Somewhere the great historian Frederick William Maitland likened doing history to predicting the past. He couldn't have known but brain science has come to support that view. What our brain does is two things: it predicts a pattern and it watches for variances on that pattern. When you first open your eyes in the morning, your brain is already prepared for what it expects to see. It will calmly register nothing if nothing is unusual. If anything is out of place, it will focus on that and you will spend a few conscious moments determining that the dark blob in the middle of the floor is a sock and not a rat. And then you'll go back to normal.
Our entire memory of the past is what our brain expects to be there. That is to say, we only remember anything because our brain has been trained to be ready to respond to possible challenges. You remember your name, your birthplace and birth date, what schools you went to and whatever else you remember because you expect to be asked about these things and the only reason you expect to be asked is because you've been trained to expect to be asked by people asking you. It was important to remember who you had for math in Grade 10 and so your brain got good at storing that detail. And you might continue to remember it long after it ceases to be useful.
Most of the time, being able to answer "correctly" means being able to perform successfully. It means being able to give and sustain an answer. I'm asked who my teacher is and I give an answer that others will accept. We forget how scary that can be in Grades 1 and 2. You go to recess on the first day and kids you know ask you "Who you got?" If you can't pull up a credible answer, you'll be mocked and shunned. That's pure terror at that age.
A lie is a kind of performance. It's an attempt to sustain an answer. Forget about dictionary definitions about "false statements" because both "false" and "statement" very sophisticated notions that you learn years after you're expected to know what "lying" and "telling the truth" are.
From your brain's perspective lying has a lot more in common with telling the truth than we like to admit. Your brain predicts a pattern of response and most of the time you try to give the answer that will sustain that pattern. Very early on in life you will encounter bullies who will teach you in no uncertain terms that answering questions is a high-risk activity. For our brains, the "right answer" and the "safe answer" are just two ways of saying the same thing.
Lying is like picking your nose, masturbating or putting things in your mouth. That is to say, these are things that every child will naturally do unless and until they are taught not to. You do these things because they feel safe and good and the only way your parents and other authority figures have to make you stop is to make these things feel unsafe. Explaining to you why you shouldn't do these things isn't going to be enough. You have to think they are unsafe and the best way adults have of conveying that message is to actually make it unsafe for you to do them. At which point the difference between your mommy and the schoolyard bully can get a bit blurry.
There is a good reason why the theological virtues are faith, hope and love and not loyalty, trust and obedience. A good gang member can have all of the second set while being a drug dealer, pimp and murderer. And yet, mommy and all your elementary school teachers spent more time trying to teach you the latter three virtues.
Don't blame them for this. You can't really teach faith, hope and love. You can "model" them to a point but we only use ugly jargon like that when we're lying to ourselves.
Any time we answer a question, including questions about the past, our brain is scanning for signs that something is going wrong. This happens on two levels. The first level is to monitor responses from other people. We get tense during conversations that are going badly long before we are consciously aware that another person is challenging us. At the same time, our brains also monitor ourselves. But not by "looking inside". For our brain, our bodies are just another data source. Heart rate, sweating, hesitant voice patterns, these are just data that our brain monitors and then evaluates based on the context.
Once we start operating at a very sophisticated level—which is to say after years an years of social training—we get to the point where we start monitoring our answers not only to see if they are safe performances in this particular context but also to see what impact they might have on other predictable contexts. The girl in the schoolyard asks you a question and you consider not only what is safe to say right now but also whether that will continue to be safe if she goes straight to the teacher or her mother and repeats what she said. Included in that calculation will be an assessment of how likely she is to do that.
And part of that is considering what you've said in other contexts. When we learn the right answer we are also taught that the right answer will be consistent with other things we say. Again, bullies are some of our most important teachers in this regard.
It's often said that liars have to have good memories but that is nonsense. Everyone who answers questions has to have a good memory in order to figure out what performance to give in response. The only reason to develop a memory in the first place is to be able to perform successfully. When tiger kittens play with one another, they are developing memories of moves that will eventually help them pull down and kill prey.
Human beings accumulate and process memories on a very sophisticated level. It's odd that we attribute more sophistication in doing so to liars—for when we say "liars have to have good memories" we are really praising an odd figure we might call "a good liar". But stop a minute and consider when we use that expression. It's always when we've caught a liar. We're effectively telling them that they had better become better performers if they want to try pulling that off again.
