That's The Truth?

In politics, well, it depends.

A reminder that Spanish versions of my essays are now available here, and some Italian versions of my essays are available here. Marco Zeloni is now also posting some Italian translations. Many thanks to all the translators.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.

So much sheer nonsense has been talked about the use of information and “facts” in political argument, that I thought it might be useful to make a modest attempt to set a few things out clearly, so as to reduce confusion, and explain how things actually work. I’m going to cover two issues: first, how we can think of “truth” in politics, and second, how governments handle information and the legal and political issues that surround it. I’m going to try to be as factual as possible, without getting drawn into controversy.

The first thing to remind ourselves of, is that we are indeed talking about politics, and not philosophy. Concepts of “truth” and its associated vocabulary of “cover-ups,” “lying,” “misinformation,” “disinformation” and whatever, are political weapons, not technical terms, and have no fixed meaning outside the person who uses them, the context in which they are used and the political purposes they serve. So we have to distinguish at all times between the content of a piece of information (what it says) and the use to which it is put (what it does.).

Some people find this kind of approach unsettling, but, as I’ve argued before, there’s no need to. In theory, perhaps, absolute truth and completely reliable knowledge are available, on another plane of existence. But in real life, concepts of truth (and there are many) are approximate and incomplete, and most of us get through life quite well with that understanding. We know that Legal Truth, for example, is what judges decide based on an elaborate technical game with complex rules, and can be overturned in minutes if new evidence emerges. We know that Scientific Truth is provisional and subject to refinement, and, if you believe Popper, to falsification as well. (Scientific truths of even a century ago have been modified or even abandoned today.) And we know that Religious Truth is based on revelation and divine authority, and cannot be disproved. So, unless we are drawn to Idealism as a personal philosophy and a practical guide to life, we have to accept that, in reality, The Absolute Truth about anything important can never be known, and we should stop worrying about it. In particular, we should not confuse the banal fact that all truths are partial and incomplete with the idea that you can have any truth you like and all are equally valid— a position which no serious thinker has ever actually taken, so far as I know.

Much of our personal experience confirms this. Serious and reputable journalists (insofar as they still exist) may produce quite different versions of the same basic story, just by emphasising different elements of it. Any sufficiently complex historical episode can be legitimately presented in a number of different ways by reputable scholars: that’s why we have historical controversies. If you have ever written even quite a short article on history, never mind a book, you will be uncomfortably aware that the mere selection of material can substantially alter the thrust of your argument. And the same goes for biographies of any reasonably interesting person. It would be thought bizarre if we were to demand “the truth” about, say, the currently fashionable Battle of Kursk in 1943, or to complain that the latest biography of Winston Churchill was not “the truth.” On the other hand, it is legitimate to complain if some of the alleged “facts” are in practice not true, or not substantiated, or to claim that the overall selection of facts, even if individually true, still  gives an unbalanced or even false perspective. I’ll come back to this distinction in a minute.

Things are different in political discourse, and indeed that discourse is becoming more and more closed and more and more removed from the discourses of daily life, and the specialist discourses I have given examples of above. The political discourse of Truth is one of absolutes, but absolutes which have no empirical content. What do I mean by that rather gnomic pronouncement?  Well, simply put, in the wider political sphere (so including the media, various pundits and alleged experts) Truth is a label which we attach either to alleged facts that are politically useful to us, or that we demand others attach to statements that we may make. There may, of course, be a factual basis for our statements, and our alleged facts may turn out to be true, but that is not the point.It follows that for practical political purposes what is held to be “true” is what is convenient for us, and what is “false” is what is inconvenient for us. It is quite possible, of course, that after a while we find that these labels have to be changed, as our need for things to be true or false changes. But the point remains that at no stage in politics is there a deliberate and disinterested search for Truth.

Of course, in reality no discourse like this can ever be completely closed and self-contained. Events may intervene brutally, as they are doing over Ukraine, for example, and force some kind of modification. Moreover, governments are not stupid (well, mostly not stupid) and do not give hostages to fortune if they can avoid it. So if a government is asked, for example, whether it will recognise the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, it will not say “never, never.” It will say “we have no intention of doing so,” which is a fair representation of the situation, but also allows some room for manoeuvre, if the situation changes out of all recognition in the future. That’s why you should always read the words of government statements very carefully, and it’s also why western governments are in such a mess now over Ukraine, where they have made extreme and unconditional statements they may now regret. But in general, governments try to express things in such a way that they can cope with any anticipated changes, and later insist that whatever the outcome or whatever their final decision, it’s consistent with what they said earlier (Of course, Opposition forces will ritually denounce the lack of clarity, allege equivocation and so forth, but that’s part of the game.)

