To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Writing Truth and Lies

It's to the best of our knowledge from PRX. How hard is it to write the truth? I think you can't be no matter what you can't be 100 % honest. Because we have fictions about our lives who we are, what we do. She knew she was writing fiction, and yet she clung to the idea that everything in the books was all true. Can you at trust memory to inform your own truth? I trust very little in my life. So many people do that because they're afraid of the truth itself. Denial, confusion, misrepresentation. You don't even know what to say anymore. That's the scariest thing about now. I'm Ann Strangehamps, this hour, four writers on truth, fiction, and lies. First this. You

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You You You You You It's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Ann Strangehamps. Remember the little house books, Ma and Pa, Ingles, Laura and Mary, their dog Jack growing up in the big woods, on the prairies. I love those books growing up. Oh my God, no, not the TV show. I hated that show. There's Michael Landon and Ma looking so happy and here come the

girls looking cleaner than any prairie girls would ever have looked. Maybe your mother would let you wear a Sunday dress. The wagon pulling into that immaculate town. Everybody's all happy and smiling. Pa gave us so much already. He can't ask for more. Oh my God, talk about cheesecake. What does people say things they don't mean? That's not the frontier. That's hallmark. Well, if we weren't so dog on civilized, I'd suggest a public horse whipping. No, the real little house stories gone like this. Little house in the big woods. This is the true little house. Once upon a time, many years ago, a little girl lived in the big woods of Wisconsin in a little grey house made of logs. The great dark trees of the big woods stood all around the house and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees. There was nothing but woods. This is what

I loved. The tiny house. The little girl. The big dark forest primeval. There were no houses. There were no roads. There were no people. Except there were people. The Ho Chiang. The Minamania. The Ojibwe. People who were there long before the Ingalls family or any other white settlers moved into those woods and prairies. That's the reason these books have been at the center of a storm of controversy this year. As a native person, I didn't see myself represented in those words. I think that it's important to provide the education needed to explain why those words were used and what was happening at that time in history. By now, millions of American children have grown up with these books. I read them first as a eight or nine, ten years old. Caroline Fraser is one of them. You know, read them over and over again and couldn't really get enough of them. And I do remember talking to my grandmother

who grew up on a farm in Minnesota. Did she say, oh yeah, it was just like that? You know, it was interesting because she had a little bit of a withering response. Her reaction was that no. It was much worse than that. And I think it kind of planted this idea that maybe there was more to the story. This hour, writing the truth. The whole truth about anything is difficult and complicated. Caroline Fraser wrote a biography of Laura Ingalls' wilder to try to get closer to the truth, the real truth. It won the Pulitzer Prize this year. It's called Prairie Fires. And let me just pause here to say that this is kind of embarrassing to admit, but I always thought those books were true. I don't know why, since they were shelved in the fiction section, but somehow I just assumed

everything in those books really happened. Caroline Fraser says, in the case of the little house books, what Laura left out is just as important as what she put in. So many of the little details that kind of defined their poverty, I don't think she always thought of them as poor and struggling. You know, she thought of the family as remarkably cohesive and warm and judged them by values other than material ones. But that said, she did leave out a lot of her father's struggles, his inability to put together a secure, stable life in one place. Is that why they kept moving? I mean, I read the books and I always felt like they were just off on another adventure.

Yeah, I mean, I think that is the impression that you get from the books. But when you read them as an adult, you can see quite clearly that they're so much better off in the first book. In Wisconsin. But when they go off to these other places to Kansas or Indian Territory, and she called it circumstances, really throw them back on their heels. She wrote, all I've told is true, but it's not the whole truth, suggesting that there were darker things, memories that she didn't care to return to. It also resonates so strangely today, when we're talking a lot about truth and fake news and what's not true. How do these books resonate and those questions resonate for you today? Yeah, that's a fascinating statement that she made in that speech, which she gave in 1937, when she was about halfway through writing the books. And it's so tantalizing, because she

constantly emphasizes her parents' values, what they taught her and her sisters, one of which is honesty and integrity. And she knew she was writing fiction, and yet she clung to the idea that everything in the books was all true in every detail. And her daughter, Rose, really doubled down on that idea and actually accused people who noted the fictional aspects of the books of being liars, and of saying that her mother was liar. So it introduced this very strange contradiction in the whole story, because there was nothing wrong with what Wilder was doing and in fictionalizing her life, but what was so odd was her later denial of that. Her insistence that she was not fictionalizing. That's right.

