The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment

by Dallas G. Denery II

  There was nothing Scudéry could have done about this, nothing anyone could have done to erase the always threatening difference between what we say and what we mean. With those hidden depths of self-interest forever imperceptible, Scudéry opts for what we can perceive, reducing civil society to a seamless flow of words always leading to more words, each sentence expressly designed to delight even as it conceals the intentions that motivate the speaker. Complaisance is the price she pays to purchase a place free from the contest and troubles and misogyny of the public world of male-dominated competitive discourse. Ultimately, the challenge Scudéry confronts is no different from the problem Moderata Fonte confronted in The Worth of Women. But whereas Fonte saw nothing for it but to dream of a utopian world of women freed from the impenetrable and ensnaring lies of men, Scudéry converts that world of women into the idyllic dream of a civil society rooted in nothing but false pleasantries, uniting both men and women in the private refuge of the salon.

  The problem of lying and hypocrisy, present yet veiled in every preceding chapter of Conversations on Diverse Subjects, finally surfaces in first volume’s last dialogue, “On Dissimulation and Sincerity.” The speakers wonder if it is possible to distinguish complaisance from flattery, sincerity from hypocrisy, truth from lies. “But as for sincerity,” Lucinda announces, “all the world boasts of it and wants to have it; and those who are the greatest dissimulators cover themselves no less in sincerity, for without it their dissimulation would be ineffectual.”130 Mathilda wishfully suggests that sincerity and hypocrisy can be distinguished, for “sincerity must of necessity carry along with it all the beauty of truth, all the charms of freedom, all the sweetness of confidence.” Sincerity reveals itself not in words but in an open heart, in guileless eyes and agreeable expressions. “In a word,” she concludes, “it is like beauty without paint, which fears neither to be seen in the truest light nor closely examined.”131 But everyone else present at the conversation realizes, as had the women in Moderata Fonte’s Worth of Women and, indeed, as Bernard Mandeville would assert some forty years later, that this is little more than a dream. The success of civil society depends on concealing intentions and interests behind white lies, false pleasantries, and insincere gestures. Women cannot help but perceive each other as rivals, and men are too competitive to ever really open themselves to one another.132 “When I examine myself,” Padilla states, “I am all too aware that sincerity often quits me. I have said a hundred times to women of my acquaintance that I thought them beautiful and well dressed, well made, that they danced admirably, yet I believed nothing of all this. We conceal love, hatred, ambition, and we only show what we believe may please or be useful. The world has ever took this course and ever will.”133

  And saying this, the conversation continues. Indeed it must continue. Deftly diverted to less pessimistic topics, the artful banter of the salon will proceed through another volume of conversations, skimming along on a beautiful pleasant surface, where lies no longer matter so long as they add to the conversation.

  CONCLUSION

  The Lie Becomes Modern

  In the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers his own account of the origin of lies and deception. Invoking no sacred garden, neither God nor serpent, Rousseau tells the story of wild men and women, once solitary but contented wanderers, now coming together to form the first families and, soon, the first societies. Settled in gatherings of primitive huts, they slowly develop language and tools, the first farms, and the art of metallurgy. With agriculture, they discover the need to divide land, to assign each lot to the man who tills it and, over time, from years of repeated use, these lots become that man’s personal property. Property, in its turn, requires a system of justice, for “as men began to look to the future and as they all saw themselves with some goods to lose, there was not one of them who did not have to fear reprisals against himself for wrongs he might do to another.”1

  Had all men been naturally equal, Rousseau suggests, equally strong and clever, industrious, and thrifty, none of these changes would have been so problematic. Unfortunately, men are far from equal and, as a result, they began to perceive themselves and each other in new and troublesome ways. Differences in wealth, prestige, and status, in mind, beauty, strength, and skill, stirred the envy of the less well-off, while it goaded the pride of the successful. “And these qualities being the only ones which could attract consideration,” Rousseau ominously notes, “it was soon necessary to have them or affect them; for one’s own advantage, it was necessary to appear to be other than what one in fact was. To be and to seem to be became two altogether different things; and from this distinction came conspicuous ostentation, deceptive cunning, and all the vices that follow from them.”2

