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By Root 1126 0

nothing-up-my-sleeves approach was hypocritical and demagogic. But hypocrisy is preferable to unashamed evil, if only because it puts some restraints on behavior; in the old saw about hypocrisy being the tribute that vice pays to virtue, everyone accents “vice”; but one might also emphasize “tribute.” As for demagogy, it seems to me good that we have a tradition that makes this kind of demagogy profitable. It is surely better to overvalue Facts than to deny their existence. There was something moving about Vice-President Nixon’s anguished cry to the Communist-led students in Lima when they stoned him during his 1958 Latin American tour: “Don’t you want to hear facts?” Attorney-General Kennedy took the same tack, more successfully, when he faced a noisy mob of Socialist students in Japan last winter.

Best of all, however, is to understand the nature of Facts and to treat them accordingly, neither with Russian contempt nor American awe. “A commodity,” Marx writes on the first page of Capital, “is a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.” So is and does a Fact. The word comes from the Latin factum (a thing done, a deed) and is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “a particular truth known by actual observation or authentic testimony as opposed to what is merely inferred; a datum of experience as distinguished from the conclusions that may be based upon it.” Facts are thus the raw material from which general conclusions, or theories, may be inferred. But the process also runs the other way. The meaning of a Fact, indeed its very existence in a psychological sense, depends on the context in which it appears—depends, that is, on “the conclusions that may be based upon it.” A Fact by itself is useless, impotent, phantasmal, as weak and wavering as the shades of the dead that Ulysses met in the underworld. And as the shades became strong enough to speak only by drinking the blood from Ulysses’ sacrifices, so a Fact can acquire reality only by drinking the blood of theory, by becoming related to other Facts through some kind of assumption, hypothesis, generalization. Indeed, a Fact not thus fortified is usually too weak even to be perceived; as a rule, one pays attention only to data that fit into some general idea of things one already has.[8] “The facts speak for themselves,” we say, but this is just what they don’t do. Rather, they are like Swift’s Laputans who have to be roused to practical discourse by attendants touching their lips with inflated bladders. Here, the bladders are one’s assumptions.

The meaninglessness of facts qua facts is shown in the opening scene of Dickens’ Hard Times where Mr. Gradgrind, the type of “hard-headed” Victorian bourgeois, tries to explain his doctrine to a classroom of children:

“Now,” says Mr. Gradgrind, “what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle upon which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, Sir!”

“Bitzer,” said Thomas Gradgrind, “your definition of a horse.”

“Quadruped, Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth and twelve incisors. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Age known by marks in mouth.” Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

“Very well,” said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms. “That’s a horse. Now let me ask you girls and boys, would you paper a room with representations of horses?”

After a pause, one half the children cried in chorus, “Yes, sir.”

Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that yes was wrong, cried out in a chorus, “No, sir!”—as the custom is, in these examinations.

“I’ll explain to you then,” said the gentleman after another and a dismal pause, “why you wouldn’t paper a room with