What was really true and what wasn't? One of the great examples of this is the Grasshopper. So yeah, I remember the Grasshopper is a rive, and they just eat everything, and the prairie is kind of leveled in their crop. That's all I remember. Right, and she describes it very accurately. In fact, historians have used that description kind of as an eyewitness account of the experience that farmers were having in 1875, but what she left out was really the consequences of this for the family. The whole episode left the family virtually homeless for a time and sent them on this journey back east, first to stay with family, then to work in a squalid hotel. She and Mary waited on tables, and you know, it's just, it's a part of the story she never told. This is not the romantic story of self

-reliant farmers lighting out for the territory and making a success of it, dependent on no one but themselves. Was she ashamed of their poverty? I think that she was ashamed of certain aspects of what they had gone through, particularly the failures after she married El Manzo. Their early married life was just one thing after another. They lost crops, they were heavily in debt, they fell ill, and he was left with a disability really for the rest of his life, and they lost a child, and then their house burned down. I think that that really was a watershed moment for her. You talked about how influential these books have been, not just to generations of children, but in shaping a lot of our ideas about that period of American history and even about the American character. What do you think the

consequences are the larger consequences? How has that shaped attitudes and beliefs we have about that period of American history? I think one of the things that has happened as a result of generations of children reading these stories is that we have accepted them as true, and we haven't asked some of the hard questions about the real history behind the little house books, including the ways in which white settlers interacted with Indians what they did in terms of appropriating land and resources. Are the books racist? I remember, for instance, I think it's been a long time since I read them, but isn't it Mr. Edwards, one of Pa's friends who says the only good Indian is a dead Indian? That comes up three times in the little house in the prairie. I think it's Mrs.

Scott, the neighbor who introduces that phrase, and Pa, Charles Engels, criticizes the phrase in the book. So to be sure, there are these stereotypes in the books and racist language. Pa, at one point, says of an Indian, he's no common trash. Of course, implying that other Indians are. So the book presents a lot of issues that have to be dealt with. Do you think we should, as a culture, still read the books? Do you think they still matter? I do. I think that they make us question some of the assumptions that we've always had about why people came here, did they succeed? Was it a good idea to farm in certain places? And the whole issue of how we develop and identity as Americans

is really sharply brought into focus by these books and Wilder's own life. So that, I think, is a real reason why people keep coming back to them. Yeah, but that question of how we develop an identity. I mean, they purport to tell a life story truthfully, but they don't. And there are surely huge consequences for us as a people, given that these books have been so influential. They're part of the myth of the self -reliant American homesteader. Yeah, I think that they are incredibly important in shining a light on that very concept of self -reliance. What do we mean by that? Why is that so central to our conception of the American character? It's really fascinating to look at the origins of that because, of course, Wilder and her daughter later in

life become dedicated to libertarian principles. You know, the idea that everybody is radically responsible for their own lives and should never rely on the government or anybody else. Didn't a dissentant of hers run for U .S. president as a libertarian? Yes and no. When Rose died, she had no children. She had what she called an adopted grandson who was the son of her editor, Reader's Digest, a fellow named Roger McBride. He was no relation, but he inherited the estate. Shortly thereafter, he sells the rights to the little housebooks to a Hollywood producer. It becomes the TV show and he runs for president as a libertarian. That's just so fascinating. The little housebooks fortune fuels a libertarian presidential candidate. I don't

even know what to make of that. It's extraordinary. You can trace the line from the original Ingalls family founders on the soil. The people who came over with the pilgrims and the Puritans, these people who are the embodiment of that whole idea of self -reliance. And you can just trace that down through the centuries all the way to Roger McBride. So it's extraordinary to see how that idea kind of loses its original religious trappings somewhere along the way. And yet people like Laura and her daughter still cling to it as if it is a religious principle. Caroline Fraser's biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder is called Prairie Fires. In 2018, it won a Pulitzer.

