Truth, fact and fiction

I love the expression ‘in my humble opinion’. That’s because it isn’t just wrong. It’s wrong in so many different ways.

After all, how can an opinion be humble or proud? Or pretty much anything other than right or wrong, well-founded or fanciful? The holder of the opinion may be humble, but if so, why advance the opinion anyway? Surely putting forward an opinion at all shows a certain confidence in it, if not downright arrogance?

Anyway, in my humble opinion, the two best pieces of TV I’ve watched in recent months are Unbelievable and Unorthodox. The fact that both titles are negative adjectives may be unnerving but is certainly unintentional.

Merritt Wever and Toni Collette as the detectives in Unbelievable
Fictionalised versions of real characters

Unbelievable is based on a compelling account of police work, led by two women detectives, on a serial rapist, with the linked story of a young woman whose rape complaint wasn’t believed by far less bright cops.

Unorthodox is drawn from the novel, built around her experiences, of a woman who broke free from an Orthodox Jewish community in New York, and the difficulties she faced both in her earlier existence and in coming to terms with the new one.

Shira Haas in Unothodox
The lake scene is one of the most poignant in the series

Both are works of fiction based on historical fact. This is not a spoiler, but there is a strand in Unorthodox to do with music which does not correspond to the real character’s history. But it’s powerful and engrossing, so it’s a welcome addition to the story. And it certainly doesn’t detract from its psychological truth.

Similarly, in Unbelievable, the names of the female protagonists have been changed. In the case of the young rape victim, this is principally to protect her identity. In the case of the two outstanding detectives, it is because though they are drawn from real figures, they differ from them in certain ways, and the invented names recognise the extent to which they are fictional creations.

Libby Hill recently ran an interview on Indiewire with Susannah Grant, co-creator of Unbelievable. The article’s worth reading in its entirety, but for now I’m going to focus on just a single sentence, because it struck me so forcefully. This is Hill’s opening, a quote from the novelist Madeleine L’Engle:

Truth is what is true, and it’s not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing.

Facts can be used to mislead. It is fact, for instance, that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently announced £5 billion of infrastructure expenditure as a key element in the government’s response to the economic crisis associated with the Coronavirus pandemic. It’s also a fact that when US President Franklyn Roosevelt had to respond to the economic crisis precipitated by the crash of 1929, he called it the ‘New Deal’.

Unsurprisingly, Johnson called his initiative a New Deal too.

The parallel with Roosevelt’s unprecedented and colossal programme in the 1930s is impressive. Or so it seems, until we add a further fact. Johnson’s New Deal represents 0.2% of British GDP, while FDR’s amounted to around 40% of the US economy.

A fact without context gave us a fiction that communicates a falsehood.

Unbelievable, on the other hand, took facts as a starting point, but then built a fiction around them which conveyed important truths. It used the fiction to illustrate the horror and distress of rape, the pain of the victim disbelieved, and the contrast between the slapdash work of an inept policeman and the tireless and exhaustive work of two excellent ones.

In other words, a good fiction can communicate an important truth, while simple facts, as in Johnson’s case, can be used to deliver a falsehood.

This all put me in mind of one of my favourites writers of all time, Denis Diderot, the French novelist and philosopher of the eighteenth century. He was a remarkable writer, and his novels sparkle and amuse even today (if you don’t know it, you should try Jacques the Fatalist, one of the greatest comic novels of all time). Strangely, he admired Samuel Richardson, an English writer whose novels are stodgy and cloyingly sentimental with a touch of sadism thrown in. Diderot was heavily influenced by him, which is odd, since his books are lighter, more compelling and above all funnier.

There was a sharp debate in Diderot’s day about the relative truth of history and the novel. This was a time when historians were not above inventing speeches to put in the mouths of the major figures they were dealing with, on the grounds that, though no one knew what Julius Caesar or Charlemagne had said on a particular occasion, this is the kind of thing they might have said. But even without such downright invention, much history is necessarily speculative – based on documentary evidence perhaps, but filling in gaps by interpretation.

Diderot directly addresses Richardson on this subject:

Oh Richardson! I will go so far as to say that the truest of histories is full of lies, and your novel is full of truths. History paints a few individuals; you paint the whole human race… The human heart, which has been, is and always will be the same, is the model you copy… I will go so far as to say that history is often a bad novel; and the novel, as you have made it, is a good history. O painter of nature! It is you who never lie.