  Rousseau narrates a secular fall from the state of nature in which men present themselves to one another just as they are, hiding nothing because they have nothing to hide, to the state of civil society in which “suspicion, offenses, fears, coldness, reserve, hate, and betrayal constantly hide under that uniform and false veil of politeness, under that much vaunted urbanity we owe to the enlightenment of our century.”3 Extending a line of thought already present in Augustine’s meditations on Adam and Eve’s disobedience, and revived in both Jacobus Acontius’s Satans Strategems and John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Rousseau asks what it was about the first couple, about any of us, that makes it possible for us to sin. “You say we are sinners because of our first father’s sin,” Rousseau writes to the bishop Beaumont of Paris in 1763, “but why was our first father himself a sinner? Why wouldn’t the same reason by which you explain his sin apply to his descendants without original sin?”4 This question troubled Augustine, who saw nothing for it but to suspect a hidden and always present and percolating pride in the first couple, already tilting them toward evil even before the serpent arrived on the scene. Every subsequent medieval and Reformation theologian rejected Augustine’s solution because it suggested that God had created mankind with an innate propensity toward evil. Whatever hidden steps led to that initial disobedience, Augustine and the theologians all agreed that the consequence of that fateful action was the hereditary stain of original sin, the continuing source of human perversity.

  For his part, Rousseau simply rejects the entire notion of original sin because it explains nothing. As he argues in his letter to Beaumont, to invoke original sin as the reason for our evil actions is to do little more than to argue that mankind is corrupt because it is corrupt. Rousseau, by contrast, claims to have an account of how mankind, born naturally good, becomes corrupt.5 As men and women formed the first families and groups, they became aware of one another, learned to speak and began the long, slow, ever-constricting and enslaving process of human socialization. “Each one began to look at the others and wanted to be looked at himself, and public esteem had value,” Rousseau explains in the Discourse on Inequality, “and that was the first step towards inequality and, at the same time, towards vice. From these first preferences were born on the one hand vanity and contempt, on the other shame and envy; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.”6

  We lie, Rousseau argues, because we are social, have become social, valuing more what people think about us than what we really are, and as society develops, as the arts and sciences develop, our lies become ever more refined and inescapable. “Before Art had molded our manners,” Rousseau writes, “and taught our passions to speak an affected language, our morals were rustic but natural.” But now we worry so much about public opinion that no one “dares to appear as he is,” and “a base and deceptive uniformity prevails in our morals” as we restrain our impulses and carefully compose our every word and deed, rendering us unknown to everyone else and everyone else unknown to us. “Even to know our friends,” Rousseau writes, “we must await some critical and pressing occasion; that is, until it is too late; for it is on those very occasions that such knowledge is of use to us.”7 Man
y writers from the prior century—Marquise de Sablé, François La Rochefoucauld, and Madeleine de Scudéry among them—had made precisely these sorts of observations, noticing that in the courts and salons of Europe, the facade of virtue had replaced any concern with real virtue. We compliment others whom we have no desire to compliment and exchange courtesies with people we despise because that will make things easier for us. Social cohesion and the public good require that we tell such lies, and what is good for society is good for us. Rousseau suggests something very different. Society divides us against ourselves: it opposes our natural inclinations and sentiments with its own standards. Confused, we become lost to ourselves, inauthentic and insincere. As Rousseau writes in Emile, “Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either man or citizen. He will be good neither to himself or others.”8 No inherent perversity of will, no original sin, just human beings grown prideful and deceptive through historical circumstance, alienated from themselves, tricked into believing that hypocrisy provides the surest route to happiness.