Coming up, Academy Award -winning filmmaker, Errol Morris, and Norwegian novelist, Carl of a Knows guard, are also struggling with truth. We're in the sea of information and disinformation. A kind of dizzy, ramic confusion where you don't know what side is up and what side is down. It's nothing to be afraid of, she said. I can't handle whatever, as long as it's true. But you didn't know the nature of that truth. I'm Ann Strenchamps. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio. NPRX. NPRX.

NPRX. This hour we're talking about writing truth, putting what actually happened on paper, which in theory sounds easy, but it's not. Because the process of revisiting personal memories can be excruciating. This year, Teresa Marie Mayet published a brutally honest and also wildly popular memoir called Heartberries. Teresa grew up on the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific

Northwest, and the story she tells about her life on the reservation includes alcohol and sexual abuse, poverty, and violence. She wound up hospitalized and diagnosed with PTSD and bipolar disorder. And there, she was given a notebook. She told Charles Monroe Kane she used it to write her way out of trauma. In a coffee shop, I couldn't catch my breath and double over with pain. I remembered a man in the shower. I went outside, closing my eyes only disoriented me further from the world pain, right? On a coffee shop. And holding onto things made me feel too connected, receptive to every fiber of a bench or treat. I caught Casey. I wondered if he thought this was a real emergency or

another dramatic thing. I'm constantly in some panic or despair it seems. I wondered more than I could breathe. What do I do with my hands? I thought. What do I do with my eyes, which felt obscene in the light? Can you tell me about the context of that story, of that reading? Yeah, I was busy finishing my thesis. And I was accomplished enough where I felt like I was removed away from all the dysfunction I saw growing up. And then I was just kind of sitting there with my coffee. And the memories that were always around me in my life of my father. And I realized that all the things made sense. The drawings that I made that were disturbing to my mother, that illustrated things I shouldn't have known at that age. The moments between my

father, which I didn't think were ever appropriate. And the fact that when I was younger, I did tell my mother that something had happened. But I feel like she convinced me that it was impossible, you know? Yeah. Well, first before we move on, I want to say I'm sorry that that happened. You made this decision to make this a memoir and not a novel. And of course, the central problem in your memoir is the fact that you were assaulted or molested by your father. You could do that as a novel as well. Why do you choose that to be nonfiction? I think because if I were to tell this story with a fictionalized character, I would feel like the stakes were not as high personally, recollecting and interacting with my readership. You could feel the stakes on the page, you know, because it's a real story. Those things really happened and the knowledge of that for the reader ups the ante so that

they know that maybe things are not going to be okay. It was interesting though, because it is a memory. Can you trust memory to inform your own truth? I think you put it like memory can be a serpent. Yeah. I trust very little in my life, especially the way that I've interpreted my past, because I did a lot of work to mitigate and minimize my pain. Through therapy, I was able to unpack everything and make sense of it. I think when you render it that way, you feel more trusting, because I think when you've been hurt, you really do blame yourself and you doubt yourself in this way that I think so many people do that, because they're afraid of the truth itself. Because if they had to admit that something happened, they would have to deal with it as well. It's funny, you just used the word render. I was thinking about rendering and you render fat. You have a piece of meat and you render the fat

