Posted by Many, including yours truly, feel we are living in a post-truth era. In August, 2019 The Washington Post claimed that President Trump had made more than 12,000 false or misleading claims since becoming president (that’s thirteen false or misleading statements a day or one every two hours).
Lying has always been a very common human behavior and like, sin, has always been with us. In the Garden of Eden, both Adam and Eve lied to their creator when they tried to avoid guilt for disobeying God.
Louis le Brocquy’s Adam and Eve in the Garden
Dallas G. Genery tells us that “the 12th-century English courtier and future Bishop of Chartres, John of Salisbury, feared no time had ever been so dangerous for men of honest virtue. According to John, the royal and ecclesiastical courts of Europe teemed with every sort of deceiver and falsifier, with timeservers and wheedlers, gift-givers, actors, mimics, procurers and gossipmongers. The only thing that surpassed their variety was their number “for the foul inundation of their cancerous disease seeps into all so that there is rarely anyone left uncontaminated.” Genery goes on to say “the problem of lying and hypocrisy often seemed to be experienced most keenly in the courts of the European elite, those hybrid spaces, both public and private, political and domestic, in which eager bureaucrats and all manner of hangers-on sought their fortunes. A zero-sum game, fortune hunting required the self-serving courtier to deceive and slander his competitors, to fawn over and flatter his superiors.”
While lying was common, it had always considered sinful. The Bible calls Satan the “father of lies.” However, some Renaissance thinkers believed that lying for good reasons, for example, to protect oneself, was acceptable. For example. Odysseus’s lies to the Cyclops were necessary to keep himself from being eaten.
Most lies, however, are told to avoid guilt or advance our position. Some philosophers believed that lying to protect the state was also acceptable behavior. Machiavelli writes, “Everyone admits how praiseworthy it is in a prince to keep his word, and to behave with integrity rather than cunning. Nevertheless our experience has been that those princes who have done great things have considered keeping their word of little account and have known how to beguile men’s minds by shrewdness and cunning. In the end these princes have overcome those who have relied on keeping their word.”
Genery writes that , on the other hand, many philosophers have argued that lying undermines social trust. “civil society depends upon the assumption that we deal truthfully and honestly with each other. If we were to deem some lies acceptable, how could we ever trust anyone, trust that, even as you sign this contract, make this promise, you have not secretly judged this to be a moment of permissible mendacity?”
Trust is central to our economic system. Niko Matouschek observed:
“To take the quintessential economic transaction as an example — if you (the buyer) don’t trust me (the seller) not to sell you a lemon, then you won’t buy from me in the first place. And you won’t buy from me even if, in principle, I could make a product that you value more than it costs me. And so, trust matters to economists because it enables and facilitates transactions that create value and therefore are good for all of us. Or the other way around — trust matters because the absence of trust is an impediment to growth. It’s an impediment to growth in employment, wages and profits, and therefore makes us all worse off.”
Some professions lie more than others. Politicians are particularly apt to stretch or break the truth. As George Orwell said with more than a bit of hyperbole in Politics and the English Language, “Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” Thus President Trump can be seen as coming from a long line of lying forbearers.
Despite what I’ve written above, the present time seems different from earlier times. Humans have always lied, and often they were ashamed of it. Nevertheless, previous eras seem different. When Bill Clinton said, “I didn’t have sex with that woman,” he was lying through his teeth. He was impeached for the lie as much as for the sex. When Trump lies about paying off Stormy Daniels, voters just yawn. It is not the lying that has changed (though it has), it’s the lack of consequences for being caught in a lie.
My next post will examine why we no longer value truth, the study of agnotology.