‘true’. We use ‘know’ and other epistemic terms in many and various ways, and there is no one definition to capture the variety. Moreover, many epistemologists nowadays think that trying to ‘analyse’ knowledge is a hopeless endeavour: every such analysis – for example that knowledge is justified true belief – will always be open to counter-examples. What about the term ‘evidence’? Very roughly put, we might say that evidence is what supports a belief. Having epistemic evidence for a belief usually makes is more likely that the belief is true, for example. But of course there can also be many other kinds of evidence: moral or prudential for example. Again, we all use the term in these various ways without having a ready definition. I’m really interested in this whole relationship between discourse and conventions and what those discourses and conventions are seeking to analyse. But let’s turn things around: take something like the science of anatomy which says that ‘The heart is in this particular place, we have two kidneys’, and so on. It seems to me to be fair to say, ‘It is a fact that human beings have two kidneys’ – you can test it easily. Is there a problem with saying, ‘It is a fact that a human being has two kidneys’? And if there isn’t a problem with it, isn’t that acknowledging that scientific discourse gets at something that is simply true? It is not a fact that all human beings have two kidneys: some have only one, some have more than two – even a case of someone having five kidneys has been reported in the medical literature. So let’s add a ‘normally’: ‘It is a fact that normally human beings have two kidneys.’ And of course that is true. And I don’t know anyone who would deny that the claim is true – at least if by ‘normal’ we mean something like ‘usually’. (Of course often we give a stronger, normative, meaning to the ‘normal’: the normal is as it should be. It is unclear whether taken in that way, ‘normally human beings have two kidneys’ is true, or a fact.) Anyway, your question

132 Conversations on Truth seems to imply that there are people who would deny that human beings usually have two kidneys, and that perhaps I am one of those people. I suppose that is kind of what I am getting at. I am guessing that there are people, I don’t know specifically whether Alan Sokal would say this, but certainly people of his ilk, who would say ‘The trouble with the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge approaches to science is that they are getting at the idea that ultimately there is no objective reality, that there is nothing that exists separately from our perception of it.’ Now, they would disagree with that. What would you say in response? Many things need to be said in response. Here are a few. First of all, we need to distinguish between relativism and constructivism. A constructivist holds that some of the things that we usually take to be ‘simply there’, ready-made and independently of us, are – to some extent at least – constituted or made possible by things we do. If we acted differently, then these things would be different too. (Think for example of ideas of female or male beauty: we now accept that these ideas are in good part a product of culture.) Constructivists often are relativists, too, but they need not be. A relativist about a certain domain thinks that disagreements concerning it can be ‘faultless’. Consider taste: you claim green tea tastes horrid; I maintain it tastes wonderful. I also think that ‘de gustibus non est disputandum’ (when green tea is concerned). Hence I am a relativist about the taste of green tea. I take it that our views about green tea are equally valid. Few people are troubled by relativism about green tea. Controversy starts, however, as we turn from tea to morals, or knowledge. Most of us feel troubled by the idea of faultless disagreement in the moral realm. And if you allow for faultless disagreement in the realm of epistemic justification or knowledge, you get attacked by Sokal, among others. To be an epistemic relativist is to maintain that there can be faultless disagreement about epistemic justification. Cardinal Bellarmine, Galileo’s famous opponent, defended an earth-centred universe with quotations from the Bible. We do not accept this as an appropriate form of argument in our scientific culture. The relativist says: given his tradition of argument, Bellarmine is right. Given our scientific culture, he is wrong. We disagree with Bellarmine, but the disagreement is faultless. A further important distinction is that between substantive and methodological forms of relativism or constructivism. This opposition is important for understanding the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK). SSK advocates relativism only as (part of) a method for studying past and present science. Take the conflict between Bellarmine and Galileo. When SSK practitioners study controversies they seek to under-

Martin Kusch 133 stand the role of social, political and cultural ideas and practices in both camps. SSK practitioners are not focusing on the question ‘who is/was right?’ Indeed, they believe that concentrating on that question is a distraction. Hence SSK recommends that we study, say the dispute between Bellarmine and Galileo, as if epistemic relativism were true – as if there were no issue of right and wrong. Why did Bellarmine argue the way he did? Which conventions and social institutions made his arguments convincing to his community? And which conventions and prior beliefs made Galileo’s reasoning compelling to others? SSK does not deny that the question ‘who is right and who is wrong?’ makes good sense. It is just that as a form of sociology, SSK is interested in a different set of questions. SSK is not equipped to adjudicate astronomical claims – that is the role of astronomers. SSK is in the business of trying to understand social processes. And in order to understand these processes – say in the seventeenth century and around the dispute between Bellarmine and Galileo – we do not need to know the answer to the question ‘who was right?’ Critics of SSK usually ignore the distinction between methodological and substantive relativism and constructivism. They reason roughly like this: SSK does not pay attention to who is right; hence SSK is committed to thinking that everyone is right; hence everyone must be constructing their own world; hence for SSK there is no real world out there at all. This form of criticism overlooks the distinctions I have tried to outline above. So the point is not to adjudicate which way of talking is right, but rather to understand how those communities are talking and interacting? Yes. And that is the point that I fear critics like Sokal are not getting. Right. But why do you think they don’t get it? If you were to sit down with Sokal and discuss it, why would he disagree with you? Why would he reject your argument? I have never met Alan Sokal so I do not know whether we could have a fruitful exchange. But let’s leave aside Sokal’s (and my) personality. The more interesting issue is a sociological one. We never encounter texts in total isolation; we read and interpret texts in light of our preconceptions and prior understanding of the issue, the genre and the author. I suspect that Sokal and other scientists approach texts in SSK with the preconception that sociologists are ‘radical debunkers’, that is, people who are trying to undermine science. And once one is in the grip of this preconception, almost all evidence to the contrary gets filtered out. Consider for example Paul Boghossian’s recent book-length attack on

134 Conversations on Truth relativism and constructivism.1 One of his targets is David Bloor, one of the most important figures in SSK. Boghossian quotes Bloor as saying that the sociology of knowledge ‘would be causal, that is, concerned with the conditions which bring about belief or states of knowledge. It would be impartial with respect to truth or falsity, rationality, success or failure.’2 Boghossian takes this passage to show that for Bloor scientific beliefs are the products of nothing but social-political interests. Alas, Boghossian fails to mention or indicate that he has left out a crucial qualification between the two quoted sentences. The ‘forgotten’ passage reads in Bloor’s original: ‘Naturally there will be other types of causes apart from social ones which will cooperate in bringing about belief.’3 Had Boghossian thought about this qualification, he could not possibly have accused Bloor of reducing all scientific reasons to sociopolitical considerations. I am not suggesting that Boghossian acted dishonestly in leaving out Bloor’s crucial sentence. I am sure his mistake was due to a genuine oversight. My point is rather that such oversight is naturally understood as the result of a strong preconception concerning Bloor’s and SSK’s views. If you already think, and have been told many times, that Bloor is reducing science to ‘nothing but’ a game of power and political interest, then you will inadvertently ignore evidence to the contrary. We all tend to concentrate on evidence that confirms our expectations, and ignore evidence which runs against them. Are there any people working in your area who would conform to this expectation that these scientists have, who really do hold an extremely constructivist view, who believe that we really just create the world around us? Or do they not exist? Could such a person exist? Can you really imagine someone who thinks that the world is just our collective invention? Well not seriously. But I spoke recently with a playwright who is strongly postmodernist, and when I suggested that science can discover truths about the world he asked, ‘Well what is a truth?’ To which I replied, ‘It is a truth that I cannot just go and walk through that wall’, and his response was, ‘No you just haven’t worked out how to walk through the wall yet’! And there does seem to be a strain of thought in popular discourse that believes that there is no objective truth. This may not be the case in academic circles, but it does seem that there are people who are attracted to what you might describe as a postmodern approach to the world because it allows them in effect to believe what they like.

Martin Kusch 135 You are not alone in worrying about these ‘postmodern’ deniers of reality. For the past 20 years, one philosopher after another has stood up to defend the real world, warning us that ‘there are dangerous people on the loose, especially in English and sociology departments, people who think that there is no real world, and that we can believe whatever we like. These dangerous people corrupt the young, and we are the last line of defence.’ I think we should use a bit of common sense in relation to this fear. Just ask yourself what kind of life someone would lead who believed that everything around them is nothing but the product of their arbitrary imagination. How would someone who thought that they could believe anything they like, and that mere believing made it so, behave? And how many people fit that bill? Let us go back to your playwright. Don’t forget that sometimes a claim that at first sounds dubious or mad can, set in the right context, become perfectly intelligible. Take your claim ‘It is a fact that you cannot walk through the wall.’ Perhaps in rejecting your statement the playwright was seeking to remind you that what we count as ‘passing through the wall’ is itself dependent upon conventions, preconceptions or criteria. After all, with the help of a jackhammer or a drill we are able to pass through (most) walls. His reminder is of course perfectly compatible with the fact that there are natural physical constraints on what we are able to do. In relation to what you have been saying could you talk a little bit about the objective world? A natural starting-point here is the recent book Objectivity4 by two American historians of science, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. The two authors argue that the notion of objectivity has a history. In medieval times the dichotomy ‘objective versus subjective’ meant the opposite of what it means today. We think that the subjective is fleeting and arbitrary, and the objective independent of us, real and ‘out there’. The medieval philosophers took the objective to be in our minds (only) and the subjective to be solid, strong and standing its own ground. And this is just one of many different facets and changes in the history of the term ‘objective’. Thus we have to be careful and historically sensitive when we make claims about the ‘objective world’. I suppose you want me to say something about the following question: ‘Is there something “out there” that is able to “resist” our theorizing, our thinking that nature is one way rather than another?’ This is not as easy an issue as might appear at first. We need to ask, for example, what is meant by ‘resistance’ here? When I interpret your behaviour in a certain way, and you learn about this interpretation, then you might well resist it: you might tell me that I am wrong. But how are we to cash out the metaphor

136 Conversations on Truth when the interpreted entity is a part of physical nature? It is not certain that the metaphor of resistance is helpful here. Perhaps you say: ‘Nature can resist our conceptions of it by impeding our survival as a species. If we did not, as a species, get nature roughly right, then we would not be able to survive.’ This would be an evolutionary way of spelling out the resistance. And there is something to this line of thought. But it is not without problems (as Stephen Stich pointed out some time ago). The suggestion implies that false beliefs must always be detrimental to survival. This is wrong. The false belief that aeroplanes always crash is not detrimental to survival; it might even be marginally better for one’s survival than the true belief that aeroplanes crash only very rarely. In other words, you cannot conclude from the fact that a species flourishes that it has a true picture of the world. Obviously we do want to say that there are many things that are not up to us; for instance, we cannot turn cheese into an atomic bomb, and we cannot move mountains. Perhaps that is all that the phrase ‘reality is objective’ is meant to say. But then it is important to remember that the phrase is pretty empty – it is all too obvious. We do not learn much by reflecting on it. People like Alan Sokal, or in another context Richard Dawkins, seem to be so militant in their attack on sociological approaches and so on, because there is a perception on their part that science is under attack. The most obvious example of this might be the debate about creationism and evolution in America. You have people engaging in a form of relativism by saying that if you are going to teach evolution in schools you should teach creationism too and let students make up their own minds. Now the argument against that is that creationism is simply not true and, while evolution may not be a perfect theory, it is certainly a much better one. So how would you respond to that? One thing is worth stressing first and foremost: there are no more than 20 authors (historians and sociologists) who are writing SSK-type analyses of science. Are we really going to believe this tiny group of academics from low-status disciplines are about to bring down physics and biology? Concerning creationism, it is unclear to me how SSK could be of any use to the creationist. SSK urges us to disregard issues of who is right when, and only when, we are focusing on understanding the social dimensions of science. I fail to grasp how this research heuristic could translate into support for creationism. Should creationism be taught in science classes in school? I cannot see any good reason for a positive reply. (That I am a relativist about some issues doesn’t commit me to having to defend a relativistic response

Martin Kusch 137 regarding all questions.) I don’t think the principle ‘teach children all sides of the debate, and leave them to make up their own minds’ is workable. Does anyone seriously think we should expose our children to all rejected scientific theories of the past, and then let them make their own choices? Our intellectual growth and development presupposes that we trust others. Most of what we believe we believe on the basis of what others have told us. There is no alternative to relying on others. There are more than enough occasions for exercising one’s own judgement: there is no good reason to think that the creationist option is the crucial place at which intellectual independence must prove its mettle. You were talking earlier about how scientific conventions can change, and that seems to me to be a sort Kuhnian view in terms of paradigm shifts. Is it possible at all to speculate on what current conventions in science might change in the future? Is there any way of getting a sense of where our scientific discourse might go? Where the next changes might happen? Such predictions are almost always wrong. And we need to remember that ‘science’ consists of numerous distinct and often unrelated discourses. Nevertheless, not all speculation need be fruitless. Let me refer once more to Daston’s and Galison’s Objectivity. The book is primarily about how representations in science – pictures – have changed. Two hundred years ago a scientific illustrator was eager to depict a beautiful, ideal or perfect specimen, not really existing, concrete individuals. In the early twentieth century scientists aimed instead for ‘mechanical objectivity’: they sought to represent nature in ways that owed as little as possible to the ingenuity or efforts of the artist. Objectivity ends with the suggestion that our notion of representation may currently be undergoing another major development. Internet image galleries constitute a new step in that they allow the viewer to interact with pictures: change them, combine them, develop them. This seems a plausible and modest prediction of a change in scientific culture. This idea of the position of the observer is interesting. Now we obviously have to be careful about making lazy analogies with theories in quantum physics, but when you speak of the observer, the first name that jumps into my head is Heisenberg and his idea of the uncertainty principle. Do you think, either in a literal or a metaphorical sense, that the idea that the position of the observer affects what is being observed is something that is useful from your point of view of understanding how knowledge is constructed and understood?

138 Conversations on Truth There are many ways, and many contexts, in which the knower changes and shapes what comes to be known. The issue is best understood regarding the ‘human sciences’ thanks to the efforts of philosopher-historians such as Michel Foucault and Ian Hacking. It was in good part the effort to understand ‘deviant’ forms of sexuality that created the figure of ‘the homosexual’. In other words, trying to understand people, scientists ‘made them up’: trying to find concepts for categorizing people, scientists gave people concepts for creating their identities. And these identities then confirmed the scientific concepts. In this day and age, such claims no longer strike us as terribly radical. You have described yourself as ‘the village relativist’ and you have said that many philosophers don’t want to have anything to do with relativism. Why is that? If only I knew the answer! As it happens, I am in the early stages of trying to find out. I am currently writing a book that tries to explain why at the beginning of the nineteenth century few if any authors worried about relativism, and why, since the dawn of the twentieth century, relativism and anti-relativism have been central topics for philosophers, scientists and artists. I want to understand what happened during the nineteenth century that made relativism such a pressing philosophical issue. One factor that explains the widespread hostility to relativism is that it is usually equated, or conflated, with irrationalism. Critics mistake relativism for the thesis that all views are equally true; and they rightly regard such as a thesis as irrational. This leads the critics to suspect, quite generally, that relativism and irrationalism must go hand-in-hand. Anti-relativists also presume that wherever they find forms of irrationalism, relativism must be just around the corner. This illuminates for instance the oft-heard suspicion that Nazism (the ultimate form of irrationalism) and relativism must somehow be connected: either because the Nazis themselves were relativists, or because the relativists paved the way for Nazism. (I have to admit that for me as a German this is a very sore point.) Historically this is all wrong. Many of the people opposing the Nazis were relativists, and the leading Nazi philosophers equated Jewishness with ‘cosmopolitanism’ – a Nazi technical term for relativism. You briefly touched on the issue of relativism in the moral sphere earlier, and it seems that this is an area where relativism is seen as being particularly dangerous – when you have people saying that we should not complain about the way the women are treated in the Arab world because that is their culture. Now the response to that might be to say: ‘Well, who says? Why should ‘culture’ justify oppression and

Martin Kusch 139 violence?’ Perhaps the fear is that relativism can be used to justify a tolerance of injustice? It is important to understand that the issue of tolerance is orthogonal to the relativism–anti-relativism debate. The absolutist has the option of insisting that everyone should accept certain principles of tolerance, for instance, that everyone should grant to each culture the right to make its own decisions on female circumcision. And the relativist might regard himself as entitled to evaluate the practices of other cultures by his own lights – while conceding, at the same time, that members of the other cultures will faultlessly disagree with his evaluations. This is what such a relativist might say to the culture that practises female circumcision: ‘Judging by my moral principles, your actions are wrong. I accept that judging by your moral principles, your actions are permissible. Neither one of us is at fault. But I have to act on what seems morally right to me. And thus I have to prevent you from subjecting your daughters to this horrible (horrible by my standards!) procedure.’ There is a further consideration too that is worth keeping in mind. Moral relativism need not be an all-or-nothing matter. One might well be a relativist regarding some moral matters, and be an absolutist concerning others. So how do you make that distinction between the two? By reasoning about it, by trying to negotiate a way through our conflicting intuitions. Take again the case of female circumcision. I have conflicting intuitions about it. On the one hand I feel pulled by the consideration that cultures – at least up to a point – have the right to organize their own affairs and institutions. On the other hand, there is the strength of my conviction that no human being should have to suffer terrible pain. And thus I have to make a decision: which intuition should I give greater weight to? I am inclined to let the latter outweigh the former. Let me also give you a case where – at least in my judgement – the relativist intuition wins. In his book Perceiving God,5 the epistemologist William Alston defends a principle of ‘mystical perception’, that is, the view that under certain conditions one may be justified in taking oneself to be spoken to by God. Alston’s defence of this principle is detailed, sophisticated and intellectually impressive. It seems to me that he has made no obvious mistake in his defence of mystical perception. And yet I cannot bring myself to agree with him. I am inclined to think that as far as mystical perception is concerned, Alston and I faultlessly disagree. We are equally right in the sense that I can see no reason why he should shift to my position, or why I should shift to his. Each one of us is right – relative to his overall epistemic principles.

