by Ian Leslie
Even Kant may not have been quite as unyielding on the subject as he claimed. In the Metaphysics of Morals, the same writer who would – in theory – give his friend away to a murderer rather than lie, ponders more quotidian questions, like whether it’s acceptable to write ‘your obedient servant’ at the close of a letter, or what to say to an author who asks you whether you like his work, when the true answer is no. One might choose to laugh off such questions with a quip, muses Kant, but ‘who always has his wits about him?’ Never has the great man sounded more human. ‘The slightest hesitation,’ he writes, ‘is already a mortification for the author. May one flatter him, then?’ In these frowning, shrugging sentences we can hear Kant struggling with the moral muddiness of everyday life, and coming close to an admission that equivocation has its uses.
Afterword: How to Be Honest
Three Principles of Living Honestly
1. Share the Work
Realising how central lies are to our existence forces us to think harder about what being honest really means. Honesty is not effortless, but something at which we have to work.
Kant famously expressed his awe at ‘the starry sky above us, and the moral law within’. Darwin and his successors, however, have portrayed the human species as being in possession of a rather erratic internal moral compass. Although we are by no means a purely selfish animal, we are what the contemporary philosopher Peter Railton terms ‘us-ish’: naturally inclined to look after our own kith and kin first. We are also, as we’ve seen, wrapped in useful illusions. Our brains aren’t designed to seek the truth, about either ourselves or the world around us. The anthropologist Robin Fox put it to me like this: ‘The brain’s business is not to give us an accurate or objective view of the world, but to give us a useful view – one we can act on.’ Its primary job is to help the packet of tissue, bone and muscle in which it’s encased to survive and thrive; reporting on reality is an important but secondary consideration. So is telling the truth to others.
That’s not to say Kant’s admiration was misplaced. We have somehow managed to straighten the crooked timber of our own nature; to overcome our natural partiality and bias and get closer to the truth. How? By acting in concert. First, we’ve developed social norms of truth-telling; an understanding, expressed in written or unwritten ethical codes, that telling the truth is usually preferable to lying. Second, we’ve developed habits of shared enquiry; the procedures of logic and rigorous scientific procedure of the kind bequeathed to us by Voltaire, Bacon, Lavoisier and Franklin. Third, we’ve evolved institutions of law, democracy and the right to free expression, so that every claim to truth is challenged, every partial viewpoint opposed or contrasted with another.
None of these is a perfect guard against dishonesty or corruption, of course – far from it – and they don’t change our fundamental nature. But that was Benjamin Constant’s point: man is a flawed creature, but it’s his social obligations rather than abstract moral rules that keep him honest, which is why we must engage in a constant struggle to maintain and improve the institutions of an enlightened, liberal society. It’s also why we should take care to design and sustain social environments – at school, at work – that reward truth-telling more often than not. Honesty is something we do together.
2. Distrust Your Own Certainty
The idea of trusting yourself runs deep in modern culture, we’re all taught to follow our hearts and believe in our instincts. But our instincts can be misleading. The research of Timothy Wilson, for instance, suggests that we can’t even predict our own behaviour very well – that our friends, or even informed strangers, have a much clearer idea of how we’re going to act than we do. Yes, we have privileged access to our own thoughts and motivations, but often this results in a case of too much information. Unable to see the behavioural wood for the mental trees, we make flaky predictions about what we’re going to do, based on flawed analyses of our own characters. We over-estimate the likelihood that we’ll stick to a diet or an exercise regime, and under-estimate our propensity to fall for entirely unsuitable partners. We profess to motivations and intentions that don’t exist and deny the existence of real ones.
An important and under-estimated facet of being honest with yourself, then, is not trusting your own sense of certainty. Most of us have been in situations where even if we know we don’t have all the facts to hand, we just know we’re right about something. We have a natural tendency to think that the more passionately convinced we are of something, the more likely it is that we’re correct. But this just isn’t so. The neurologist Robert Burton argues that the correlation we discern between the strength of a conviction and the likelihood of it being right is a self-deceiving illusion spun by the brain – what he calls the ‘feeling of knowing’. The warm rush of certainty we experience when arriving at a definite point of view or reiterating a long-held belief is not to be trusted. It’s something we are biologically programmed to feel but the programme, although intended to help us come to a decision – to act – has little to do with whether or not we’re actually right.
The feeling of knowing can lead us astray in all sorts of ways, because it encourages us to shut our minds off to discussion or contradictory opinion, thus allowing in-built, irrational biases and prejudices to rule our mental roost.34 (Our over-confidence about being able to tell whether someone is lying to us being just one example.) We have to be on our guard against the many ruses of the self-deceptive mind. ‘The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool,’ said the physicist Richard Feynman.