I love that notion. Fiction can be more truthful than fact. “Truth and fact are not the same thing,” as Madeleine L’Engle so sharply put it.

To see how valid that is, watch Unbelievable and Unorthodox if you haven’t already seen them. And tease out the truths in these and other fictions, of screen or page.

Then listen to the allegedly factual statements of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin or even mini-Trump Boris Johnson, with a seriously large pinch of salt.

The Empress, the Wit and the Disappointed

When I first went to university, it was to study Maths and Physics. It didn’t work out. I spent a rather purgatorial time immersed in the politics of the far left – all about ‘having faith in the working class’ which always left me a little uneasy, as I felt the left ought to be about evidence not faith – and even became president of my college students’ union, but at the end of the process I had no degree.

This struck me as annoying, so I immediately signed up to study something completely different. French. That gave my mother a wonderful told-you-so moment: she pointed out that I had always been temperamentally far more suited to the humanities than the sciences. And she was right.

Fortune favours the bold. Sometimes, I find it favours the downright impertinent. At the end of my first year of French studies, I let my professor know that I wanted to do a PhD.

‘Come and see me at the beginning of your fourth year,’ he sagely told me. 

After all, I had a failed degree behind me, and I certainly had something to prove before I could be considered for postgraduate studies. Like graduating, for instance.

Well, I stuck it out. At the beginning of my fourth year, a message trickled through to me that Professor William Barber would like to see me. I made an appointment and dropped in for a chat.

It seemed that he was now open to the idea of my doing a PhD. I was delighted. Why, I’d even chosen the extraordinary man I wanted to study. Denis Diderot, the son of a craftsman, had emerged in the eighteenth century as one of the leading figures of the French enlightenment. He was the prime mover of the Encyclopédie: at a time when the belief was that driving knowledge forward was the most important endeavour of mankind, what could be more valuable than to bring all available knowledge together in one easily accessible place – the first Encyclopaedia ever?

Denis Diderot: an extraordinary brain and a delightful wit

But what appealed to me most about Diderot was his extraordinary wit. If you don’t know his Jacques the Fatalist, you should try to find it and read it: it’s rich in lessons about tolerance and decency, and is also one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read.

William Barber, my Professor, invited me to sit down.

‘Subject to your getting a sufficiently good degree, I’d be happy to supervise you doing a PhD,’ he told me.

I was delighted.

‘I’d like you to work on Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis.’

I was disappointed.

Maupertuis was someone I’d heard of, but only because he appeared in two footnotes of a work of Diderot’s. It was a bit of a come down. And yet – William was right. Maupertuis was a scientist as well as a philosopher. My failed studies of science had at least equipped me with enough knowledge to understand his work.

‘Of course,’ William had assured me, ‘you don’t have to choose Maupertuis. But if you want me to supervise you, that’s who I’d like you to work on.’

Since I did want to work with William, I accepted his suggestion. For the next ten years, Maupertuis would dominate my life, as I wrote his Intellectual Biography. He may have been obscure and I may have done little to shine much light on his life, but I enjoyed what I did. There’s also a little pride in having been, however briefly, the world’s leading authority on Maupertuis, which I never would have been on Diderot. That’s big fish in a small pond thinking, I know, but hey, that’s not without its satisfaction.

So, I have no complaints about William’s decision.

On the other hand, I do still sometimes regret not having worked on Diderot. He was so much more attractive a character than Maupertuis. If nothing else, he didn’t take himself half so seriously - Maupertuis had what was no doubt to his mind an accurate estimate, to everyone else a wildly overblown one, of what was due to him.

So it was a pleasure to come across an anecdote about Diderot I was unaware of while reading a biography of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. Well, I say reading, but in reality I was listening to it: these days I often find it easier to listen to books than read them. 

Catherine was a great fan of Diderot’s, and even had him come to Russia as a guest for several months.

Diderot did outstanding work but it wasn’t well paid. He was never wealthy. He was devoted to his daughter, the only child he and his wife had after a series of miscarriages. When the daughter reached adulthood, he was anxious to raise a dowry for her. With little material wealth, he decided that all he could do was sell his library. He went looking for 15,000 French pounds (yes, the pound was a French currency too at one time) for it.

