The Lie of the Land
"I have a very clear memory
of the meeting," declares one central figure (Bill Clinton) in Washington's
ongoing sexual and legal battles, "and I told the truth."
"I proceeded to explain to
[ Newsweek 's Michael Isikoff]," says another figure (onetime Kathleen
Willey friend Julie Hiatt Steele), "that Ms. Willey had asked me to lie to
support her version of the event, and that I had, in fact, done so."
"There are people who talk a
lot," observes a third participant (Monica Lewinsky's lawyer William H.
Ginsburg), "and as part of that scenario, peccadilloes, they may tell fibs,
lies, exaggerations, oversell."
USA
Today , summing up the experience of the past two months, asked in a
headline, "Who can claim truth or objectivity anymore?"
Ah, that old question. "What is truth?" demanded Pontius
Pilate (John 18:38) during his interrogation of Jesus. He received no reply.
Perhaps because it is less accessible, or at least less prevalent, the act of
truth telling has garnered far less attention in popular speech than the act of
lying. In Roget's Thesaurus , words associated with falsity outnumber
those associated with veracity by about 5-to-1. Synonyms for truth telling are
formal and dull: candor , honesty , veridity . Those for
conveying falsehoods are colorful and ebullient: equivocation ,
mythomania , casuistry , quackery , buncombe ,
cajolery , duplicity , perjury , bamboozlement ,
pettifoggery , sugarcoating , a crock , a con job ,
twaddle .
The
gravitational pull of falsity is so powerful that even words and phrases that
start out as truth reinforcers tend, over time, to acquire the opposite
connotation. Who is not immediately put on guard when confronted with
statements introduced by "Frankly ...," "To be perfectly honest
...," or "The fact of the matter is ..."? When Ginsburg described
certain testimony as being "totally reliable ," the words were served up
in press accounts (as, unavoidably, they also are here) within an isolated
setting of quotation marks, which function as a stage wink. The ostensible
truth multiplier 1,000 percent (from George McGovern's 1972 avowal of
support for his running mate, Thomas F. Eagleton, whom he claimed to support
"1,000 percent" and then summarily dropped from the ticket) is now an ironic
synonym for "don't bet on it" or even "not on your life."
In much the same way, categorical
denials have suffered an irreversible erosion of face value, owing to their
routine issuance by bombastic politicians, aggrieved miscreants, and
representatives of liberation armies and international terrorists.
( Categorical denial , with its serration of easy consonants and regularly
spaced vowels, seems to be within pronunciation range of all non-English
speakers.) Once intended to endow a denial with the qualities of pervasiveness
and totality, the adjective categorical ("absolute," "unqualified,"
"explicit") now raises doubts and eyebrows. The British poet and screenwriter
James Lasdun's recent protestation--"I categorically deny being a
neo-formalist"--plants the suspicion that his sympathies are, indeed,
neoformalist. Responding to rumors that Disney was planning to add new
sequences to the classic animated film Snow White , a spokesman for the
company declared, "I categorically deny that we would ever touch Snow
White ."
Still,
the idea of "category" as it applies to lies is worth exploring--and leads into
the realm of theology. Say what one will about Catholic theology, it offers a
cosmological taxonomy in which all things have an appointed place and a
well-thought-out definition, rendered with lapidary minimalism. Truth ,
for instance, is helpfully defined in The Catholic Encyclopedia as the
"accordance or conformity between what is asserted and what is," or "the
conformity of intellection with being." Falsity , in turn, is the
"deformity of intellection and being."
In the weeks ahead it will be important to maintain clear
theological distinctions (per the Encyclopedia ) among various kinds of
lies. There is the mendacium jocosum --the "lie told in jest." A second
type of lie is the mendacium officiosum , or "officious lie," whose
purpose is to achieve some useful end or to prevent some distinct harm.
(Examples might include a doctor misleading a terminally ill patient or a
prisoner lying to enemy interrogators.) A third type of lie is the mendacium
perniciosum , or "pernicious lie," a lie that is intended to do harm.
A fourth
type of lie might be called the mendacium universalis , the "universal or
endemic lie." This is the type of lie--if it is, indeed, a lie--that we seem to
be encountering most frequently these days. If a lie, by definition, becomes a
lie only in the context of communication (speech, writing, gesture), and if a
lie is immoral because it destroys the fundamental trust that makes
communication possible--if all this is so, can a lie be told in a context where
communication is understood to have no objective value to begin with? I give
the floor back to the theologians:
In the
extremely difficult situations being considered, there is no mutual trust or
confidence to destroy. In fact, a maximum of distrust prevails between the
parties, and no man in such a position could prudently take the words of the
other at their face value. In such a case, words would cease, to a degree, to
be a medium for the exchange of thought. Communication would be broken down,
and to the extent in which communication of mind with mind has become
impossible, it would be equally impossible to realize the idea of a lie. ...
[It] seems incontestable that if no communication in the ordinary sense of the
word is possible, there can be no lie.
Not all falsehoods, of course, are lies (the
key ingredient in a lie is intentionality). Nor are all lies deceptions--some
lies are told without any intention to deceive ("You've lost weight!" "Let's do
lunch!"). Moreover, some deceptions are, technically, not lies, theologically
speaking: "A person could tell a truth with sufficient clarity to avoid making
a false statement and sufficient ambiguity and evasiveness to avoid revealing a
truth which he wants to keep hidden." (For instance, if you're a presidential
candidate and are asked if you have ever smoked marijuana, and you have, but
only in England, you might reply that you have broken no state laws.) A
statement that successfully picks its way across this dangerous terrain is said
to exhibit an economy of truth , and a person who has uttered such a
statement is said to have been economical with the truth . These
characterizations, too, were originally conferred with a sense of professional
appreciation (I first heard them on the lips of some Jesuit friends), but they
have also been pulled out of truth's orbit and into the atmosphere of
mendacity. Today an economy of truth sometimes just means "a lie,"
albeit one whose seriousness may be debatable. Julie Burchill wrote recently in
the Guardian , "The idea that one party has to overcome the 'natural'
resistance of the other party to sexual intercourse by a combination of gifts
and being economical with the truth takes us perilously near to
date-rape territory."
The concept of an
economy of truth may have lost its purity, but it retains considerable
utility. If nothing else, it adds a timely new dimension to the hortatory
reminder "It's the economy, stupid."
