When I was around 10 years old a new family moved in down the street from my grandmother’s house. One day in the local park I met a boy of about the same age as me: he stuck out a palm and introduced himself as David. I was a shy, somewhat lonely child, whereas he was the polar opposite: gregarious, slightly bumptious, and full of the self-confidence I longed to possess.
I quickly came under his spell. Over the two short weeks I knew David, we spent more or less every waking hour together. We roamed the nearby sand dunes, built a treehouse with wood pilfered from a local building site, and he stayed over one evening for tea.
I thought of David when I first heard about the academic Jason Arday, who was found dead on 14 August after weeks of extraordinary scrutiny. The late academic had made a series of outlandish claims. He purportedly had a medical condition that, according to the New York Times, had “no precedent in medical literature”; he claimed, effectively, to be one of the world’s top endurance athletes; and more seriously, he copied extensively from the work of other scholars and passed off case studies from other papers as his own1. When Times Higher Education prepared to publish allegations about his work, Arday instructed the libel firm Carter-Ruck; the story was subsequently killed.
David was a rather harmless boy who compulsively spun an arresting life for himself. His tall tales shone brightly against the grey and provincial backdrop of the town in which I lived. He had been skydiving; his father was a racing car driver; and at home he had a pet tarantula. It went on and on and on, each lie creating a surrounding architecture of further lies.
It was the tarantula story that finally prompted my grandmother to intervene. “I think he’s having you on,” she told me one night as she wrung out a dishcloth over the sink. “I think he’s one of those boys who likes to make things up.” I defended my marvellous friend with defiance and passion. He was going to show me the tarantula. He was going to show her the tarantula. David was going to show the world that he was exactly who he said he was. Just you wait.
Of course he never did. My grandmother, in her late sixties, had encountered the type many times before; I was getting my first crash course in it. I desperately wanted to believe that David was all the things he said he was; that someone like him would choose me to be his friend. Something in me needed him to exist.
A short while later I stopped returning David’s calls. I hid upstairs when he knocked on our front door, pleading with my grandmother to reel off a ready-made excuse. Eventually he got the message, and within a week David had faded out of my life as quickly as he had appeared. It was a vertiginous feeling for a boy of 10: I was sad about my friend; but the world felt as if it had lost its solidity. I never wanted to be around somebody like that ever again.
The sheer scale of the coverage, and especially its vitriolic register, has been blamed for contributing to Jason Arday's untimely end. Sections of the media thrilled at the prospect of knocking a successful black man off his perch. To them, he was less a human being than a symbol of “DEI” (diversity, equity and inclusion) and political correctness run amok. He had a target on his back from the moment he took up his post at Cambridge.
But Arday’s detractors were not the only ones who had invested in him as a symbol of something greater than themselves. To those who saw Arday as an exemplar of black excellence, inconvenient facts were liable to ricochet off their consciousness like hailstones off a slate roof. It was either a “smear” or, once he was gone, a “lynching”.
I have thought about David a lot this week. When we first met I had needed him to exist in some way; I had needed to believe that someone with such a gigantic presence—someone who moved through the world like a human fireball—could see something worthwhile in me.
I was also reminded of Enric Marco, a Spaniard who constructed an extraordinary heroic identity for himself, eventually becoming president of an association of Spanish concentration-camp survivors—despite never having been in a Nazi concentration camp. The Spanish writer Javier Cercas wrote a book about Marco called The Impostor, which came out in 2014. The book is not only about Marco but also about why so many intelligent and respectable people needed Marco to be true.
Cercas’s argument is that ordinary social life already involves presenting versions of ourselves to different people. Marco is terrifying not because he is completely alien but because he takes this universal process of self-fashioning to an extreme: unable to tolerate the mediocrity of his actual life, he manufactures a heroic one.
Marco is vain, egotistical and narcissistic; but he also desperately wants to be loved, which lends his very public downfall a lugubrious air. He recruits his audience on a moral plane: he is a man of action, an anti-fascist, a resistance fighter, a victim, a survivor, a campaigner. Look what I have overcome; look what I represent; look what my life proves.
He is also a “kitsch-man”: his whole performance is a debasement of real history and real lives, just as kitsch art is a form of aesthetic corruption. And the Spanish left, emerging from nearly four decades of Francoism—and arriving at the end of history and the ideological eclipse of socialism—is particularly susceptible to it. The grand sweep of history had been replaced by personal narratives that are “larded with sentiment”. As Cercas writes:
“There can be little doubt that, at the moment, the greatest enemy of the left is the left itself; meaning: left-wing kitsch; meaning the transformation of left-wing discourse into a hollow shell, into the hypocritical, meaningless sentimentalism that the right call do-goodism. […] Marco’s lies satisfied a massive vacuous leftist demand for toxic sentimental fodder seasoned with historical good conscience.”
There are many differences between the cases of Jason Arday and Enric Marco. But there are important similarities too. Both men were afforded a degree of epistemic protection by the causes they were supposed to represent. To challenge Marco meant that one was a “fascist”, whereas to question the star sociology professor’s sensational backstory or academic work meant that you were giving ammunition to the far-right. To their supporters, criticism quickly became indistinguishable from hostility to a righteous cause.
In his essay on The Impostor, Ariel Dorfman used the phrase “culpable credulity” to describe the phenomenon. It is perhaps why, in recent weeks, we have been hearing variations of the following:
That allegation comes from hostile people.
That detail has been taken out of context.
Nobody's biography is completely accurate.
The important thing is what he represents.
Why are people so obsessed with bringing this person down?
Statements like these sit uneasily alongside journalism worthy of its name. It is one thing to recoil from the muck churned up by the cheap press, pungent as it is with the stench of racial excitement; but it is incumbent on even the respectable journalist or critic to tread where the purveyors of a cause (however worthy and pious) dare not. Sometimes people are right for the wrong reasons. Criticism, if it is worth anything, must be willing to discomfit even those whose political sympathies it shares.