Catherine decided to offer him 16,000. But then she attached a condition to the sale. On the grounds that it was wrong to separate a scholar from his books, she insisted that he should keep them for her during his lifetime.

In effect, she had made him a librarian of hers. So she decided to pay him 1000 pounds a year to play that role. That worked fine in the first year, but his pay failed to show up in the second. Catherine, much embarrassed, made up for the oversight, by sending him fifty thousand pounds.

As she told him, that was fifty years’ salary, paid in advance.

Ah, yes. He was a special man, our Diderot. And, to be fair, Catherine was a pretty remarkable woman too.

Catherine the Great
As keen a fan of Diderot as I am. But with the means to prove it

Corbyn and Peter Pan politics

“Every time a child says, ‘I don't believe in fairies,’ there is a fairy somewhere that falls down dead.”

Peter Pan leads the way to a fantasy land
where fairies depend on children's beliefs

“I believe it because it is absurd,” said Tertullian, one of the fathers of the Christian church. It’s a powerful and highly sophisticated statement.

Christianity, like any belief system, requires faith, an ability to believe despite a lack of evidence, even against all evidence. After all, you need no faith to believe that the sun will set in the West: that’s the definition of the West. To believe that a man can be executed and rise on the third day, that does require faith.

This is as true of trivial beliefs as these more profound ones, such as Peter Pan’s statement about fairies. Or the belief that a portly, white-bearded man in a red suit will come down a chimney to bring good children presents.

I find it impossible to make such an act of faith. I say that even though I know the great comfort that faith provides. It’s no accident that the words “communion” and “community” are linked: shared belief creates a community and belonging to one is a deep human need and a source of consolation in a difficult world.

Even so, I can’t make that leap. Like Diderot, I find it less of a miracle that Lazarus was brought back from the dead, than that nobody, but nobody, chose to record the fact. Surely, somewhere there’d be something from a neutral third party: a spice merchant from Asia Minor, a Roman officer writing home, perhaps a sailor from Alexandria, even if all they were saying was “there’s a really weird tale going around this place at the moment, about a guy called Lazarus. They say, would you believe, that he died but a visiting miracle-worker brought him back to life.” Instead, nothing, nada, nix. The only authority is from the gospel writers themselves, those who were promoting the belief in the first place.

Not a problem, of course, for those like Tertullian who believe because it is absurd. But for someone like me, looking for evidence to support a point of view (which isn’t quite as strong as a belief: it can be overturned by new evidence), I simply can’t accept the story on such thin backing.

So I’m deprived of the child’s joy in waiting for the tooth fairy to call, believing in the fairy even though no one’s ever seen her. Or indeed the sense of belonging that inspires a mass at its best, even though no one’s ever documented the conversion of a biscuit and a chalice of wine into flesh and blood. Or indeed, the atmosphere at a meeting of Corbynistas, encouraging each other to further acts of faith, even though no Opposition leader in history has ever won an election from a base of unpopularity as dire as their guru’s.

That’s a double misfortune for me. In the first place, because I can’t enjoy the simple comfort of the believer drawn from the mere fact of belief. There must be joy in the fervour of the Corbynist who can, like Tertullian, convince himself of the truth of an absurd notion, such as John McDonnell’s that Corbyn can turn the poll position around in twelve months. I can’t share in it.

Then there’s the second misfortune. A child whose parents are sufficiently indulgent, and sufficiently well-heeled, will wake up in the morning to find that a coin has replaced the tooth she placed under the pillow on going to bed. Unless the parents are exceptionally indulgent, an adult who does the same with a lost tooth is likely to suffer acute disappointment. Generally, indeed, we expect adults to grow out of such childish beliefs.

In the case of Corbynist fancy, not growing out of it has serious consequences for everyone in Britain: clinging to the belief that Corbyn can defeat the Tories prevents us replacing him by someone who might make some progress against them. That simply ensures continued Tory rule. The results are all about us to see: hospitals offering doctors nearly £1000 to do a shift in A&E to prevent complete collapse into unsafe service, kids from poor backgrounds far less likely to attend good schools, families of dying invalids deprived of basic support.

Unlike the Peter Pan claim, in the Corbyn fantasy, it isn’t lack of belief that kills. On the contrary, it’s belief itself. The longer we cling on to that absurd faith, we ensure the suffering, even death, of more people – not fairies, let me stress, but people.