140 Conversations on Truth That I take this attitude towards Alston does not of course commit me to adopting a similar stance towards someone who (today) claims to be Napoleon. Alston’s defence of the principle of mystical perception is impressive even by my lights – regardless of my ultimate rejection of the principle. But there is nothing impressive about the madman thinking he is Napoleon. Put differently, when we find ourselves disagreeing with someone else, we have a range of options: we might dismiss the other as mad; we might switch to their view; we might try to convince them of our viewpoint; we might begin to doubt that there is a right answer; and we might become relativists concerning the issue in question. Could you say something about the nature of how political or scientific power and authority relates to the way in which truth or ideas about the world are discussed or disseminated amongst the wider populace? Your question is huge – so let me select just one aspect. One interesting and topical issue is what role scientists and the public should have when it comes to making decisions about funding, and choosing between, future scientific projects. One of the most interesting and important observations regarding this topic concerns the limited knowledge scientists have of science. The claim is not that scientists do not know their stuff. The point is rather that scientists are highly specialized. And being highly competent in one (narrow) scientific specialty does not mean being scientifically competent ‘in general’, that is, being competent to pass judgement on scientific questions, and funding matters, regarding other scientific fields and specialties. Some sociologists and philosophers (e.g. Collins, Jasanoff, Kitcher, Wynne) have therefore argued that decisionmaking about scientific funding should now be more democratic than it has been in the past: the public or its representatives, at least those with some expertise, should have a place at the negotiating table. Could you, finally, say something about why the notion of truth as a subject still captivates us? I doubt that it is the ‘notion of truth’ that captivates us. Science captivates us, and that is hardly surprising: over the past century or so, ‘technoscience’ has come to shape more and more aspects of our lives. Obviously we are trying to make sense of that experience and its causes. And it should not occasion surprise that we feel ambivalent about science and technology: enthusiastic one moment, sceptical or worried the next. We criticize science in the morning, and use its latest deliveries in the afternoon. There is nothing irrational about this: science and modern technology confront us both with tremendous opportunities and with risks of hitherto unknown dimensions. Global warming is currently the

Martin Kusch 141 most discussed of the latter. The concepts of truth, knowledge or progress are some of our traditional tools for making sense of science, technoscience and technology. But there is no guarantee that they are the most appropriate terms. It is interesting that you mention global warming because it reminds me of another issue that makes people jumpy about what they perceive to be the relativistic approach to science. Many people whom one might describe as ‘climate-change deniers’ would say: ‘Well, this is just another apocalypse myth: we used to think God was going to destroy the world and now we think it will be global warming; whereas actually it is just the case that people always think that they are living in the end times.’ Now the argument against that is that while it may be true that people always think they are living in the end times, that does not necessarily make the scientific evidence any less true that we actually are living in those end times now. What is your response to that way in which global warming is discussed? Since relativism and SSK have been our guiding themes, I must begin with the reminder that relativists and absolutists can be found on both sides of the debate over global warming. For instance, Simon Blackburn, a wellknown philosopher and critic of relativism, insisted for several years that the case for global warming was quite weak. I am inclined to defend a form of epistemic relativism, and I think the evidence for global warming has been overwhelmingly strong for many years. Moreover, it cannot be denied that there continues to be much scientific uncertainty about the causes, the pattern and the effects of global warming. Only this morning I read on the BBC website that according to the latest climate models for the next ten years the average temperature in Europe will actually fall! But if you had said that six months ago, you might have been denounced as a supporter of George Bush Jr’s outrageous antienvironmental policies.

11

Mary Midgley

Do you have a working definition of the word ‘truth’? There are two very different areas, it seems to me, in which this word ‘truth’ finds itself being used. The oldest, and I think still the deepest, is the moral one about truth and lies – deception. I was looking in the dictionary and, as I expected, I discovered that that was the oldest – so you speak of someone as being a ‘true servant’, or a ‘true wife’. It means ‘constant’, ‘reliable’, and in a sense the ‘real’ one – the idea of reality comes in here. So you’re a true wife or husband if you are true to your spouse, and that means you’re doing what it is right for you to do. That moral view of the word seems to me to be terribly basic. And this is natural, not because people are deliberately lying to each other all the time, but because it’s important to us to know when they are, and so we are always very much on the alert for lies. And there are many contexts in which not having a precise definition doesn’t raise a serious problem, because if one has some sort of general definition of truth – such as ‘correspondence with the facts’ – everybody usually knows which particular facts are in question, and so everybody usually knows whether they have been misrepresented. We are often, in this sort of situation, not talking about delicate or borderline cases. Then, of course, there grows out of this the more epistemological, knowledge-based question, about whether getting a complete understanding of the truth is actually possible – whether full correspondence with the facts is possible. This is the idea of there being some sort of ‘whole truth’ that we might hope to get to by enquiry. Yet this is very difficult to attain, and when people are trying to describe something which they don’t fully understand themselves, they can often end up saying, ‘I don’t think we can get at the truth here, it’s too much.’ And actually, in practical terms, when people talk about ‘the whole truth’ in a law court 142

Mary Midgley 143 for instance, nobody supposes that you would put in all the bits. It would actually be wrong, and obviously kind of wicked, to distract people by putting in lots of extraneous details – that’s not what it’s about. You’re meant to know in law courts which bits are important, and you’re meant to represent them in a way which is not going to deceive people. That’s what ‘the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’ means in that situation. But let’s move away from this specific example, and look at things in a more general, scientific context. If you were to say, for instance, ‘I’m now going to try to understand the complete workings of the different planets’, or something of that sort, the idea of the whole truth would still be extremely misty – you won’t ever be able know everything about them. And if then you say, ‘well, actually you just have to pick out the important parts’, then what you count as important will vary with your standpoint, won’t it? There’s nothing fishy about that, and as time goes on people think differently – different things appear as important. So now the people who started with the idea that we can have a pretty straightforward model for truth – with a black-and-white distinction about what is true and what is not – can begin to become confused and unhappy, and some people start to say, ‘well, you can’t know the truth at all, can you?’ So it is much harder, in an abstract scientific or philosophical context to make everything clear about truth than it is in a political context. You’re using the word ‘facts’ a lot. Could you define what a fact is? That’s a tricky one! Because in one age and in one place, people will take things for granted, as the ground floor of their beliefs, which in another place would be questioned and which might then turn out really to be mistaken. So I think that they simply have to be defined as the most central certainties of the situations that you’re dealing with. Geoffrey Warnock had a very interesting discussion about this where he points out that facts are the opposite of opinions – they are not the opposite of values. And he gives the example of general value judgements – he says that the idea that it is bad for people to be tortured, humiliated and starved is not an opinion, it’s a fact. So when we talk about things being good and bad, we are making a value-judgement, but these judgements are so central that nothing else can make sense without them. I mean, I’ve actually been thinking a lot lately, about torture. Now if torture’s not wrong, what would be? So facts are what lie at the centre of the system. The word that’s quite closely allied to facts, particularly in the scientific realm, is ‘evidence’. Do you have an understanding of what evidence means – what can be considered to be legitimate evidence?

144 Conversations on Truth What is legitimate is going to vary with the situation, isn’t it? I mean, evidence is what you put forward in support of your claim that something in particular is a matter of fact. Now, there is a sort of dogmatic materialism that’s hanging around at the moment, which you might see in Grayling’s or Dawkins’ work, and which takes it that only physical facts, and nothing else, can really count as evidence. And so Dawkins takes it, for instance, that there is no evidence for God. But if we are asking in more general terms about what would count as evidence, then I think a very interesting field to illuminate this point, is mental illness. We have been, for a long time, maybe a century, in a terrible muddle, because of the two different ways in which we discuss troubled people. When you ask, say, ‘Is that person depressed?’, you have to say, ‘Well, what’s the evidence?’ Now, in a medical context, you would have to talk about this in relation to certain sorts of physical behaviour. Now this behaviour is certainly relevant to the question, and in a way it can’t be helped – we do after all, think of these people as physical objects, they have physical bodies which can move around and which may do harm. But equally, you might say, ‘Well actually he seems to be behaving all right, but look at what he told me last week.’ So we can have insights into things which are still pretty relevant but which might not make sense in strictly behaviourist terms. And there has been an awful division, I think, in this field, between people shouting for one approach and people shouting for the other. So whenever we talk about evidence, we have to talk about something being evidence for a particular interpretation of what’s going on. And if people think of mental illness only in strictly behaviourist terms – then they will inevitably only accept certain things as evidence. But actually, I bring up this case, because I don’t think anyone, however materialist, ever approaches that sort of problem in that sort of way. We all have to think about things like this in two separate ways, and these have to be brought together. I mean, you can’t talk of somebody’s behaviour without talking of their motives, or their vision of the world, and so forth. If you want to get at the ‘whole’ then you have to approach it from two different angles. It’s a little bit like the way that we perceive the world by sight and also by touch, you see. And these senses are not continuous – they’re different, aren’t they? And while they can conflict, on the whole we use them pretty well together, because we are using them as a whole. I suppose, in more general terms, I’m actually homing in on the general problem of scepticism and postmodernism, and so forth. This kind of problem seems to arise when people get so bewildered by the complexity of some of these cases, that they end up thinking that there is absolutely no right method and no answer, and that the truth really is just different for different people in different situations. But this is an unhelpful kind

Mary Midgley 145 of approach, because, ultimately, you’ve got to talk to other people, and you’ve got to have ways of bringing together these separate approaches. I mean, it is always interesting that when we hear of a view of the world very different from our own, we don’t just say, ‘Oh, they’re different, aren’t they?’ We at once begin to think, ‘Now, how can they think like that?’ Let me quote from an example that I put in an article long ago, and which I still think is a smasher. When I was beginning to teach at Somerville, I was talking with a student about different types of moral customs, and so forth, and she said, ‘Oh yes, just like in classical Japanese, they had a single word for trying out one’s sword on a chance wayfarer.’ This, you see, the samurai had to do, because it was important that his sword could bisect somebody at a stroke – if he couldn’t do that, he let down his emperor, and so on. So, taking his sword out for a walk, he would search for a chance wayfarer, and bisect them. The only thing he must not do is to bisect another samurai – but it was perfectly all right to do this to a chance wayfarer! Now when you hear that, you begin to think: ‘Well, what did they mean by that, what did it mean to them?’ You begin to ask about the background within which this kind of behaviour made sense. And also, we should note, they began to think like this themselves. As time went on the classical Japanese began to think this was rather a bad idea and they then only used condemned criminals, and then gradually they dropped it altogether. So, you know, Japanese culture is not a closed box, it allows a change. But, in fact, when any two humans communicate, or when one human picks up a new idea, the road from one position to another must be found, mustn’t it? And I think that we spend an awful lot of our time doing this, though I couldn’t say whether we spend more time today than people have done in the past, because people have always been confronted with unexpected views haven’t they? Now, of course, we can’t do it completely, and I suppose that is that bit which the postmodernists would write about. So it is important that everything’s provisional, but does that mean that some day torture will look all right? Well, I don’t think I have to say so! Because, as Geoffrey Warnock has said, there are facts about human beings, about the kind of animals that we are, which are so central, that it hardly makes sense to think that you could get round them. But it is also plainly true that people in a different culture may take certain things to be absolutely central, which might not actually look so central for ever. For instance, look at the allegiance that people used to have to their kings, and so forth: now we really have moved away from that. And this is not just random, we can see by what roads we have moved; we can see what we would have to give up in order to get back there; and we can see what people got then that we do not get now. So it’s always possible to map the

146 Conversations on Truth surrounding country. Now, obviously at present there’s a nostalgia for certain views, and this can turn people either into creationists if they want something to fix onto, or it can turn them into noisy champions of ‘science’. Though I don’t think either of those is a lot better than the other. In relation to these issues of postmodernism and cross-cultural morality, what do you understand by the concept of relativism, in an epistemological and a moral sense? That is a word that is obviously quite widely used, and again there’s a spectrum. I mean it can just have the pretty harmless meaning of knowing that particular moral standards can be different in different situations. So if you’re in the South Seas and polygamy is absolutely normal, then it is not a crime as it might be in areas where it is not so normal. So there are all sorts of more-or-less optional things which customs do vary about. In that very simple sort of sense, relativism can just be an acknowledgement of the fact that actions have different meanings in different situations, and so you can’t set up absolute standards of behaviour. What about in a more extreme sense? I mentioned earlier Geoffrey Warnock’s suggestion that it’s not an opinion but a fact that it’s bad for people to be tortured and starved, humiliated and hurt. There are things that are bad and good for people to have done to them which don’t vary that much from one culture to another; there are things that it’s right or wrong to do that can’t vary that much. And if people are being relativistic about that sort of thing, well that would be an example of a more dangerous form of relativism. Now, it is certainly true that cultures which seem much opposed in morality are often emphasizing different values or are willingly giving up what they think is the less important value for the more important one – that kind of thing is something that anthropologists have been very interested in. But if people think that the idea of truth can just go altogether, well, I would want to say that it can’t, unless you get rid of the idea of falsehood and of error. After all, some things have got to be wrong, either as facts or in moral terms, because we need some sort of compass by which we can keep moving. And if people think they are so sophisticated that they aren’t convinced about this talk of truth – though other people might be – then I think they are simply mistaken. I mean we can prove this point by saying, ‘Well, if you’re putting forward this extreme relativism about truth as something that is true, then logically, you’ve ended up in a bit of a hole, haven’t you?’ I mean this can be a cheap point, but I don’t think it is if people are doing this.

Mary Midgley 147 Well that argument has been made about postmodernism – the postmodern idea that everything’s just language and that there are no absolutes, is itself an absolute statement and is therefore contradictory. Yes, well it is. It aims to be outside of all these doubtful things, and to be the ground on which everything stands, but it can’t – it can’t do that. People who claim to be widely sceptical are usually sitting on some particular thing they are jolly sure of, aren’t they? And of course a lot of this kind of thought in the last century or two has been sitting on the idea of freedom. I mean, Sartre goes on as if there are no moral standards, and yet he’s got a terribly rigorous moral standard of being what he calls ‘authentic’, which is not being bound to anybody or anything. So it’s hopeless to try to dispense with an idea of there being any ground under your feet. I think this appearance of doubting everything very widely is an awfully deceptive thing. After all, Descartes thought that he was doubting everything, but he was sitting on an immense amount of metaphysics, wasn’t he? And this was particularly in relation to a notion of what he himself was – he was quite clear of what he himself was. So relativism about cultures – and usually it is all about cultures – is aiming to make a judgement from nowhere. But as people in other cultures have been pointing out quite a lot in recent times, you’ve got to be sitting in the West in order to make this judgement in the first place. Now this isn’t a fault – we have to sit somewhere, we know that. And we need to be aware that we’re sitting somewhere in so far as possible in order to be able to think ‘Well what would I think if I was in x, y and z’s place?’ Ultimately, objectivity has to be about making sense of things from a proper range of viewpoints, doesn’t it? It’s not that there’s one place where you sit and get it all right, but a range. And when somebody points out to you that the range you are using is incomplete and shows you another one, well, you’re supposed to try to go there, aren’t you, so far as you can? I mean, I think people like Richard Rorty – whom I take to be a fairly typical sort of postmodernist – will sometimes give you the perfectly sensible version of their views, and you might think, ‘How very interesting and useful’, and sometimes they try to make this extreme, dramatic statement, that nothing’s any more true than anything else. And I think that does seem to undercut itself in a way that is not just superficial but important. It strikes me that there’s a general sense in our society, amongst both scientists and laypeople, that science is moving ever closer to achieving a full comprehension of reality, whether that’s physicists moving towards a Grand Unifying Theory, or biologists, you know, just filling

148 Conversations on Truth every last hole in the theory of evolution. Is that view of science fair? And if not, why not? I think that view is most misleading, and most serious scientists know this. Because, although there is this often quite right tendency to try to unify, the actual development of thought is always going to lead to separation, isn’t it? It does this by constantly pointing out how our generalizations are too simple. I mean, I think this issue is particularly interesting in the biological case, because the suggestion has been not just that evolution is the explanation of everything, but that evolution only comes down to natural selection and nothing else. And that doesn’t make sense because it implies that, at any stage, an infinite variety of possibilities are available and it’s only by experience, and by killing almost all of them, that the best one to survive is found. But this is nonsensical, because you don’t ever have an infinite variety of possibilities. And as many biologists have been pointing out lately, for any organism, there is actually only a very small range of directions that are possible for it to go in, and this is because of where it is at the start, and also because that range of directions is not sort of standard throughout all organisms. So there are these tendencies already affecting the evolutionary direction in which a thing is going. And while, of course, its journey is selected partly by the question of survival, it is also guided by these non-survival-related tendencies. So the suggestion, which I think is modelled on what the physicists are trying to do, that there’s just one law which governs evolution – such as ‘trial and error does it all’ is a wild attempt to simplify things with a view to not having to think about them any longer. Whereas actually, simplification is always the first step towards seeing what the next lot of complexities are. Now I deal more with biology than with physics, but it does look to me as though this quest for a theory of everything in physics, this notion that there must be a theory of everything, is quite irrational. There are a number of different kinds of pattern we can pursue in physics as there certainly are in biology, so we have to understand different things in different ways. And if Einstein’s theory of relativity can’t be brought into the same terms as quantum mechanics, well, I can’t see that’s too surprising. So this seems to me to be a bit like the fact that we see the world with our eyes and we feel it with our fingers. And while it’s very important that we keep these things in synch, that we think about them together and look for the connections, we cannot expect to find, as those in the seventeenth century so cheerfully did, a single pattern. And the Enlightenment has kind of had that thought in the background all the time – Leibniz knew this was all pretty complicated, and Kant certainly knew that there is not just one way of thinking. But the hope that the rest of the world has picked up from all this successful science that there will eventually be some

Mary Midgley 149 infallible, final pattern, and that if there isn’t, then it’s a disaster, shouldn’t really be believed anymore. That thought has been discredited. You write about issues like myth and symbolism within science. Now I can imagine some scientific critics of that stance saying, ‘well those are bad terms to use, because they imply kind of falsehood or a distance from literal truth’. The term ‘myth’ is a bit unlucky, isn’t it? Perhaps I shouldn’t use it as I do. People do often use it to mean simply ‘a false story’. But it’s also so useful a way of talking about symbols and it has been used in that way a lot since Plato onwards. I suppose a myth is a story in which there are many symbols. Now I do think, in a way, that it’s very hard for us to understand how or why it is that we perceive the world so very symbolically. But these things are important to us nonetheless, and dammit, that’s just the creatures that we are! And I understand that in the Buddhist tradition, myths are taken to be perfectly OK, and as being on a different level from these frightfully abstract truths about how things really are. So the Lamas do not distress themselves if the populace really enjoys these plays about demons, and so forth, because they can see that that’s quite clearly a different kind of talk from the more literal and rational one, and that the two can be used together. Whereas it does seem as if, in the West, we’ve lost that power of using these different ways of speaking together, and I think that is pretty serious. If you start to say, for instance, of a religious view, that it has mythical truth, or mythical value, some people will just dismiss it by saying ‘Well, it’s just a story.’ That is fine, but what does it mean to be just a story? People press Dawkins about this, in particular, because he actually claims to be quite keen on literature. Unlike Peter Atkins, who despises it, Dawkins thinks it’s quite good. Perhaps then we should ask him, in what way is it quite good? What does it do? I mean, I was just re-reading War and Peace, and I thought ‘this is colossal stuff ’, and each time I read it I find out more about the world. And this isn’t particularly because of those rather long bits when Tolstoy tells you about history. Rather it’s from the shape of the story as a whole, and I think if literature didn’t do that kind of thing for people, then it would be inexcusable that people studied it so much. So reading literature should not just be seen as a hobby for one’s spare time. But somehow the importance of bringing literature together with more literal statements of facts has been loosened in the last century or so, and I think that is pretty bad. I think the narrowing of the definition of ‘science’ by Karl Popper & Co. has had an unfortunate influence here. He threw out Freud and threw out Marx, and he said that nothing really counts as science except the