Of course, it’s nigh on impossible to live without certainty – it’s probably best to be certain that stepping in front of a moving car will kill you, that you will need to eat again at some point, or that Seinfeld is the best sitcom ever made. As much as is reasonable, however, we might experiment with replacing the words I know with I believe, even if that means we admit to not being so certain about whether God exists or if man-made climate-change is real. The economist Tyler Cowen has remarked that whereas most people seem to work with a model of nearly a hundred per cent probability that their political beliefs are correct, it would be more sensible to work with something like a sixty per cent probability. Such an internal admission of fallibility is easier said than done – try it now, with whatever you consider your core beliefs, and you’ll see what I mean. But the world might be a better place if we all listened a little less to our feeling of knowing and a little more to each other.
3. Accept a Necessary Margin of Illusion
Between Vancouver Island and the Pacific coast of North America is a slender strip of water, home to fjord-like inlets, sounds, and hundreds of densely forested, rocky, almost impenetrable islands. For thousands of years a fishing people known as the Kwakiutl populated this archipelago, as well as the northern part of Vancouver Island and the adjoining mainland. The Kwakiutl were famed for their beautiful art and pottery and for idiosyncratic customs like the potlatch, in which the chiefs of different bands competed to give away the most wealth. They were also known for their shamans: healers who could cure people of sickness by communicating with the spirits. In 1887 the anthropologist Franz Boas made a primitive recording of a Kwakiutl shaman singing a healing song. The shaman’s name was Quesalid (pronounced Kesalid). After recording his voice, Boas transcribed Quesalid’s account of how, many years before, he became a shaman.
In his youth, Quesalid was an angry young man. Shamans in Native American tribes were something like a cross between priests, doctors and rock stars; highly respected, even feared, and paid highly for their services. Almost alone amongst his family and friends Quesalid was resentful of the shamans, their riches and their prestige; in his eyes they were frauds who preyed on the needy, the vulnerable and the foolish. So he concocted a plan to expose them. First, he would win their trust so that they would share their secrets with him. Then he would tell the world, and break their power for ever.
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br /> He started hanging around with the local shamans until, eventually, one of them offered him an apprenticeship. Sure enough, Quesalid’s first lessons were an education in deception: he was taught how to simulate fainting and nervous fits (sometimes shamans would appear to be in a battle with the spirits) and about the practice of ‘dreamers’: spies employed by the shamans to eavesdrop on private conversations around the village and report back to them, so that later they could seem to intuit the symptoms and origin of the patient’s condition.
He even learnt the greatest secret of all – the truth behind the signature move of Kwakiutl shamans. When a member of the tribe fell sick the shaman would be called for a consultation and, if he deemed it worthwhile, an elaborate ritual would be enacted. At a fire-lit ceremony filled with music, singing and chanting, the shaman would lean over the body of the sick person, place his mouth to the affected part – the patient’s chest, for example – and appear to suck out a physical manifestation of the evil spirit. Now Quesalid learned how it worked: the shaman hides a little tuft of eagle down in his mouth and bites his tongue to make it bleed. He bends over the patient. As the drums beat faster and the music comes to a crescendo, he lifts up his head and spits out the blood-soaked tuft.
Quesalid’s worst suspicions were confirmed: the highest magic of the shamans was nothing more than a sleight-of-hand, a shabby deceit. He resolved to publicise his findings. But then something unexpected happened. His apprenticeship amongst the shamans had become common knowledge, and one day he was summoned by the family of a sick boy who had dreamed of Quesalid as his healer. It was known that when this happened, whoever the ailing person had dreamed of would be most likely to cure them. The family, who lived on a nearby island, were desperate for help; Quesalid could hardly say no. As night fell, men from the boy’s village came in their canoes to collect him. Having already secreted some eagle down under his upper lip, Quesalid set off to perform his first healing ceremony.
Once ashore, he was welcomed into the house of the boy’s grandfather. In the middle of the house was a fire, surrounded by men, women and children from the village. Music was being played. At the rear of the house was the boy, who seemed weak, his breath short. As Quesalid knelt down beside him, the boy opened his eyes and, pointing to his lower ribs, whispered, ‘Welcome. Have mercy on me that I may live.’ The apprentice shaman placed his mouth to the boy’s body, biting on his own tongue as he did so. After a few seconds he lifted his head and spat the bloody down into the palm of his hand. The musicians played loud and fast as he danced around the fire, singing a sacred song and holding out the boy’s disease for everyone to see. Then he buried it in the hot ashes of the fire. The boy sat up. He was better already.
Here is the American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, writing in 1952:
Next, there is the old question of deception. Probably most shamans or medicine men, the world over, help along with sleight-of-hand in curing and especially in exhibitions of power. This sleight-of-hand is sometimes deliberate; in many cases awareness is perhaps not deeper than the foreconscious. The attitude, whether there has been repression or not, seems to be as towards a pious fraud. Field ethnographers seem quite generally convinced that even shamans who know that they are frauds nevertheless also believe in their powers, and especially in those of other shamans: they consult them when they themselves or their children are ill.