Personally, I can’t believe that fairies exist and depend on the belief of children to assure their own survival.

I can’t believe that the universe is run by a God who took human form to suffer and die to redeem humankind from a fate to which he’d condemned it in the first place.

And I can’t believe that the least popular Opposition leader in my lifetime has the slightest chance of winning a general election.

Well, it would be absurd, wouldn’t it?

Shalom! It's Easter

Good Friday, the celebration of a supreme sacrifice to save us all from the consequences of our own depravity. Also a break from work and, this year at least, it's coincided with glorious spring weather, making it difficult to maintain quite the solemnity many would feel the occasion merits.

In any case, like Denis Diderot, I’ve always had trouble getting my mind round the idea of God taking human form as his own son and descending to Earth to suffer and die in order to redeem us all from the terrible fate to which he condemned us in the first place. Still, I’m no theologian and probably lack the subtlety of thought to follow these intricacies.

In passing, I can't resist mentioning Diderot’s neatest statement on religion, when he pointed out that God is a father who sets great store by his apples and far less by his children.

My Jewish roots don’t help with coming to grips with this Easter business. Fortunately, a dear friend who happens also to be of Jewish extraction, is joining us tomorrow. I told her that I felt it right for Jews to get together to mark a weekend devoted to the most famous Jew of all.

‘Karl Marx came a good second,’ she replied.

Well, maybe. But wouldn’t the world be a much happier place if we were of a disposition to prefer Groucho to Karl for this relatively honourable position?

Promintent Jews down the ages

This reminds me of an old story appropriate to the season. My apologies to the many people who’ve heard me tell it before. I like to think it bears the repetition, but you can be the judge of that.

A Jew active in the City of London, whom we shall call Moishe (and you don't get more appropriate than that) became the close friend of an Irish colleague whose name was (naturally) Patrick.

They’d worked together for some time when Patrick said to Moishe, ‘you know, most weekends I go back to Ireland. It would be a great pleasure if I could persuade you to join me some time.’

Moishe was only too glad to accept the invitation and shortly afterwards they both travelled out to Patrick’s village.

Patrick was a generous host and ensured that Moishe lacked for nothing. Wonderful dinners, delightful conversations with friends and neighbours, a pleasant game of tennis, a lovely country walk, all was laid on for him. Until Sunday morning.

‘Moishe, my friend,’ said Patrick, ‘when I’m in the village, I’m rather expected to attend Sunday Mass. I hope you don’t mind if I’m out for an hour or so.’

‘Actually, Patrick,’ Moishe replied, ‘I’ve never been to a Catholic service. Would you mind if I joined you?’

Patrick was only too happy with the suggestion, as long as Father O’Connor agreed. At the church door, he immediately approached the priest.

‘Father,’ he said, ‘this is my friend Moishe, who’s not of our persuasion, but would like to attend this morning’s mass, if you have no objection.’

Father O’Connor had none and Patrick showed Moishe to a pew.

The Mass began. Shortly afterwards there was a ring on a bell and the collecting plate came round. Patrick reached into his pocket and put in a ten Euro note. Moishe, naturally, put in ten euros of his own.

A few minutes later there was another ring of the bell and round came the collecting plate again. Once more, Patrick put in ten euros, but Moishe had no ten euro notes left, so he put in twenty.

To his surprise, it wasn’t long before the bell rang once more and the collecting plate made a further appearance. Patrick had a third ten-euro note, but this time Moishe was obliged to put in a fifty.

By this time, he was beginning to find the experience expensively bought, but fortunately the Mass soon came to an end. As they were leaving the church, Patrick asked Moishe how he’d found the service.

‘Very interesting,’ said Moishe, ‘and in fact I’d be pleased to have the opportunity to ask some questions of your priest.’

Moishe got his chance on the way out.

‘Father O’Connor,’ he said, ‘let me get this straight. That Jesus Christ, wasn’t he a Jew?’

‘Why, yes,’ replied the priest, ‘he most certainly was, his whole life long.’

‘And all those disciples, weren’t they Jews too?’

‘Yes, indeed, now you mention it, good God-fearing Jews.’

Moishe shook his head. ‘You mean we started this business, and then let it get out of our control?’

Shabbat Shalom for tonight, and a happy Easter for the whole weekend.