150 Conversations on Truth disproving of the hypotheses which are, themselves, thrown out more or less at random. But that is to get rid of the element of background ‘vision’ which has always been there in science. Now, of course, until fairly recent times in the West this meant pretty much the Christian vision or one’s own variation on that – a cosmic narrative of considerable scale. And the idea that you can get rid of that and not replace it with anything does seem to have been a great mistake. Now, there were those Marxist polymaths like Haldane and Bernal, and so on, who I think were very impressive people, and the myth or pattern that they were tracing in political terms guided them in their science, it wasn’t seen as something separate. But Marxism’s gone out of fashion now, and I do think, in some ways, that this is unfortunate. I mean, obviously there are a lot of things wrong with Marxism, particularly on the political side, but it did require people to have a view of what the world is that was comprehensive but that allowed for these different sorts of thoughts and angles. One’s always talking about angles and perspectives and different points of view, but I think you have to do that. Well in that sense, is it possible to make a judgement about which angle or perspective or point of view is more true than another, or able to get you closer to reality than another? I think when you’re asking very specific questions, it is. I mean, if we take the evolution example, as I mentioned before, a lot of biologists in recent times have pointed out how it isn’t just all about fighting for survival. They have pointed out how particular animals have some quite specific tastes and that they prefer some kind of life to some other kind of life. I mean, you know, geese are not jackdaws, as Lorenz pointed out, and they aren’t wolves either. And so the closer you get to a phenomenon, the more you can see a reason for using one way of thinking about it rather than another. The idea that a lot of people suppose came from Darwin – but which really came from Herbert Spencer – that evolution is all a sort of standard Hobbesian war of all against all, turns out to be quite unhelpful when you actually look at how animals behave. This idea does not actually fit the facts or the details. And we could look at this also in relation to political and moral questions – take this recent thing where the Americans seem to have got the idea that torture is actually justifiable. I was just reading quite an interesting article in the New York Review of Books where an American writer pointed out how very much better than the Americans the British had been at dealing with this kind of terrorism, because they had some experience of it in Northern Ireland. They had found out that it doesn’t actually pay to bully people and frighten them. By looking at the details of the case, they found that a different way was better. And I think a lot of

Mary Midgley 151 moral truths require just that kind of detailed attention. You know, people used to believe in the seventeenth century that it was a good idea to hang, draw and quarter people, and indeed that you must certainly torture them, and this was because they were not looking at what that actually does, and what it actually means. They were following a sort of casual vision of their own, which was remote from the facts. And this debate about punishment has gone on in so many places, hasn’t it? But moral advances often involve looking more closely at the facts, taking them more seriously, and taking a wider range of facts seriously – for instance it means looking at what it’s like from other people’s points of view: what does doing this teach our children? What’s the victim of torture undergoing? The failure to take in the whole of a situation is, I think, often behind a lot of evil. Because we supply this evil ourselves, and we don’t let it be corrected by input that the world is actually willing to give us. But let me, if I may, take this all back to the conversation we were having about myths and symbols. Look at the myth of empire which we were all so stuck on a little time back. You can pick up a lot about this from Victorian writers such as Kipling, who talked of a rather noble willingness to sacrifice oneself for the empire, and a sense of the mission that empire had, and so on. But this particular vision got discredited largely when the people who were supposed to be being so splendidly ruled started giving their own point of view. Now, of course, we should really have seen this before, because it is not a new thought – empire has been something that people have resisted since the Romans. But then, when people do resist it, they’ve got to move in a different way, haven’t they? And they have to find new ways of envisaging their own community in relation to those around them. And it can often be rather hard at first to see how this will happen. But by developing symbols through the arts, then after a while everything can begin to take a clearer form. I suppose what we’re trying to account for is the fact that the way in which we deal with other beings can’t all be expressed in abstract terms. We always end up forming things into figures and dramas. Drama is terribly important – we see ourselves as engaged in dramas, don’t we? And there is nothing wrong with that – it’s just that you’ve got to get the right drama, and not the wrong one. So I suppose that it’s understandable from the Americans’ point of view, why they picked up on this military drama. But that is only suitable for dealing with a real war, and if you haven’t got a real war, then to call it a war is radically misleading, and not just in a superficial way. Because it makes people feel justified in acting in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t act in. The great point of calling something a war, of course, is that you’re then supposed to be to be allowed to do things which in no ordinary circumstances would you be allowed to do.

152 Conversations on Truth Giles Fraser, when we interviewed him for the book Conversations on Religion, describes the approach to understanding the world that is evident in someone like Richard Dawkins as being a kind of ‘radical empiricism’. He argued that it seeks to understand truth in a very narrow and absolutist way. Do you think that’s a useful phrase for describing that trend of scientific and philosophical enquiry? Well, I actually wish they were more empiricist in their approach – an empiricist to me is someone like William James, who actually wants to know the real details of experience, you see, and not just see things in term of their own assumptions. These people like Dawkins put their confidence in a kind of framework which is to be imposed on everything. Now I like Giles, I think he’s an interesting fellow, but a lot of people call Dawkins’ kind of approach empiricism and I think that is a bit of a scandal. Your empiricist philosopher is someone like Locke – who is actually deeply interested in the details of experience, but who therefore comes out with a pretty confused system in the end. Now Hume is a bit more of a system fellow. But to have a kind of systematic empiricism, I think, is a mistake. It is rationalism that is supposed to be reliant on pure reason and on abstract systems. Empiricism, by contrast, says, look, things are not as simple as that – we need to look at the details. That’s what William James does – and I think he’s the top empiricist. So would Giles be better off using the phrase ‘radical rationalism’, then, instead of ‘radical empiricism’? I don’t think I would wish to use either phrase! Though there is, of course, a strong strain of rationalism in that kind of approach – so it relies on a belief that if you’ve got a system, and it tells you that things are pink, then they therefore can’t be green despite what your senses might be telling you. And currently a great many people think that science is very much like that. Behaviourism is a smashing example of this. Behaviourists said, ‘It’s irrational to think that you have a soul, and so it’s irrational to think about consciousness at all, and psychology must deal only with outside behaviour.’ Now, they called that ‘scientific’, but it wasn’t, it was never worked out at all. And there wasn’t any advance in the physical sciences that brought this about – rather it came from a feud with some other psychologists who were trying to make introspection the great source of knowledge, and who were doing that rather badly. So Watson got into a row with them and said after a bit, ‘Well OK then, there is no such thing as consciousness.’ And so people like him do seem to me to have been very frightened of attending to feeling – the notion of attending to your own feelings and to other people’s feelings frightened them, because they

Mary Midgley 153 wanted to impose a certain sort of order. So, yes, there’s a rationalist temper in that kind of reductive scientism. There is a passion for a good set of classifications and formulas which will settle things. But, of course, Dawkins probably would say he’s an empiricist, because he and people like him do see science as a new way of describing experience. But it is actually much more abstract than that – it’s a set of ways of answering particular questions about the physical world. You’ve been talking about things like torture and a gradual sort of realization that there are certain facts in relation to morality. Does that mean that you’re comfortable with the idea of there being absolute moral truths? And if so, how do we come to understand those? Is it via reason, or via intuition? We have to use a great range of faculties, I think. There is not one single faculty which will let you know, and I think that’s probably quite important to realize. And of course this contrast between rationalism and empiricism has been very active here, too. Some philosophers have emphasized that you have to think these things out, and others that you have to have the right feelings, and yet both seem to be important. But with regards to the idea of moral absolutes, well I think we get back to this idea of the ground floor on which we stand. I think an absolute is something at the centre of a system, which is our whole life, and I think the prime example of how to identify them is the question: if that isn’t wrong, then what is? That is what one has to ask. And when one asks about outlying things, such as polygamy, or even suicide maybe, one might say, ‘Well this is not as wrong as such and such a deeper principle with which it conflicts.’ But it’s always a matter of conflict, of course, and we do have this very conflicting nature in which we’ve got contrary impulses, and which we have to balance one against another. And the difficulty with making any particular standard absolute is you then think of an example where it will conflict with something else. For instance, Kant said you should never tell lies, but then imagine if the secret police knock on the door, and say, ‘Has George been here?’ Well what do you do? Kant says ‘You need not answer’, but that doesn’t get you far. Doing that might get you killed! That’s right! Well, I mean, I think Kant was getting quite one-sided about all of this, with his standard of telling the truth. He was deeply impressed with the thought that if you deceive somebody then you are exploiting them – you are using them as a means to your own ends – and that that was awful. And while I think that is a very important general moral truth, it doesn’t follow from that that you must never lie. Because there are other

154 Conversations on Truth things which are also very important and which may at some points conflict with it. But nonetheless I still think Kant was on the right track to treat this as one central idea that one needs to have – that you shouldn’t be systematically deceiving people, because you shouldn’t be systematically treating them as means to your end. That is a pretty deep principle, I think, but of course it’s very general. The more helpful these big principles get, the more general they are, and the more you may have a particular conflict. Do you think truth is important for most people? Are human beings truth-seeking creatures? Yes, I think they are, in two sorts of ways. Firstly, we are simply curious, as a lot of animals are. We simply want to know more, and beyond that we want to get things right – we want to get to the real thing. Look at it like this: we need that sort of unity-seeking because we are so various in our wishes and we’ve got such complicated and different impulses that if we don’t try to bring them together and check one against another then we’d get lost. And that would be very frightening. People are frightened of going to pieces, and so they should be, right? You wouldn’t need to be frightened of going to pieces if you had a simpler nature, because there wouldn’t be so many pieces, but we’ve got an awful lot of pieces. So we’re truth-seeking not only in that we are curious and want to know particular facts about the world, but also because we want to bring them together in a way that is authentic – that doesn’t allow them all to go off in different directions. Jung described this as ‘the integration of the personality’, and I think it’s quite a good phrase. We want to be serious and real ourselves, and that requires that we should bring together different visions of the world: so we are not only curious about particular facts, but we want to see them in relation to each other. And of course that’s the source of this wish for a single theory of everything – the intellectual wish to unify is an entirely proper wish, it is a wish to have a truth. But, unfortunately, in our complicated world, if you are ruled by one thing, you very soon start ignoring some other things, because they won’t fit. Ultimately you can’t get it all to fit together.

12

Peter Oborne

Do you have a working definition of the word ‘truth’? In my book The Rise of Political Lying1 I don’t go for a big abstract definition of the word truth because I am not a philosopher. I am a journalist, and so my definition of what is true relates to what is factually true. When I was very young, 17 or 18, I thought my mission in life was to discover the truth. I didn’t really know what the truth was, but I think it meant to me the reality behind apparent events. So I had a sort of gnostic view of truth I suppose. I remember going into my interview at university and saying to the senior tutor, ‘I want to discover the truth, the truth, the truth’. And then I went through a period of finding that trying to examine philosophical views of truth could be hopelessly confusing and I became a bit despairing about it all. It was a bit of a disaster because I went up all kinds of blind alleyways. Then I became a journalist and it offered me a route back to pursuing the truth. One of the things that you learn when you become a journalist is how to construct news stories. Now they do obviously have a connection with the truth, and you do have to be aware of the truth because otherwise you might get sued or have to issue a correction, and so on. But nevertheless, the construction of news stories was often at a tangent to the truth, and you were under pressure to do things which were playing games with the truth – such as picking out a very narrow version of events and presenting that as the truth of how things are, for instance. But you also got a sort of empirical training in truthfulness because beneath it all there was a level of reality to which you had to adhere. And as I got more experienced as a political journalist, I then noticed that particularly in the kind of journalism I was doing, a lot of the material written was actually fabrication. Often stories would have no basis of any kind: they were collaborations between spin-doctors and 155

156 Conversations on Truth journalists, or ministers and journalists. They pertained to a reality of their own, but they were actually fictions. And I started to develop a technique for undermining these fabrications. I began to realize that the stuff I failed to understand when I was at university was actually relevant – postmodernism in particular. This had completely baffled me when I was 20; it gave me a headache and made me feel depressed because I couldn’t understand what it meant. But it became incredibly interesting when interpreting the nature of political reporting because it was about the creation of truth, and I could see that happening. Whereas by then I was trying to adhere to the very basic Samuel Johnson version of truth, an Anglo-Saxon empiricism which may not be very sophisticated but which basically said that it was possible to prove something to be the case. Does your idea, or the idea of truth, have a relationship to goodness? I couldn’t make a philosophical connection between the two ideas, but on the other hand I think it probably does. Because I think that falsehood is often the way that evil promotes itself. You can see examples of how false versions of events lead to evil – for instance with the idea that Jews are pigs, that sort of way of thinking led to the concentration camps. And so if you can try to tackle those falsehoods then you can achieve good. But equally, there is a philosophical school that sees falsehood and goodness as being compatible. That is a Platonic school of thinking which believes that there is a higher truth which justifies falsehood. And I don’t actually subscribe to that, I think it is quite a dangerous hypothesis, because it implies that an elite or a minority has a superior understanding and I don’t think anyone can lay claim to that kind of superior understanding. So I think that it is a very useful discipline to try to unpick falsehood, and I think you can do good by doing that. There is a particular definition of truth called the ‘pragmatic definition’, which says that ‘a belief is true if it is useful for me to believe it’. What is wrong with that idea? Well I don’t think it is a definition of truth. It is a statement of something being useful, not a statement about truth. Just because something is comforting or useful does not mean it is true. Do you have a definition of the word ‘lie’? Yes, of course. A lie has two elements to it. It contains falsehood, and it deliberately deceives somebody. There is an act of conscious will behind it. Of course you can almost tell a lie by telling the truth because you can

Peter Oborne 157 use the truth in order to create a false impression, but a lie is always a deliberate act of deception. This is interesting. In your book you focus on the two ways that you see government, particularly New Labour, mislead the public. The first is through outright falsehood, or more often it seems to be by what is commonly termed ‘spin’, so something is framed in a certain way with certain facts omitted in order to give a particular view of that issue. Now you have cited people like John Lloyd and Onora O’Neill as saying that much of this is the fault of the media – that politicians have to lie more these days because the media distort things so much anyway, but is it right to say that you don’t think that is the case? Well I can see that argument. But someone like O’Neill actually thinks that politicians have some sort of permission to lie because of the venal media, which they say creates such a poisonous arena for discourse that politicians themselves have to operate with deceit. But I think that is a disastrous view. Now I do think that the image of the media as put forward by the government, its allies and people like O’Neill is wrong, by the way. The media is actually an ally, or an instrument of government, and it tells even bigger whoppers, but they are normally pro-government whoppers. In the book I am writing at the moment I provide endless examples of the media telling whoppers on behalf of the government. I mean the classic case of course is before the Iraq War. And there is no question at all that the media sanctioned the lies told by the government, gave them added currency and improved on them. And I demonstrate this again and again. And likewise, in order to get away with the lies that I cite in my book, the government requires the media to act as an accomplice to sanction those lies and not to worry about them or investigate them. In your book The Rise of Political Lying you focus largely on New Labour but then you trace the roots of this lying back through to Major and Thatcher. In terms of this new book, do you see that tradition of lying and distortion going back pre-Thatcher? Is your focus on Iraq here just because it is a contemporary issue and that actually what it represents is a sign of a wider malaise? I think actually there was an epistemological leap with New Labour. I have bent over backwards to discover lies told by Thatcher. Now because I am a Tory, my critics have often said that I am biased! But I only discovered two lies that she told, and have only been able to prove one. She certainly lied over the sinking of the Belgrano, and she probably did over the Westland affair, but there is no actual proof of that. Actually I think she had a

158 Conversations on Truth much more reverent approach to truth-telling by far than New Labour. But I did try to find what I could. And because I was aware that people would criticize me for being a biased Tory I put those appendices at the back of the book – the articles by Tony Bevens in which he set out to prove that Thatcher was a liar. He wrote two quite long articles trying to show that the Tories lied, but by the very severe standards that I set in my book, most of the things he accused her of were not lies at all. So my critics will say that because I am a Tory I am determined to show that Labour are liars and that I won’t accept that Tories lie. Well I can see that that is a compelling way of arguing, but I just don’t think it is true. I do think we had an epistemological leap with New Labour, and for very interesting reasons. New Labour has a different relationship with the truth; it believes it has an overarching vision, a basic goodness to it which the hated Tories don’t, and that this legitimizes its lies. Would you say there is a parallel here between New Labour and the neocons in America and the Straussian idea that lying to the people can be justified in the name of the greater good? Yes – they have the same philosophical origins in communism. I mean if you look at the Neocons they started off as Trots in the 1960s and then they switched, and New Labour comes out of the hard left, not the soft left, and many of its ideologists are former CP. Those who aren’t former CP tend to be ex-Trots, and so they come from a Marxist vein of thinking that teaches that truth is purely instrumental. The Marxist notion is that truth is a bourgeois construct of the ruling class. And because the end justifies the means you are allowed to do what you need to en route to attaining your goals. Because you are virtuous, you are liberated to act in a venal way in order to reach your goals. And it is very interesting how, although politically in mainstream politics the CP and hard left has had little effect, almost all of New Labour – Milburn, Byers, Hewitt, and so on, started on the hard left in the late 1970s, and then leapt over the soft left, people like Roy Hattersley, in the mid-1980s, to land where they are now. It is amazing how many of them are ex-coms! So many of the New Labour ideologists are, and they take their attitude to truth from their early training. And it is not just their view of truth and falsehood, but their whole methodology, their belief in centralizing, and so on. You do list Milburn and Hewitt as two people whom you have not found telling any lies though. Yes. I did a pretty thorough look for lies, and it seemed right for me to mention those who had not told any. Though they were, nonetheless, part of that methodology of deceit.