What gets missed in all this is that truth-telling is actually a sophisticated performance of its own. It requires us to assess our answer-performance not just in terms of what will happen right now but also in terms of what might happen given a whole lot of of other possibilities.
This is why your girlfriend or wife will almost always lie to you about her some sexual issues. Stone-faced denials will almost always be the safest answer. She can easily imagine ways that telling you the truth will lead to disaster whereas the odds of your being able to determine what she really thinks or really has done are vanishingly small.
And that is important because she will, in other contexts, insist that it is important to tell the truth and perhaps even insist that being a truth teller is part of who she is. The second the man in her life asks certain questions, she is just like that scared little girl confronting the bully in grade school and the only answer that will ever come out of her mouth is what she judges to be the safest one.
This runs against what we tell ourselves about truth telling. We want to believe that it is a simple matter to tell the truth. You just say what you believe to be true.
It can't be to say what you know to be the truth. Think of our school kid on day one being asked who his teacher is. "I don't remember," is not a safe answer. You're supposed to know. The same is true during a math test. We're taught very early on that giving the right answer is not to say what you know and believe but to say what you are supposed to know and believe.
What kind of sadist looms over a small child and tells her that it's simple to tell the truth? It's far more effective to tell the child that its brave to tell the truth. That said, there is something manipulative about both these behaviours.
To lie is "to knowingly make a false statement". When is a child asked to make a statement? Statements are what you make to the police. No child is asked to make a statement to the teacher, principal or to mommy. She is asked to make a particular kind of performance in a particular context.
In order for a child to learn how to tell the truth, her parents need to know when it is acceptable to ask for the truth. You need a good reason to ask questions. Not just because it isn't fair to ask, although it sometimes isn't, but because the child needs to learn that there are good reasons to tell the truth in certain contexts. She needs to learn that telling the truth can be the loving thing to do. And she's not stupid, she's going to figure out early on that a lot of people will ask her for the truth because they want to hurt her and others.
Okay, but what about the title for this post. What does truth have to do with memory? Telling the truth reinforces memory. If we keep repeating the truth to others, we get better and better at remembering it. In some contexts that is a very good thing to do.
Showing posts with label lying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lying. Show all posts
Monday, June 5, 2017
Friday, May 19, 2017
To tell the truth
You know that game where a mommy smiles at her baby and the baby, after much struggle, smiles back? That sort of activity is the foundation of all human learning. Our brain's basic function is imitative/predictive. We learn to imitate patterns.
The same goes for what we call the "meanings" of the word. At the very beginning, the child needs to know to move her hands the same way mommy does when mommy sings the song. Eventually, she will learn to move her hands at the sound of the words. Mommy plays a new game where she says, "baby knees" and her daughter touches her knees, "baby eyes" and she points at her eyes and so on. Learning this is a long process with much correction. The child isn't learning concepts. What the child is doing is imitating patterns and then learning how to predict patterns so she can act as is expected of her.
When we think about lying, we tend to imagine someone saying something she knows isn't true. And that description matches some lies. But it rapidly gets more complicated than that. Suppose Theresa borrowed her sister's ring without asking and then loses it. Her sister later wants to wear the ring asks Theresa if she knows where it is. Theresa says she doesn't know and that is, in a certain sense, the truth, for Theresa has no clue where it is. And yet Theresa is lying. Why do we feel so confident saying this?
Consider another example. When Elizabeth Warren claimed to be descended from indigenous peoples it seems to me that she believed what she was saying. People inside her family had been telling her this since childhood. And yet, it is fair to call Warren a liar. Why do I say this? Because different standards of truth apply in different situations. You believe what your mother told you and you can repeat to others. Best, however, to hedge your bets; to not say, "I am part Cherokee "but rather say, "The family lore is that we're part Cherokee and it may be true, I hope it is, but I've never verified this."
What we call "truth telling" is a matter of the brains predictive function. My answer to your questions is based on my assurance that certain patterns will hold. If you ask me if I have an appendix, I will say I do have an appendix. I've never checked. If I had to justify my claim, I might say that I know of no operations, that there are no visible scars and that I've never heard of anyone being born without an appendix. It's not impossible, however, that I might not have one. There just isn't any reason to check.
I have, however, often heard of people who were told things about their ethnic heritage that turned out not to be true. There is every reason to check and not checking before filling out a form claiming minority status is lying.
Lying, and this is my main point, is very closely related to the notion of "what can you get away with". That makes us uncomfortable. We want lying to be more like following a rule. We want it to be something you can easily check.