off and you boil it down. When I read your book, you boil it down and that book is rendered. You took all the fat off, all the sentimentality out, and you got to the facts that are super painful. I'm curious, as a person, it seems like it would be such a painful experience to just boil everything down to the essence of such pain. I think I was tired and bored of hearing myself talk, trying to communicate to therapists or to my husband. I don't like myself off the page. I'm not as good as at communicating. I wanted to see it on the page. I knew I could do a better job that way. Did you have to go for lots of long walks away, right? The book seems like you needed something deeper than just therapy to recover from writing such intensity. Seeing on the page was intense, but it felt like a tangible thing you could hold in your hand as opposed to things that kind of work in your brain and

don't do any good. I think there's a will to keep working forward after you realize the people that should have taken care of you didn't. I think that kind of heartbreak never really escapes you. I was already dealing with it every day. You know, I was very uncomfortable, and one of the things that affected me that made me so uncomfortable is the book is full of shame. So full of shame that I didn't even know what to do with it when I read it, like I was looking at something I shouldn't be looking at. When you wrote it down, then you were able to overcome some of these, or do you share the shame in some way, like because I picked up some of it just a little bit enough that I could handle, right? That alleviates it from you and the more people that pick up on your pain, the more that it goes away, does that make sense? That's kind of how purging works. Letting go isn't as simple as writing a letter and ripping it up and letting it blow in the wind.

You know, that's not really letting go. Letting go is really purging, and it's almost like an exorcism, right? You're conjuring all the things you really do have to expel from yourself. And then you let go. For me, it healed me in a way that was deep, but I am not a hundred percent. I'm not the person I'm going to be when I'm 50 years old, you know, but I'm better off. I want to read something to you that you wrote. It's something you wrote about your father that is clearly much bigger than him and about something else. You're limited to you. As an Indian woman, I resist the urge to bleed out on a page to impart the story of my drunken father. It was dangerous to be alone with him as it was dangerous to forgive. As it was dangerous to say he was a monster. If he were a monster, that would make me part monster, part Indian. You ask a rhetorical question, but I'm going to ask it to you. Like, so if he

was a monster and he's your father, then are you part monster? Is that in you? I think there's something monstrous about abuse because it... I mean, even with my siblings, it makes you afraid to love somebody because you think you're damaged. You know, you think you've inherited some monstrous nature. And we all know all of us are really good to small children. We care about our nieces and nephews and my brother and my sister have children and my brother guy has cats, which he treats like children. And I think in that sense, we've been able to prove the theory that we didn't deserve normal things like a good family wrong. Yes. But it's always moving that you feel damaged. You don't feel like normal, quote unquote normal. And I think in that sense, you feel monstrous. I'm curious about something. You know, you've alcohol abuse, mental illness and eating disorder, poverty, broken relationships, sexual abuse. You had a rough

life on the reservation. Then you got your MFA. You have a best -selling book. You have a CRV. You've done fellowships. You're a professor. Do you feel guilty? I don't know. I can't acclimate to it because to me, it is everything, you know, being able to buy my kids winter jackets and take them out on vacation. I can't acclimate to it, but I believe my sons have. And I think that's really nice. Like my son is used to being able to ask me if he needs new shoes. And it's not a guilt trip like my mother would have where she would talk to me about how she's not even sure how to keep the lights on right now. And then we take on the burden and we would help her and raise her up. Like she really needed because being a single mom is rough. And I'm not a single mom anymore. I just don't know how to accept so much good in the world. But I kind of just keep saying, wow, this is crazy.

You asked a question at the end of the book that I really liked. And you said, if rock is permeable in water, I wonder what that makes me in all of this. Well, you know, the river is really important to me. When you realize that something is strong and solid as a rock can really be shaped by something as tender as a stream, you know. Yes, I was deeply damaged, but I also being through all of that actually made me more intelligent. I'm able to read people when I walk in a room and I can read a room and know what they need because I was such a caregiver to my family. And I'm also a better teacher because I have a lot of empathy for students that come in tired. You know, and I know that struggle. And I also have a lot of empathy for single mothers at school and people who have jobs. And all of that lived experience has made me, I think, a richer human being. Thank you. Very,