Peter Oborne 159 What is new about this collaboration between government and the media to construct notions of truth. Could you give us some more examples? I think you are right to ask what is new because this kind of collaboration has existed for a long time – going back to the Zinoviev letter at Tory central office. I think it was during one of the general elections in the 1920s, when the Daily Mail helped the Conservative Party and either MI5 or MI6 to produce a piece of fiction. And there are lots of other examples like that. But what is new is that it has become absolutely systemic. Now, in terms of political reporting, if you go back 30 or 40 years – I have studied this – you find that the political reporter is a fairly low-caste figure. Although he possesses very significant craftsmanship, his shorthand and reporting skills are excellent, in both cases much higher than today, he does not actually talk very much to the politicians, and in quite a lot of cases he doesn’t do this at all. Often these reporters were anonymous as well; they were called ‘parliamentary’ or ‘political’ correspondents. They weren’t political editors – they did not have that status. Now, the difference between the parliamentary correspondent and the political correspondent is extremely important. The parliamentary correspondent works in the press gallery and he can’t go down to the lobbies and mingle with the MPs. He sits in the press gallery and he reports on what happens in parliament. But there’s a second category of correspondent, the political correspondent, who doesn’t actually sit in the press gallery – he does go and mingle; he does have certain rights to approach MPs in the lobbies. He’s allowed to go to the members’ lobby. Now, his job is to interpret. He’s allowed to go and speak to politicians on lobby terms – i.e. in private – and, without citing them specifically, he has to reflect their views – and that is interesting. Until about 1965, the dominant figure in political reporting, was the parliamentary correspondent. The man who rarely meets MPs – he reported what was happening, and that was all he did. Then a shift happened in the mid 1960s or 1970s, and suddenly the political correspondent became the senior figure. The senior man was no longer the man who reported, but the man who interpreted. Now although the lobby correspondent is a very valuable role, the problem is that he get unattributable briefings – the only way he can obtain information from politicians is by talking to them off the record. The weakness of this is that you’re then relying on information which the public cannot see – and when this transaction is a secret one, the relationship can then be used in all kinds of illegitimate ways which are destructive of the truth. So a politican can use it to brief against colleagues, and to make claims that aren’t true. And,

160 Conversations on Truth of course, there’s no comeback, because the person that’s making the hit is that journalist. And while the lobby correspondent only came to the fore quite late in the day, in about the 1960s and 1970s, he quickly became a very senior established figure in Whitehall. After a while, of course, lobby correspondents became wildly dangerous in the way they were used, are used, because they became activists. They have become part of the political process, because they are putting material into the public domain, which cannot be measured or assessed because the sources are anonymous. And it can be very difficult to prove whether what they are reporting is true because they very rarely allow you to see who their sources are. So that becomes the new dynamic. Political journalism in the last 25 years has become much more – John Lloyd and I agree on this – dynamic and much more activist. It’s taken a much more creative role for itself. And this has all kinds of consequences for truth – truth becomes something much more malleable, it becomes something you create. The parliamentary correspondent was just a bloke sitting in the press gallery reporting on what happens in the House of Commons – the virtues of his job were accuracy and objectivity. The virtues of the job of the political correspondent are making a noise, being followed up by all the papers, having an impact, causing a resignation. It’s just a completely different thing. Presumably all of this is also affected by our natural human love of intrigue and drama. And we now live in a very celebrity-oriented, personality-led culture. Do these elements have an impact on the way politics is reported and understood? I’ve thought about this issue of celebrity, and the answer is this. We now live in an era of celebrity politics, where the focus is on the individual, not the institution, and that’s a very recent change. If you look back in history, the model of the British prime minister was someone who was self-effacing, sober and discreet, he was a man who worked with colleagues – his cabinet ministers. And that model comes from Wellington who created it and then Peel who sort of cemented it. And if you look at Baldwin, Attlee, Callaghan, Major, all them were manifestations of this sort of style of leadership. There were exceptions to this, of course, with leaders such as Churchill and Lloyd George. But this gentlemanly ideal has now been displaced by a premodern form of leadership in the last ten or 15 years. Thatcher gave us a clue of it, but Blair is its real embodiment. And this style of politics means that instead of focusing on the political institutions of parliament, Whitehall, and so on, you focus on the individuals. And there are certain structural reasons why this change should

Peter Oborne 161 have happened. If you go back and look at the political parties of the postwar era, they were enormous things – the Tory Party had almost three million members. These parties were ideologically distinct; they had major programmes for government which they wanted to bring about; they had a massive army of activists. In fact their power base lay outside the political class, it was in civil society. So people were voting for programmes, they weren’t voting for individuals. Clement Attlee was, in terms of social programmes, far and away the most devastatingly successful and important political leader of the century. But, as a human being, he was sub-fusc – you wouldn’t notice him. But this has changed with the collapse of ideological distinctions. The two parties now are effectively identical both in terms of organization, and in terms of ideology. The differences are tiny. So the difference now has become the individual. And it’s these claims made about the individual, about himself or herself, that have become overriding. And that completely changes the dynamic of politics, because it is now about creating the story of a particular individual. Just to bring this back a bit to truth – do you think this focus on the individual has created the context within which Tony Blair can say things like, as you mention in your book, ‘I only know what I believe’, and assume that people will be happy accept that? Because what he seems to be doing there is simply saying ‘trust me as a person’. Well yes, let’s put this in the context of truth. As I said, all the focus now is not on the programme, or the party, or the institution – it’s on the individual. And now the individual sells himself, wins general elections, by telling a story about himself. But this story will only be partially true, and there may well be stuff that they certainly don’t want investigated. The other thing that this kind of leader does is he collapses public and private realms together, because he’s selling himself through his personality. So the public didn’t know about Baldwin, or Attlee, or Callaghan personally, but they know everything about Blair and Cameron, as they have sold themselves through their private lives, their personal tragedies. So this brings in a whole new body of people – political advisers, sometimes called spin-doctors, or image managers, whose job it is to massage and create their leader’s public image, and in fact to fabricate a public personality. The public Blair or the public Cameron, is a creation by these political svengalis who nowadays have so much more more power internally within the government or party. So externally we see Cameron or we see Blair, but internally the dynamic is the opposite: it’s Mandelson, then Blair or it’s Steve Hilton, then Cameron. That is the internal order of battle; the

162 Conversations on Truth person who is deferred to in meetings is the Svengali, the image-maker becomes the most important person. And these people manufacture the truth. And they do it through all kinds of ways – above all, through alliances with the media. Your use of the phrase ‘manufacturing the truth’ is interesting. It is quite reminiscent of the title Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent.2 Yes, that’s a very good book, I think. Really? That’s interesting because he comes from the other side of the political spectrum from you. If you look at the alternative thesis, it’s so bland. According to the Alastair Campbell–Tony Blair–John Reid official thesis, which is bought by the high journals, you know, Prospect magazine, or The Times, there is this belief that we have a hostile, nihilistic press. Now this is empirically false. But it also doesn’t have any explanatory utility, either. Because why should this press, which is so utterly establishment, prosperous, affluent, owned by large corporate owners, etc., be nihilistic? Great political thinkers like Marx had fantastic historical understanding. They could see that it would make sense that the proletariat would fight the bourgeoisie. But it doesn’t make sense that the press would fight the government – there’s no sort of reason why it should, and it doesn’t. But Chomsky is just stunning, I think, in part because his argument accords exactly with my practical experience. That you have an embedded press, or what Chomsky says – a client’s press, which owes its allegiance to the political governing elite, through all the levers which Chomsky cites: the power to control information; the power of advertisement; the power of the corporate elites; the common culture of assumption, etc. Anyway, I’m a great Chomsky fan to my surprise! This issue seems to be a highly emotional one for you. What I feel very, very strongly is that journalism should do its proper job. That’s all I want. And what is that? To tell the truth. I do come back here to the truth. Because I do think that our job is to tell the public what is happening. Our job is to tell the truth to the readers about what is happening at Westminster. That is it. That is what I interpret the job of a political journalist as being. The person who picks up Oborne, I hope, will come away having been told what’s happening. But what I’ve noticed is, and what makes me angry (and I demonstrate this in my book), is that the opposite happens – actually political

Peter Oborne 163 journalists tell people lies about what is happening at Westminster. They tell falsehoods. The Iraq War, I have to say just knocked me for six. I just didn’t believe the state machine could lie on that scale. I didn’t think that could happen; I had trust in the British state. Other people didn’t – the left, obviously, doesn’t have trust in the British state – it doesn’t believe in the British state – because it sees it as a bourgeois construction for the oppression of the workers. So it’s not a surprise to the Left, that the state would lie like that. But for me as a Tory, it was shattering. And so I had to recreate myself after that. Let me give you an example. I have been part of the political lobby for a long time, and I believe that No. 10 Downing Street should tell the truth. But I’ve got a lot of evidence now that Downing Street tells lies. Some of it is in my book, but there’s other evidence, more recent evidence, of Downing Street telling lies. And there were two or three recent cases – to do with things like cash for questions, and so on – where we can prove that Downing Street had told lies, and, as a result of being told lies, newspapers have passed on falsehoods to readers. So I drafted a letter, to be sent to Tom Kelly, who was the Downing Street director of communications. And I wanted it to be sent by the chairman of the lobby, on behalf of the whole parliamentary lobby, saying, ‘We have evidence that you have lied. We think that’s quite unacceptable and we want an apology and an assurance that it will never happen again.’ I drafted this out and I gave it to every single lobby journalist I could find – probably a hundred of them, almost everybody got one. But collectively, there was no will to send this letter. My letter was rejected. And the reason is, in my private view – I can’t prove this, because no one’s said this to me – that the key organizations which control the lobby, the Murdoch press, the BBC and five or six key political editors, are too dependent, in the Chomsky sense, on their private links to Downing Street to want to risk them or damage them. And they are the powerbrokers here, and so there can’t be any real revelation. And these key media organizations have extremely close and privileged links, which the ordinary lobby correspondent does not have. So you are interested in the way that power affects our understanding of truth. I’ve watched the connection between truth and power over the last 15 years, and what’s really horrible is the way in which governments survive by deceiving even themselves – I think that they’re unable to come to terms with the truth themselves, and so they feel the need to lie, or to create versions of events for their own benefit, and then for the nation at large. And it’s a really disgusting relationship, and it has become a bit of an obsession for me as a journalist to try to unpick this.

164 Conversations on Truth And it is amazing, the hostility that this approach generates. You turn yourself into something like a pariah figure, because you’re challenging the established mode of thought of the people in power. But it can be quite a nice place to be actually, because you feel it gives you a bit of a mission. It tells you what you’re trying to do: you are trying to win back truth, or to tell the truth, and so you feel that you’re doing something worthwhile. I do think that’s what a journalist should be doing. What I can’t believe, actually, is that I talk to people and they fail to see my point. My colleagues mainly just can’t even understand what I’m talking about. If you’re a Murdoch political journalist, for instance, there’s an approved version of the truth, which has been agreed somehow between Downing Street and Rupert Murdoch, and which is the truth as it goes out to the British people. And they’re the journalists who have the power – the respect. But basically they report a ton of lies. And you will see this on almost any issue. And it baffles, me, actually, that nobody seems to mind very much. It just baffles me. The latest example of this is with John Yates of the Metropolitan Police who is leading the investigation into the cash for peerages scandal. If you read the leading columnists in any of the respectable press in this country, i.e. The Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, The Observer, the Sun, Prospect, the Financial Times, you will read that Mr Yates is a sort of Kenneth Star-type figure who has a politically motivated desire to discredit the political class. He is subject – falsely – to a series of attacks on both his motivation and his character. He is actually just a pretty humble policeman from the Met, but they are determined to destroy him because he is trying to cast some light on the cash for peerages question. It’s a rather upside-down world. You speak, in your book, of the way in which our media culture forensically analyses language. And this is also something that Andrew Marr talks about in My Trade.3 And you use the example in your book that, when Michael Howard was asked, ‘Do you want to stand for leadership?’, and he said no, but it then later turned out that that must have been a lie because he did then stand for leadership. Now you say that he should have tried to find a more subtle form of language. But doesn’t this forensic analysis of language that the media engages in contribute to the need for politicians to lie? And are there ever times when a politician might be morally obliged to lie? Well, obviously for all of us, in our private lives, there are areas where we find it difficult to tell the truth – legitimately so. You don’t say, when you see somebody: ‘Well, you’re looking very ugly today.’ There’s whole loads of stuff which you just don’t do, where you collaborate in white lies, and

Peter Oborne 165 so on. And the same is true with the political process, when, as you say, people are asked about their intentions in relation to certain jobs, and so on. But that isn’t really what I’m talking about. I’m talking about a different level of untruth. And I would accept that within the political domain, there are a few occasions where it might be legitimate to lead people to believe things that are not true. It might be OK in the rare cases where it is a matter of life and death – in a war for instance, or where somebody’s been kidnapped. But that doesn’t legitimize the systemic telling of lies about everyday political things. There is a section of your book where you trace the philosophical pedigree of lying, back through Machiavelli to Plato. And something that struck me in terms of the classical world is that, at universities, people were often taught the art of rhetoric – the art of arguing and persuasion. This was seen as being a subject worthy of study in its own right. Now, it seems that while we might not teach rhetoric at university now, ‘spin’ could actually be seen as a contemporary form of rhetoric – in terms of learning how to present something or persuade people. You should be careful of this word ‘spin’. I think you should try not to use it, actually. Because it isn’t at all clear as to what it means. It is often seen as an attack word, but it’s also a defence word, oddly enough, as it can make things appear to be less than they are. So someone might say: ‘Oh, spin is all right. We don’t lie.’ But I think the word ‘spin’ obscures thought, because people use it as a cliché. People should actually say what they mean. Now there have always been advocates and advocacy. That is the way political debate has always been framed. And it’s true that we don’t teach rhetoric at university, but we teach law and history and philosophy, all of which talk about ways of presenting an argument. But the latest line of defence on the Iraq War is that the September dossier was just a piece of advocacy. That’s what they’re now saying, and they’re implying that that entitled them to lie. You hear this again and again from the government apologists. But that is a deliberate misunderstanding of what advocacy is – it is an attempt to confuse by ministers. Because it’s simply not true that advocacy entitles you to lie. The prosecution advocate in a court case can make persuasive lines of arguments, but he or she cannot present false facts. And the September dossier contained a lot of false facts. So there is a vital distinction there. As a journalist and as an individual, how do you seek to protect yourself? Do you try to keep a distance from the people you’re writing about? And do you find yourself under any pressure from the people you write for? Or do you not want to talk about that?

166 Conversations on Truth No – I will talk about it. I have the luxury, now, of being quite a wellknown columnist. But I understand this issue so well, in terms of its practicalities, because I started out as a reporter. I was a reporter for about 15 years. So I understand the pressures of the newsdesk, the need to break the exclusive stories, and the corrupting relationships you develop with sources in order to get stories, and the collaborating you do with other journalists in order to decide how to present a story. I’ve done all of these things. I would say that I have never lied, but as both a financial journalist and as a political journalist, I have entered into understandings with certain aides, or ministers, or public relations men, whereby I have played down one aspect of the story and played up another, for instance. And, in a way, that is deception actually, if you’re being absolutely rigorous with your terms. So I can speak with some authority, because I’ve been through all of that. And now I am in a position, which I have evolved into in the last five or ten years, where I have more control. When I was offered a job by the Daily Mail, I said to them, ‘I will write your weekly column, but I insist on having a written guarantee of editorial independence.’ And I got it. And likewise, when I first became a political journalist, I went out and sought to meet and talk and have close relationships with politicians. So I was as promiscuous as the next reporter when I set out. But now I can afford to take quite an austere view about this. I think that those are corrupting relationships. And now that I have worked out this analysis that I have been explaining to you, I have an obligation to put it into practice. But even now I have a political column to write, and I need to be able to tell my readers what is going on. And to do that, I need to go and talk to people. And there are certain compromises which that involves. In return for learning the truth about what is happening in politics this week, you have got to give back. If you’re going to have a conversation with somebody, it will be on certain terms. So there are compromises, but I do it much less these days. I try to be very, very scrupulous indeed, now, about the kinds of things which I will and won’t do in return for information.