When a man asks his wife if she loves him, she says, "yes," without even thinking about it. She may feel very much in love with him at the time but, more likely, she feels nothing at all. She's been married to the man for years now. She says, "yes," because that is the responsible answer. If she said "no" there would be serious and hurtful consequences. Assuming she's not an irresponsible jerk, saying "no" would be another way of saying, "I don't want to be married to you anymore." Either way, her answer is based on the predictive function of her brain. Her answer is based on what she senses the consequences of that answer will be.
When Elizabeth Warren grew up, she heard family lore about Cherokee and Delaware heritage. Repeating these stories inside the family had no negative consequences. No one called her a liar. So her brain got used to thinking this was safe pattern of behaviour. My guess is that Warren was probably surprised, even gobsmacked, when she was first accused of lying. She probably felt very strongly that she had not intended to deceive. But how would she know she wasn't lying to herself about this?
Bonaventure would say telling the truth requires us to meet two conditions:
We tend to find that sort of assessment harsh because it's easy to imagine cases where people honestly believe things that aren't true. I'll come back to that in a moment, but first consider the consequences of shifting all our focus to the first. Catherine honestly believes that she loves and wants to marry John. When she decides to marry him, that decision is based entirely upon her sense of her own feelings. She's certain she isn't lying when she says, "all the days of my life." Five years later, she leaves him.
How could she have avoided that lie? Looking "deeper into herself" wasn't going to help.
It is true that there are many cases where we honestly believe things that aren't true. It's also true that some lies are a simple matter of sincerity. Learning to be honest, it seems to me, is more a matter of focusing on the second condition—making sure what we say is actually true—rather than questioning our own sincerity. Which is not to say that we don't all tell bold-faced lies from time to time. Of course we do but our problem in those cases isn't figuring out whether we're telling the truth or not. The question then becomes whether the lie is justified and I think, controversially, that some lies are justified. Again, though, attempting to justify deliberately misleading someone by examining my own sense of sincerity is of no help at all.
The fact that we won't be able to prove absolutely that what we want to say is true is a feature not a bug. It reminds us that truth telling is a predictive activity. The question isn't, "Do I believe this to be true?" The question is, "How certain can I be that my claims will hold up?"
Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes.Mommy sings the words and makes the hand motions. Baby watches and, after an intensity of effort that would intimidate any adult, learns to make the right hand motions along with mommy. Later, the baby learns to sing the words along with mommy. The song includes patterns and variations. We might say, it includes patterns within a pattern. Eventually, the baby internalizes the patterns to the point that they get really good at being able to pick up new ones quickly. Every new song is sort of like the old ones only with variations. The song above, for example, uses the same tune as "London Bridge is Falling Down" (and many other children's songs) with different words.
Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes, knees and toes.
Eyes, ears, mouth and nose.
The same goes for what we call the "meanings" of the word. At the very beginning, the child needs to know to move her hands the same way mommy does when mommy sings the song. Eventually, she will learn to move her hands at the sound of the words. Mommy plays a new game where she says, "baby knees" and her daughter touches her knees, "baby eyes" and she points at her eyes and so on. Learning this is a long process with much correction. The child isn't learning concepts. What the child is doing is imitating patterns and then learning how to predict patterns so she can act as is expected of her.
When we think about lying, we tend to imagine someone saying something she knows isn't true. And that description matches some lies. But it rapidly gets more complicated than that. Suppose Theresa borrowed her sister's ring without asking and then loses it. Her sister later wants to wear the ring asks Theresa if she knows where it is. Theresa says she doesn't know and that is, in a certain sense, the truth, for Theresa has no clue where it is. And yet Theresa is lying. Why do we feel so confident saying this?
Consider another example. When Elizabeth Warren claimed to be descended from indigenous peoples it seems to me that she believed what she was saying. People inside her family had been telling her this since childhood. And yet, it is fair to call Warren a liar. Why do I say this? Because different standards of truth apply in different situations. You believe what your mother told you and you can repeat to others. Best, however, to hedge your bets; to not say, "I am part Cherokee "but rather say, "The family lore is that we're part Cherokee and it may be true, I hope it is, but I've never verified this."
What we call "truth telling" is a matter of the brains predictive function. My answer to your questions is based on my assurance that certain patterns will hold. If you ask me if I have an appendix, I will say I do have an appendix. I've never checked. If I had to justify my claim, I might say that I know of no operations, that there are no visible scars and that I've never heard of anyone being born without an appendix. It's not impossible, however, that I might not have one. There just isn't any reason to check.