Without willing it, Quesalid had gone from posing as a shaman’s apprentice to being a shaman, and from being an enemy of deceit to the perpetrator of an illusion. Although his story takes place in a society far removed from our own it raises questions that all of us, at some level, are engaged in every day.
The playwright Alan Bennett remarked that ‘be yourself’ is a ‘baffling injunction’. Perhaps what it really means, he said, is ‘pretend to be yourself’. The sociologist Erving Goffman pointed out that the line between stage acting and real life is alarmingly fine. Of course, it takes skill and training to become a good actor, but that needn’t obscure the fact that most people, given a script and a simple set of directions, can convey some sense of realness to an audience. This is because, says Goffman, ‘life itself is a dramatically enacted thing’. Ordinary social intercourse consists of improvisation around a repetoire of ready-made lines, expressions and gestures that we draw upon to make our ‘performance’ convincing. (It’s not insignificant that the word ‘person’ derives from the Latin word for a mask worn by an actor.) In Goffman’s view, we’re all actors who have half-forgotten that we’re acting. Most of the time we play a double game, aware that others are performing for us and yet believing in the performance at the same time. In Penny Lane, The Beatles sing about a series of characters – the banker, the fireman, the barber – who make up the life of the street. A young nurse selling poppies from a tray gets the feeling that she is in a play. ‘She is anyway,’ sings Paul McCartney.
A character in Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck remarks, ‘Deprive a man of his life-lie and you rob him of his happiness.’ Ibsen believed that many of us find reality so unpleasant that we wear a mask of idealism – a mask which is also a shield – and create an alternative life for ourselves. It’s a theme that runs through much modern drama and literature, and, particularly in the American tradition, it comes tied up with a bleak vision of bourgeois life. Think of Arthur Miller’s salesman, John Cheever’s swimmer, the constantly yearning and shrinking characters of Richard Yates or, in film, the slow self-destruction of Lester Burnham in American Beauty. In these stories the life-lie is portrayed as a dishonest flight from truth; a mask which it’s the artist’s job to remove. But perhaps this is competitive jealousy on the part of the artist. There is another way of looking at our capacity for deception and self-deception: as an expression of our defiantly creative nature – our refusal to accept that the world as it is, is all there is. The protagonist of Eugene O’Neil’s The Iceman Cometh declares ‘the lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober’. Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, remarked that ‘our ability to lie – but not necessarily our ability to tell the truth – belongs among the few obvious, demonstrable data that confirm human freedom.’
Our need to keep in touch with reality exists in tension with an equally strong need to make up stories that aren’t true – and to believe in them. Without the former, we couldn’t get on for long with our environment or with each other. Without the latter, we wouldn’t have the imaginative reach that has driven all human progress. Perhaps we should accept our need for both and wear our masks with equanimity, while not letting ourselves forget they are masks. In the words of Wallace Stevens, ‘The final belief is to believe in a fiction which you know to be a fiction.’
After curing his first patient, Quesalid was acclaimed as a great shaman. The only person who didn’t believe that Quesalid had performed something magical was Quesalid. But success had shaken his cynicism. As word of his triumph spread, he accepted invitations to practise his technique at the healing ceremony of neighbouring tribes, and found that he could cure patients thought to be beyond hope. In the years that followed he grew famous and wealthy by practising the art he once dismissed as a sham. Although Quesalid told Boas that he was still a sceptic, he took great pride in his work.
Notes
1. While this is inherently true of language per se, it may be that there are some languages in which it is harder to lie than in others. The language of the Matses, an Amazonian tribe, has a structure that obliges its speakers to specify exactly how they know what they’re saying is true. Instead of saying ‘An animal passed here,’ the Matses speaker must specify whether he saw the animal passing, or saw its footprints and made an inference, or made an educated guess, or heard it from somebody else. If somebody makes a statement without backing it up like this, it’s considered a lie. According to the linguist Guy Deutscher, if you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at th
at very moment he’ll answer in the past tense and say something like ‘There were two last time I checked.’ After all, he can’t be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago – so to report it as a fact would be deceitful.
2. Talwar relates that the creativity of the lies told by children in this test is impressive, ranging from ‘That’s great, my dad really needs a bar of soap.’ To ‘I collect soap.’
3. This awful story ended with more violence. After his arrest, Weddell was released on bail. He travelled to his mother-in-law’s house, shot her, then turned the gun on himself.
4. Larson brought back Margaret Taylor for another session the day after her first, ostensibly to find out whether the questioner was affecting the subject and hence the reliability of the test. He asked her to lie to him, and then he asked her out. Within a year they were married.
5. The polygraph was also adopted by organisations wishing to screen for homosexuality. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police experimented with a device that monitored the diameter of a subject’s pupil while he was shown pictures of naked men. Faced with inconclusive results, the Mounties designed a fluid-filled tube that fastened around the subject’s penis, registering any tumescence whilst he viewed lurid images of men, women and children. The penile plethysmograph is used in the assessment of sex offenders to this day.