The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays

Lies That Tell the Truth             In art truth is suggested by false means.                                    —EDGAR DEGAS             Truth is only believed when someone has invented it well.                                    —GEORGE SANTAYANA             To think clearly in human terms you have to be impelled by a poem.                                    —LES MURRAY  THIS ESSAY WAS ORIGINALLY an address to the annual conferenceof the Supreme Court of New South Wales. where its title, at therequest of the organizers, was changed to 'Historical and Other Truths'– which was deemed more appropriate for such a serious audience. Forjudges Me supposed to be serious; indeed. don't they wear wigs andgowns to convince us – and remind themselves – of their seriousness?Serious people have little time for any form of fiction. With such a flippanttitle, my talk was not likely to attract many listeners. Still, thechange left me slightly uneasy – since, strictly speaking, I am not a historian– and I am glad to be able now to relinquish the false advertisementof which I was somehow guilty. My article carries three epigraphs. Most lectures, addresses – andessays – are usually forgettable. Epigraphs should be memorable. Myreaders will naturally forget this article, but they should remember theepigraphs. The first one is by a painter, the second one by a philosopher.the third one by a poet. Painters, philosophers, poets, creative writers – and also inventorsand scientists – all reach truth by taking imaginative short-cuts. Let usconsider some of these. Plato's dialogues remain the cornerstone of all Western philosophy.Very often what we find at their core is not discursive reasoning but variousmyths – short philosophical parables. Myth is the oldest and richestform of fiction. It performs an essential function: 'what mythcommunicates is not truth but reality; truth is always about something—reality is what truth is about' (C.S. Lewis). At roughly the same time as Plato in the West, ancient Daoist thinkersin China also expressed their ideas in imaginative form. On the subjectthat occupies us here – how do our minds reach truth – there is onetale in Lie Zi that seems illuminating and fundamental. In the time of the Warring States, horses were very important formilitary reasons. The feudal lords employed the services of experts tofind good ones. Best of all was the super-horse (qian-li ma), an animalwhich could run a thousand miles a day without leaving tracks and withoutraising dust. Super-horses were most sought after, but they werealso very rare and hard to detect. Hence the need for highly specializedexperts; most famous among these was a man called Bole. EventuallyBole became too old to pursue his field trips prospecting for super-horses.Thus his employer, the Duke of Qin, asked him if he could recommendanother expert to carry on with this task. 'Yes,' said Bole. 'Ihave a friend, a pedlar of firewood in the market, who is quite a connoisseurof horses. ' Following Bole's advice. the duke dispatched this manon a mission to find a super-horse. Three months later, the manreturned and reported to the duke: 'I have found one; it is in such-and-sucha place; it's a brown mare.' The duke sent his people to fetch theanimal, which proved to be a black stallion. The duke was not happy andsummoned Bole: That friend of yours – he does not seem to be muchof an expert: he could not even get the animal's sex and colour right!'On hearing this, Bole was amazed:  “Fantastic! He is even better than myself, a hundred, a thousandtimes better than myself! What he perceives is the innermost natureof the animal. He looks for and sees what he needs to see. He ignoreswhat he does not need to see. Not distracted by external appearances,he goes straight to the inner essence. The way he judgeshorses shows that he should be judge of more important things thanhorses.” And, needless to say, this particular animal proved to be a super-horseindeed, a horse that could run a thousand miles a day without leavingtracks and without raising dust. In reflecting on the ways by which our minds apprehend truth, youmay feel that a 2300-year-old Chinese parable is of only limited relevance.But if so, let us consider something closer to hand: the mentalprocesses followed by modern Western science. Claude Bernard, the great pathologist whose research and discoverieswere of momentous importance in the development of modernmedical science, one day entered the lecture hall where he was going toteach and noticed something peculiar: various trays were on a table,containing different human organs; on one of these trays, flies had gathered.A common mind would have made a common observation, perhapsdeploring a lack of cleanliness in the room or instructing thejanitor to keep the windows shut. But Bernard's was not a commonmind: he observed that the flies had gathered on the tray which containedlivers – and he thought, There must be sugar there. And he discoveredthe glycogenic function of the liver – a discovery that proveddecisive for the understanding and treatment of diabetes. I found this anecdote not in any history of medical science, but inthe diaries of the greatest modern French poet, Paul Claudel. AndClaudel commented: 'This mental process is identical to that of poeticalwriting … The impelling motion is the same. Which shows that the primarysource of