It’s also trivially true that there are many examples in politics where a given situation can support a whole series of different interpretations and even “truths,” all at odds with each other. Statistics are a classic case. Whilst they can’t literally be used to “prove anything”, they can be used, and often are, to support completely opposed arguments. So, assume a government is being criticised because crime figures are rising. Crime Up by 5% In Last Year, say the headlines. Yes, says the government, but most of that is because of new laws and recategorisations, and campaigns asking people to report crime. Violent crime, in fact, is down, and most of the increase is in crimes like shoplifting and motoring offences. No, say the opposition. Murders and armed robberies have both increased. Yes, says the government, but both figures have gone up only slightly, and are a very small part of overall crime. Anyway there are fewer murders now than when the opposition was last in power. And so on. Taken individually, each of these statements can be true, and for a long time now, part of political discourse has consisted of selecting and putting together things which are individually true, to convey the message you want to convey.

Governments naturally want to put the best interpretation on events that they can, just as we do in our private lives, and there is really nothing scandalous about that, any more than those opposed to governments putting their own spin on the same sets of facts. But it’s hard to avoid noticing the much shriller tone of criticisms of government in the last few decades. As much as anything else, this is a feature of competition on social media. “I don’t think the figures support the interpretation the government put on them” of fifty years ago has become “the government is lying and those responsible should resign or be prosecuted” today, simply because it’s always the loudest voice that is heard. In addition, though, this increasing shrillness is also related to certain types of political beliefs, to certain types of psychological orientations, and often to an assumption of personal moral superiority. In my experience, individuals do often feel morally superior to governments, and believe themselves entitled to lecture them and, in the jargon of this curious discourse, “hold them accountable.” Thus, you may read that the government “has refused to cut off development aid to country X in spite of criticisms made by human rights groups.” You could write a short essay on the hidden assumptions behind such statements, but here, it’s enough to say that competent governments generally try to find out the truth of such allegations, as far as it can be established, and act accordingly. They are not going to allow themselves to be jerked around by an unelected group of human rights lawyers. Of course a refusal to act on such allegations (which the allegers will naturally have anticipated) will in turn lead to accusations of a “cover-up” and of “lying” which can be profitably continued with the aid of sympathetic journalists for quite a while. (It will be interesting to see if the experience of media coverage of Ukraine eventually affects the instinctive credulity of the average western person in believing atrocity allegations.)

As  well as individuals and groups whose business model depends on the assumption that governments are always hiding things, there are others whose beliefs are so firmly entrenched that they simply cannot bring themselves to accept that the government is right on some issue, and they are wrong. An extreme example, but actually rather an instructive one, is that when the British government introduced legislation on Open Government a couple of decades ago, the greatest single number of requests for access to documents came from campaigners who were convinced that the government was hiding details of contact with alien races and Unidentified Flying Objects. If you think about it for a moment, you realise how enormously life-justifying and exciting it would be if these allegations were true, and how depressing it would be if they were not. So of course when the documents released turned out to be mundane and banal and to contain no such secrets, the only reaction possible was to claim that the government was still “hiding something” or had destroyed the incriminating files, even while, no doubt, continuing its quarterly liaison meetings with alien representatives at a secret underground site in the Scottish Highlands or wherever.

This kind of wish-fulfilment (“somewhere there must be secret documents that show I’m right”) overlaps with a superficial cynicism which probably has its origins in folk memories of the experiences of Vietnam and Watergate in the US half a century ago, but has been generalised now to much of the western world. It was summed up in the much-quoted remark of the journalist IF Stone that “all governments lie.” Now of course Stone could not have meant this literally, since the only government he had much experience of was that of the US, and it seems from the context that he was not suggesting that even the US government was lying all the time. But many people since have believed that it’s funny, or smart, or daring to say such things, even if all they really mean is “I disagree with what they say.” And of course once you acquire an irrational conviction of this kind, it persists effectively forever.

It seems likely that this kind of conviction arises ultimately from the memory that our parents kept secrets from us when we were children, and that there were things they preferred not to talk about (Freud would no doubt have related it to the Primal Scene.) As we get older, such unresolved conflicts with our parents are projected onto others, and converted into the idea that parent substitutes, including authority figures and ultimately the government, are hiding things from us in turn. Because our parents really were hiding things from us, of course, this belief is very hard to shift.

