Rumination on "Facts," From Dark to Light to Dark

Ever since I wrote about Mike Daisey and the brouhaha over The Lifespan of a Fact, my prolixity surrounding all that, something's gotten in my craw, and I have the need to purge. The idea of "facts" seems very emotionally-laden. They're usually associated with the "cold" and "rational" realm. They are, but let's look at the non-rational aspect of "fact" and see if we "see"... Hell, maybe I'll write my way to something closer to the "truth." Facts and the Truth are both good, right?

We don't want "lies," we say; give us "facts." But I was thinking about Robert Anton Wilson giving an interview, and being asked about his historical novels, and his research for them. He said using one encyclopedia was useless. When trying to ascertain how high the walls of the Bastille were in 1770 or so, one Authoritative source gave one number, another Authority said something else, and a third yet something dissentual from the other two.

And what does a fact-checker do? They work hard to verify that...what will be consumed by its eventual audience "is" true. But how do they know? They talk to someone who was there. Maybe a few people. They consult all kinds of documents: newspaper clippings, web searches, phone books, photographs, recordings, musty old almanacs, competing reports of some...(supposed) event. Are each of the items listed in the previous sentence unimpeachable "evidence"? Are they infallible?

It gets worse.

It turns out, from about 60 years (or you can argue: 110 years?) of cognitive psychological research, that as searchers with skills to ferret truth from lies, and the detection of biases...we're biased and will only perceive that which fits into our reality tunnels. Some may be better at detecting their own biases and seeing a bigger slice of the picture - they have developed alternative models for thinking -  but no one Sees All, or can Determine Absolutely What Went On, how it all "really" went down.

This seems a very unpleasant "fact." And no doubt there is someone who is reading this that is getting so mad at me for denying they can know the Whole Truth that, in this day and age in Unistat...I'm glad my address isn't listed here. Sorry! A welter of empirical data shows we are colored by very ingrained cultural, social, behavioral and even biological structures embedded in neural circuitry. (Biological in that other animals "see" the world differently than we do. This may seem trivial given the socio-cultural aspects that occlude, but I think it's a valuable reminder of our glorious embodiment, and that it prevents us from sensing certain things that come easy to, say, dogs and birds, ants and snakes.)

It seems we tell ourselves "we've ran it through the fact-checkers...looks doubtful we're gonna get sued" and that's probably good enough most of the time. But at a more granular level of "facts"? I think we just all want to pretend that we can definitively know. The documentation is there, man! And the writers of those documents "were" people of fine character. Okay. Maybe.

Nonetheless, it's an important job, lots can hang on it (not being brought down by a libel suit, for example), and as David Zweig argues in a recent article, the fact-checker's responsibilities seem isomorphic to the graphic designer's, the piano tuner for a world-class pianist, and the anesthesiologist: all are unsung, but vital.

And facts are not a trifle; they're simply fallible. In reading, listening, thinking, writing, we must use our uncommon sense, wits, intuition (whatever that is: our non-dominant hemisphere?), our "built-in, shockproof crap detector." And it's gotta be good enough for now. We give it a good shot and move on, 'cuz it's time for Jeopardy!


In a brazen attempt to manipulate your mood - the "Light" in the title above - and steal 10 minutes of your time, here's a short film about fact-checkers, starring Bill Murray:

In a 1942 essay by Wallace Stevens he asserts that "reality" and "imagination" are inseparable. Our "ordinary" reality of today is the hardened, naturalized, codified place where imagination was once new.

And we're to either take imagination - our imaginations - seriously, and practice thinking change and then enacting change, or we shall go on, having our mendacious leaders and our "faith" tell us everything's okay; things will get better. Well, I've perceived what's happened since, oh, late 2000 CE, and this will not cut it. Right-wing billionaires and bank-bought liberals, clownish candidates, endless wars, a crumbling infrastructure, jealous bailed-out CEOs and their "talent" and privilege and unearned, obscene bonuses right out of an Alfred Jarry play, a whole political party operating in a wholly-concocted sham reality-bubble, a craven corporate media, the growing Panopticon, the fact that Unistat tortures and insists it can kill anyone they want, anytime, for reasons of State, in perpetuity..."faith" will not do. More imagination is needed. Can we carry it off? Are there enough of us?

