There are people I would once have disliked almost on principle.
Peter Oborne, for example. Conservative, patrician, faintly schoolmasterish, a political journalist from a world I instinctively distrusted. Rory Stewart too: Eton, Oxford, diplomat, Tory MP, minister, the whole British establishment curriculum vitae laid out almost too perfectly. Stewart is not really a journalist in the conventional sense – he has been a diplomat, politician, author, academic and broadcaster – but he now occupies some of the same territory: travelling, listening, asking questions, trying to understand how institutions and people actually work.
Twenty years ago I would probably have spent more time establishing what was wrong with their politics.
Now I find myself listening. Not because I have become a Conservative. Nor because they have somehow arrived at my politics. That isn’t the point. I listen because I increasingly recognise something more fundamental than agreement: seriousness.
Oborne, for instance, walked out of the Daily Telegraph in 2015 and publicly accused the paper of allowing commercial considerations to distort its journalism. Whatever one thinks of him politically, that is a fairly pure journalistic act: deciding that there is a line and that the line matters more than the institution paying you.
I think this is what I was looking for all along.
Not liberal, conservative, progressive, reactionary, Polish, British, European.
A compass. And questions.
I came into journalism with a problem that I can see much more clearly now. I had a PhD from the LSE. I thought I was clever. More dangerously, I sometimes thought being clever excused me from taking seriously people who knew things I didn’t.
I knew, formally, that I had to learn journalism. Listen. Watch. File. Rewrite. Understand what an editor wanted. Get the story out on time. Learn the rhythm of an organisation rather than treating every assignment as an opportunity to demonstrate that the assignment was beneath me.
But another voice was running underneath. I did not come all this way to Poland to write this.
Some business story. Some minister saying something mildly different from what another minister had said the day before. Some miserable piece of wire copy whose most important property was that it had arrived before somebody else’s miserable piece of wire copy.
So I listened, but not always generously. I learned, but with a private superiority.
That is a terrible combination.
Arrogance and unreliability are bad enough individually. Together they are almost a professional philosophy of self-sabotage.
And I owe an apology, of sorts, to some of the journalists and editors I did not take seriously enough.
Not because they were always right. Not because every newsroom culture I encountered was good.
But because I often confused disagreement with superiority. I sometimes treated the discipline of journalism as though it were merely an obstacle between me and the thing I really wanted to say.
There is an irony here.
Journalism was trying to teach me precisely the thing I now think matters most.
You do not begin with what you want to say. You begin with what you don’t know.
Who says this? How do they know? Where is the document? What happened before? Who benefits? Who disagrees? What would prove this wrong? What have I misunderstood?
And then, if you’re lucky, after enough listening and enough checking, you get to say something.
That is quite different from having opinions.
I have plenty of opinions, as most people do. The internet has demonstrated that an opinion is one of the cheapest objects human beings can manufacture.
What interests me more now is doubt. The kind that doesn’t become conspiracy because it remains capable of discovering that it was mistaken.
Perhaps that is what I admire in people like Oborne and Stewart now. I don’t have to share their histories or their conclusions. I don’t even have to like everything they say. But I recognise people who are prepared to go somewhere, speak to somebody, discover that reality is less convenient than the argument they arrived with, and keep going.
And I think I was always trying to find that position myself. The difficulty was that for years I expected journalism to give it to me.
It never happened and perhaps it couldn’t.
The things that interested me were too untidy. Poland, yes, but also Britain. Borders. Europe. Migration. Memory. Class. Sex. Masculinity. Journalism itself. The strange things people do when they are frightened. The difference between what states say they are doing and what actually happens to people on the ground.
For a while I blamed the institutions.
Then I blamed Poland.
Then I blamed myself.
There were structural incompatibilities and mistakes. There was vanity and impatience, a tendency not to respect sufficiently the work that was actually in front of me.
There was also ability and curiosity, and even persistence, when I cared. An eye for contradiction. A willingness, eventually, to change my mind.
That last one has become increasingly important. I don’t think maturity consists in finally discovering that you were right. It may consist in becoming less frightened of discovering where you were wrong.
And perhaps that is where I am professionally now.
Smaller.
Much smaller, actually.
There is no major newsroom or glamorous title. Certainly no secure salary or institution standing behind me and lending me authority.
There is a house in Warsaw.
A desk.
Three university courses.
Some students.
Books I have written.
A website.
A few editing possibilities.
Journalism when it comes.
A morning news brief that I write partly because I still need to know what is happening in the country where I live.
It is not much compared with the fantasy.
But it may be more solid.
I am not interested now in announcing that I have finally found my voice. That sounds suspiciously like the old vanity in a new jacket.
I would rather say that I hear it better.
I also hear its weaknesses better. Its tendency towards performance, its appetite for recognition, its impatience and occasional pomposity.
And this is where the future becomes interesting again. Because I don’t actually want to leave Poland, which surprises me.
The peculiar accumulated knowledge of having lived in one country long enough to know that everything outsiders say about it is both partly true and completely inadequate.
This is a quieter ambition.
To become more reliable.
More exact.
Less impressed by certainty.
Less frightened by doubt.
More willing to listen to people with whom I disagree.
More willing to admit when somebody I dismissed twenty years ago turns out to possess qualities I should have noticed then.
And to keep working.
Not because I am brilliant.
Because I am finally beginning to understand what I am good at, what I am bad at, and what kind of work is worth becoming better for.
That seems enough of a future to be getting on with.
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