very much. And bless you. Thank you. This is great. To reach Marie Mayette's best -selling memoir is called Heart Barriers. It's been nominated for some of Canada's top literary awards. She's from the Seabird Island Band in the Pacific Northwest and she's also on the faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts in New Mexico. Charles Monroe came, talked with her. The air outside of the square had a nick about it. And I sipped up my jacket before going over to World Internet Cafe, having to farther up the street on the other side of the road. Norwegian writer Carl Overknauskaard, reading from his novel My Struggle. There was a lot going on at the moment with manuscripts flying backwards and forwards between me and the

publishers. The day was approaching when I would have to give up the manuscript to Linda and she would begin to read what I have written about our life together. The only thing she knew was that I had written about us. She had no idea what or in what way. And every time I said I was dreading her reading it, she would reassure me it's nothing to be afraid of, she said. I can't handle whatever as long as it's true. But she didn't know the nature of that truth. Oh, I was so completely in the shit. To have to hand her the manuscript as I hear with this, it's being published in a month. So, it's one thing to write the truth about your own life. But what about the lives

of your family, the people who care about you most? How much of their truth is it fair to put on the page? Norwegian novelist Carl Overknauskaard has published six volumes of intensely personal descriptions of his daily life. He calls it fiction, but he says it's all true, including intimate details of his wife's complete mental breakdown. My struggle made Knauskaard a celebrity, but his honesty caused him some of his closest relationships and a divorce. Steve Paulson wondered why anybody would choose to write like this. I think it was out of despair, basically. When I started this, I didn't think about the consequences very much. I didn't think this is going to be published, this is going to be a lot of attention. I have I was in my own room and I wrote for myself. And I didn't think very much about the consequences. I have to say. How could you not, though? You were writing about these very personal details about your brother,

your father, your wife. Yeah, but I had to create a place where I could be completely free and where I could say whatever I wanted to say. And then the book was about to be published and I have to send it out to the people that I've written about. And then I realized the consequences and then the turmoil started and all the difficulties started. And then I could take the decision, should I publish, should I not publish, should I hurt these people, should not hurt these people. I'm afraid of conflict. I'm never in conflict, if I can avoid it. But this time I had to face them and I had to do it with the person after the person I was. And this is now, this is now seven, eight years ago. But still when I start talking about it, I do remember how the tension and all the difficulties and problems that came out of this. Well, I mean the other thing that's so remarkable about this whole project is there are six books in the series. And so by the time that you were writing, some of the later books, the early books had already been published. Your family was reading them and so had everyone else in Norway.

I mean, you had become a literary sensation, a writer celebrated around the world. But you're also getting blowback from some people very close to you. And the whole conceit of this project is that you were not going to pull any punches. You were going to be honest. But I guess I wonder how honest could you be when at that point you knew that your family was reading what you were writing? Yeah, I think you can't be no matter what. You can't be 100 % honest in a project like this. That's impossible. I mean, by honest, I mean, tell everything and tell, you know, you can't do that. But you can push those limits. The big theme of this book of this series, my struggle, is your very difficult relationship with your father. Who was an alcoholic, sometimes violent, sometimes quite nasty to you. And some of the people on your father's side of the family did not agree with what you had written about him. They said that you made up certain scenes. For instance, you went to see your father. I think it was at his mother's house near the end of his life. He was lying on the floor, drunk. He had soiled

himself. Your uncle Gunner says this never happened. In fact, he sent you an email after you sent him the manuscript in the subject line was verbal rape. And he tried to block the publication of the book, right? Yeah, that's true. There was a letter that wrote to a newspaper. Everyone else under my father's family side signed. There was a very crucial moment in this process. This was before publication of book one. He read a manuscript and book one is about the death of my father. And his story is very simple. He was an alcoholic. He moved back home to his mother, locked himself in, started drinking massively there and died there. And me and my brother came down to the house when the day after he died. And the house looked like a junkiness. It was really terrible. It was bottles everywhere. And I wrote about that. And then my uncle read the book and he said, no, this is not true. That was not the way it happened. Your father didn't stay there for