  All of which means the problem of lying, of whether it is ever acceptable to lie, takes quite a different shape in Rousseau’s writings. He explicitly discusses lying in the fourth of his Reveries of the Solitary Walker. Long pained by the memory of a youthful lie, Rousseau believes he has ever since assiduously cultivated a life devoted to truth, going so far as to claim for his personal motto a variation on a line from the Roman writer Juvenal’s Satires, “To consecrate one’s life to truth.”9 A mere moment’s reflection, however, brings to mind all the occasions he has lied and prevaricated without any remorse, neither at the time nor later when reflecting on his actions. He begins with a definition of lying, one he claims to have read “in a Philosophy Book that to lie is to conceal a truth we ought to make manifest.”10 This definition frames the question of lying in the language of debt. When do we owe someone else the truth? When do we owe ourselves the truth? What are the sorts of things we can owe to others and to ourselves? These are complicated questions that grow only more complex as the essay continues, but it is a complexity Rousseau refuses to evade. Repeatedly stressing that what matters most is what can be put into practice, he simply rejects all those many austere moralists who steer clear of these problems by arguing we must never lie, no matter what the consequence. Such men, Rousseau dismissively notes, offer little more than “idle chatter impossible to put into practice.”11

  Not only does he reject the austere advice of moralists, he rejects truth as an absolute good in and of itself. While general and abstract truths are precious, allowing us to reason and conduct ourselves toward our due ends, particular truths can be beneficial, harmful, or simply irrelevant. He clarifies the distinctions between useful, harmful, and indifferent truths through a comparison. Imagine a man, the sort whom most of the world calls truthful, a man who faithfully ensures the accuracy of every trivial little fact he states but who, when it comes to himself and his own interests, adopts colorful language and, even if he doesn’t lie, is more than happy to mislead others for his own benefit. Now imagine a different sort of man, a man, no doubt, of the sort Rousseau imagines himself to be, a man so perfectly indifferent to all those trivial details that “he will scarcely have scruples about amusing a group of people with contrived facts from which no unjust judgment results.” But, when it comes to truths that matter, when it comes to things pertaining to his own interest or the interests of others, “he is solidly truthful, even against his self-interest.” For Rousseau this is the man who exemplifies what it means to be truthful because he renders what is owed, and only things that matter, things that have value, are things that can be owed. “The truth that is owed is that which interests justice,” Rousseau writes, “and this sacred name of truth is debased if applied to vain things whose existence is indifferent to all and knowledge of which is useless for anything.”12 Scrupulous adherence to justice can even justify certain lies, and Rousseau recalls two episodes from his youth in which he lied to protect friends from what he perceived would have been unjust punishment and then adds, “and a hundred others of the same nature have happened to me in my life.”13

  Between Augustine and Rousseau everything seems to have changed. Perhaps this is not surprising, and it may even be obvious, but it is worth pointing out. Augustine had argued, and argued repeatedly, that the very essence of sin and, therefore, the very essence of lying as the prototype of all sin consisted in the belief that we can discriminate between good and evil when we decide that this act, this lie, is no sin at all. “When a man lives according to truth, then he lives not according to self, but according to God; for it is God Who has said, ‘I am the truth,’ ” Augustine writes in The City of God. “When he lives according to self—that is, according to man, and not according to God—he then certainly lives according to falsehood.”14 In sharp contrast, though within limits, Rousseau seems to make himself the arbiter of what is moral and immoral, true and false. As he puts it near the very end of the “Fourth Walk,” “From all these reflections, it follows that the commitment I made to truthfulness is founded more on feelings of uprightness and equity than on the reality of things, and that in practice I have more readily followed the moral dictates of my conscience than abstract notions of the true and the false.”15 We act with justice when we act in accord with our inner sentiments, when we replace the insincerity that society demands of us with the sincerity that we can, with effort, demand from ourselves.