13

David Livingstone Smith

Do you have a working definition of the term ‘truth’? Philosophers have been trying to define the word for a very long time, and there probably isn’t an entirely satisfactory definition for it. I use the word ‘truth’ to describe a fit between a representation of the world and how the world really is. And how would you define the word ‘knowledge’? I would give a traditional philosophical definition of knowledge that defines knowledge in relation to truth. Knowledge is justified true belief: when we have knowledge we have a belief that’s true and we have good reasons for regarding it as true. In relation to this, then, and in relation to your book Why We Lie,1 would you be able to define what a lie is? And could you put that in the context of how we understand the term morally? In my view a lie is any form of behaviour that has the function of preventing an organism from accurately representing the world. Of course, usually when we talk about lying the organisms that interest us are other people. According to some moral theories (Immanuel Kant’s is a good example) lying is always immoral. This creates some obvious difficulties, as there are circumstances in which lying is the most morally acceptable alternative. A different take is that the moral acceptability of lying depends, in any particular case, on its consequences. Many people have a nebulous position that is midway between these two. They hold that communications ought, for the most part, to be truthful but also that there are extenuating circumstances in which deception is morally acceptable. But people often don’t apply this criterion consistently to themselves. We are much more ready to apply it to 167

168 Conversations on Truth others – that is, we insist that others tell us the truth, and not lie to us, while cutting ourselves considerable slack. Pronouncements like ‘It is wrong to lie’ are, in my opinion, largely attempts at coercion. In practice, while we want to prevent other people from misleading us (at least in ways in which we don’t want to be misled), we nonetheless reserve the right to mislead others. Reserving the right to depart from the truth in our dealings with others would, of course, be blatantly hypocritical if we were to say it out loud, or indeed if we were to become aware of it. So, we tend to lie to ourselves about our commitment to truth, and this often makes us unconscious of our own dishonesty. This creates an interesting moral problem, because it raises the question of whether people can be held morally responsible for acts of which they are unconscious. On the one hand, if you do not know that you are doing something, you are not in a position consciously to refrain from doing it, so it seems reasonable to deny that you are responsible for what you are doing. But on the other hand, you are performing the act, and this suggests that you are responsible for it. Often the definition of a lie is ‘a conscious effort to mislead somebody’. That’s a hopelessly narrow definition of lying. When trying to understand how an aspect of human nature fits into the bigger picture of life on earth, which is what I try to do, then a broader definition is preferable. If you use the narrow definition of lying, then you will only end up employing a different word for the forms of lying that don’t fit into the narrow definition. For instance, some people make a semantic distinction between ‘lying’ and ‘deception’, defining the former as the conscious effort to mislead, and the latter as all the other misleading forms of behaviour. Now, this way of cutting the pie is not false, but it is rather misleading because it sets deliberate verbal lies apart from all the other forms of guile. Almost everyone would admit that it is possible to lie by omission, and that’s not an act of verbally expressing an untruth – it’s an act of refraining from verbally expressing a truth. Press them, and most people would also agree that it is possible to lie para-verbally – for example, through the emphasis that we give to certain expressions and the signs of emotion that we display when making certain statements. Now, if you’re going to treat para-verbal phenomena as forms of lying, why not go the whole hog? Why not accept that it is possible to lie non-verbally? Clearly, we non-verbally present ourselves to the world in ways that have the function of misleading others. We do this through our bearing (think of the confident swagger that conceals a timid heart), the way that we dress, our use of cosmetics, cosmetic surgery, hairpieces, hair colouring and artificial fragrances, to name just a few. Open your eyes to the devious choreography of

David Livingstone Smith 169 human social behaviour, and you will see that deliberate verbal untruths constitute only a small proportion of the lies that we communicate. So in the end does it all come down to biology? Yes, in so far as we’re animals. Like all other animals, members of the species Homo sapiens are disposed to certain forms of behaviour and not to others. Now, biologists have found that deception – which is equivalent to lying in my parlance – is really quite pervasive in nature. It is even found, in some rather unsophisticated forms, in plants and even microorganisms. Deception is so prevalent in nature because it is favoured by evolution. It is an error – as well as the epitome of human hubris – to think of our species as free from the evolutionary constraints that bind all the other organisms on the planet. Nietzsche had it exactly right when he wrote, ‘Nature was not designed by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception.’ The biosphere is awash with deceit. Could you give some examples of that deception? Could you put this in the context of the relationship between deception and survival in the animal kingdom? Evolution is driven by reproductive success. Those organisms that can out-reproduce their competitors obviously end up proliferating their traits more successfully than others. Any heritable trait that gives an organism an edge in what Darwin called the ‘struggle for existence’ is therefore likely to be preserved by natural selection and transmitted genetically to that organism’s descendants. Now, the capacity for deception is one of the traits that give organisms such an edge. If you’re a vulnerable animal, it pays to be able to deceive predators into thinking you’re a twig or a leaf. And if you’re a predator, it pays to be able to deceive your prey into thinking that you’re not there, when actually you’re poised to devour them. One of my favourite examples is the mirror orchid. These plants produce flowers that bear an uncanny resemblance to females of the species of wasp that pollinates them. They even produce a hyperpotent imitation of the sexual scent of the female wasp. As a result, male wasps are attracted to the flowers and attempt to copulate with them, which results in their carrying pollen from flower to flower. Using my broad definition of ‘lying’ we can say that the orchid lies to the wasp because it was designed by Mother Nature to misrepresent the world to the wasp. Of course, the orchids do not do this deliberately – they don’t need to, nor can they! Evolution provides an explanation of why deception is so prevalent in nature, and it also explains why the tendency to lie is built into human nature. These facts are relevant to your question about intentional acts of

170 Conversations on Truth deception, because we’ve apparently been fashioned by evolution to lie unconsciously and unintentionally; most of our lying takes place ‘under the radar’ of consciousness. As I mentioned before, for the most part we remain blissfully unaware of our deceitfulness. Here’s a nice experiment that you can try. Make an effort to keep track of how many lies you tell over the course of 24 hours. Even if you restrict yourself to counting verbal lies, you will probably be shocked by how frequently and easily untruths roll off of your tongue. You see, we are natural born liars – this is part of what it means to be human. Anyone wishing to come to grips with the moral dimensions of lying ought to begin with this uncomfortable truth. So how does it work in relation to humans’ reproductive success? Effective lying is a passport to success. Research indicates that accomplished liars are more popular, have more sexual opportunities and have better employment prospects then their less deceptive peers. The social player, the wheeler-dealer, is able to use others and manipulate their perceptions of him or her, in ways that facilitate getting ahead in life. Although most people seem, deep down, to recognize this, it can be difficult to accept if one clings to a naïve belief in the moral order of the world. So if lying is such an inherent part of our reproductive success, why do we live in a culture which – at least in one respect – appears to put such an enormous value upon the notion of truth, whether that’s in, say, a political or moral context? I wouldn’t want to reduce everything to the biological account that I just gestured towards. But part of the story is certainly that although it’s advantageous to lie successfully, it’s not advantageous to be lied to. So, as I mentioned before, we all have a vested interest in keeping everyone else honest. Our insistence on the value of truth is, I think, largely an attempt to police one another. When it comes to our own behaviour, our commitment to truth often amounts to little more than lip-service. You’re interested in evolutionary psychology. In your experience as psychologist, do you see psychological difficulties for people who lie often and successfully? I’m thinking about this in terms of cognitive dissonance. I’m not, strictly speaking, a psychologist. I’m a philosopher interested in the dynamics of human nature. Now, to address your question, the idea that deception is inherently pathological or that it leads to psychological problems can be very seductive, but it is highly dubious. In fact, I think that it is usually a moral claim dressed up as a scientific one. Because many

David Livingstone Smith 171 people believe, or at least think that they believe, that lying is intrinsically harmful to the liar or that it stems from some low-grade form of mental illness. In fact, the harmfulness or otherwise of lying probably depends on how the lying is done. Clearly, there are certain stresses that conscious liars have to be able to accommodate, and psychological stress may lead to psychological difficulties. But let’s not get too moralistic here. People who lie very poorly arguably suffer greater stress than that suffered by competent liars, perhaps because they don’t lie enough or because they lie so clumsily that it gets them into trouble. Let’s discuss this issue of self-deception. You talk a great deal in your book, as we’ve already mentioned, about camouflage in animals and of our capacity to lie in order to increase our reproductive success. But you argue that self-deception is a step further on from that – is that correct? Yes. Could you explain what self-deception is? Self-deception is lying to oneself. Just as we can manipulate other people by causing them to represent the world falsely, we can do the same to ourselves. To understand how this is possible it is essential to grasp the fact that, strange as it may sound, none of us is directly acquainted with the workings of his or her own mind. Descartes believed that the mind is transparent to itself, and that we have incorrigible access to our own mental states. This idea has been enormously influential. But the notion that we can peer into our own minds as we might peer into a fishbowl is profoundly misguided. We have to represent our own mental states to ourselves in order to be conscious of them, and anything that can be represented can also be misrepresented. Sometimes it is beneficial not to be too aware of one’s own thoughts, and in such circumstances self-deception takes over. This happens automatically, rather than consciously and deliberately. Can you give us an example of this? Sometimes when I give symposia or public lectures I get rather nervous. Like many academics – particularly if they’re philosophers – I sometimes doubt that I really know what I’m talking about. Of course, we philosophers rarely admit such doubts to one another, but in our private moments we are sometimes able to admit them to ourselves. So, when I’m in front of an audience of my peers, I somehow manage to convince myself that I possess a profound understanding of whatever it is that I’m supposed to be speaking about. If I can manage to convince myself of this,

172 Conversations on Truth then I am likely to give a terrific performance. In consequence, my reputation is enhanced. People invite me to give more talks, and buy my books. When I eventually come to my senses I am often astonished by my own aplomb. Mind you, there are plenty of philosophers and, I imagine, plenty of ‘experts’ in other disciplines, who never come to their senses. They are chronically deluded about their own pretensions to knowledge. Could you talk a bit more about the mechanism of self-deception, specifically in relation to the idea of the unconscious? The idea of the unconscious leads us straight to Freud. Now, Freud was one of the first psychological investigators decisively to reject the Cartesian concept of mind. He not only argued that mental states are brain states, rather than states of an immaterial mind, but he also denied that we can introspect our own mental processes. Freud held that mental life is essentially unconscious. He argued that all of our thinking goes on outside our awareness, and that only a small portion of this unconscious thinking gets secondarily represented consciously. In addition to this very general claim about human cognition, Freud also spoke about the unconscious as an engine of self-deception. I think the best way to explain this aspect of Freud’s thinking is as follows. Suppose that I were to ask you to introduce yourself to a group of strangers. In such a circumstance there will be some things that you will be prepared to say, and other things that you won’t divulge, but which you will share with close friends. By the same token, there are things that you are not willing to reveal to your friends, but which you would communicate to someone with whom you are more intimate, say a spouse or a lover. And there are other things that are so sensitive that you will admit them only to yourself. These are things that you will go to the grave never having told anyone. Now, Freud argued that there’s a further step in this sequence of ever-decreasing circles; there are some things that you won’t even say to yourself. And he meant this literally, because he thought that there is an important relationship between language and consciousness. Freud believed that conscious thought is, essentially, silently talking to oneself. So, to render yourself unaware of your own thoughts, you need only refrain from including them in your ongoing internal monologue. Again, this happens automatically rather than deliberately. Beyond that, I’m not able to tell you very much about the psychological or neurological mechanisms of self-deception, because these processes are poorly understood. But I would go along with Freud and say that language is probably very important in this connection. Language facilitates deception because – and here we’re coming back to the narrow conception of lying – it enables us to paint false pictures of reality at very little cost.

David Livingstone Smith 173 Language also enables us to weave deceitful narratives into our conversations with ourselves – to pull the wool over our own eyes. In your book, you’re quite hesitant in some respects to champion Freud, because there are many scientists who think that what he said was a load of nonsense. Scoffing at Freud is de rigueur in certain sectors of the contemporary intellectual scene. This is unfortunate because Freud had some very interesting conjectures about how the mind works. Those who dismiss his theories in this way are often spectacularly ill-informed about them. Unfortunately, Freud’s admirers are often only marginally more knowledgeable about his theories. I think that it is important to acknowledge Freud’s significance without glossing over his shortcomings, and to do this in a way that is accessible to readers who are extremely biased against him. Whenever I write or talk about Freud, I am acutely aware that I am skating on thin ice, which probably accounts for your sense of my hesitancy. Right, but very interestingly you talk about how various cognitive scientists refrained from using the idea of the unconscious for a while because it sounded too Freudian. How do you relate this Freudian idea of the unconscious to the way that the term is used in contemporary cognitive science now? Is it the same sort of thing, or is there a different idea of how the unconscious works? There is considerably greater similarity than most cognitive scientists realize. Freud had a much broader and more sophisticated notion of unconscious mental processes than is often attributed to him. Nowadays, psychologists who embrace the idea of unconscious mental processes claim that their ‘cognitive’ notion of the unconscious contrasts sharply with that of the benighted Freud who supposedly conceived of the unconscious as a seething mass of emotions and instinctual drives. In fact, Freud explicitly denied the existence of unconscious emotions and drives, and argued that unconscious mental processes are cognitive in nature. I see Freudian theory as a real precursor of the views of unconscious mental processing found in contemporary cognitive science, and in some respects, maybe, even ahead of them. Do you think that’s one of the reasons why contemporary cognitive scientists try to describe the unconscious in a way that’s different in their minds from Freud? Would you say that that’s possibly an act of self-deception on their behalf?

174 Conversations on Truth Often it is from sheer ignorance. But, yes, I think that there is sometimes an element of self-deception at work. Science is an emotionally laden enterprise. It’s not all cold reason, as some would have us think. Many psychologists, especially in the USA, seem to have an almost visceral antagonism towards anything Freudian. In your book you talk a great deal about the difficulty of analysing lying. Because in a clinical situation you can only usually analyse lies where the person being studied has no investment in the lies they’re telling. Whereas if they have an investment in the lies they’re telling, then they are probably in a real-world situation, and that is much harder to study scientifically. So are there problems with, or limitations to, the scientific method? And if so, what are they? First of all, I want to make it clear that I think that science is our only path to knowledge of the world. Science is really glorified common sense – it’s just reasoning on the basis of the evidence before us: a formalization of the kinds of thinking we engage in in our everyday life about the things that really matter to us. It goes without saying that some questions are very hard to get scientific answers to. Some of these questions may ultimately prove to be intractable, but neither I nor anyone else knows a priori whether this is the case. Now, any empirical approach to a research question needs to be sensitive to the conditions under which that question can be meaningfully investigated. Psychologists are not always sensitive to the complex nuances involved in social behaviour, and therefore use experimental protocols that may not address the issues properly and generate trivial results. This ought to prompt us to develop better, more naturalistic, research protocols rather than assuming that these matters are beyond the purview of scientific investigation. So do you think that, in relation to people who believe that the scientific method is the best, or only, way of truly conceiving of the world, there are elements of self-deception going on there? Or is that a more fundamentally wrong-headed way of thinking about how science works? I think that science, broadly conceived, is the only way of obtaining knowledge of the world. Hume had this pegged almost 300 years ago when he argued in his Treatise of Human Nature that there are two and only two rationally acceptable modes of enquiry. The first, mathematical and logical reasoning, is suitable for investigating the relationships that obtain between our concepts. The second, empirical reasoning, is suitable for investigating matters of fact. There is no third option, and we should be suspicious of anyone who claims that there is. This is not to say that it is

David Livingstone Smith 175 impossible to make true intuitive judgements about the world. That would be a very stupid thing to say. It’s just that these true intuitive judgements do not count as knowledge unless they can be logically or evidentially justified. So, I would say that one can truly conceive of certain aspects of the world without the benefit of science, but this falls short of having knowledge of the world. Science gives us the best way of truly conceiving of the world if we are interested in having knowledge of it. People who are unfamiliar with science sometimes mistakenly think that scientific method is monolithic. It’s not. Scientific methods are quite disparate. There isn’t a scientific method; there are a number of such methods. Of course, all of these procedures conform to certain norms – certain norms of rationality. But these norms need to be exercised in an appropriately flexible fashion. And it has to be realized that, as we say in philosophical jargon, there are degrees of epistemic constraint involved. There are some propositions about the world that we are much less certain about than others, and it may be that we will always remain uncertain about them. But that doesn’t mean we should consign them to epistemic oblivion. Speculation is a very important part of science. However, science harnesses speculation to testing – imagination is constrained by empirical procedures used to evaluate objectively the products of imagination. Unfortunately, there are a lot of scientists who take the rather pedestrian view that testing is all there is to science. And that’s just wrong. It’s wrong historically and it’s wrong methodologically. To get back to the main issue of lying: you have said that we are better at lying, in the broad forms that you describe, than we are at spotting lies. Can you speak a little bit more about that? Paradoxically, we lie best when we lie unconsciously, and this is something which we do a hell of a lot of the time. I’ve heard people say: ‘I never lie’, or ‘I teach my children not to lie.’ But this is nonsense. We teach our children how to lie rather than not to lie! Can you give an example of that? Parents teach their children that they mustn’t tell Granny that her Christmas present sucks, and insist that they thank her. They instruct their children to pretend to respect teachers and other adults whom they in fact despise, and to apologize for acts that they do not feel sorry for. This is all training in socially mandated forms of deceit. In England they call it ‘tact’! That’s right, and people call it ‘tact’ here in the States too! Using euphemistic expressions like ‘tact’, ‘politeness’ and ‘diplomacy’ is just

176 Conversations on Truth semantic gerrymandering. Adults often tell children about Father Christmas, the Easter Bunny, and so on. These are out-and-out lies, but we avoid classifying them as such. Instead, we call such practices ‘preserving the magic of childhood’ or some such rubbish. On other occasions we make things easy for ourselves by resorting to the notion of ‘little white lies’. We say to ourselves we are lying only to protect others’ feelings, which sounds rather virtuous and altruistic. Well, this, too, is usually nonsense. After all, if you tell someone a hard, painful truth you run the risk of their no longer liking you – so your white lie may be a way of manipulating others’ impressions in order to secure their affection. Now, returning to your question, there’s a good deal of research indicating that most of us are pretty lousy at detecting lies. In fact, when trying to determine whether someone is lying or not, most people might just as well flip a coin. Experiments suggest that even experienced lawenforcement officers only have a 50/50 chance of catching someone in a lie. The reason that most of us are appallingly bad at detecting lies is that we pay far too much attention to words. Words are an extraordinarily valuable resource, but, as Wittgenstein never tired of pointing out, we are easily bewitched by them. The best lie detectors are able to resist the seductive pull of language and attend to the non-verbal and para-verbal aspects of communication; they ignore the lyrics but listen to the music and watch the dance. This is important, because lies are often betrayed by one’s bearing, gestures, facial expressions and tone of voice, all of which may fail to cohere with the content of the sentences that one utters. I think our vulnerability to verbal deception is part of the price our species has paid for language acquisition. I think – though I don’t have any research specifically to back this up – that we’re much better at detecting lying when we’re not consciously trying. Sometimes, one walks away from an encounter with the feeling that something isn’t kosher, and this intuitive judgement is often spot on. Nature has endowed us with an exquisite unconscious sensitivity to deceit, but our obsession with language often prevents us from making use of it. So this has major implications in terms of the ease with which we can be manipulated. I’m thinking in terms of advertising or of political messaging. Politics is advertising. We’re in the midst of an election season here in the USA right now [November 2008], and truth seems to be largely irrelevant to voters’ preferences. Politics is driven by eye-catching presentations and appealing slogans.

