Facts Are Subversive by Timothy Garton Ash

Finding this collection of essays originally published between 2000 and 2009 was one of those happy accidents that come along from time to time. In that the title appealed to me, I did at first judge this book by its cover. Then I opened the book. It begins:

Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and postmodernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those ‘easy speeches that comfort cruel men.’

These are the first three sentences of the Preface. Unlike some, this Preface is worth your time. I found it comforting to learn there is at least one real journalist left alive on the planet. I had thought the species extinct or close to it.

Ash describes his thorough methods of research in the Preface, his methods are worth bearing in mind as you read, and I can only say we would live in a calmer and better world if more in his profession followed his example. No one can ever by completely objective. All of our personal knowledge is based on our personal experience, and our experience is never direct, but always filtered through the twin strainers of our cultural and linguistic conditioning and our personal experiences up to that point. Since no one can escape these factors (humans are not alone – wolves, elephants and crows, for example, have strict cultural arrangements), no one can completely escape bias. Ash recognizes his own, and states it up front.

I have not read every essay (yet). I have read random essays, and have found good, solid writing evenly present in all of them. Since it seems unlikely that I would just happen to pick only the essays in which these factors are present, I think it’s safe to recommend the book as a whole.

The Strange Toppling of Slobodan Milosevic, from 2000, was not entirely accessible to me in that my foundational knowledge of the time and place is limited to what I saw ten years and a few months ago on the evening news. These are contemporaneous essays written for an audience with a presumed interest in and knowledge of the topic at hand. If you were not following the story that was unfolding in Serbia in 2000, possibly you would not have read the essay at the time, when the names of the players were fresh, to the extent that we were aware of players beyond Milosevic himself. The evening news, after all, is sometimes limited to being essentially verbal headlines, and headlines do not have room for the second string. In a basketball game, the important things happen on the floor. In politics, they happen behind the bench. To continue the metaphor, even in basketball you may see the play on the floor, credit the player, and never know the name of the assistant coach who thought it up. The Strange Toppling of Slobodan Milosevic hints at a similar arrangement. In fact, all the so-called “velvet revolutions” leave room for multiple and varying interpretations. As do the other kinds of revolutions.

Two essays that continue to have relevance, and will for some time to come, are The Invisible Front Line (2007) and Liberalism (2009). The first explores the past, present and future difficulty of walking our collective way through the real culture war of our generations (plural intentional): finding mutual tolerance between Islam and “The West.” Ash propounds that there are as many fronts in this “war” as there are individuals who will connect with each other across that line. That it will be “won” or “lost” in terms of the interactions of these individuals, not in the broad-brush actions of the few at the top. He may be right, I don’t know. I do know that the few at the top have the power to change the lives of those of us farther down the food chain. Their personal interactions fall along that invisible front line as much as anyone else’s, they just have a greater ability to shift where the line lies.

Liberalism is as elegant as it is brief, and addresses one of the more import and abiding debates in US politics. It’s easy to forget that, like many adjectives, “liberal” is relative to the time and place. Ash proposes a short list the basic components of liberalism present as foundational concepts supporting the United States Constitution. These basic elements are, per Ash, “liberty under law, limited and accountable government, markets, tolerance, some version of individualism and universalism, and some notion of human equality, reason and progress.” Thus Ash helps the reader remember exactly how revolutionary the American Revolution was.

If you read nothing else from this book, I heartily encourage you to read this three-page essay. Is has genuine lasting value.

No matter what your political leanings may be, you will probably not agree with everything Ash presents in terms of political opinion. I did not, but even where I did not agree, it was refreshing to have alternate views clearly expressed and based on reason and facts. Sometimes that opinion is his, sometimes not. A book this broad and as interested in conveying content is useful in its ability to present a kaleidoscope of concurrent events. Political opinion is overtly present in some essays (see Liberalism, above), and largely absent from others (The Strange…).

If you are at all interested in the events that have brought us to where we are at present, you will enjoy or at least appreciate this book. If you are more of the what-we-call-in-the-US a Conservative, you will have to be open to an alternative point of view, but will probably be surprised at the degree to which you find yourself in agreement. The idea that modern day US liberals are somehow “anti-Constitution” will not survive an honest reading of the facts.

And facts are indeed subversive.