two years. He stayed there for two weeks. He didn't die of alcoholism. He died. He had his heart stopped so unfortunately. And there wasn't many bottles. So he said, this isn't true. And being a writer, I'm used to use my imagination. I'm used to adding things. I'm used to construct things. And I kind of had this ice cold fear in me. What if I have exaggerated? And when you write about memories, they start to become writing modern memories. And you start to forget what's writing and what's memories. That's a very common thing for novelists, I think. And then in this process, I got a letter when the book was published by someone who actually was there when my father was dead, who was in the house with the ambulance. And she described the scene, the house, everything as worse that I had. So it was very strange, but it got confirmed from the outside, so to speak. So then I realized it was my uncle who actually was lying and that was... Maybe he wasn't lying. Maybe he just remembered it differently. Exactly.

And it was also my writing about the story, my father, and he defending his brother, which is completely entitled to. And I think that's not only an conflict about my book and my family. It's a conflict about literature and life in general almost. And what can we accept? What can we do? How far can we go? Well, I mean, the big question here, one of the big questions about this whole literary project of yours is how truthful it is. Exactly. Did it really happen? And it's also very striking that I mean, you call this a novel, not a memoir, even though you're writing about all things that presumably happened. And why is that distinction important to you to call it a novel? That's because I'm not... This is not a book about revealing stories about my life or about other people. This is a search for something and I use my own life as a raw material and it's not... I mean, I include... There is a 400 -page long essay on Hitler in this book and that's not part of my life. But it is. And the

other end it is, you know, because that's part of me and my story, our story. It's... This is a very literary project. It's much more about what is it to be here? Now, what is it to be in relation to how, you know, have a father, have a mother, what forms you, what's a dent? All those kind of things that the question and novel race is much more than a memoir and do. So that's why it's a novel to me. Are you still on speaking terms with your uncle? I haven't spoke with him since the first book came out now. Wow, that's a lot of years. Yeah, that's many years. Well, you've described this whole project writing these six books as a kind of personal torture. In fact, you write, and I'm quoting here, this novel has hurt everyone around me. It has hurt me and in a few years when they're old enough to read it, it will hurt my children. I mean, that's quite a thing to say. And yet, I'm willing to bet that if you

had to do everything all over again, you would make the same choices. You would do it exactly the same way again. Does that prove? If I had known, you know, what it will be and how hard it will be to make it, I don't think I would have managed to start it. But I didn't know that and I started it very innocently and that made it possible, you know. But I don't regret doing it, no, I don't. Well, this, I have to say, is just a totally fascinating project. And we didn't even talk about Hitler. Your 400 -page digression on Hitler. No, which would be another story into itself. Thank you. Thank you. Carl Ova Canal Scard's six -volume 36 -hundred -page novel is called My Struggle. Steve Falson talked with him. So what does it matter or does it?

Whether Canal Scard or anyone's story about their own life is true or not? I mean, there are lots of kinds of truths, right? There's emotional truths, there's personal truths. And what I mean is truth isn't always literal. Coming up, Academy Award -winning filmmaker, Errol Morris, says truth may be slippery, but that doesn't mean we should grease its path. Once upon a time, he tried to convince a famous philosopher that truth is not relative. He got so angry through an ash tray. At you? You know, I can't really go into details about the ballistics here. But it was, it was aimed more or less in your direction. Yes. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio. And PRX. Music

Music This hour, we're talking about writing truth and lies. So let me tell you a story. Back in 1972, before he was an Academy Award

-winning filmmaker, a young graduate student named Errol Morris, got into an argument with one of his professors. This was a famous professor, actually. His name was Thomas Coon, author of the landmark best -selling book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And Thomas Coon got so angry during this argument that he threw an ash tray at Morris. And now, 46 years later, Errol Morris has taken his revenge. Steve Paulson sat down to talk with him about his new book. It's called The Ash Tray, or The Man Who Denied Reality. I have received some of the worst reviews for this book, which by most of the people reviewing it has been unread. It really puzzles me. Well, it doesn't fit into any formula. These extended interviews, talking about Borhas and all of that stuff, you have to kind of go with it. I think it's funny, too. It is. It's totally funny. Yes.