David Livingstone Smith 177 Could you give us a couple of examples in relation to that? Politicians are professional liars. They are people who are skilled at managing their image so as to make themselves attractive to large segments of the population. At the most general level, they do this by offering some form of salvation – a promise of magical deliverance from our problems. More specifically, I think that the secret of political success is to craft a message that coheres with and validates the public’s self-deceptions. The psychological impact of this can be immensely powerful. Recently, many Americans have been watching the debates between John McCain and Barack Obama on television. Given that viewers ostensibly decide whom to vote for on the basis of what they have to say, it ought to be disheartening to discover that both told lies. However, this fact doesn’t seem to have much impact on voters’ attitudes. It gets rationalized away. In relation to the election, I’m constantly amazed at how, from my point of view, the Republican Party, or the McCain campaign specifically, seems to lie far more frequently and audaciously than the Democratic Party or the Obama campaign. Is it possible that I’m right in that judgement, or could it be just that I am deceiving myself that Obama is more trustworthy simply because I want him to win? Either is possible. I tend to share your views about the Republican campaign, but this might be explained by the fact that I am prejudiced in favour of Obama, and I have noticed a tendency in myself to disregard facts that are inconsistent with this prejudice. If I were prejudiced towards McCain rather than Obama, then the lies that the Democrats have told would no doubt seem comparably obvious and grotesque. Now, there’s another way to look at all this. It may be that representatives of the McCain campaign lie more clumsily and therefore more obviously than Obama’s people do. So, it may just be that the Democratic team were more effective liars than the Republicans. The only way to determine whether one group lied more extensively than the other is to make an objective tally – to appeal to empirical evidence rather than rely on our biased impressions. You use the term ‘Machiavellian module’ quite a lot in your book. Could you explain what that means in relation to the discussion we’ve been having? Sure. ‘Machiavellian module’ is just a cute term for the idea that human beings evolved to possess an immensely powerful but largely unconscious faculty for social intelligence. The idea derives from the work of two primatologists – Richard Byrne and Andrew Whiten. Byrne and Whiten

178 Conversations on Truth developed what’s called ‘the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis’, which is the idea that the incredibly rapid development of intelligence in primates – and remember, we’re primates – was driven by the need to navigate complex social relationships. Our high social intelligence is the outcome of millions of years of living in large social groups in which one must master elaborate interpersonal skills in order to thrive. We take our amazing social intelligence for granted – you know, most of us can walk into a crowded room, say, at a cocktail party – and make extraordinarily rapid inferences about what’s going on in the room on the basis of minimal information. We automatically observe and interpret the significance of the way people are standing, their gestures, how they’re talking, whom they’re talking to, and so on. Compare the agony of learning the multiplication table in primary school with the ease with which you understood the dominance hierarchy in the class, you can get a sense of how our intelligence is geared towards processing information about social relations. Now, Byrne and Whiten called this ‘Machiavellian intelligence’ specifically because a great deal of social intelligence involves skilful manipulation of others, and the ability to keep track of and fend off their attempts at manipulating you. And, so, in using that term, what I’m suggesting – and I’m taking my cue here from Freud, Byrne and Whiten and also from the UK psychologist Nicholas Humphrey who wrote a pioneering paper on this subject called ‘The Social Function of Intellect’2 – is that we possess refined unconscious capacity for social intelligence, for engaging in deceptive communication and for winnowing deceptive from truthful communication. Because this faculty operates unconsciously, it is consistent with the observation that when we try consciously to distinguish lies from truth we generally don’t do very well. If we are so predisposed to self-deception, and so bad at spotting that deception, either in others or in ourselves, doesn’t that leave us with a bit of a sort of philosophical or epistemological problem? If we accept that we are that deluded or deceived most of the time, how can we possibly begin to talk about it? There seems to be a paradox there. There are several issues here. One is that we should not let the pervasiveness of deception blind us to the pervasiveness of truth. In fact, we can be confident that, as pervasive as deception is in human intercourse, truth must be even more pervasive, because deception is parasitic on truth. Remember the story of the boy who cried wolf? Without a background of truthfulness, lies lose their value. So the nightmare scenario that ‘everything is a lie, everything is a self deception’, is really an unrealistic one. However, knowing that most communications, both to ourselves and to

David Livingstone Smith 179 others, must be truthful doesn’t tell us which ones are not truthful. Suppose I were to give you a list of 100 propositions and tell you that 99 of them are true and one of them is false. Further, suppose I were to tell you that you must choose a proposition from the list, and if it turns out to be false your child will be tortured. In such circumstances – circumstances in which there is a great deal at stake – it is rational to treat every communication as potentially false. Of course, this thought experiment describes an extreme situation. However, it finds an echo in those circumstances of daily life in which it is costly to be duped. There is also another point to consider in this connection. If, as I have argued, it’s sometimes advantageous for us to deceive ourselves, we’re really going against the grain of human nature in attempting to become aware of our self-deceptions. Our position is similar to that of Oedipus, who, after becoming King of Thebes, mounts an investigation into the murder of Laius, the former king, only to discover that he, Oedipus, was the murderer and that Laius was his father! Anyone trying to track their own self-deceptions is attempting to perform an unnatural act, and the odds are stacked against their being successful at it. Let’s look at this from a more biological perspective. You talk about the way the eye works in your book. And you mention the fact that, even if you try to focus on a point with great concentration, your eye will still dart around and therefore it won’t see everything, and so our brain has then to fill in the missing bits, and you call this ‘the confabulation of saccades’. Is the implication of this that our capacity to perceive reality, even leaving aside the issue of self-deception, is inherently limited? Of course it is. So do these inherent limitations on our capacity to perceive reality have philosophical ramifications? Oh, of course. The means that we have for accessing the world places constraints on what we can know, and how we can know it. We acquire knowledge of the world around us by means of our brains and sense organs. These evolved to access certain features of the world, and not others. I think that it is reasonable to suppose that there are vast tracts of reality that will forever remain inaccessible to us. And doesn’t that therefore mean that at some level, our perception of the world is that which we have created in order to fill in those gaps? Yes that’s right. However, I think we can also safely say that natural selection has made sure that our minds are not usually burdened by gratuitous

180 Conversations on Truth illusions. The way we perceive our world has to more or less correspond with how the world is, at least in the important respects – the respects that matter in our daily lives – or else our species would have become extinct. Yes. Otherwise you could end up in what one might describe as extreme postmodernist territory. Extreme postmodernism is scientifically absurd and philosophically incoherent. Any organism has to be adapted to its environment, and that includes cognitive adaptations to its environment. It’s just that in the social sphere, sometimes self-deception is advantageous for the very specific reasons that I have described to you. At the end of your book, you are quite impassioned about why, despite all of this, we need, as you put it, to ‘tell our children history, not fairytales’. And you talk about resisting things like religious fervour or political fervour. Could you talk a little bit about that? Why is this capacity for self-deception more dangerous now than it has been historically, and why is it important to try to overcome that? I think it’s always been terribly dangerous, but it’s more dangerous now than ever before. Human beings now have greater power than they’ve ever had in the past. So if we use deception for ill – and it’s not necessarily always used for ill, deception can also be used beneficially – but if we use it for ill, we can now use it for much greater ill. This is also true of self-deception. My most recent book, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War3 looks specifically at the role of self-deception in war. In it, I make the case that some of the worst atrocities in history were made possible by our capacity to lie to ourselves. The hazards of collective deception and self-deception are augmented by the fact that our means of communication are so much more effective now than they were in the past. Populations are no longer isolated from one another – television, radio, email and the world wide web link us. The world has become dramatically smaller, and as Mark Twain pointed out, long ago, a lie travels half-way round the world before the truth has had the chance to get its shoes on. Well, we now possess information superhighways along which lies can and do travel at breakneck speed. In your personal life, how has your study of truth and lies affected the way you live? Does it have a personal impact on you? Yes, it does. The practical impact has been threefold. First, I’ve realized what an appallingly bad liar I am – I mean really, really bad! I’m terribly unskilled at it. Second, understanding the degree to which we’re putty in our own hands when it comes to self-deception has made me more willing

David Livingstone Smith 181 to question my own beliefs, inferences, perceptions and memories. And third, understanding that the penchant for lying is normal, that it’s natural, that it’s built in to the human animal, has made me more compassionate. I have come to realize that it is inevitable that human beings will often stray from the truth, often without realizing that they are doing so, and we should not judge them too harshly for failing to live up to an impossible ideal. Being truthful requires discipline and vigilance. Ultimately, though, no matter how hard we try, we’re all just poor animals condemned to struggle against the constraints imposed upon us by our own nature.

14

Mary Warnock

Do you have a working definition of the term ‘truth? No, I certainly don’t. Rather, I have a very pragmatic approach to truth. And I think that philosophers have really wasted an awful lot of time on trying to find a concept of truth that covers truths of science and truths of the imagination, and all these different kinds of truth. Basically, I think we normally talk about truth in a fairly pragmatic context. For instance, it’s true that today is Monday. And if you tell me that it’s not I simply say that’s not true. And this knowledge comes from a build-up of evidence that today is Monday, this is evidence which is extremely easy to come by. So at the end of the day I think we need to talk about it in terms of what there is evidence for. But, on the other hand, it’s quite possible to use the word ‘true’ in a way that is not evidence-based, or not exactly evidencebased, where one just believes that something or other accords with experience. Could you give an example of that? It seems to me, very obviously, that there are nice things and nasty things. I think that is a very important truth. And people on the whole can come to a pretty good measure of agreement on what is nice and what is nasty. Everybody knows that it’s nasty to be deprived of food, water or freedom of movement. And these are things which we regard as human rights, which we know people don’t want to be deprived of. And I think that is a very important truth. It makes it possible to teach morality, as a matter of fact. Because if you teach children that nice things are nicer than nasty things, and that people on the whole can agree on what’s nasty, then you can teach children to put themselves in other people’s shoes, which they might not be able to do at all without being taught. So you say, ‘How would you like it if somebody hit you or smashed up your building with 182

Mary Warnock 183 bricks?’ And the child can honestly agree that he knows that he wouldn’t like it. And if he’s got an interest in doing nice things and not doing nasty things, then he will stop himself from persecuting other people. So it seems to me that that truth, that we have an awful lot in common, is very important. But if you ask me, ‘Well what is your evidence for that?’, all I can say in reply is: ‘Just look around you.’ Do you have a definition of the word ‘evidence?’ Yes, I mean I think I use the scientific concept of evidence – so verification is by looking at how the things we’ve been talking about actually do work. But of course the way we look for evidence will differ according to different subjects. So the way we look for evidence of the existence of particular galaxies is quite different from the way we look for evidence that the lettuce seeds that I’ve got in my garden are growing satisfactorily. In that case, I can just go out in to my garden and look with my own eyes. But it is much more complicated, when one is gathering evidence about the nature of universe and the stars and so on – obviously, one needs special apparatus, etc. What’s the difference between evidence and knowledge? I think, in an awful lot of contexts, you can’t claim to have knowledge of something unless there’s some evidence for it. I mean, think of the disagreements about alternative medicine. Those people who practise alternative medicine are not willing to subject their theories to evidential test, and so they can’t really claim to know if they’re right. Whereas more orthodox doctors will not claim to know what they don’t know, or will not claim not to know what they actually do. And what is your understanding of the term ‘relativism’? I think my understanding is that relativists believe that there is no such thing as truth. People who are relativistically inclined tend to say things like, ‘That may be true for you but it’s not true for me.’ Now they don’t necessarily mean by that that everybody simply has their own concept of truth. I mean obviously it’s true of me that I’m an 80-year-old, but it’s not true of you. It is true that some people hold a relativist position absolutely and in general relation to everything. But most people tend to use relativistic concepts in the context of morality, when they say, ‘People have different moralities and they’re all equally justified.’ Though I think that very few people really seriously believe that all truth is relative. I mean, quite simply you wouldn’t be able to get on in the world if you really did not believe that there was any objective truth.

184 Conversations on Truth What’s the relationship between ideas of morality and ideas of truth? My idea of morality is very closely connected with this idea of truth that I’ve already talked about – this idea that human beings share a lot of things in common. What we like and what we dislike, and what we want to avoid, are, broadly speaking, all very much the same. I mean I know this can be infinitely distorted by quirky religious beliefs, and so on. But if you leave aside religion, which is a huge example of claims to knowledge without evidence, then I think most people would agree that, you know, having your thumbnails torn off is nasty, and you want to avoid it, or being thrown out of your home is nasty, and you want to avoid it. And I think you can’t really teach anybody to want to be morally good rather than morally bad, unless they accept that belief, which is a factual belief, about the similarity of one human being to another. Morality arises among social human beings, so it must be based on beliefs that we have about other human beings, and indeed other sentient beings, because we could, up to a point, include animals as well. Would it be fair to say that there are certain moral statements or principles which are more true than others? More true, or more important? Well, how do you see the distinction between those two? There’s no doubt whatever that some principles, some moral statements, are more fundamental, more important, more significant to us than others. And one of the things, of course, that’s really important, though not always overridingly important, in my view, is that we place a great deal of value on human life. But one thing does seem to be fundamentally true, and that is that not all principles are compatible with one another. So in some cases, human life is something that is sacrificed to a yet more important value. By value, I mean what we like and what we’re prepared to try to preserve. So it comes back again to the fact that human beings have a great deal in common, and they do value things in an intelligible way. And we can usually understand other people’s values. So is it fair to say that in your moral equation, empathy is a large component for you? Well how does empathy differ from sympathy? I prefer to use the word ‘sympathy’. And this is a word which David Hume also sees as an important factor in morality. It is important in the context of people being able to understand what other people like and dislike. And I think sympathy and compassion are also very connected to each other, because it seems to

Mary Warnock 185 me that we may, one day, have to realize that compassion could make us, for example, not insist that people go on living if they don’t want to. And so then we would be compelled to help them commit suicide. And that is a case where, though we value human life very highly, we ought, I think, to stop saying that it’s sacred and that it’s the only thing of value. I think that’s a moral principle, actually. But we are still rather in thrall to an idea, which can’t be true, that human beings consist of a soul and a body. This idea says that the soul is detachable from the body, but that therefore we must, somehow, just go on living in our bodies, until something detaches us. Yet as human beings we have no right to make the detachment ourselves. But since Darwin, we can’t really seriously go on thinking that. Would you say that a moral statement like ‘murder is wrong’, or ‘euthanasia can be acceptable’, at its core is a statement of preference rather than fact? Any proposition that contains moral terms can’t be a straightforward matter of fact. So this is why I prefer to use the concept of value, as this really incorporates the idea of liking and disliking something. Because all animals – not just human animals, but all of them – have values, in the sense that they seek to avoid some things and seek to go after others. So that’s the basis of the concept value. But of course it’s become infinitely complex, because human beings are so bright, and that can complicate things. I agree with you that most people would agree that having your fingernails pulled out is nasty, and that having time to yourself with a roof over your head is nice. Yet there are some people who might say, ‘Well, most people think that God exists, and therefore that’s an argument for the existence of God’, or ‘most people think such and such a statement’. What’s the difference between those two? In both cases there seems to be an appeal to a kind of majority belief or instinct. I think an important element comes in here, which is that not all truth is literal truth. And I think this is one of the real difficulties about religion. That, on the whole, religions tend to overlook the difference between the kind of truth that you may feel you have got through religious beliefs, religious discourse, religious stories and a kind of truth that you can go out and verify. Do you mean ‘verify’ in a scientific way? I think imaginative truth is enormously important, but it’s a different order of truth from the ordinary, verification idea of truth. Though actually I think one infinitely depraves and diminishes the idea of truth if

186 Conversations on Truth one overlooks the truth of the imagination. But, in this context, how you find the truth or come up with the truth in terms of the imagination must be itself a metaphor. We usually talk about it in terms of illumination, or exploration, or we say that ‘everything has fallen into place’, and so on. And this is a different kind of acceptable truth. We can certainly get, from novels, or works of art, or other things like that, a feeling that ‘this is how things are’. And this, I think, is what I mean by imaginative truth: it is when you have the feeling that, by reading a novel, you are participating in some kind of truth. For instance, one thing that never fails to give me this sense is the scene in Jane Austen’s novel Emma, where Emma is just beginning to realize that she’s very much attached to Mr Knightley, and she becomes so irritated by her old friend Miss Bates that she lashes out at her at a party. And then the party breaks up and she gets into her carriage, and Knightley comes out and stands by her, and says, ‘Emma . . . how could you be so unfeeling to Miss Bates? How could you be so insolent to a woman of her character, age and situation?’, and she absolutely collapses in horror. Now that scene is one of the most beautiful bits of writing that ever there was. I can entirely identify with Emma. And it’s all the more awful because she is beginning to realize that Knightley is tremendously important to her. It’s absolutely brilliant, and I can never read it without weeping. It’s just so good. And that seems to be an imaginative truth – we know that Emma didn’t exist, we know that Mr Knightley didn’t exist, none of it happened. But it absolutely captures the feelings of selfreproach, and having wasted things, and thrown things away – it’s terrible. So I mean that’s the sort of thing that one must allow to be true, and I can’t see how anybody could read that without recognizing its truth. How would you respond to somebody who reads that particular passage in Emma and just says, ‘Quite honestly, that just doesn’t chime with my sense of the world’? Or in a moral sense, how do you respond to somebody who says, ‘I just genuinely don’t think it’s not preferable to have your fingernails pulled out’? Assuming this person was not just playing devil’s advocate, how would you understand somebody who just doesn’t chime with your assumptions about what people want? I would have to know, first of all, in terms of that second person, what their capacity to experience physical pain was. If he does not have the capacity to experience physical pain then that makes things slightly different. But if he does experience physical pain, or dislike it, in whatever context, then what I think he’s saying is that ‘It doesn’t matter that somebody suffers physical pain, even if it is at my hands, because some greater value is at stake.’ And some fanatical religious people, particularly fanatical Muslims, do tend to take that view. And I would deeply disagree with

Mary Warnock 187 that, because I would say that there’s no value that could possibly outweigh deliberately imposing physical pain on someone. That’s a really, really bad thing to do. Now, of course, I would subject my child to physical pain if it were quite obvious that the good that was going to come of that would outweigh the momentary pain of the injection, or whatever it was. But this is the kind of analogy that the fanatical religious person would be using in a much more extreme way, namely the end justifies the means. How then do we respond to people like that, people who have a radically different sense of what is true or right or acceptable in moral terms? In your opinion, is rational debate or argument something that could help? Or do you have to be coercive – do you have to engage the mechanism of the state, or authority, to prevent those people from behaving in that manner? One truth that I would enunciate of a very general kind is that society can’t exist, the state can’t exist, without the rule of law. And therefore one has to put the rule of law above any particular view that an individual or a group of individuals has. And I know that this could be a very dangerous doctrine, because one could get into the position that the Nazis were in, in the 1930s, where they justified their actions by saying that ‘the law is the law and therefore it is right’, and this kind of position can certainly make it very difficult to distinguish between a good law and a bad law. But Bentham, that commonsensical person, had it right when he said your first duty is to obey, but to criticize ceaselessly. So, you are aware that the law is there, but it may be a bad law, and so you are entitled to say so. But one has to keep that distinction clear. And the law’s against blowing people up on buses and the Underground, and so on. A law that restrains people from doing that is undoubtedly a fundamentally good law, because it keeps society together. So I think we’re entitled to say people who disregard that sort of law must be locked up and stopped in their tracks. But of course, the way that we stop them in their tracks is very important. And we’ve just been having a debate in the House of Lords about how far one can go in overlooking ordinary human rights, in the criminal justice act. Is this in relation to the proposed 42 days detention for terrorist suspects? Yes, and in relation to various other rumours of bad treatment and torture, and so on, that’s been going on. I think treating suspects or prisoners in a humane way ought to be one of the values that is made manifest in all societies. Now let’s take this back to the issue of truth and imaginative truth. People often can get an imaginative kind of truth from

188 Conversations on Truth religion. And I can entirely sympathize with this, and I can see that this is often necessary and sustaining for those people. And that is fine, provided they don’t then insist on literal truth of much of what is in their faith. So it is very important in my view to recognize that there are other sorts of truth besides the literal, evidence-based truth. For instance, I remember when I was very small, I must have been about 6, I was lying on a mat on the floor in the doorway, and somebody was playing on the gramophone the first movement of Bach’s Third Brandenburg. This was one of the first bits of music that’s ever really hit me. It’s an awe-inspiring piece, and I remember listening to this, and saying to my mother, ‘I know everything is all right, really.’ It just gave me an incredible feeling of bliss, really, and solidity, and I think my mother was rather touched by this sort of ‘truth’ that I had expressed. It was that bit of music that gave me that feeling at that moment. Now, obviously, everything isn’t always going to be all right, and I was wrong, and that wasn’t a truth! But nonetheless you can get that immense sense of satisfied bliss, and a feeling that the world is wonderful. And I think there are lots of people who can get this feeling from all kinds of art, particularly music, and so I would hate not to be able to use words like ‘true’ for great works of music and art. Art says something that you can’t express in words, so therefore it can’t be literally true, but it conveys a truth. And I think that’s an important point. I’d like to approach the issue now from a different perspective, focusing in particular on your role as an active member of the House of Lords. I’m interested in the relationship between power and authority – whether that’s political power, or intellectual and academic authority – and notions of truth. We’ve interviewed Noam Chomsky, and obviously he’s a big critic of how political power in America is used either to subvert truth or manufacture truth. Could you say something about that, both from a philosophical and a political point of view? I know that Chomsky is very much enraged by American political life and I’ve read quite a lot of his work. And I think I’d agree with him in so far as the fact that as soon as the idea takes hold of people that politicians manufacture truth, or spin the facts to their own advantage, at that moment trust flies out of the window. And really, people are governable if and only if they trust their rulers. And Hume, whom I enormously admire as a philosopher, said that it’s only when people believe in their rulers that they will consent to be governed – all government is government by consent, because the people who are being governed far outnumber the people who are governing.

