The Truth. We say we want it. Politicians promise it, journalism claims to uncover it, lovers ask it of one another. Courts attempt to establish it. Families spend decades arguing about versions of it.
Almost every human relationship, though, depends on limits to what can be known, what needs to be known and what one person is entitled to demand from another.
Perhaps the interesting question is therefore not simply What is true? Perhaps it is: What do we need to know?
This is partly a question for the moral philosophers and partly one for the hacks.
Journalists are professionally trained to want to know. Better still, to know something before everybody else does. The scoop is not merely information but possession: I found it. I got there first. I know what you don’t know.
There is something magnificent in that impulse and something potentially ugly.
Democracies depend upon disclosure. Power cannot be held accountable if governments, corporations and institutions are permitted to hide everything inconvenient behind walls of secrecy. Journalism therefore exists partly to cross boundaries: to obtain the document, find the witness, follow the money, ask the question somebody would rather not answer.
But crossing a boundary is not the same as abolishing it.
British journalism learned this through phone hacking and the Leveson Inquiry. The scandal was not that journalists had discovered things that were false. Much of the information was real. The deeper problem was the assumption that because information could be obtained, somebody therefore possessed the right to obtain and publish it.
That distinction remains difficult. The public interest is not identical to whatever happens to interest the public.
This is an uncomfortable idea for journalists because journalism is built around knowing more. The reporter is professionally suspicious of the closed door.
Why will they not tell us? What are they hiding?
As Jeremy Paxman once put it, the assumption is always that the bastard is lying to you.
Often that is exactly the right instinct, but sometimes it is not.
I once interviewed a well-known international journalist in Warsaw. I didn’t want the standard interview: career highlights, polished opinions, the usual dull regurgitation of things already said elsewhere. I wanted the human story. I interrupted. I pushed. I tried to get behind the professional performance towards the person underneath it.
The thing never ran.
He thought I had not let him speak enough and, more importantly, that I had crossed lines about what was acceptable to use. Whatever I thought I had discovered, whatever I thought made the piece more alive, he did not accept the terms upon which I had turned the encounter into a story.
I thought I wanted the human being.
Perhaps I also wanted possession of the better story.
There is a point at which curiosity ceases to illuminate its subject and begins instead to reveal something about the person doing the looking.
I have crossed that line in other ways.
In one of my books I borrowed pieces of another writer’s article. Not his argument exactly, but his voice, his choice of words, the particular way in which he had assembled the material. I was writing about the way other people had written about something, moving constantly between quotation, paraphrase, interpretation and my own narrative, until somewhere along the way I confused the line between reproducing somebody else’s words and interpreting them.
I am not proud of it.
At some point confusion ceases to be a defence. Whatever was happening in my head as I wrote, some of those words were his and not mine. I had become as confused about authorship as I was guilty of plagiarism.
That too is a border.
An idea can enter you so completely that you stop remembering where it came from. A sentence becomes part of the furniture of your own mind. Journalism, scholarship and writing all depend upon other people’s words, but their existence inside your consciousness does not make them yours.
The border between influence and appropriation can become astonishingly porous when you are the person doing the appropriating.
It looks rather clearer from the other side.
I know something about that side too.
For months I was myself the object of somebody else’s investigation. I was conducting a secret love affair. I lied. I concealed things. I moved between lives and attempted to keep the walls between them standing.
Someone watched.
Patterns were recorded. Movements connected. The lies accumulated until they could be placed next to the evidence and the gap between the two became indefensible.
When it was finally laid out, there wasn’t very much to argue about.
The evidence was good.
Great work.
It is an odd experience for a journalist to become somebody else’s story.
Suddenly all the things we celebrate professionally – persistence, attention to detail, reconstruction, corroboration, refusing to accept the first explanation – acquire another emotional temperature altogether.
You realise why people hate journalists. Not necessarily because the journalist is wrong. Sometimes precisely because the journalist is right.
Truth may expose something that needed exposing and still humiliate the person exposed. Those two propositions can coexist. The fact that exposure is justified does not make exposure painless. Nor does the pain of being exposed make the facts disappear.
That experience should perhaps have taught me more than it did.
