Lying and Society

 

In large, complex societies, honesty takes on added weight because so many transactions take place between strangers. At the same time, we’re descended from those who felt little need to tell the truth to those they didn’t recognize. As we saw in the last chapter, for most of human history, lying to outsiders was not only condoned but sanctioned. Integrity helped us deal with our own, duplicity with outsiders. As a result, the will to deceive unfamiliar human beings may be one of our genetic memories. Paradoxically, a will to be honest may also be an inherited trait. Darwin himself believed that because it strengthened communal bonds, truthfulness had survival value.

Members of tribes that emphasized honesty were most likely to have heirs. Us. From our distant ancestors we have inherited complementary urges to be honest and dishonest. Depending on the context, both tendencies helped us survive: honesty for our own kind, deception for everyone else. Just as dealing with familiar faces promotes a tendency to tell the truth to this very day, so may contact with a stranger trigger an ancient impulse to lie. This bifurcated heritage is reflected in the variable ethical standards that are still commonplace. Subjects in one of Bella DePaulo’s studies said they lied during 28 percent of their conversations with friends, 48 percent with acquaintances, and 77 percent with strangers. Even in Tipton, Iowa, Alan Wolfe found an insider-outsider ethical dichotomy alive and well. The strong emphasis residents placed on being honest with each other weakened when questions arose about telling the truth to those who lived elsewhere, or to large corporations, or the IRS. “The moral instinct of Tiptonites is to value honesty more when the recipient of one’s honesty is a close neighbor or friend,” Wolfe discovered, “than when it is a stranger.”

If it is true that dealing with people we don’t know, or don’t know well, triggers a tendency to deceive inherited from our ancestors on the savanna, then as more and more of us deal with a rising numbers of strangers (or those who feel like strangers), an urge to tell lies is increasingly unleashed. At the very least our inhibitions about being dishonest are lowered. On the receiving end, anyone we meet could be lying at any time about anything, and we would have no way to know. (As we’ll see in a later chapter, the human capacity to detect lies is quite limited.) Paul Ekman—who has devoted his career to studying deception—believes it is unwise to trust one’s assessment of another person’s honesty without having some knowledge about that person. One proven enhancer of lie-detection accuracy is knowing how a suspected liar has behaved in two or more situations.

Ekman has an interesting theory about why most of us can’t detect lies very well. In our ancestral environment, he speculates, there was not much opportunity to deceive one another. We lived cheek by jowl in groups where consequences for being deceitful were severe. As a result, there was little incentive to be dishonest, or opportunity to unmask those who were. Lies would not have been told often enough for lie catchers to hone their skills. In such a context the adaptive value of a lie-telling talent or a complementary ability to catch liars would be low. The context in which most of us now live is just the opposite. Opportunities to lie are constant today, the means to disguise lies plentiful, and the penalties for being caught meager. At worst, those revealed as liars can simply move on—to another place, a different spouse, new friends, who have no idea that they are known liars.

One could hypothesize that the looser human ties are in any social context, the more likely it is that those who live there will deceive and be deceived. And even if we aren’t being hoodwinked in such settings, it is easy to suspect that we are, because we just don’t know.

Lie Regulations

 

All societies must reconcile the fact that lying is socially toxic with the fact that nearly all their members engage in this practice. Every belief system does its best to regulate dishonesty with taboos, sanctions, and norms. Few such systems claim that every lie is always wrong. This would put them too far out of synch with facts on the ground.

Therefore a major task for all belief systems has been to determine when it’s permissible to tell a lie.

Those participating in this search have usually taken three basic approaches: (1) lying is wrong, period (Augustine, Wesley, Kant); (2) it all depends (Montaigne, Voltaire, Bacon); (3) there is something to be said for a good lie well told (Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Wilde).

Greek gods were celebrated for their skill at deceiving humans and each other. In The Odyssey, Odysseus the dissembler is a far more intriguing character than Achilles the truth teller. When Athena, no slouch herself in the deception arts, approaches Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca in disguise, she is favorably impressed by the persuasive yarns he spins about himself. “Crafty must be he,” Athena tells Odysseus, “and Knavish, who would outdo thee in all manner of guile.”