scientific thought is not reasoning, but the precise verificationof an association originally supplied by the imagination.' Note that when I refer to 'poetry', I am taking this word in its mostfundamental sense. Samuel Johnson, in his monumental dictionary ofthe English language, assigns three definitions to the word ' poet', indecreasing order of importance: first, 'an inventor'; second, 'an authorof fiction'; and last, 'a writer of poems.' Truth is grasped by an imaginative leap. This applies not only toscientific thinking but also to philosophical thought. When I was anaive young student in the first year of university, our Arts courseincluded the study of philosophy – a prospect that excited me much atfirst, though I was soon disappointed by the mediocrity of our lecturer.However, through family acquaintances I had the good fortune toknow personally an eminent philosopher of our time, who happened tobe also a kind and generous man. On my request, he drafted for me alist of basic readings: one handwritten page with bibliographic referencesof a selection of classic texts, modern works, histories of philosophyand introductions to philosophy. I treasured this document; yet,over the years, wandering round the world, I misplaced it and, likemany other treasures, eventually lost it. Now, half a century later, Ihave long forgotten the actual items on the list. What I still rememberis the postscript the great philosopher had inscribed at the bottom ofthat page – I remember it vividly because, at the time, I did not understandit and it puzzled me. The postscript said (underlined), 'Mostimportant of all, don't forget: do read a lot of novels.' When I first readthis note, as an immature student, it shocked me. Somehow it did notsound serious enough. For, naively, we tend to confuse what is seriouswith what is deep. (In the editorial pages of our newspapers, leadingarticles are serious, while cartoons are funny; yet quite often the cartoonis deep and the leader is vapid.) It took me a long time to appreciatethe full wisdom of my philosopher's advice; now I frequentlyencounter echoes of it. And to the observation I have already quotedelsewhere, that one should prefer a medical practitioner who readsChekhov, I would add that, if I commit a crime, I hope to be judged bya judge who has read Simenon. Men of action – people who are totally involved in tackling whatthey believe to be real life – tend to dismiss poetry and all forms ofcreative writing as a frivolous distraction. Our great Polar explorerMawson wrote in a letter to his wife some instructions concerningtheir children's education. He insisted that they should not waste theirtime reading novels, but should instead acquire factual informationfrom books of history and biography. This view – quite prevalent, actually – that there is an essential differencebetween works of imagination on the one hand, and records offacts and events on the other, is very naive. At a certain depth or a certainlevel of quality, all writings tend to be creative writing, for they allpartake of the same essence: poetry. History (contrary to the common view) does not record events. Itmerely records echoes of events – which is a very different thing – and,in doing this, it must rely on imagination as much as on memory. Memoryby itself can only accumulate data, pointlessly and meaninglessly.Remember Jorge Luis Borges' philosophical parable 'Funes the Memorious'. Funes is a young man who, falling on his head from a horsebecomes strangely crippled: his memory hyper-develops, he is deprivedof any ability to forget, he remembers everything; his mind becomes amonstrous garbage dump cluttered and clogged with irrelevant data, agigantic heap of unrelated images and disconnected instants; he cannotevacuate any fragment of past experiences, however trifling. This relentlesscapacity for absolute and continuous recollection is a curse; itexcludes all possibility of thought. For thinking requires space m whichto forget, to select, to delete and to isolate what is significant. If you cannotdiscard any item from the memory store, you cannot abstract andgeneralize. But without abstraction and generalization, there can be nothought.  The historian does not merely record; he edits, he omits, he judges,he interprets, he reorganizes, he composes. His mission is nothing lessthan 'to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, bybringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its everyaspect'. Yet this quote is not from a historian discussing history writing;it is from a novelist on the art of fiction: it is the famous beginning ofJoseph Conrad's preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', a true manifesto ofthe novelist's mission. The fact is, these two arts – history writing and fiction writing -originating both in poetry, involve similar activities and mobilize thesame faculties: memory and imagination; and this is why it could rightlybe said that the novelist is the historian of the present and the historian ofthe novelist of the past. Both must invent the truth.  