Introduction
The Varnished Truth
We all do it from time to timedissemble, fib, fabulate, prevaricate, call it what you willbut for most of us, it all boils down to just one word: lying. Of course, not all lies are the same. From little white lies to moral necessities to bald-face deceit, there is a seemingly limitless spectrum for the lying-sensitive to explore.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, lying is also a recurrent literary and cultural theme, from Pinocchio to Oscar Wilde, Kafka to Shakespeare. Lying is, for better or worse, an essential aspect of the human condition.
Martin Jay, Ehrman Professor of History at UC Berkeley and one of Americas most renowned intellectual historians, has also spent much time thinking about lying. But for Martin, examining equivocation is not so much motivated by a desire to probe our underlying moral framework, but rather to shed some light on the political animal within: might we be able to use the act of lying to help us better understand what separates the political domain from any other?
Intellectually primed by the likes of Jrgen Habermas, Friedrich Nietzsche and Hannah Arendt, Martins mendacious musings began in earnest when asked by the London Review of Books to critique both Christopher Hitchens anti-Clinton polemic No One Left to Lie To and George Stephanopoulos memoir, All Too Human.
Writing those book reviews was the immediate cause. But there must have been something prior to that, which was probably my reading of Hannah Arendt, specifically her essays on truth and politics and lying in politics. These essays were in a way typically Arendtianwhich is to say, against the conventional wisdom, provocative, and not fully clear on the implications. She was always subtle enough to understand the ambiguities of positions. The notion that there is something special about the political realmsomething that sets it apartwas something that she was a great advocate of.
Reading her essays started me thinking about whether or not one of the things that did set the political realm apart is precisely the pass given, under many circumstances, to the fudging, or twisting, or shading of the truthand perhaps even to outright lying. At the very same time the accusation of lyingthe accusation hurled at ones enemiesis itself such a staple of politics.
That paradoxthat people often accept the fact that politics is a realm in which certain moral conventions about lying are, if not suspended, at least qualified, while at the same time accepting that within politics the accusation of lying could be used as a tool against enemieswas probably lurking in the background when I began writing that article for the London Review.
Several years later, Martin presented his continually developing ideas in the Richard Lectures at the University of Virginia, the core content of which was eventually published in book form as The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics.
His conclusions, as usual, were many and varied.
First off, there is the question of to whom the truth is owed:
Politics involves interactions with people who are basically either adversarial or who have different interests. Politics involves getting something done or preventing something from getting done. It is inevitably consequentialist. The issue is to whom the truth is owed, and for what reason.
Obviously, in a situation of full antagonisma war, even a cold war we dont owe the enemy the truth. Theres no question that we want to win, and our existence may be at stake. Truth is always a casualty of war, for good or for ill. When were fighting a war, we even propagandize our own people to try to lift their morale.
Now, in somewhat less adversarial situationsin, lets say, a diplomatic situation, where we are jockeying for position but without violence or the threat of violencethere is a way in which we also know that there is a certain bending of the truth. You promise things, you sugar-coat things. The line that Sir Henry Wotton is always credited with A diplomat is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country,captures that quality of our being in a kind of game, a political, international game of trying to gain advantage through whatever meanswhich sometimes includes lying.
A parallel issue to consider, Martin asserts, is the equally significant notion of the directionality of truth-telling: whether it is imposed from the powerful to the powerless or the other way around.
Think of the Quentin Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds, which begins with the Jew Hunter coming to a house with his Nazi troops and asking a peasant, who is hiding Jews in the basement of the house, whether or not there are any Jews there. The peasant initially lies, trying to save them, protect them. But, finally, he is coerced through threats into telling the truth and the Jews are gunned down, with one of them escaping. In this case, there is a question of whether it would have been more moral to tell lies to power, to tell lies to the authorities. This is an example of the murderer-at-the-door case.
Indeed, the closer one looks at the political, the more complicated the situation seems to become. Do we really want our governments to tell the truth at all times? Are lies necessary for effective diplomacy? Is there something somehow positive, in short, that lying gives to politics, something we would be foolish to cut away, if we somehow could?
The crucial thing is to think of the wariness that we have about lying as something that we cant give up. We ought not to be completely cynical about it. My book argues against the notion that politics is just the realm of self-interest, of corruption, of cynicism. It urges that something good gets done, even when people suspend overly moral, regulative ideals.
In keeping with the great intellectual historian tradition to which he has so consistently contributed, an overarching conclusion to Martins measured explorations is that things are vastly more subtle and complicated than they are often presented to us as being: that however unsuitable knee-jerk Manichean reductions to good truth-tellers and evil liars might be to our personal lives, they are likely even more unsuitable still to the political realm.