Mary Warnock 189 And even a tyrannical government has at least to keep its population reasonably happy, or there could be a revolution. Yes. Well, the government is bound to be – to a certain extent – pragmatic and utilitarian. They can’t go against too great a majority of public opinion. I mean this is plainly so in relation to legislation that involves moral principles, which much of it does. Now obviously legislation about which side of the road we have to drive on does not have any moral content, it’s just that we’ve got to have some law or other. But an awful lot of what we spend time talking about are moral issues such as abortion, euthanasia and all these other issues. And I think people must accept the rightness of the law, or they will simply disregard it, and then it becomes unenforceable, and one of the considerations you have to think about when making law is whether it will be enforceable. But going back to the question of trust: I think I do believe Chomsky in that if trust is completely lost, then government becomes impossible, and I feel it’s rather alarming, really, that nobody believes what politicians say at the moment. Even if they’re telling the truth, they’re not believed, and so this really could be a very dangerous situation, I think. Can we talk about the ethics of deception in relation to this? Are there times when it’s acceptable or even morally imperative for a government to deceive the public, or for one individual to deceive another? Yes, there obviously are cases, I suppose. Particularly in the context of, say, the stock market, where if the government told the truth that the stock market was on the verge of collapse, then the situation would be exacerbated, and people could face bankruptcy. So I fully agree there are some secrets that must be kept, and some falsehoods that must be uttered. But I think to decide that you’re definitely going to deceive the public, then you are putting one value that you hold very dear behind another, and this can only be temporary, and you have to be able to justify it and explain it afterwards. But we often have to prioritize values. Take human life: this is obviously one of the most enormously valued values, but there are situations, such as in a time of war, for example, when you have to put people at risk of losing their lives for something that you value even more highly. And I think this is why the war in Iraq is so incredibly unpopular – because here we are putting human lives at risk when in the end we don’t know that we will end up serving a more fundamental value. And Chomsky’s thought on this that the value that’s being preferred here to human life is access to oil is an insult, he thinks, and I think he’s right, really. And again, nobody in government says that – it’s only the critics who say that. Blair’s people never say that for a moment. And one of the

190 Conversations on Truth things about Blair that I absolutely detest, and Chomsky detests too, is his proneness to say, ‘I did what I thought was right.’ Well, I don’t give a damn about what he thought was right – I think we know it was wrong. So you think he’s lying when he says that? No, I don’t think he’s lying, I think he’s deluded. He’s deluded in the sense that he thinks everybody respects his conscience. Well actually, if it was his conscience that led him to do it, then he ought to have resigned when he found that what he told everybody about weapons of mass destruction wasn’t true. That would be a resignation matter, it seems to me, if he had any conscience at all. But all that he really liked was power – and so again I rather agree with Chomsky. But the question of trust is really important, because I think it used to be thought that it was only in really very exceptional circumstances that politicians would positively deceive the public, but now that isn’t true at all. I mean, people just do it all the time. They either tell direct lies, or they mislead, or they are economical with the truth, and so on. You’re talking about the possibility for one value to trump another, and you say that even the value of human life can be outweighed by other things. Within this hierarchy of value, is there anything that you could describe as actually being an absolute value? I’m a great believer in Isaiah Berlin’s theory that not all values are compatible. And it is a truth that sometimes people will disagree on what is to be preferred to what. I mean if you genuinely believe that human life is sacred, then nothing will justify you even risking somebody else’s life, it seems to me. But this dogma that human life is sacred is very curious to me. It’s frequently uttered, and yet it’s often not actually believed. I find this very interesting in the context of Jewish morality, because in the euthanasia debate, the rabbis are even more hostile to any form of deliberately taking human life than Christians. And one rabbi, I’ve forgotten now which it was, who had been giving evidence to the select committee, actually said, ‘It’s morally outrageous to shorten human life: human life is sacred.’ He argued that it was a gift from God, and therefore it mustn’t be removed by anyone except God, and that even if you shortened a life by half a minute, that would be wrong. And yet in a way, part of Jewish religion is based on the idea of sacrifice – with poor old Abraham, who had to sacrifice Isaac at the command of God; so this seems to me to be a curious paradox, really. I don’t think any of us actually genuinely believes that this stuff about shortening a life by half a minute is an awful sin. I can’t believe that they do, but then maybe they do.

Mary Warnock 191 So you’re unpicking, here, something about the notion of truth in our contemporary ethical and cultural discourse. And you seem to be identifying that some ideas we have about moral truths – that life is sacred for instance – are actually often based on a kind of cultural or religious hangover? Exactly. I think an awful lot of things that people say are hangovers from what they used to believe literally. Now I find it terribly difficult to see what it would be like to be a medieval peasant who just listens to their priest and no one else. I don’t know what that would be like any more than I know what it would be like to be a horse – that all just involves a completely different conceptual apparatus – it’s difficult to think oneself into so much ignorance. But then I suppose it is the case that all those Victorian hymn-writers and believers did, literally, believe that they would go to heaven. But nowadays, in terms of religious ideas of truth, we have to come back again to this issue of metaphor. And while some metaphors might work, and others don’t, you must recognize that they are all metaphors. Religious language is inherently metaphorical and to think otherwise is pure anthropomorphism. Finally, do you think science can give us an objective picture of the world? It sort of aims to do that, but that picture will always be over the horizon, because somebody else is always going to eventually find another theory that explains even more. I mean I believe that we should distrust any scientist who would say, ‘We’ve come to the end now – we know everything’, because I just don’t think that can be the case. Whether we are talking about a particular science like medicine, or whether we are looking at a physical theory of the universe, I don’t think we can be sure that what we’ve got now is the best we’re ever going to get. Would you say that this idea of there being a Grand Unifying Theory in physics will turn out to be a bit of a myth, or a bit of a red herring? I don’t really see why we should ever reach one theory of everything. But of course, that’s what physicists want, and that’s why people who respect physics are attracted to it – that idea that they might be able to explain everything. Now physics obviously is the best science to pursue if what you want is a theory that can explain everything. After all, why is it that physics and mathematics are so mysterious? Perhaps it is because they do seem to come nearer to being able to explain everything than anything else. But I very much doubt whether any physicist will ever be able truthfully to say, ‘We’ve got there’.

15

Peter Wilby

Do you have a working definition of the term ‘truth’? Yes, I suppose I do. I think that truth is something that is consistent with the facts as I see them. But then, of course, somebody else may see those facts in an entirely different way. So I don’t think there is just a sort of thing as an objective truth out there which all people would all accept as true. The truth is something that I feel that I can argue or say, because it’s consistent with the evidence, with the facts that I have. Could you expand on what you would consider to be a fact – what makes something a good or reliable fact? Yes. I think a good or reliable fact is something that has documentary, statistical or research evidence behind it. But facts are obviously open to interpretation. So take an example like – I’m plucking this out of the air – crime. Now official figures say that crime is going down, not up. That’s both in terms of what the police figures say and what the British Crime Survey says. But how about people’s fear of crime? Well, that’s a different matter. Even when crime is going down, even when experience of crime is going down, there may be still growing fear of crime. And that can be quite a concerning thing. So I think whatever argument you have should try to be consistent with the facts as they are. But of course, ultimately, when you have those facts it always comes down to a question of how you interpret them. How would you describe what the word ‘propaganda’ means? Propaganda is something, to my mind, that really distorts the facts; it claims that things are facts when they are not facts. So, for instance, if you’re talking about crime, for example, and you claim that crime is going up when it isn’t, well that’s propaganda. It is something that flies in the face of evidence. 192

Peter Wilby 193 If your job as a journalist is to interpret facts as you see them, where does honesty come into the equation? Well facts are open to differing interpretations, and there are lots of facts in the world! So I think that if you want to be a good journalist or a good arguer, a good debater, or whatever word you choose, you should always be able to make your case without being dishonest or misleading about the core details of the facts. I mean, do we accuse barristers of being dishonest because they make a defence case for people that they know, probably in their heart of hearts, to be guilty? If they stick to the facts as they exist – and of course if they don’t then that weakens their case, if their facts are patently wrong then the judge will pull them up on that – if they’re honest about the facts, and say, ‘Well, these are the facts, and this is the interpretation that I put upon them’, then I think that they can make their case perfectly legitimately. Or look at it another way – my specialist field as a journalist is education. I was an education correspondent for many years, and I probably know more about education than I do about any other subject. And I know perfectly well that vast amounts of research have been conducted on education. And the idea that anybody could sit down and say, ‘Here is all this research, and some of it is in favour of selection, and some of it is against, so I will, with a completely blank mind make up my mind about what is true’, is completely ridiculous. I mean, people will, initially, always have an inkling one way or another. They have to have a hypothesis. And if you’re an academic researcher, you will have a hypothesis, and you will conclude ‘Well, this hypothesis is supported by my research’, or ‘it’s not supported by my research’. And as a journalist, you don’t even conduct original research in that way, you just go to the people who will tell you what you want to hear, basically. You’ll find plenty of reputable people who will tell you what you want to hear! So it’s quite possible for journalists to be scrupulously honest in one respect but still only ever report what they would have reported anyway? Sure. I mean, I don’t think that either the Telegraph or the Guardian are dishonest papers. I mean, I am a Guardian writer. And obviously my political prejudices are on the side of the Guardian. So I trust the Guardian on my own terms. I trust the Guardian to tell me good, sound facts in support of my point of view. But that doesn’t mean that I automatically don’t believe what I read in the Telegraph. (Though if you go down to, say, the Daily Mail or the Sun, then that becomes a different matter.) The Telegraph just selects a different lot of facts that is all, and those are facts that

194 Conversations on Truth support its point of view – it selects the things it wants to report. I mean, if say, Policy Exchange, which is the main centre-right think-tank at the moment, publishes a report, it will get a page lead in the Telegraph, but will probably be ignored in the Guardian. Whereas a report from one of the left-wing think-tanks, or campaigning groups, such as Compass, or whatever, will get a page lead in the Guardian, but be ignored in the Telegraph. It seems that there are three broad and quite related critiques of how the media works at the moment. There’s the old one from Chomsky that the mainstream corporate media is based upon internalizing certain assumptions about how the world works . . . I’d largely agree with that, yes. And then there’s Nick Davies, who has coined the term ‘churnalism’ to describe the effects of economic cutbacks on journalism. And then you’ve got Peter Oborne, who, despite being a Tory, described Chomsky as ‘an amazing bloke’. And his argument is that actually the mainstream press is quite subservient to the government and to government authority. How would you respond to those three critiques? Let’s take Chomsky first. I think there’s a lot of truth in what he says: that there are basic assumptions that the mainstream media accept, and everyone else who does not is marginalized, laughed at or mocked. So the views of, say, John Pilger are quite widely mocked in the media even though he is actually a very popular journalist. Pilger was a New Statesman columnist when I edited that magazine; he has a very honoured place there and frequently makes the cover. When he does, he always boosts the sales! Occasionally he writes for the Guardian, and he still makes mainstream television to a remarkable extent, or at least he used to. He was one of the very few documentary journalists who could command peak-time time on television for hour-and-a-half documentaries which got remarkably high viewing figures. So Pilger has an enormous following out there. You know, I used to sit on the tube, reading the New Statesman, in a rather ostentatious way, when I was editor, and people would come up to me when his name was on the cover and say, ‘I really admire that man John Pilger. I want to know what this magazine is. Does he write for it regularly?’ I really had that, and it was a remarkable thing. And I’ve never known that happen in relation to any other individual journalist. But the mainstream media marginalizes these voices. The classic example of this is the way that the Mail, for example, will run something by somebody on the left, and will always describe it as: ‘a controversial view’. So the implication is that nothing that Melanie Phillips or Richard

Peter Wilby 195 Littlejohn or any of those people says is controversial, whereas anything that anybody from the left says is always controversial. And this is a kind of signal, if something is ‘controversial’ then the paper is saying, ‘well, you probably shouldn’t agree with this’. So there’s this kind of distancing that the mainstream media do with a certain set of views. And you see this with reporting too. If you look at someone like Chavez, in Venezuela, journalists often feel that they have to be extremely sceptical about him, and while that might probably be right in a way, there are all these other things which are brought into the equation, such as whether he’s a dictator – the man is treated as though he is an incipient Stalin – and this is something for which I see no evidence whatever. So the frame within which things are reported can be very important. And how about Nick Davies? I think there’s also a lot of truth in what Nick Davies says. I’m a bit sceptical about some of his figures, but I think the basic thesis that PR is infinitely more powerful than it was 20 or 30 years ago is absolutely true. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. When I was an education correspondent 20 or 30 years ago, if I rang up any local education authority – and these were the days when local education authorities and chief education officers were genuinely important, much more so than the Secretary of State for Education in Whitehall – I could be pretty certain, particularly since I was known as a reputable education correspondent, of getting through to the head of the authority personally. I’d have no difficulty with their secretary. Whereas I would find that very difficult now – because you are almost always transferred to a press officer. Everybody these days, no matter who it is, in whatever organization in the field of education, will have a press officer, whereas 30 years ago they would probably not have done. It used to be that if you rang up then you just spoke to the chap at the top, and he dealt with it. Now, no matter what it is, who it is, or what organization it is, there will be a press officer. Now don’t get me wrong – press officers are very useful if you want basic facts. If you want to ask, ‘How many members does your trade union have?’, or, ‘What is the annual turnover of your company?’, or ‘How many children are there in schools in your local education authority?’, they can be useful. So I have no problem with that. But if you actually want to talk to somebody about what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, what their policy is, then you want to talk to the man or woman at the top, and it is increasingly difficult to do that. And the amount of material that you receive which is put out by PR is enormous. It’s more enormous now than it ever was. I mean, if you think of the classic definition of news, which is ‘something that somebody, somewhere, doesn’t want to be known’, then 95 per cent of

196 Conversations on Truth what is in the papers now is not news. Because 95 per cent of what is in the papers has been put out by somebody in the form of a press release, or by holding a press conference, or because they’ve rung up and given an informal briefing to one of their favourite journalists, or whatever. And there is an awful lot of that sort of thing going on; it is where most news comes from. And so, I think, basically, without necessarily accepting his specific figures, and the way that those figures were arrived at, I think Nick is right. I think he thought that by getting an academic study done of all of this that he would strengthen his case. But I actually think he weakened it. Why do you think that? His analysis is based upon the fact that nowadays we have the same number of journalists, but they have a lot more space to fill. Yet his research takes no account of how the space is filled in different ways, or of the fact that journalists can now find things out much faster via the internet. I mean, I could write a whole piece today with the help of the internet, which I could not have written in the past without the help of a library or without ringing up whole loads of people. The web can make things a doddle. If I want to know how many children are educated in a particular local education authority, well, by using a search engine I can find out pretty quickly. There are a lot of things that you can now find out quite quickly, and so quite frankly, I think journalists ought to be able to produce more. I suppose the flip-side of that argument in relation to the internet is that it can mean that journalists often end up going nowhere else but the internet for their facts. And that itself can be a problem. Yes, I think there is truth in that. I mean I write quite a lot of pieces now, as a columnist, without having to ring anybody up. But I’m always struck, when I do ring people up, by how much more informed and improved, and so on, the piece is. So yes, I think there is a real danger that journalists become isolated from the world – they can stay on their computers and think that searching things out on the internet is all that is needed. So you are absolutely right about that, there is a great danger there. But nevertheless, there’s an awful lot of basic factual work that journalists do, for which the internet is very helpful. I mean, you’re not going to ask the chief education officer for a particular area how many children are educated in his schools. You could spend your time with him much more valuably by discussing what he’s doing, why he’s doing it. So that is why I think Nick’s thesis is weakened, in a way. But in the more general sense he is absolutely right about the problem of PR. And an awful lot of this is

Peter Wilby 197 accounted for by the chronic laziness of journalists, anyway. Journalists are the kind of people who, if you ask them to walk 100 yards will walk 98. They’re quite lazy really. Has it always been the case that journalists are lazy? Yes! Yes! Definitely. Oh yes, absolutely! And how about Peter Oborne’s critique? I think you would probably already expect me to agree with Chomsky and with Nick Davies, because they’re both lefties like me. But bizarrely enough, I think of these three critiques, the one who has got it most right is Peter. I think that he is absolutely spot on about the mendacity of New Labour. I think that New Labour took this deception to a new level of scientific skill. And I think part of Gordon Brown’s political troubles are actually because he has tried to get away from this – and just look at the state that New Labour is in now! I mean, Alastair Campbell, in my opinion, was the most brilliant spin doctor, or PR person – call it what you like – that there has ever been. And I think this was the case for a number of reasons. For a start, Alastair has a physical presence – he’s quite a big man, so he can be intimidating. But it was also because he was completely dedicated to his project. And this was understandable really, because the Labour Party was out of power for 18 years, and so there was this determination that should they ever get back into power, then they wouldn’t lose it again. So Campbell has been at the heart of something that had never been achieved before in British history, which is a Labour government not only winning power but maintaining it with strength for two or three terms. That’s never happened before, and people forget this. And it was Campbell’s belief that anything was justified in order to achieve this. He believed, as Blair did, that any price should be paid for that. Now Alastair’s great technique was never to lose control of the headlines. So if the opposition was to say anything, then he would immediately trump it with something else, either by knocking down what they had said, or by bringing in something else, or whatever. You just had to keep your own agenda going and if that meant repeating what you’d said before as if it were a new thing, then that was fine. Alastair was fantastically good at making sure that the Sunday papers always had a strong line. And the Sunday papers are vitally important, because they set the tone for the week ahead. The Monday papers are almost entirely full of stories you read in the Sunday papers. There’s nothing new in them, really, unless there’s been an earthquake, or something, somewhere in the world. So Alastair was brilliant at doing all that. Now, obviously he knew what would get broadsheet headlines, but he was best at knowing what would get a tabloid