Even early ethicists who warned against telling lies seldom did so on absolute terms. Plato, who condemned lying on general principles, nonetheless thought it was crucial for the guardians of his ideal republic to propagate “noble lies” so that the masses would accept their place and not disturb social harmony. Across the Adriatic, Cicero’s On Duties emphasized the need for truth telling among free men. In Cicero’s world, lying to a slave was not considered dishonest.

Most societies leave the question of determining which lies are justified to their clergy. Over the millennia theologians of all stripes have occupied themselves with explaining why some lies are worse than others. Even though the fourth of Buddhism’s five precepts admonishes the faithful to abstain from lying, Buddhists distinguish between major lies (such as feigning enlightenment), minor lies (making things up), and lies told to benefit others (as when a doctor conceals the truth from a patient who is dying). The latter in particular are not considered much of a problem.

Like Buddhism’s fourth precept, Hindu ethics proscribe lying. The seminal text Laws of Manu admonishes Hindi never to “swear an oath falsely, even in a trifling matter.” That seems clear enough. In its next passage, however, Manu’s laws advise that “there is no crime in a [false] oath about women whom one desires, marriages, fodder for cows, fuel, and helping a priest.”

This is how it goes in most theology. Admonitions not to lie are followed by a list of circumstances in which lying is permissible. Muhammad said his followers should always be truthful, except when a lie was necessary to preserve domestic harmony, save their life, or keep the peace. The Talmud also notes a need to keep peace as justifying falsehood. According to Judaism’s civil and religious laws, a pious scholar is always to tell the truth except when asked about his marital relations, or to avoid sounding boastful, or when telling others how well he has been hosted might burden his host with too many other guests.

Both Testaments of the Bible, and the Old Testament especially, combine condemnations of dishonesty with admiring accounts of successful deception: Abraham claiming that Sarah was his sister, not his wife; Jacob passing as his brother Esau to win his father’s blessing (and inheritance); Egyptian midwives rescuing Hebrew children by telling Pharaoh that their mothers were so vigorous that—unlike Egyptian women—they gave birth before the midwives arrived. 

We do tell more lies

 

I think it’s fair to say that honesty is on the ropes. Deception has become commonplace at all levels of contemporary life. At one level that consists of “He’s in a meeting” or “No, that dress doesn’t make you look fat.” On another level it refers to “I never had sexual relations with that woman” or “We found the weapons of mass destruction.” High-profile dissemblers vie for headlines: fabulist college professors, fabricating journalists, stonewalling bishops, book-cooking executives and their friends the creative accountants. They are the most visible face of a far broader phenomenon: the routinization of dishonesty. I’m not talking just about those who try to fib their way out of a tight spot (“I wasn’t out drinking last night; I had to work late”) but casual lying done for no apparent reason (“Yes, I was a cheerleader in high school”).

Ludwig Wittgenstein once observed how often he lied when the truth would have done just as well. This Viennese philosopher has many modern disciples. The gap between truth and lies has shrunk to a sliver. Choosing which to tell is largely a matter of convenience. 

We lie for all the usual reasons, or for no apparent reason at all. It’s no longer assumed that truth telling is even our default setting. When Monica Lewinsky said she’d lied and been lied to all her life, few eyebrows were raised. 

Our attitudes toward lying have grown, to say the least, tolerant. “It’s now as acceptable to lie as it is to exceed the speed limit when driving,” observed British psychologist Philip Hodson. “Nobody thinks twice about tattered condition of contemporary candor is suggested by how often we use phrases such as “quite frankly,” “let me be frank,” “let me be candid,” “truth be told,” “to tell you the truth,” “to be truthful,” “the truth is,” “truthfully,” “in all candor,” “in all honesty,” “in my honest opinion,” and “to be perfectly honest.” Such verbal tics are a rough gauge of how routinely we deceive each other. If we didn’t, why all the disclaimers?