What does all this have to do with "fact-checking"? Just this, my friends: In our Information Economy, the organization of "facts" trumps anything like "truth." The brutal Rationality of the State seems too oriented toward suffering and death for most of us, if not us right now in Unistat, then our friends and brothers and sisters in other lands.

Why should we pay attention to what "the market" did today? What about those unemployment statistics? How about the recent poll numbers for one corporate-bought candidate over the other one? Gross National Product, population trends, demographics...this stuff can make you sick. Are we supposed to follow the numbers and not perceive with our eyes and ears?

Do I have a bloodlust towards the people of Iran? Afghanistan? Far, far from it. Do you think air strikes are the only answer? If so, I must ask you: when did you lose it? Because you have lost it, in my opinion.

Let's use imagination. Maybe Mike Daisey, in his superabundance of imagination, exercised it un-cautiously when discussing how Apple products are made. But really: how truthful is his story, on the whole? And was it all about rhythm? Or human suffering?

I'll end by quoting Wallace Stevens, from 1942:

In speaking of the pressure of reality, I am thinking of life in a state of violence, not physically violent, as yet, for us in America, but physically violent for millions of our friends and for still more millions of our enemies and spiritually violent, it may be said, for everyone alive...A possible poet must be a poet capable of resisting or evading the pressure of the reality of this last degree, with the knowledge that the degree of today may become a deadlier degree tomorrow.

                                          Wallace Stevens, American poet.

Mike Daisey and the Lifespan of a Fact

Preliminary Bullshit
Dear Readers: Herein I shall attempt to report only the honest facts - as checked by me; hey, I don't get paid for this blogstuff - and discuss some Current Events and how they might relate to Philosophy. The "stories" I've read and will link to "are" true (I think?), and really, if I hadn't read and saw these items with my own eyes I would have had serious doubts...about...your existence. Or mine. Or the nature of veracity. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at what I've decided is the beginning.

I hope I'm being faithful to Marianne Moore when she hinted that poetry was an "imaginary garden with real toads" in it. Not sure if I should've put quotes around that...

But we're not talking about "poetry" here. (Or will we?) We're talking about fiction versus non-fiction, journalism and what we think it "really" oughtta be, documentary films, feature films about historical events, artistic license (who evah hoidda such a thing?), and who gets away with what. And maybe why and how, if the lunch bell doesn't ring, in which case all speech should cease while we dash off to fill our pie-holes, of paramount import.

I remember working in a library, shelving books under the Dewey Decimal System. Do such work for 25 hours a week and you're almost guaranteed to learn the System pretty quickly.

I quickly noticed all the books from 200 to 299 were about religion. Okay. But the Bible was in there, too. So: at some point They had a meeting and decided the Bible was "non-fiction"?

                                             Supposedly, this is Carlos Castaneda

Later I read a thick book by a skeptic, Richard DeMille, who had been adopted by Cecil B. DeMille, and was at one time linked to L. Ron Hubbard and John Wilkes Booth, but let us not let any guilt-by-association into this screed. I hate that type of rhetoric.

Richard made his intellectual career out of showing what a con artist Carlos Castaneda had been, and still was, while DeMille was writing his books. I had read Castaneda and thought his tales of interaction with the shaman Don Juan marvelous, almost too marvelous to be true. DeMille pretty much convinced me Castaneda made it all up. (Maybe?) It's a long story. I recommend checking out The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies.

But did this make everything in Castaneda "false"? This story, by its commodius vicus of recirculation, keeps coming back around. And I always enjoy it. I find much of value in Castaneda, even though I doubt he ever went into the desert at all. I don't believe Don Juan existed. I think Castaneda wrote his books in the UCLA library, liberally stealing from other books on shamanism, Taoism, zen, American Indian tales, books on psychedelic drugs, and ideas from a branch of sociology called Ethnomethodology, whose greatest practitioner, Harold Garfinkel, was one of Castaneda's faculty advisors at UCLA. But Castaneda's books - shelved also in the non-fiction section of most libraries - constitute something of fictional gardens with real toads in them. At least for me. Is "poetry" true?

