Ran into this today:
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In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay in The New Yorker [Feb 25,1967 p.48, if you have access] about what she saw as an inherent conflict between politics and facts. As varieties of truth go, she wrote, facts are fragile. Unlike axioms and mathematical proofs that can be derived by anyone at any time, there is nothing necessary about the fact, to use Arendt’s example, that German troops crossed the border with Belgium on the night of August 4th, 1914, and not some other border at some other time. Like all facts, this one is established through witnesses, testimony, documents, and collective agreement about what counts as evidence — it is political, and as the propaganda machines of the 20th century showed, political power is perfectly capable of destroying it. Furthermore, they will always be tempted to, because facts represent a sort of rival power, a constraint and limit “hated by tyrants who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize,” and at risk in democracies, where they are suspiciously impervious to public opinion. Facts, in other words, don’t care about your feelings. “Unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness,” Arendt wrote.
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