When I was a schoolboy I stole a fountain pen. The teacher recognized the pen and asked where I’d found it. I don’t recall what I said but I remember vividly how my face became red hot while I insisted resolutely that the pen was mine. The teacher didn’t buy it, the pen was returned and justice done.
Lying disturbs our natural biological functions, writes essayist and physician, Lewis Thomas. Electric discharges on the surface of our skin change, and our heart and breathing rhythms fluctuate. A flushed face may occur, as was my case in school. The lie detector documents these aberrations providing convincing evidence that for human beings our default position is set for truth telling. The lie detector exposes lying because our bodies spill the beans. We’re hardwired for truth. For us, lying is an unnatural act.
We hold truth as our highest virtue, so why did the ancient Greeks believe everyone was a liar. In their famous myth, the philosopher Diogenes, lantern held high, searches for an honest man but finds none? Was Diogenes looking for a man who tells the truth all the time or did he exclude women from the search. Either might explain his discouraging results.
Since human bodies react negatively to lying, dishonesty debilitates us, not only physically but also psychologically and spiritually as well. I know people living in dysfunctional families for whom the effects of lies can imprison its members in a hopeless world. Some undiagnosed complaints plaguing many people are often traced to living with lies that produce symptoms like lower back pain, headaches, listlessness, bad moods, and some forms of depression. Our own lies victimize others and ourselves as well.
In popular thinking, we arrange lies hierarchically, the way priests categorize venal and mortal sins; dirty lies top the list, then whoppers, next white lies and finally fibs.
There are times when lying can be a virtue. For marriages, strategic equivocations are absolutely necessary for keeping couples happy: I think of a husband whose wife asks him if he’s noticed she’s lost twenty pounds. He says yes but he really hasn’t. Or the wife who assures her husband she’s fine with him watching Monday night football and drinking beer with his buddies. Truth is she hates Monday nights and his boorish friends.
A child shows the picture she drew of you; your face is red, hair green, legs like sticks, your nose like a cucumber and your ears like Dumbo’s. She asks if you think it’s nice. “Oh sweetheart, it’s beautiful.” To say otherwise would be worse than any dirty lie you might ever tell.
Princeton moral philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt discusses the subject of truth in his scholarly book called, On Bullshit. Frankfurt draws fine distinctions in this business of truth telling. A liar, he tells us, utters statements that he knows aren’t true. ‘BS’ on the other hand is a statement someone may utter with authority although he’s wholly unaware that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. People most inclined to ‘BS’ are those from whom the public expects authoritative statements like clergy and politicians. Under pressure some may come to believe as truth what they have unwittingly made up.
A Bishop of my own denomination in 1654, stated definitively: “God created heaven and earth . . . beginning the night of the 23rd of October in the year 710 of Julian.” Before reading Frankfurt’s book I would have considered the Bishop’s statement a whopper. It may well be that it was simply ‘BS’, that is, the Bishop sincerely believed he knew what he was talking about. I might add Donald Trump as a contemporary example of the consummate BS’r.
Popular opinion holds that politicians ‘BS’ most of the time. It’s hard to tell. Some you know right away are really shoveling it while others you can’t quite tell whether they’re lying or just BS-ing. A fair number of political promises fit easily into the ‘dirty lies’ category.
For all the fine points of what truth is, I’ve found that some moments of truth are profoundly moving. They are beautiful and rarely forgotten. Whenever I recall the ravages caused to South Africa’s people in the wake of apartheid, I think of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. His inspired vision of truth and reconciliation, unprecedented in this day when reprisals are a way of life, saved the nation from a bloodbath of vengeance. The truth that he helped the nation speak, also set it free.
Once I personally experienced one man’s truth and I was profoundly moved by it. I was a parish priest then in New York City. I often drove from my church on the West Side across town to visit shut in’s. One day, when I returned to my car, it had been rear-ended. I found a slip of paper tucked under the windshield wiper on which a man had written an apology for the damages, left his name and phone number asking that I call him so that he could cover the costs.
The man could have easily have disappeared and remained anonymous. I found his gesture extraordinary because it was not driven by expediency but by his heart. Truth, when we find it, is lovely.
Some might think that finding an honest man in New York City is a dead end. Not so. I discovered one after being rear-ended. You never know when or where an honest person will show up. And when one does, it can make your day.
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