Of course, accuracy of data is the pre-condition of any historicalwork. But in the end, what determines the quality of a historian is thequality of his judgment. Two historians may be in possession of thesame data; what distinguishes them is what they make of their commoninformation. For example, on the subject of convict Australia, RobertHughes gathered a wealth of material which he presented in his FatalShore in a vivid and highly readable style. On the basis of that sameinformation, however, Geoffrey Blainey drew a conclusion that is radicallydifferent – and much more convincing. Hughes had likened convictAustralia to the 'Gulag Archipelago' of the Soviet Union, but Blameypointed out that whereas the Soviet Gulag was a totally sterile machinedesigned solely to crush and destroy its inmates, in Australia, out of aconvict system that was also brutal and ferocious, a number of individualsemerged full of vigour and ambition, who rose to become some oftheir country's richest citizens. In turn, they soon generated a dynamicsociety and, eventually, a vibrant young democracy What matters mostin the end is how the historian reads events – and this is where his judgmentis put to the test. To reach the truth of the past, historians must overcome specificobstacles: they have to gather information that is not always readilyavailable. In this sense, they must master the methods of a specializeddiscipline. But to understand the truth of the present time, right infront of us, is not the preserve of historians; it is our common task. Howdo we usually cope with it? Not too well, it seems. Let us consider just two examples – still quite close to us, and ofcolossal dimensions. The twentieth century was a hideous centuryfilled with horrors on a gigantic scale. In sheer magnitude, the terrorperpetrated by modern totalitarianisms was unprecedented. It developedessentially in two varieties: Stalinist and Hitlerian. When we read the writings of Soviet and East European dissidentsand exiles, we are struck by one recurrent theme: their amazement,indignation and anger in the face of the stupidity, ignorance and indifferenceof Western opinion and especially of the Western intelligentsia,which remained largely incapable of registering the reality of their predicament.And yet the Western countries were spending huge resources,both to gather intelligence and to develop scholarly research on thecommunist world – all to very little avail. Robert Conquest, one of thevery few Sovietologists who was clear-sighted from the start, experiencedacute frustration in his attempts to share and communicate hisknowledge. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, his publisherproposed to reissue a collection of his earlier essays and asked him whattitle he would suggest. Conquest thought for one second and said, 'Howabout I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?’ Interestingly enough, the name of one writer appears again andagain in the writings of the dissidents from the communist world – theypay homage to him as the only author who fully perceived the concretereality of their condition, down to its very sounds and smells – and thisis George Orwell. Aleksandr Nekrich summed up this view: 'Orwell is the only Western writer who really understood the essential nature ofthe Soviet world: Czeslaw Milosz and many others made similar assessments.And yet, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a work of fiction – an imaginaryprojection set in the future of England. The Western incapacity to grasp the Soviet reality and all its Asianvariants was not a failure of information (which was always plentiful); itwas a failure of imagination. The horrors of the Nazi regime have long been fully documented: thecriminals have been defeated and sentenced; the victims, survivors, witnesseshave spoken; the historians have gathered evidence and passedjudgment. Full light has been cast upon this entire era. The records fillentire libraries. In all this huge literature, however, I would wish to single out onesmall book, extraordinary because of its very ordinariness: the pre-warmemoir of a young Berliner, Raimund Pretzel, who chose to leave hiscountry in 1938 on purely moral grounds. Written under the pen-nameof Sebastian Haffner, it carries a fittingly modest and unassuming title:Geschichte eines Deutschen (Story of a German), which was badly translatedfor the English edition as Defying Hitler. It was published posthumouslyonly a few years ago by the author's son, who discovered the manuscriptin his father's papers.  The author was a well-educated young man; the son of a magistrate,he himself was entering that same career; his future prospects weresecure; he loved his friends, his city, his culture, his language. Yet, likeall his compatriots, he witnessed Hitler's ascent. He had no privilegedinformation; simply, like any other intellectual, he read the newspapers,followed the news, discussed current affairs with friends and colleagues.He clearly felt that, together with the rest of the country, hewas being progressively sucked into a poisonous swamp. To ensure areasonably smooth and trouble-free existence, small compromiseswere constantly required – nothing difficult nor particularly dramatic;everyone else, to a various extent, was similarly involved. Yet the sumtotal of these fairly banal, daily surrenders eroded the integrity of eachindividual. Haffner himself was never forced into participating in anyextreme situation, was never confronted with atrocities, never personallywitnessed dramatic events or political crimes. Simply, he foundhimself softly enveloped into the all-pervasive moral degradation of anentire society. Experiencing nothing more than what all his compatriotswere experiencing, he faced the inescapable truth. Since he waslucky