Against this background, let’s look at what actually happens with information and politics, so far as it can be set out coherently. Government has been partly about communication for a long time now, and in recent decades you could be forgiven for supposing that it was about nothing else. So these sorts of issues of presentation and interpretation have moved from the relative periphery to the centre. Whereas until, perhaps thirty years ago communications would be only one part of government strategy, they have now come to dominate it. Indeed, it’s wise to check government announcements carefully, these days, because sometimes they have no objective content at all, but are just a re-packaging or re-messaging of existing policies.

In the circumstances, therefore information (a better word here than “facts”) is more than ever a weapon in the struggle for political power and influence. It might be worth looking at how information gets used in practice, starting with governments.

Presumably, everyone accepts that any elected government has the right to govern, and to set out, explain and defend its policies. Now I say that, but on reflection some may see such a statement as controversial, or at least questionable. The full-on assault on the very idea of government by neoliberal forces over the last forty years has been assisted, unfortunately, by fashionable vaguely-anarchist distrust of and cynicism about, government from both Left and Right, and a widespread, if seldom fully articulated view that government, by its very nature is always corrupt, dangerous up to no good and telling lies. Since this is politics, these cynical and peremptory dismissals alternate with urgent demands that government should actually do something, whether fighting Covid or fighting wars, and with laments that it doesn’t seem able to.

But basically, if a government doesn’t have the right to govern, including using information to make and defend its case, then no political system can last, and in reality, no matter how awful current governments may be, and how disillusioned we may be with current politicians,  few of us can think of an alternative which is practically achievable. And one of the things about being in government is that it gives you access to, and control of, large amounts of information, just as when you are out of government you lose that control. (This, by the way, is why political parties in opposition always preach open government, and suddenly realise its unexpected shortcomings once they are in power.)

The easiest way to approach this question, perhaps, is through the common misunderstanding (or at least oversimplification) that governments have something called “secrets” which they are “hiding” from us and which heroic journalists or bloggers need to “discover” so that Good will triumph. It’s not like that in reality, of course. So let’s set out very simply what the situation actually is.

Government, like many organisations, has information that it wants to keep to itself. There are severely practical reasons why this is so: if anyone could see policy documents being evolved, for example, or discussions about how to respond to a foreign power, then any kind of government would be impossible. But there are also reasons of principle: few of us would like our medical records or the detail of our tax affairs to be available for anyone to see. (Ironically, governments are regularly bitterly criticised for allowing such information to leak: it’s a funny old world.) And finally, an elected government benefits from laws to do with the protection of government information in the way that those not in government don’t.

Once we get away from the juvenile model of governments “hiding secrets” from us, the actual protection of government documents follows fairly straightforward rules. A surprising amount of information in government files (or on government computers) is not really sensitive. It may be protected to the degree that it relates to decisions that have yet to be taken, arguments within government, or just the personal details of members of the public. Beyond that, most governments have formal classification schemes, partly to ensure that time and effort is not wasted. This is important to understand, because terms like “confidential”, “secret,” and so forth are frequently thrown around by media and commentators who have no idea what they are talking about. Let’s start at the beginning.

There is generally a level of classification of information which desirably should be kept discreet. It may be called Official, or Restricted Distribution, or something similar. After that, most states have a classification known as Confidential, which is a step up, and generally indicates information of some sensitivity. Above that is Secret, which generally refers to highly sensitive information, and in most countries is the highest level of access given to people who have not been through special security procedures. In addition, Secret level material may also be compartmentalised if it refers to something detailed and especially sensitive: all nuclear powers, for example, seem to have a special term, or several special terms, which limit access to such material to those who need to see it as part of their jobs. And finally, the category of Top Secret or equivalent is for a small proportion of information that is especially sensitive, and is often accompanied by other markings to restrict its circulation even further.

Now, for one reason or another, you may feel that this process is silly or unnecessary, and shouldn’t happen. But it does happen, and it happens in effectively every country in the world. Information is therefore protected by security classifications at different levels, depending on the content, and that’s the first thing to understand.

The second thing to understand is that every country has laws against the unauthorised release of documents and information. I’ll say that again: unauthorised release of documents and information. Since that word has caused a lot of confusion, let me say a little bit about it, noting in passing that authorised release is not the same as declassification. Security classifications are given by the originator of the document, and that person’s organisation, or the political leadership, may decide that it can be shared with outsiders. Quite often, this would be with friendly governments: Country A might pass on the key points of the visit of the President of Country B to the Embassy of Country C, because they have a common interest. The same applies to trusted people in the private sector or in banking, where sensitive financial issues may be involved. A much bigger problem is how this plays out with the media.