I have, however, often heard of people who were told things about their ethnic heritage that turned out not to be true. There is every reason to check and not checking before filling out a form claiming minority status is lying.
Lying, and this is my main point, is very closely related to the notion of "what can you get away with". That makes us uncomfortable. We want lying to be more like following a rule. We want it to be something you can easily check.
When a man asks his wife if she loves him, she says, "yes," without even thinking about it. She may feel very much in love with him at the time but, more likely, she feels nothing at all. She's been married to the man for years now. She says, "yes," because that is the responsible answer. If she said "no" there would be serious and hurtful consequences. Assuming she's not an irresponsible jerk, saying "no" would be another way of saying, "I don't want to be married to you anymore." Either way, her answer is based on the predictive function of her brain. Her answer is based on what she senses the consequences of that answer will be.
When Elizabeth Warren grew up, she heard family lore about Cherokee and Delaware heritage. Repeating these stories inside the family had no negative consequences. No one called her a liar. So her brain got used to thinking this was safe pattern of behaviour. My guess is that Warren was probably surprised, even gobsmacked, when she was first accused of lying. She probably felt very strongly that she had not intended to deceive. But how would she know she wasn't lying to herself about this?
Bonaventure would say telling the truth requires us to meet two conditions:
- You have to believe what you are saying is true.
- What you are saying actually has to be true.
We tend to find that sort of assessment harsh because it's easy to imagine cases where people honestly believe things that aren't true. I'll come back to that in a moment, but first consider the consequences of shifting all our focus to the first. Catherine honestly believes that she loves and wants to marry John. When she decides to marry him, that decision is based entirely upon her sense of her own feelings. She's certain she isn't lying when she says, "all the days of my life." Five years later, she leaves him.
How could she have avoided that lie? Looking "deeper into herself" wasn't going to help.
It is true that there are many cases where we honestly believe things that aren't true. It's also true that some lies are a simple matter of sincerity. Learning to be honest, it seems to me, is more a matter of focusing on the second condition—making sure what we say is actually true—rather than questioning our own sincerity. Which is not to say that we don't all tell bold-faced lies from time to time. Of course we do but our problem in those cases isn't figuring out whether we're telling the truth or not. The question then becomes whether the lie is justified and I think, controversially, that some lies are justified. Again, though, attempting to justify deliberately misleading someone by examining my own sense of sincerity is of no help at all.
The fact that we won't be able to prove absolutely that what we want to say is true is a feature not a bug. It reminds us that truth telling is a predictive activity. The question isn't, "Do I believe this to be true?" The question is, "How certain can I be that my claims will hold up?"
Friday, April 25, 2014
Friday round up
1. The lonely lives of scientists*
There is a study that says FaceBook may (weaselly language alert) make women feel bad about their bodies.Most spent about 80 minutes on Facebook every day. The most popular activities were reading the news feed and looking at photos, according to the study.
Spending more time on Facebook was linked to a significantly greater likelihood that a woman would feel bad about her own body, the study revealed. It also was tied to greater odds that she would compare herself to others.
That was especially true if she felt like she needed to lose weight, the researchers noted.
Unless, of course, the causality runs the other way.
This should be obvious enough even for a scientist to figure out. FaceBook is the sort of thing that would appeal to women who already feel bad about their bodies; they can interact without actually being physically present to others.
* I stole that headline from James Taranto
2. The advice they give
Slate's Dear Prudie column handles the case of a man who is asking his wife for a paternity test for an as-yet-unborn child. The advice Emily Yoffe, who writes the column, gives would certainly be good advice if the facts as are as reported. The problem is that we can't know that; we only have one side of the story.
Yoffe has a disturbing tendency to almost always take a woman's account of her relationship as true. It could be, as this woman claims, that there is no good reason to ask for a paternity test. Then again, who knows.
I'll tell you what would worry me in this case: this woman seems to really, really want a child. The man may be thinking that she really wants this child more than she really wants him. He may, as she claims, have no reason to suspect infidelity but he may also have noticed a significant change in her attitude towards him since the positive pregnancy test. It may be that the child is his but he suddenly feels pushed away. The woman asking the question tells us that this is the first serious relationship for her husband and it has led to marriage and children. If you were this guy, you might just be asking yourself how you got so far so fast given a previous track record like that. He probably hasn't thought things through but he has a sense that something isn't right and he started to fear this one thing because it's better to have a name to put to your problem than to be feeling scared of something vague and indefinable.