198 Conversations on Truth headline. He knew what would get the page lead, or the splash, or whatever, in the Sun, or the Mirror, or the Mail, and so on. And he knew how to do this because he’d been a tabloid journalist. Many people have asked me during my career, particularly people in education, such as vice chancellors of universities, or chief education officers: ‘How can we improve our PR?’ And I have always said, ‘Well the last thing you want is someone from a PR firm. You want a journalist. You want a journalist who is rooted in your organization, and who knows what’s going on.’ Now, does Gordon Brown have that? Who is the journalist rooted at the centre of Brown’s organization who understands the press? Nobody understands the press like a journalist. That’s why Brown is in trouble. And of course, Blair’s decline began as soon as Campbell had gone. Campbell went, and Blair was no longer able to defy gravity. Up until then, Blair had taken the country into an unpopular war, and vast numbers of things he’d done had completely failed. But he got away with it, with enough momentum to win the 2005 election, because of Alastair. But the moment Campbell went, Blair went down the pan. Let’s relate this back to Peter Oborne’s point. He seems to be saying that journalists are only as good as their relationships now, because their relationships with politicians are the key to little titbits of information that make their story a bit more interesting. And so they’re very unlikely to compromise those relationships. Peter is spot on about that – that is absolutely true. And one of the things that Campbell did was to create this relationship with the lobby, with political journalists generally, where everybody knew the game. Now nobody is going to say that you can never criticize – nobody is going to say you can’t ever run a knocking story. But Campbell knew very well that there were limits beyond which you could not go. Campbell understood entirely and totally, this kind of bargaining game which is at the heart of the relationship between political journalists and the government or politicians generally. And Campbell would tolerate criticism so long as he retained control of the overall agenda. And the most brilliant example of how he retained control of the agenda was with the whole David Kelly affair. Look at the way he went to the select committee, and then marched into Channel 4, and so on, and said, ‘This is a terrible thing, that the BBC has done.’ And Andrew Gilligan had been saying these things for weeks, but nobody remembered them until Campbell suddenly decided to home in on them – and by doing so he made Gilligan the issue and not Blair. It was brilliant.

Peter Wilby 199 You’ve obviously got a lot of admiration for his capacity to do his job. Absolutely. But would you say, though, that the job he was doing, and the fact that he was doing it so well, was very disruptive to journalism in this country? Or disruptive of the notion truth within journalism? I don’t think we can blame him. That was his job after all, and journalists should have been better at dealing with it. But I think that is the nature of the Westminster lobby, which is based upon a corrupt relationship with politicians. And that’s not the fault of any individual within it – it is just a corrupt relationship. I mean it is the last closed shop in the country. You or I can’t just go into the House of Commons and start walking around the corridors interviewing MPs. I mean, how do you get hold of a minister if you want to talk about something when you’re doing a story? It’s quite difficult, actually but a lobby journalist can do it any time he likes. And in order to maintain their position as a lobby journalist, they have to behave in a certain way? Exactly. It’s all about access. And I’ve actually had that said to me by lobby journalists. When I’ve run things in the New Statesman or the Independent on Sunday which have been outrageous about the governing party, or whatever, or even the opposition party, I’ve had my lobby correspondent say to me, ‘Oh, well, this is all very well, but it damages my access.’ They actually use that word. They actually say, ‘My access is at stake here because of this bollocks that you are running.’ But do you as an editor have to balance the interest of that journalist maintaining their links and access with your desire to report certain things? I’ve no doubt that many editors do, but I didn’t. When I was the editor of the New Statesman I just thought ‘Well who the hell cares about the lobby correspondents’ access?’ I mean, I frequently considered not having a political editor at all. They’re too much bloody trouble, with their ‘access’, and all the rest of it, their wanting to keep in with the consensus, and so on. So no, I never balanced these matters – but I’m sure that most editors do. Would you say that there’s a crisis in the news media’s capacity to tell the truth at the moment? Yes, I think there is. PR has reached levels of sophistication which did not exist 20 years ago. I mean, bear in mind that the whole business of PR and

200 Conversations on Truth that kind of marketing is relatively young. Whereas modern journalism goes back certainly to Victorian times, PR is a more recent thing. So yes, there’s a crisis in terms of how journalism reacts to all that. And I don’t know what the answer to all of it is. Every day, 95 per cent of the papers are based upon what somebody’s put out in a press release. It’s funny, I often think about celebrity journalism. Now, obviously there is a lot of stuff in this area too that is put out deliberately. But when these journalists do the kind of thing we tend to condemn such as photographing a celebrity coming out of a nightclub pissed, I often think ‘Well here is somebody who is at least telling it as it really is!’ Now upmarket journalism will say, ‘that’s trivial’, and ‘that’s not important’, and ‘that’s not what journalism should be doing’. But the whole thing about the paparazzi is that they are not mediated by PR – they get around PR. The problem with them, then, is not their methods but the end to which they put their methods? Yes, I suppose so. Though that is a slightly different discussion about what one should be writing about and what one should be photographing, and so on. But I think there’s a whole issue here about the way in which so much of the world is presented through the press and the media generally – television and radio as well – it’s shown through a prism that is determined by those already in power, and those that are privileged. So yes, I think there’s a crisis in the relationship between journalists and the powerful, privileged people that they write about. Because all of those powerful people and privileged people have got PR now. It doesn’t matter who you are – you could be the most minor footballer, but you’ll still have an agent who puts out stories in the press about how Manchester United wants to buy you for a million pounds, or whatever. I mean the sports pages are a wonderful little study of all this in miniature really. It is all about something completely unimportant, but nonetheless, there it is – these pages are full of all this crap about ‘so-and-so is about to leave for such-and-such a club’, and so on. It’s all put out by agents to try to pump up the prices of their players. So it might have some basis in fact, but not an awful lot to be honest. There’s no distinction between what is real and what isn’t. And what are your aspirations for journalism? Oh, God knows! The aspiration, I suppose, is to present the world as it is, so we can just say, ‘Well, this is the world as it is.’ What I like to do, basically, when I write is to try to stand back from it all and say to my readers, ‘This is what you are being sold here. You are being sold something. Somebody is selling something here, either to somebody else, or

Peter Wilby 201 more often than not to you, the reader.’ And I don’t quite see enough of that kind of honesty. There’s not enough standing back from it all and saying, ‘This is what it’s all about really.’ I think that’s the problem, and I would like to see more of that. We’ve been talking, so far, about the corporate media and places like the Guardian, New Statesman, the Spectator and Telegraph, which are all quite open about their political bias. But what about an organization like the BBC, which has a commitment to what they would call ‘objectivity’ or to ‘balance’. Do you think that objectivity in that regard is a myth? I think there’s no such thing as objectivity. I mean, you inevitably approach things with a set of assumptions, and the BBC approaches things with a set of central assumptions or biases towards the government of the day. So when Labour’s in power they tend to see the world through the prism of Labour, and when the Tories are in power, they tend to see the world through the prism of the Tories. The BBC tends to follow fashionable, metropolitan opinion. And I don’t think I see anything wrong with that, that’s fine as a centre of gravity. Any news organization has to have a centre of gravity. Our centre of gravity on the New Statesman was somewhere to the left of Tony Blair. Not hugely to the left. We’re not with Dennis Skinner or anything like that. And that’s the historical position of the New Statesman, really – at various times of its history it was too far left, it was putting itself outside the parliamentary debate, and other times it was too far right, it was too ‘this is what the Labour party says, we will say it as well’. So there has to be a kind of centre of gravity which is where your editorials are, and where most of your writers are, and so on. It’s a kind of default position. And so I think the default position of the BBC is, for want of a better word, what the chattering classes think. It’s kind of what you might call ‘respectable, established, centrist opinion’. I can’t see anything wrong with that really. Of course it’s not objective; nothing is objective. But do you think the fact the BBC claims to be balanced is just wrong, or do you think that claiming that can be damaging? I don’t see any harm in the BBC claiming it. I mean, I’m a great supporter of the BBC, I think it’s a very admirable organization. Now I agree with John Pilger that it excludes the views that he has, and which to some extent I share, and that annoys me. But I recognize that that’s not within the BBC’s default, centrist position. And, you know, if myself or John Pilger only occasionally get our views aired, well that’s OK, as long as the BNP don’t get their views aired. I mean, I’m not saying that the BNP are

202 Conversations on Truth our equivalent. But clearly the BBC has to take account of where respectable opinion is at – though that is not the same as where public opinion is, that’s a different thing. Public opinion is in favour of capital punishment. So the BBC represents respectable opinion, and I can’t think of a better definition of where a public broadcasting organization should be at as its default position. And you do get lots of diverse views on the BBC, and millions of people throughout the world trust it. You get a much better general view of things from the BBC than you get from any American broadcasting organization. I mean, compare it with Fox News for God’s sake! And it sets the standard for other broadcasting organizations in this country. If you look at ITN, or even at Sky News – not that Rupert Murdoch would like to see things like that – they’re not that different. Could you talk a little bit about the ethics of suppression? Andrew Marr in his book My Trade mentions in passing that he has suppressed stories when he has felt it necessary. Is it ever right for journalists sometimes to suppress the truth? In your time as a journalist and as an editor, how have you grappled with that? I don’t think I’ve ever suppressed anything that I can think of. I’m trying to think very hard about this, but I don’t think I have, really. I think perhaps that I’ve published things that I’d rather I’d suppressed or that maybe I should have suppressed. We published a notorious piece about the Israeli lobby in the New Statesman once, though I think the problem with that was really the cover rather than anything else. So I think we got that wrong and I quite accept that we didn’t do it well. Although I’m not sure that we did as badly as some people have said. My view initially was ‘let’s just take on this pro-Israeli lobby’, and, maybe that turned out to be a bit too much for me! So maybe I should have suppressed that. As a professional journalist, again, both as a writer and an editor, could you talk a little bit about the pressures that you must come under, whether it’s from government, lobby organizations or from other journalists? Does dealing with those things take up a lot of time or significantly get in the way of you reporting? Sometimes it does. Obviously this whole Israeli/anti-Semitism thing took up a lot of my time, and I couldn’t think about anything else for about ten days until I eventually resolved it. Or here’s another example: when I was deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday we discovered that Cherie Blair, then of course the wife of the leader of the opposition, was prosecuting people who had evaded the Poll Tax. And we splashed on this, saying ‘Cherie Blair prosecutes people who have failed to pay Poll Tax, and demands jail sentences for them’, and so on. Now we were condemned

Peter Wilby 203 quite vitriolically for publishing this. We had a deluge of letters. People were saying ‘you shouldn’t do this’, ‘this is anti-woman’ (though I didn’t quite get that one!). And people said that we didn’t understand that barristers had this kind of taxi-cab principle whereby they had to take a case if it turned up. And we were widely denounced for it. But I was deputy to Ian Jack, and I think he would have become editor of The Observer had it not been for that fatal lack of judgement. Though actually the judgement was basically mine – he had more doubts about it than I did. So what you reported was factually true, but people felt that you had taken the event out of context? Yes. And Ian Jack made an interesting point that what we should have done, rather than splashing on it was run it on page 3, and that could have made all the difference. If we had put it on page 3 we would be saying, ‘well here is a serious story, but it is not a front-page story’. Where you put things in the paper makes an enormous difference. When you’re making a decision about what to write, or what to run as an editor, what criteria do you use to assess that? Truth, as you have described it, is obviously one, but what others are there? The criteria are firstly, as you say: Is it true? Secondly: Is it of interest to the readers? And thirdly: Is it important? Though it all also depends on what else is around. I mean a thing that might make splash one day, might scarcely be in the paper on another day. So news depends on a whole range of things, but those are the three main things that you consider. My favourite example of this, for which I suppose I shall never receive any credit, is the millennium bug story. I think I was probably the first British newspaper editor to have it, round about 1994 or ’95. One of my journalists wrote this story about how all computers would break down at the millennium, the news editor brought it to me, and I said, ‘No, I’m not running this. It is patently bollocks! If I’ve ever seen bollocks, this is bollocks!’ The news editor came back to me the following week with it rewritten, and I said, ‘It’s still bollocks! I don’t believe it.’ And the news editor said he was pretty certain that it was true and that it could be a big story. He took it away again, but came back after a third week and I said, ‘You’re wasting your time – this is never going to happen!’ And so he admitted defeat and went away again and that was it. And then about three or four weeks later it began to appear in other publications and the great millennium bug story took off. And for all the years that followed I sat there thinking, ‘I have missed the greatest scoop of my career!’ But I didn’t back down because I knew it wasn’t true.

204 Conversations on Truth Did you not regret that? Part of me did because all the other papers had this rollicking story! But of course everything ended up exactly as I had predicted. Well one of the reasons that that story ran for so long was because it sold papers. Now when you gave us your three criteria on what to print, you didn’t mention sales. What is of interest to readers extends into sales to a degree. But actually, if you’ve got a good story these days, because of the internet, it does not really help with sales, because by the time you have broken the story it has gone round the world within 30 seconds. So getting a brilliant story won’t boost your sales. What will boost your sales is where you, your publication, becomes the story. So, with the New Statesman the allegations of anti-Semitism surrounding our cover boosted our sales enormously. Or when I wrote an outrageous leader about 9/11 we saw a big rise in sales. And it is exactly the same thing with The Spectator. I mean what was the biggest story that they had recently? It was Boris Johnson having to go to Liverpool to apologize for the leader they ran. Now that wasn’t actually about a story they had got, it was about something they had said. If that kind of thing occurs then people are going to go and buy you in order to get a sense of what you really said and to share in the outrage. Given that the newspapers seem to be so full of the same things, and if people can’t rely on them as a source of information, where should they go if they want to find out more about specific issues – whether that is global warming, or Israel–Palestine, or whatever? I think the only sure way to get an idea of what is going on is to read as many things as you can, but that is a lot of hard work! To be honest, there is certainly no paper now, not even the Guardian, which gives a completely reliable view of the world. We don’t have any real paper of record. What we want is a paper which says, regardless of ideological prejudices: ‘Well these are the important things; these are the things that matter.’ Do you think such a thing is possible? I don’t know really. I think The Financial Times is probably the closest thing we have to this, though it is not as good as it used to be. Look at my copy here – it has a whole page about the Tory Party’s policies, and that is the kind of thing I want to see. It is highly likely that they are going to be in power after the next election and so you want someone to be telling you clearly and straightforwardly what the Tories want and whether they are able to achieve it. But of course, the FT under Lionel Barber has become

Peter Wilby 205 more of a cheerleader for the business community that it has been in the past. And I can understand why they have done that given their financial focus, but it has moved it downhill somewhat. What we really want is a white version of the FT. The Independent once aspired to be this, but I don’t think it is anymore. In general terms, is there anything that people either inside or outside the industry can do to improve the quality of the media if they are in such a debased state at the moment? Maybe we shouldn’t use the word ‘debased’. I mean I am not sure things are any worse now than they have ever been! And what we have is infinitely preferable to those dreary, pompous, wordy and self-important American papers. And it is those American papers that fail when it really matters. They totally, utterly and completely failed after 9/11 in a way in which the British press, for all of its faults, didn’t. The British press wasn’t brilliant then, but at least there was some questioning of what was going on. People like me still occasionally get a look in in the British press. After I wrote my controversial leader about 9/11, the Evening Standard rang me up and said that I was public enemy number one, and would I therefore like to write something for them! Now I think I ended up in some obscure part of the paper, but at least I was asked to write in the first place. So the British papers are at least interested, up to a point, in different views, in which the American papers are not. I think the British press is still better than a lot of other presses around the world. People like Jonathan Freedland and Polly Toynbee, or Matthew Parris and Peter Oborne simply wouldn’t exist in many other countries. And how do you make sense of politics without those people. So I wouldn’t say that it was in a debased state, rather that it is in an imperfect state. But then that is the way with most things in this world.

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Notes

Chapter 1 1. Simon Blackburn, ‘Reality Check’, Times Higher Educational Supplement, 24 April 2008. Chapter 2 1. Alan Turing, ‘On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Enscheidungs problem’, Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, ser. 2, 42 (1936–37): 230–65. Chapter 3 1. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). Chapter 4 1. Nick Davies, Flat Earth News (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008). 2. Ibid., p. 44. 3. Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995). (First published in 1991 as La Guerre du Golfe n’a pas eu lieu (Paris: Galilié.) 4. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent. Chapter 5 1. Richard Evans, In Defence of History (London: Granta, 2001). Chapter 6 1. Dan Hind, The Threat to Reason (London: Verso, 2007). 2. John Gray, Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern (London: Faber & Faber, 2004). Chapter 8 1. Peter Oborne, The Rise of Political Lying (New York and London: Simon & Schuster, 2005).

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208 Notes Chapter 9 1. Dan Hind, The Threat to Reason (London: Verso, 2007). 2. Joel Bakan, The Corporation (New York: Free Press, 2005). 3. Ted Nace, Gangs of America (San Francisco, CA: Berrett Koehler, 2003). 4. Davies, Flat Earth News. Chapter 10 1. Paul Boghossian, Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). 2. Boghossian (quoting David Bloor), ibid. 3. David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1991). 4. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 5. William Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Chapter 12 1. Oborne, The Rise of Political Lying. 2. Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent. 3. Andrew Marr, My Trade (London: Macmillan, 2004). Chapter 13 1. David Livingstone Smith, Why We Lie (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2005). 2. Nicholas Humphrey, ‘The Social Function of Intellect’, in P. P. G. Bateson and R. A. Hinde, Growing Points in Ethology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 303–17. 3. David Livingstone Smith, The Most Dangerous Animal: Human Nature and the Origins of War (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2005).