Fact-Checking and Non-Fiction
Richard DeMille's book cited above, 500-plus pages, constitutes an extended fact-check on Castaneda, with plenty of contributions from expert witnesses, some friendly to Castaneda, most not. If DeMille's book does anything truly valuable, it's to add to the High Weirdness that has mounted around the history of Cultural Anthropology, particularly ethnographies.

All of which I find endlessly fascinating, but more recently and more domestically, a book called The Lifespan of a Fact has brought this whole issue of liminality around. Ostensibly the book is a back-and-forth between a writer of a non-fiction essay about a young man's suicide in Las Vegas, and the fact-checker of his "story." If you're not already all over this, pause now and read up on it HERE, HERE,  (an excerpt HERE), HERE, HERE, and if you're not sick of it already, HERE. I don't have the time to go over the minutiae.

My Derived Opinions About Facts as Discussed by Some Critics of the Book About Facts
I have only perused the book and not read it cover-to-cover. My preliminary opinion-feel is that D'Agata is a pretentious tool, and Fingal was just trying to do his job. I'm stunned by how D'Agata wants to abuse his literary license, choosing to defend such trivialities, such as defending 34 because it's rhythmically better than the true 31, etc, many more examples, etc.

I also assume most of the great non-fiction essays - especially the ones by the New Journalists and the so-called New-New Journalists, contain some inaccuracies, emanating from poetic license, or facts that couldn't be verified, or mistaken information the author found congenial to their aims.

It seems to me a matter of degree: might we possibly ask, how vital is this information? If one were to act on the (inaccurate?) information, could it significantly increase harm to someone? If it turns out there are alarming inaccuracies, does it impinge on our abilities to make good decisions in the "real world"? What does it mean to lie, even with poetic aims? This last one is my favorite, because it cuts into the philosophical terrain of "How do we know what we think we know?" and "How is knowledge constituted?" and "How can we tell if something is really true or not?" These un-toothsome queries being mere paraphrastic basic definitions from that wily branch of Philosophy, epistemology. (And in our case here, a sub-branch, "social epistemology.")

I do not find it fruitful to keep separate, via some derived rule, epistemology and ethics, or ethics and ontology, or epistemology and ontology, or...you get the point. My main model of the world as of late March, 2012 forbids such Kantian rationalistic fears of "contamination" or untidy blurring of lines we meme-reified/made up at some point in our neurohistory...

Why do we lie to our kids about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy? At what point is this lying "unethical"? When are kids ready to be taught that, not long ago, six million people were exterminated because of their heritage? Or facts about the centuries-long Inquisition in Europe? It seems most Unistatians would rather stay closer to the Tooth Fairy when the history of their own land is framed like this: "America was built upon genocide and slavery." Is that last statement "false"?

Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" reigns supreme o'er the land. Senator Moynihan famously said something like "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts." It turns out his..."argument" is losing in Unistat, 2012. But then I'm biased, to some degree, because I have no Archimedean vantage point by which to tell "the" truth, such a Damned Thing exists. All this - this whole Overweening Generalist blog - is me trying, hoping, to get my opinions and ideas across. Not "the truth." But I will tell you what I think, as of that day. I'm always hoping to get closer to something like the truth and assume a vast ignorance within myself.

As for the reviews of The Lifespan of a Fact I linked to above, two passages resonated with me. See if they do with you too, or to what degree they do:

In Laura Miller's piece from Salon, she ends by noting how an implementation of a fact-checking habit in our own lives could be salutary, and writes:

To me, this seems far more likely to break a person open and destabilize his understanding of himself and the world than hopping on D'Agata's magic carpet ride of Art. The pity is that more nonwriters  aren't subjected to fact checking. It may not be fun, but it's good for you.


In the piece by New Yorker fact-checker Hannah Goldberg:

The conceit that one must choose facts or beauty - even if it's beauty in the name of "Truth" or a true "idea" - is preposterous. A good writer - with the help of a fact-checker or an editor, perhaps - should be able to marry the two, and a writer who refuses to try is, simply, a hack. If I've learned anything at this job, it's that facts can be quite astonishing.