Because there is another occupational danger.
Someone lets you see something. Not a document or a bank statement necessarily.
A life.
Over months, perhaps, somebody talks. Stories accumulate and characters develop. There are things funny enough, strange enough, painful enough, human enough that the journalist somewhere inside you begins quietly taking notes.
And what a story it could be. Almost too good not to tell.
That may be the moment when the trouble begins.
Because being trusted with a story is not necessarily the same thing as being given it.
Being allowed inside somebody’s world is not permission to annex it.
I know this because I did it.
Someone I loved told me stories from her life over a period of months. They were extraordinary stories. Messy, funny, sexual, intimate, sometimes painful. To a journalist, they were irresistible.
And I used them.
It would be comforting to say that I simply failed to understand the boundary.
That would also be untrue.
Jealousy was there. So was retaliation.
I had listened to stories about other men, about lovers, about people who had occupied parts of her life. I was hurt by them. And when I later used parts of what she had told me in my own writing, however much I might dress it up as transformation, literature, observation or ownership of my own experience, there was something punitive in it.
I don’t particularly like admitting that.
But if this is an essay about truth, leaving it out would rather defeat the point.
The journalist’s temptation is to believe that disclosure creates ownership: you told me, therefore I can use it.
The lover’s temptation can be worse: you let me inside, therefore some part of this now belongs to me.
There is even a peculiar seduction in it. The story can begin to feel like a route further inside. If I understand enough, if I arrange the fragments correctly, if I write it beautifully enough, perhaps the distance between observer and subject will disappear.
Perhaps writing the story becomes another way of remaining inside the life.
Sometimes precisely the opposite happens.
The story becomes the door closing. And you lose your source.
That is not merely a professional failure. Sometimes it is an ethical one.
It may also be a personal one.
And somewhere in all of this sits triangulation.
Journalists are taught to triangulate. One source is not enough. Find another. Check the document. Find somebody who was there. Establish the fact by approaching it from several directions.
It is a useful defence against fantasy.
Human beings triangulate too, although rather less cleanly.
We understand one person through another. We talk about a lover to a friend, about a spouse to a lover, about ourselves through the eyes of somebody who desires us, despises us, envies us or forgives us. A third person enters a relationship and suddenly becomes a mirror in which the first two people can see themselves.
Sometimes we barely seem to live directly at all.
We live through other people.
We desire ourselves through their desire. We measure ourselves through their rejection. We tell one person what another person said and then watch the reaction. We introduce witnesses, rivals, ex-lovers, friends, therapists, readers, journalists into what we imagine is a relationship between two people.
The triangle can stabilise things but can also destroy them.
Sometimes the third person merely allows us to avoid the much harder encounter between two people who cannot finally know what is happening inside one another.
Areal investigation contains within itself the possibility of being wrong. There must be some imaginable piece of evidence that would make the investigator abandon the story.
A conspiracy theory does not permit this. Its borders continually expand. Silence is evidence. Contradiction is evidence. The absence of evidence proves the success of the cover-up.
Nothing remains outside the explanation.
There is something political about this desire for total knowledge. The fantasy that if only everything were visible then uncertainty would disappear.
But uncertainty is part of living among other people.
Privacy is not necessarily deception and silence not necessarily concealment.
Another person’s interior world is not territory waiting to be annexed.
Moral philosophers have been arguing around this problem for centuries: what do we owe one another? When does one person’s freedom meet another person’s claim? Is truth always an overriding good, or does truth itself acquire moral meaning from the circumstances in which it is sought, spoken and used?
And perhaps it also occasionally requires an apology.
That is the part journalists do not like very much. We are accustomed to thinking of the source as something we protect, cultivate, persuade or, if necessary, lose in pursuit of the larger story.
It is rather different when the source is somebody you love.
And when the story you were investigating was, partly, your own.
Perhaps this is why knowing when to stop matters so much.
The hack wants one more question.
The lover wants one more answer.
The plagiarist wants the sentence to have somehow become his.
The liar wants one more compartment in which contradictory truths can continue to coexist.
The investigator wants the final piece of evidence that will make the whole thing cohere.
Sometimes wisdom consists in recognising that there is no final piece.
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