If you grant to governments the simple right to present and defend their policies, then obviously they have a great deal of information which cannot be made public in documents, and perhaps which contains things that would be tricky to put in the public domain, but is nonetheless useful. What happens then is not that the government will post off copies of sensitive documents to the media, but rather that trusted members of the media will be invited to “off-the-record” briefings, which in most countries follow basic rules. Nothing is handed over, the journalists are free to take notes but should not attribute anything to individuals, and they should fairly represent what they are told, attributing statements to “government sources” or something similar. Journalists who don’t respect this part of the bargain may not be invited back. Journalists who will use the material against the government are obviously not invited in the first place. One can, of course, object to such a system, but it is used everywhere in representative democracies.

Practice varies in different countries, but it’s also possible that a single journalist will be given some genuinely sensitive material in a less formal setting, over lunch for example, if there is something important that government wants to get into the public domain. In undisciplined systems like that of the US, this often happens when different parts of the government want to brief against each other, which most people would consider an abuse of the system. But the US system is different from the norm in this respect as in any others, and its highly-politicised nature means that individuals in senior positions do not scruple to leak information to advance their professional, or even personal agendas. Fortunately, this is not normal in most other countries.

All of these forms of release are authorised by a government, to help it in the political struggle. (I’ll come to information released for other purposes in a moment.) It follows that unauthorised release of government information is a crime. If you think “crime” is a value judgement (and I don’t) you can substitute “breaking the law” or some similar expression. Note that someone who releases information without authorisation is breaking the law even if that information actually helps the position of the government.

Governments then have to consider whether to investigate and perhaps prosecute. Very often, this is not done, sometimes because the perpetrator is not obvious, sometimes because the information is only of transitory importance, and not that sensitive anyway. A trial will, after all, only give the material that was leaked even more publicity. Often, governments will simply wait for the fuss to die down: in general, leakers, whatever their motive, greatly overestimate the effect of leaked information on the actual behaviour of governments.

You would expect, perhaps, that leakers who were caught would accept moral and for that matter criminal, responsibility for what they had done. But this is increasingly less the case, and leakers and those who defend them are prone to argue variously that they have committed no crime, or that if they did it was for a higher purpose which absolves them of any responsibility. This argument has a certain seductive appeal, because, in the end, we all secretly believe that only the laws we approve of should be enforced, and then only in cases we approve of. But the obvious difficulty is that if we make our personal moral views the criterion for whether the law should be enforced or not, chaos will result, since no two sets of moral values are going to be alike, and even as individuals, our moral views are seldom consistent. It’s always helpful in such cases to consider how we would react to this kind of argument if it was made by someone we profoundly disagree with. So in most western countries in recent decades, the majority of the population have accepted the decriminalisation of abortion and the extension of the legally permitted term. But this opinion is far from unanimous, and we can imagine that in a country where a significant relaxation of the law was being considered, an employee of the Justice Ministry leaks details of violent disagreement within the government about the best way forward, which has the effect of damaging the government’s case. The leaker, perhaps a fervent churchgoer and mother of several children, would argue that she was “saving lives” and that this justified her act. In reality of course (and you can take any example or counter-example you like) such a person puts themselves on a higher moral plane than the government, which is a status that anyone can claim, but that there is no objective way of proving.

I said I would come back to the question of the less routine and more questionable use of information to serve political ends. This is a subject on which there is a lot of misunderstanding also, but where some useful distinctions can be made. As we have seen, media figures are often given unattributable briefings, but in general they will write stories which acknowledge that their sources are official. A much more complicated question is whether journalists should write stories to dictation, or even whether it is legitimate to set up an agency or an internet site which is an official government operation but is not acknowledged as such. The only pragmatic answer, as often, is that, whilst in principle it’s not a good idea, ultimately “it depends.”

I suggested earlier that the real distinction was not something simple, between “truth” and “falsehood”, but more complex, to do with the purpose of releasing or promoting the information in the first place. As George Orwell observed, all propaganda is false, even when it’s true, because the purpose of propaganda is to persuade, not to inform. Orwell was working at the wartime BBC, which developed a good reputation for accurate reporting: censoring certain things, but not actually making them up.

But even in World War II, the Psychological Warfare Executive had begun to try to attack German “morale” through propaganda broadcasting, including the creation of fake news stations broadcasting defeatist messages allegedly from inside Germany. The trend continued in the Cold War, and is different from simple propaganda in that the “facts” are either invented or heavily slanted, and the station itself pretends to be something it is not.