**

Even though there have always been liars, lies have usually been told with hesitation, a dash of anxiety, a bit of guilt, a little shame, at least some sheepishness. Now, clever people that we are, we have come up with rationales for tampering with truth so we can dissemble guilt-free. I call it post-truth. We live in a post-truth era. Post-truthfulness exists in an ethical twilight zone. It allows us to dissemble without considering ourselves dishonest. When our behavior conflicts with our values, what we’re most likely to do is reconceive our values. Few of us want to think of ourselves as being unethical, let alone admit that to others, so we devise alternative approaches to morality. Think of them as alt.ethics. This term refers to ethical systems in which dissembling is considered okay, not necessarily wrong, therefore not really “dishonest” in the negative sense of the word.

Even if we do tell more lies than ever, no one wants to be considered a liar. That word sounds so harsh, so judgmental. Men in particular are extremely careful to avoid giving other men any opportunity to say “You callin’ me a liar?” Once those fatal words are spoken, it’s hard for dialogue to continue without fists being thrown, or worse. The word lie itself is both a description and a weapon. 

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this term “is normally a violent expression of moral reprobation, which in polite conversation tends to be avoided.” That’s why we come up with avoidance mechanisms: rationales for dishonesty, reasons why it’s okay to lie, not nearly as bad as we once thought, maybe not so bad after all. The emotional valence of words associated with deception has declined. We no longer tell lies. Instead we “misspeak.” We “exaggerate.” We “exercise poor judgment.” “Mistakes were made,” we say. The term “deceive” gives way to the more playful “spin.” At worst, saying “I wasn’t truthful” sounds better than “I lied.” Nor would we want to accuse others of lying; we say they’re “in denial.” That was sometimes said even of Richard Nixon, the premier liar of modern times, who went to his grave without ever confessing to anything more than errors of judgment. Presidential aspirant Gary Hart admitted only to “thoughtlessness and misjudgment” after reporters revealed Hart’s dishonesty (not only about his sex life but about his age). When, during a primary debate, John Kerry referred to a nonexistent poll that put his popularity well above Hillary Clinton’s, an aide later said Kerry “misspoke.” And it isn’t just male politicians who parse words this way. In the course of writing The Dance of Deception, Harriet Lerner asked women friends what lies they’d recently told. This request was invariably greeted with silence. When Lerner asked the same friends for examples of “pretending" they had no problem complying. “I pretended to be out when my friends called,” said one without hesitation.

A direct admission of lying (“I lied”) is rare to nonexistent. Those willing to make such a bold statement cast doubt on anything they have said in the past and anything they will say in the future. This is why, rather than open the floodgates and accept lying as a way of life, we manipulate notions of truth. We “massage” truthfulness, we “sweeten it,” we tell “the truth improved.” Britain’s cabinet secretary Sir Robert Armstrong once created an uproar with his droll admission that he’d been “economical with the truth” (a phrase he borrowed from Edmund Burke). Since then, all manner of creative phrasemaking has been devoted to explaining why lies are something else altogether. My favorite depicts a liar as “someone for whom truth is temporarily unavailable.”

**

Honesty was once considered an all-or-nothing proposition. You were either honest or dishonest. In the post-truth era this concept has become more nuanced. We think less about honesty and dishonesty per se and more about degrees of either one. Ethics are judged on a sliding scale. If our intentions are good, and we tell the truth more often than we lie, we consider ourselves on firm moral ground. If we add up truths and lies we’ve told and find more of the former than the latter, we classify ourselves honest. This is ledger-book morality. Conceding that his magazine soft-pedaled criticism of advertisers, one publisher concluded, “I guess you could say we’re 75 percent honest, which isn’t bad.”

In terms of values, this approach denotes a significant shift. Previous generations tended to think you were virtuous or you weren’t. Morality was not assessed by tallying assets and debits on a spreadsheet of virtue and hoping to come out ahead. Another analogy would be that we have shifted from set menu to buffet style ethics: picking and choosing which ones to abide. This approach allows for the “compartmentalizing” at which Bill Clinton was said to excel. Abraham Lincoln would not be impressed. 

The Post-Truth Era