In Defense of Facts: What opinion rests on.

Mr. Kimball is managing editor of The New Criterion. His book The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America is forthcoming from Encounter Books.

It is a pity that Edmund Morris's parents did not acquaint him more thoroughly with the teachings of Samuel Johnson. "Accustom your children constantly to this," Johnson advised; "if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end."

One place it winds up is in books like Dutch. In the controversy over Morris's book (I hesitate to call it a biography) about Ronald Reagan, I am firmly on the side of the critics. Peggy Noonan got it about right, I believe, when she observed in her review for the Wall Street Journal that Dutch is a "waste-of history's time, the Reagans' faith, the writer's talent."

It is the first item, the traducing of history, that is most troubling.

Morris has been roundly, and rightly, criticized for a lack of sympathy with his subject. Given the unparalleled access he was granted, it cannot help seeming like a personal betrayal. But his deeper betrayal is of the historical record. By insinuating himself illegitimately into his narrative, by deliberately fusing fact and fiction, Morris has been untrue to his calling as a biographer and historian.

What makes this particularly lamentable is that Morris's performance is by no means a rare exception. Indeed, in his cavalier approach to the historical record, Morris reveals himself only too clearly as a product of his age. It is a defining feature of our "postmodern" era that truth is everywhere held in contempt. I am not talking about anything arcane: just plain, factual truth, as in, "The Battle of Hastings took place in 1066."

It is easy enough to discount some of the more outrageous examples of the assault on truth. I daresay that few sensible people take seriously the claims of Holocaust deniers. What is significant, however, is the way in which such extreme doctrines tend to be dismissed. Increasingly, they are repudiated not as pernicious falsehoods but as more or less unfortunate "perspectives" or "points of view," the gospel being that everyone is "entitled" to his own hobbyhorse, no matter how flagrantly at odds with the truth it might be. Never mind that such an attitude not only disparages truth, but also erodes the legitimacy of serious opinion.

Take the recent movies directed by Oliver Stone. Anyone who looks into the matter knows that Stone's portrayals of Presidents Kennedy and Nixon are exercises in (left-wing) political fantasy. Yet the popularity of such movies testifies not to the political commitments of those who patronize his movies, but to the public's capacious appetite for historical "reconstruction": that is, its appetite for history glamorized and minus the burdensome requirement to tell the truth-history, to put it in a word, "lite." Morris's book reminds us that this vice is not confined to the political Left.

There are no doubt many reasons for this development. One important reason is the degree to which Western intellectual elites-in the media, the world of culture, and, above all, the academy-have reneged on their commitment to truth. This abdication has a long and complex heritage. And it comes in many forms and degrees of finality, from trial separation to, in extreme cases, irrevocable divorce (epitomized, for example, by the title and contents of Paul Feyerabend's book on the philosophy of science, Anything Goes). As always in the world of ideas, what matters is not so much the existence, but the influence and prevalence of such commitments. Morris is a popular biographer whose work has reached many thousands. His new book suggests that the cavalier attitude toward historical truth has reached epidemic proportions-has in fact become part of the intellectual furniture of our age, something presupposed rather than argued for.

One sign of this situation is the horror with which the idea of "objective truth" is regarded in certain academic circles today. Another is the widespread tendency to downgrade facts to matters of opinion-a tendency that follows naturally from the rejection of objective truth. This shows itself in the amazingly prevalent assumption that truth is "relative," i.e., that the truth of what is said depends crucially on the interests, prejudices, and even the sex or ethnic origin of the speaker, rather than on-well, than on the truth or falsity of what the speaker says. The basic idea is that truth is somehow invented rather than discovered. Typical of this position is the feminist complaint about "male-centered" epistemologies that make false claims to universality (another word that inspires panic) or objectivity.

The historian Simon Schama provided a more genteel expression of this attitude toward truth in the afterword of his bestselling harlequinade Dead Certainties (1991). "The claims for historical knowledge," Schama assured his readers, "must always be fatally circumscribed [fatally circumscribed, mind you] by the character and prejudices of its narrator." In other words, the limitations of the historian make the achievement of historical truth impossible. How many college-educated people today would dare to dissent from this assertion? Schama was at pains to deny that his was a "naively relativist position"; yet at bottom, his claim is little more than a chummy periphrasis for Nietzsche's famous declaration of nihilism: "There are no facts, only interpretations." This is a gospel that Morris has wholeheartedly embraced in his new book.

The irony that attends this triumph of interpretation over facts is that it ultimately undermines opinion just as thoroughly as it undermines fact.

When facts are downgraded to opinions, they no longer have the authority of facts; but opinions without the bedrock of facts deliquesce into whims. As Hannah Arendt observed in her essay "Truth and Politics," opinion remains opinion only so long as it is grounded in, and can be corrected by, fact.

"Facts," she wrote, "inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute."

What is at stake in the confusion of fact and opinion, Arendt concluded, is nothing less than the common world of factual reality and historical truth.

It will be pointed out that truth is very often difficult to achieve, that facts are often hard to establish, that the historical record is incomplete, contradictory, inaccessible. Yes. Precisely. But the recalcitrance of truth is all the more reason we need to remain faithful to the procedures for achieving it: Without them, we are blind. In a famous passage in The Republic, Plato has Socrates say that "to be deceived about the truth of things and so to be in ignorance and error and to harbor untruth in the soul is abhorred above everything." Edmund Morris has neglected that warning to his readers' disservice and his own diminishment.