My favorite piece on this highfalutin' imbroglio was by Dan Kois at Slate, "Facts Are Stupid." Robert Anton Wilson fans should appreciate this one. Check his links! Note the notes at the end of the piece! This is a piece I wish I would've written...One can spend a lot of time analyzing this piece and its link to its own "inaccuracies," which themselves suggest further "inaccuracies"...Kois, I suspect, is Illuminati.

                                Orson needs to be in the middle of a discussion such as this.


More Philosophy-Lite Jibber-Jabber About <cough> Truth
How to square this with Jean-Luc Godard's bit about film being "lies at 24 frames per second," or Dorothy Allison's "Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning," or "Art is a lie I use to tell the truth," usually attributed to Picasso. Oscar Wilde once queried, "Are the critics of Hamlet mad or only pretending to be so?"

I think the convention of presenting or framing a work as non-fiction puts an onus upon the writer to attempt to be factual to the utmost, all the while we must never forget who we are as humans, and that the Trickster gods are always at play in our Art, whether putatively "fiction" or not. Some of us will always be more possessed by the local Trickster gods and goddesses. This I take as basic fact.

Why Mike Daisey Should Go On As He's Been, and That Ira Glass Is a Tool
First: a gedankenexperiment: JFK really was killed, right? And Clifford Irving really did get caught hoaxing a prominent publishing house by asserting he had a hotline to Howard Hughes and a sure-fire Number One Bestseller. And some painters are such good forgers that some of their paintings have fooled Art "experts" and are hanging in some of the world's great museums, right? And Orson Welles really did scare the bejeezus out of very many people with his "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, right? Okay now: watch Oliver Stone's feature film JFK, followed by Orson Welles's documentary F For Fake, then decide how much of each film was "really true." For extra credit, tell us why you think Stone and Welles made the decisions they did.

Okay: Mike Daisey. Does he present himself as a journalist? A hard-hitting reporter of "facts"? No, but he seemed to be crossing over into a new territory when he started talking about Apple and the working conditions in China where the Apple products are assembled. If you've had a "life" lately and don't know the story, HERE is an item. And HERE. If you're still into it, HERE. Mike Daisey's blog is HERE. NPR's This American Life Pulls the Apple story.

First off, Ira Glass and the other movers at NPR -  I like NPR and listen to This American Life and I really like the show - seem to me pretentious here. Their show is NOT journalism. There are readings of fiction pieces. They aim to entertain by having people at times answer off-the-cuff questions about personal aesthetics, there's a lot of literary goofiness about the show. Etcetera. And Mike Daisey? Has he earned the right to be a Mark Twain-ish storyteller? Or, as one critic said of Daisey: a cross between Noam Chomsky and Jack Black. (I think this comparison apt if overblown, risking the disappointment of hardcore Jack Black and ardent devotees of Noam Chomsky.) You're not allowed to do that?

(I'd like to see some guy come out as a cross between George Carlin and the Dalai Lama - now you Osho/Rajneesh fans: don't tell me He was it: the jokes weren't there, if ya knowwhattamean - but now I'm rambling...)

Did we forget Daisey's background? A little CONTEXT, please? Was Daisey contrite when NPR called him out? Can Mike Daisey speak for himself astonishingly well? Does he bring into question the ideas about artists pointing out injustices in a way that Just The Facts M'am journalists have not? Possibly because it's unpleasant to face those facts, when you're so goddamned in love with a company's gadgets? (I got a little carried away there, and I apologize, but I say the answer is YES to all the above.)

Now: I consider the form of the comedic monologue to a form of poetry, one of my favorite forms in fact. There is where I stand.

About six years ago, Daisey - Unsitat's most brilliant monologist, as good as Spaulding Gray was, in my opinion - did a talk-piece called Truth, if I remember correctly. Now, earlier today I checked You Tube and found and re-watched two four-minute "teasers" for that show, both hilarious, one on James Frey and one on J.T. LeRoy, but a few hours later, they've been removed from You Tube. Qui bono?, Mike Daisey? I think they bolster your cred! Anyway, I guess he has his reasons.

(There are five errors in the above piece, for which I apologize. - the OG)

Here's Daisey being interviewed in Cork, Ireland, in 2010. It's 4 minutes, 47 seconds.

6 minutes from a Daisey performance called "Invincible Summer":