Questionable as this kind of behaviour is in general, the most questionable aspect of it is whether it has ever had any measurable effect. Certainly, it is not possible to point to any specific case over the last few generations where an effect can be shown. But in fact, this is really just a particular case of the general proven ineffectiveness of propaganda as a whole, which is why we should not get so worried about it., or easily assumed that people can be “harmed.”  To take an extreme case, the propaganda of Joseph Goebbels was certainly pervasive and inventive, and used the most modern techniques of social engineering, but for all Goebbels’s evil genius reputation, there is little evidence that it had any significant effect on the German people. Propaganda in general seems to be of doubtful effectiveness even if what it says is actually true.

I want to come finally to the topic of the use and misuse of intelligence-derived information, since that has generated a huge amount of controversy, generally provoked by people who have no idea what they are talking about. Let’s remind ourselves that Intelligence is just a particular kind of information: broadly, sensitive information that has been stolen. (“sensitive” because otherwise there would be no point in making the effort to steal it.) That is to say, the fact that something is labelled “intelligence”says nothing about the content of the information, only the means by which it is collected. The fact that the President of country X is paying a visit to country Y to try to repair relations may be announced openly, deliberately leaked to newspapers, communicated to friendly countries alone, or kept such a secret that only intelligence methods were capable of finding it out all. But in each case, the content of the information is identical, what differed was how easy it was to discover it.

Intelligence is not inherently more (or less) reliable than other types of information gathered in other ways. Human sources may be mistaken, badly informed or just lying. Technical sources may produce information which is mistaken, out of date or incomprehensible without a wider context that you lack. So intelligence has to be analysed by experts, evaluated and commented on, before being released. When combined, and put together with other material, intelligence material can be used to provide general analyses, but these are always provisional, based on the information that is actually available. For that reason, few intelligence agencies ever claim to produce the Whole Truth about anything. If you look at intelligence analyses that have been made publicly available, you’ll see that their authors use phrases like “we believe” or “we assess”, that they talk about probabilities and possibilities, not certainties.

So the popular idea that intelligence agencies “know” things, is generally false, and a product of wishful thinking and Hollywood films. It follows that media articles claiming that this or that is true or false should be treated with suspicion, because simply ascribing some information or some judgement to “intelligence sources” is meaningless in itself. It may refer to anything from a single piece of uncorroborated information about which doubts have been raised, up to a fully staffed and highly reliable piece of detailed analysis: there is no way of knowing. Now there are cases where governments have information from intelligence sources that they want to get into the public domain, when they cannot come by that information in any other way. An obvious case would be that the Islamic State does not hold press conferences or issue media guidance about when it is going to carry out its next attack in Europe, so any information about that, and any justification for asking the people to take precautions, could only come from intelligence sources. Ironically, of course, if attacks take place and governments did not issue warnings based on intelligence material, then they will be criticised for not doing so.

There are also a number of wider reasons governments might want intelligence material to become known: to influence foreign countries perhaps, to strengthen its position with one over a controversial issue. An occasional use is signalling: if you have strong intelligence, but no certainty, that your neighbour was behind a bomb attack in your country, then a story attributing knowledge of this to “intelligence sources” is a way of passing messages to your neighbour along the lines of We Know, Don’t do it Again. And there are other, similar, possibilities.

Like anything else, intelligence information, or alleged information, can be misused, but this is usually a result of the failure or corruption of the political system question, not the intelligence agencies. You will occasionally encounter people claiming that intelligence agencies “always lie” or even that their job consists of misleading the public, which would be a curious use of expensive and sensitive resources, to say the least. As well as the popular presumption that They Are Hiding Secrets, this attitude also generalises, once more, a specific historical incident: the misuse of intelligence in the run-up to the 2002 Iraq War. The argument “they deceived us over that so everything intelligence agencies say is a lie “ is not only irrational, it ignores the fact that it was the US and British governments, not their intelligence agencies, who were responsible for the deliberate lies that were told, and they misused intelligence agencies and their credibility in ways unacceptable in a democracy.

That said, heads of intelligence agencies are government servants, and their job is to help the government explain and defend its policies. You would not expect them to take a different position from government in a public statement, whatever their personal views: that’s how democratic political systems work. But you would hope that they would have enough independence to refuse to endorse things that were clearly not true: no government can force its staff to tell deliberate lies, for example.

All the above is true. No, really.