enough to have no family responsibilities, he was free to abandonhis beloved surroundings and to forsake the chance of a brilliant career:he went into voluntary exile, first to France and then England – to savehis soul. His short (unfinished), clear-sighted and sober memoir raisesone terrifying question: all that Haffner knew at the time, many millionsof people around him knew equally well. Why was there only oneHaffner? Earlier on, I suggested that artists and creative writers actuallydevelop alternative modes of access to truth – all the short-cuts affordedby inspired imagination. Please do not misunderstand me: if I suggestthat there are alternative approaches to truth, I do not mean that thereare alternative truths. Truth is not relative; by nature it is within thereach of everyone, it is plain and obvious – sometimes even painfully so.Haffner's example illustrates it well. At the time of the Dreyfus Affair – the most shameful miscarriage ofjustice in French modern history – one of the eminent personalitieswho came to Dreyfus's defense was a most unlikely figure. MarechalLyautey, being an aristocrat, monarchist, Catholic, third-generationmilitary man, seemed naturally to belong to the other side – the side ofrightist, anti-Semitic, clerical, militaro-chauvinistic bigots. He becamea supporter of Dreyfus (who was falsely convicted of the crime of treason)for only one reason: he himself had integrity. The pro-Dreyfuscommittee gathered to discuss what to call itself; most members suggestedthe name Alliance for Justice. 'No,’ said Lyauter 'We must call itAlliance for Truth.’ And he was right, for one can honestly hesitate on whatis just (since justice must always take into account complex and contradictoryfactors), but one cannot hesitate on what is true. Which brings me to my conclusion. My conclusion is in fact myunspoken starting point. When I was first invited to speak on the subjectof truth, it was a few days before Easter. During the successive daysof the Christian Holy Week, we read in church the four Gospel narrativesof the last two days in the life of Christ. These narratives each containa passage on the trial of Jesus in front of the Roman governor,Pontius Pilate; the concept of truth appears there in a brief dialoguebetween judge and accused. It is a well-known passage; at that time, itstruck me in a very special way. The high priests and the Sanhedrin had arrested Jesus, and theyinterrogated him. In conclusion, they decided that he should be put todeath for blasphemy. But they were now colonial subjects of the Romanempire; they had lost the power to pronounce and carry out death sentences.Only the Roman governor possessed such authority. Thus they bring Jesus to Pilate. Pilate finds himself in a predicament.First, there is the problem inherent to his position: he is both head ofthe executive and head of the judiciary As supreme ruler, he is concernedwith issues of public order and security; as supreme judge, heshould ensure that the demands of justice are being met. Then there ishis own personal situation: the Jews naturally see him for what he is –an odious foreign oppressor. And he distrusts and dislikes these quarrelsomeand incomprehensible natives who give him endless trouble.During his tenure, twice already there have been severe disturbances;the governor handled them badly – he was even denounced in Rome.He cannot afford another incident. And this time, he fears a trap. The Jewish leaders present themselves as loyal subjects of Caesar.They accuse Jesus of being a rebel, a political agitator who tells the peoplenot to pay taxes and who challenges Caesar's authority by claimingthat he himself is a king. Now, if Pilate does not condemn him, Pilatehimself would be disloyal to Caesar. Pilate interrogates Jesus. Naturally, he finds Jesus' notion of a spiritualkingdom quite fanciful, but it seems also harmless enough. Theaccused appears to be neither violent nor fanatic; he has poise; he isarticulate. Pilate is impressed by his calm dignity, and it quickly becomesobvious to him that Jesus is entirely innocent of all the crimes of whichhe has been accused. Pilate repeats it several times: '1 can find no faultin this man.' But the mob demands his death, and the Gospel adds that,hearing their shouts, 'Pilate was more afraid than ever.' Pilate is scared:he does not want to have, once again, a riot on his hands. Should thishappen, it would be the end of his career. In the course of his interrogation, as Pilate questions Jesus on hisactivities, Jesus replies: 'What I came into the world for, is to bear witnessof the truth. Whoever belongs to the truth, listens to my voice.'To which Pilate retorts: 'The truth! But what is the truth?' He is aneducated and sophisticated Roman; he has seen the world and read thephilosophers; unlike this simple man, this provincial carpenter fromGalilee, he knows that there are many gods and many creeds under thesun … However, beware! Whenever people wonder 'What is the truth?' usuallyit is because the truth is just under their noses – but it would be veryinconvenient to acknowledge it. And thus, against his own better judgment,Pilate yields to the will of the crowd and lets Jesus be crucified. Pilate's problem was not how to ascertain Jesus' innocence. This waseasy enough: It was obvious. No, the real problem was that, in the end -like all of us, most of the time – he found it more expedient to wash hishands of the truth.