Thank you. So let's talk about Thomas Coon now. So are you, are you, are you ready here? I could be. Okay. Good. I have to say, this book seems like a pretty unusual project for you. I mean, when you go back to your grad school days, when you were 24 years old, an argument you had decades ago with a famous professor, why does Thomas Coon still stick in your craw? One of the feelings that I've had, I probably have had it since I was a little boy, is that there is such a thing as true, and such a thing as falsity. And if there's anything that gives some measure of nobility to the human enterprise, and there may not be, I would say it's our search for truth, some understanding of where we are, who we are, what we do, what has happened, and what hasn't happened.

Truth is really central to the human enterprise. What stuck in my craw was Coon's underlying belief that there was no such thing as truth. Perhaps no such thing as reality. It struck me then and still strikes me now as a postmodern and pernicious idea. I want to come back to that, implications for today, but for our listeners who are not familiar with Thomas Coon, can you give us a brief outline of who he was and what he argued in his most famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions? It's one of those books, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that appeared in 1962, it became a kind of academic bestseller, overwhelmingly popular, but as a friend of my one said to me, well, so did Pet Rocks. And they were popular for a while. Well, he's partly popular because of

this phrase that I don't know if he's the one who coined it, the paradigm shift. He did coin it. Okay, so Coon's idea, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong on this, is that to some degree, we're always trapped inside of our own biases, our own theories. We can't see beyond the paradigm until eventually a new paradigm comes along and then our view becomes outdated. Yup. It doesn't necessarily mean that the new paradigm is the truth, but it's an entirely new mindset, just as Einstein came along and displaced Newtonian physics. The idea is that the Newtonians couldn't even really talk with Einstein's people because they had two fundamentally different versions of reality. This is nonsense talk. We are endlessly changing the nature of science, but without losing our ability to communicate with each other about it. It's inconceivable to me that Newton and Einstein, if they had had the opportunity to get together and carry on a conversation, would

just have stared at each other in kind of mute incomprehension. Yeah, they would have had to discuss this and that. They would have argued about various sundry things, but to say that they could not communicate about science and about the nature of the physical world, I think, is nonsense talk. And that just fundamentally bothers you. It sounds like you're saying it's not just wrong, but it's morally wrong. There's various schools of philosophy. We don't really want to go into this stuff. But there is this idea. Do we have any kind of access to the world around us? Or are we just simply trapped inside of our own heads? And I'm not an idealist, a Kantian idealist, where I think that somehow thought determines everything. Thought doesn't determine everything. Just because a political leader thinks that what he thinks is correct or right or true, just

because he thinks that doesn't make it true. Good God. So there's a personal story here. It goes back to when you were a first year grad student at Princeton, and you were taking a class with Thomas Coon. The way you write about this is you wrote an essay for the class, and he wrote 30 pages of comments in response to your essay. Yes, I believe the comments were longer than the essay itself. 30 pages, I mean, there's a certain element of obsessiveness here. You might say that. So you went into Thomas Coon's office then and talked about this? Try to. You know, I'm not the easiest person to get along with. I was telling him that I found his ideas to be nonsensical. He got angry and angrier as I was questioning the whole basis for the structure of scientific revolutions.