  Rousseau accepts this justification for the occasional lie even as he admits that it displeases him and does not clear him of all guilt. “In weighing so carefully what I owed others,” he asks, “have I sufficiently examined what I owed myself?”16 The truthful man, Rousseau will argue, must above all else be “jealous of his self-esteem, this is the good that he can least get along without, and he would feel a real loss in acquiring the esteem of others at its expense.”17 But does he pay himself his just due when he spices up sterile conversation with innocent lies, or does he instead sell himself cheaply to a society that asks him to play the liar and hypocrite so that others perceive him as he wishes to be perceived? These lapses are so much the worse given his motto that publicly proclaims his absolute commitment to truth. Rousseau’s response is not to side with the austere moralists but to lower his sights. When he has lied, it has been out of weakness, not a desire to be false. “With a weak soul we can at the most preserve ourselves from vice; but to dare to profess great virtues is to be arrogant and rash.” When we learn who and what we really are, we sometimes learn that we must “presume less” of ourselves, expect less from ourselves.18 Rousseau counters the socially sanctioned and instituted hypocrisy that alienates us from ourselves, that renders us insincere, with the ideal of personal integrity and unity, with personal sincerity as a good in and of itself, as an end in itself. We are sincere when we act and speak according to our inner sentiments and nature, even if those inner sentiments cannot live up to the ideals we think we hold.19

  If there is a before and an after in the history of lying, then Rousseau’s Discourses may well mark the moment when the one becomes the other. Although he was far from the only eighteenth-century thinker to question the notion of original sin, Rousseau’s critique is without doubt the most intense, the most developed, the most devastating.20 With Rousseau, deception and lying become natural problems, problems with natural causes and, hopefully, natural solutions. While this development was never inevitable, the history of lying certainly suggests how it became possible, in what Rousseau both retains and rejects from that history. On the one hand, he is inescapably beholden to the long-held belief that we have fallen from a state of perfection into a state of corruption. His narrative of that fall may differ markedly from the one that so many had accepted for so long, but the beginning and end of the stories, however told, remained the same. On the other hand, his sense of disgust with our current state seems more profound than it was for many of his immediate pr
edecessors and contemporaries.

  Even before the eighteenth century, writers had gradually been coming to terms with what they understood to be our inherent penchant for deception and lying. Jacobus Acontius had recognized that our inability to interpret God’s Word with total clarity, with total accuracy, while unfortunate, simultaneously provided a basis for harmonious coexistence among the many varied Protestant sects. While the theologians never gave up their contention that every lie is a sin, they ceaselessly worked to mitigate the culpability of beneficial lies and to expand the range of deceptive and misleading (though never mendacious) behavior. In the tradition of courtly writing, the value and function of lies had steadily expanded, from a means of countering the deceits and evil intentions of others to providing the very foundation of social harmony and, to hear Mandeville tell it, prosperity as well. Something similar occurs with female writers responding to charges of their inherent deceitfulness. From Christine de Pizan to Madeleine de Scudéry, women writers made a concerted effort to demonstrate why women can engage in prudential deceptions and lies, while rehabilitating the role of coverings, appearances, and deceptive pretenses. A cynical reading of Scudéry’s Conversations on Diverse Subjects suggests that the seventeenth century’s most popular author believed the only society in which men and women could coexist in peace would be a society of mere appearances, innocent fabrications, and carefully structured lies.

  Everywhere, it seems, lying and deception had already become normalized, not so much secularized and stripped of their roots in Genesis, as unquestionably fitted into the successful and harmonious operation of a fallen world. If this book’s central question, Is it ever acceptable to lie? was always really a question about how we should live in a corrupted world, whether we should accommodate ourselves to it or reject it, a number of writers leading up to and during the eighteenth century had increasing difficulty imagining a world in which we did not lie, a world that did not need our lies. Unable to return to paradise, this world, the world in which the fallen Adam and Eve found themselves, in which all their descendants had and would continue to find themselves, had always been corrupt and full of liars. In a very real sense, the history of the human race was the history of an always already-corrupted species and, as a result, the only options were to accept or reject the ways of this world. Rousseau discovers a third option: recovery. For him, the fall from honesty and innocence into mendacity and corruption is a historical event, an event that occurred and continues to occur in this world, in the complicated interplay between individual and society. The recovery of what has been lost, Rousseau admits, will never be total. We live in the aftermath of society, forever in its wake, and whatever innocence we regain will be rooted less in honesty than in a state of personal integrity and sincerity, in remaining true to our deepest and most personal sentiments—and sentiments can conflict with principles. We might lie and feel justified in our hearts, even as we recognize that it goes against our ideals, and this is fine.