He got so angry through an ashtray at you. You know, I can't really go into details about the ballistics here. But it was it was aimed more or less in your direction. Yes. I mean, this is at the Institute for Advanced Study. A couple of doors down from Einstein's old office. Think of the people who worked at IAS. Many of the great intellectuals of the 20th century. And I kept thinking he's attacking me like an animal. It's very odd. I have been endlessly fascinated by history. And I often ask myself this question. It's a fundamental question about history. Can we ever get back to the past? Right. Can we ever know the past? Can we ever know what really happened? Can we ever know what really happened? Well, I want to come back to how this relates to what you've done as a filmmaker. Because it seems like so many of your

documentaries have been investigations into truth and to what really happened. I mean, going back to the thin blue line. There are all of these questions that I wanted to examine about memory, about perception and observation. But what I wanted to learn more than anything else. Did he know it? Is he innocent? Is he guilty? Are these claims true or false? And after two and a half years of investigation. It became absolutely clear that they were false. They had sentenced to death a man who was innocent. And he came within two days of being electrocuted. Well, I mean, that's sort of the essence of all true crime stories, right? The mystery is what really happened. Which is sort of fundamentally opposite of the kind

of philosophy that Thomas Kuhn was proposing. Absolutely, yes. I joke about it. The Kuhnian priest comes to visit the condemned just before his execution and tells him to suck it up. You know, it really depends on what paradigm you're in. So how does this way of thinking apply to some of your later documentaries like the unknown known about Donald Rumsfeld and his role in the Iraq war? That was another investigation into the historical record looking at one of the main architects of that war. Yes. I often think that history involves two parts. There's the investigation of history and then there's the investigation of people's attempts to cover up history, to deny it, to face it. The story of a cover up can be as interesting if not more interesting than actually the truth itself. And I might add, if there wasn't any

such thing as truth, why would people be so interested in covering stuff up? So to bring this story up to our own political moment and to come back to Thomas Kuhn, you once suggested, I don't know if you still believe this, that Kuhn maybe inadvertently led to political figures who constantly spin and lie and try to subvert the truth. As you put it, you see a line from Kuhn to Karl Rove and Kelly and Conway and Donald Trump. I'm not sure it's a straight line, but is there a similarity of ideas? Look, lying was not invented in the 20th century. It has a long, long, long history. And Thomas Kuhn was never talking, I mean, he never celebrated lying. He was just saying, you know, we could never know the absolute truth. Not that we couldn't know the absolute truth, but that there was no absolute truth to be known. That's a big

and more ambitious claim. I mean, if you strap me into this chair and ask me, do you think you can ever know the absolute truth? I would say perhaps not, but I think that there is a truth to be known, even if we can't know it. And furthermore, we should be pursuing it. Okay, so then make the case for how that connects to what Donald Trump is saying these days. We are told that, you know, there are alternative facts. You know, I have another name for alternative facts. I call them lies. We're saying so many, many, many contradictory things that you could be anything. You're being supplied with a kind of pile of mush. I find that even more disturbing than just out -now lying, the idea of muddying the waters. And that is certainly a characteristic of our current time. Denial,

confusion, misrepresentation, to the point where you don't even know what to say anymore. That's the scariest thing about now for me is that the whole process, the whole rational process by which we decide what is true and false, has almost been thrown out the window. We're in this sea of information and disinformation, a kind of dizzy -ramic confusion. And I think it becomes more important than ever to emphasize the importance of reason, of rationality, of coming to an understanding of what is true and false. Yeah. And if I'm one kind of faint voice in the middle of all of this, well, so be it. I'm very happy to be that one faint voice.

Filmmaker Aero Morris. His documentaries include The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War, which won an Academy Award. His book about Thomas Coon is called The Ashtray, or The Man Who Denied Reality. Steve Paulson talked with him. And now it's time for our story, for this week at least, to come to an end. To the best of our knowledge comes to you from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. Every week to the best of our knowledge is put together by a bunch of producers who are also writers. Together, they cover at least three genres. Memoir, Charleston, Rokane. Biography, Shannon Henry Clyburn. Nonfiction essay, Steve Paulson. As for the rest of us, Mark Rickers makes digital wonder. Joe Hartke makes music out of everything, and I like to talk. I'm Ann Strangehams. Thanks for listening.

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