3. Identity theft?
The most fantastic element of the saga — the fact that Don stole the identity of a wealthier, more accomplished dead man during the Korean War and has lived it ever since — is there because it’s central to the series’ theme: that the American advertising industry is dynamic, but fake and inauthentic,because much of American society is just the same.
That is one of the 956,000 results that Google gives for the search string, "Don Draper stolen identity". The assumption that Draper stole his identity is widespread. It's not a claim that he stole his identity for it is made with far too much certainty to be anything but an assumption; the people who say this don't think they need to argue the point; it is as obvious to them as the fact that Don Draper has black hair.
I don't think it's true. At the very least, true identity theft means taking something that is someone else's and Dick takes almost nothing more than a name from Donald Draper and, except in cases of copyright, to take the same name as someone else in no way robs them of the full use of it.
The real Donald Draper was an engineer. Dick Whitman didn't set out to become him. He didn't set out to pass himself off as the other Don Draper. He didn't write cheques against the other guy's account, didn't apply for jobs on the basis of the other guy's record. Dick Whitman used Don Draper's name along with his serial number to apply for a driver's license and then went to work as a used car salesman.
I think Esther Perel, whom I wrote a post about a few weeks ago, describes perfectly what happened in the transition from Dick to Don when she described why people have affairs:
Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.
When Don tells Anna Draper that he wants to get married, he suggests that she should meet Betty. She brushes the idea off. He wants to take care of her, says he owes her "this whole life". She tells him he'll have a family and that it will be good for him, "this is a chance at a whole new life".
Toxic shame, according to the theory, derives from childhood fear of abandonment. Your parents didn't meet your needs and you blamed yourself. You convinced yourself that the way to please them was to appear to not have needs. This habit carries on into adulthood. These bad habits cause us to interact with others in ways that are ineffective.
I can't make up my mind about it. Part of it seems absolutely correct. I see my own bad habits match the theory. On the other hand, there have been long periods of my life when I have avoided these bad habits. I wonder if the problem is not that we have these childhood behaviour patterns but that a serious crisis of confidence can cause us to revert to them.
The author of the above piece makes the very good point that one of the bad story-telling habits of our time is to make everything hinge on the big revelation. This reflects a popular psychology that says that getting the truth out will make it possible to progress. Having everything build up to this moment only to have nothing change is more like what actually happens in life.
4. Toxic Shame
One of the most popular explanations of why people behave like Don Draper behave the way they do is "toxic shame".Toxic shame, according to the theory, derives from childhood fear of abandonment. Your parents didn't meet your needs and you blamed yourself. You convinced yourself that the way to please them was to appear to not have needs. This habit carries on into adulthood. These bad habits cause us to interact with others in ways that are ineffective.
I can't make up my mind about it. Part of it seems absolutely correct. I see my own bad habits match the theory. On the other hand, there have been long periods of my life when I have avoided these bad habits. I wonder if the problem is not that we have these childhood behaviour patterns but that a serious crisis of confidence can cause us to revert to them.
5. Me too!
Wish I'd written this:“Mr. Campbell, who cares?” is one of my favorite moments of the show and maybe even of TV history. There’s so much about it that’s brilliant, from the way that it instantly subverts a seemingly very important plot point to the way it cuts to the quick of every thematic point the first season has been building. We’ve been trained for so long by television to look at these sorts of big, character-defining mysteries as the only things that matter, and on most shows, the revelation of Don’s true identity would have had serious, world-shattering consequences. Here, it’s just a thing that Bert ultimately doesn’t give a shit about. For the most part, nobody is ever as interested in us as we are in ourselves, and that’s a hard lesson to learn. Pete expects Bert Cooper to behave like a character in a story who really cares about the protagonist’s big secret; Bert Cooper is just a man who’s old enough to know everybody has secrets.Read the whole thing.
The author of the above piece makes the very good point that one of the bad story-telling habits of our time is to make everything hinge on the big revelation. This reflects a popular psychology that says that getting the truth out will make it possible to progress. Having everything build up to this moment only to have nothing change is more like what actually happens in life.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Maximalizing the defintion
One thing I think is worth noting here is that some Catholic thinkers' prohibitions of lying involve what I call maximalizing the definition. That is to say we are told that an activity is wrong and context and purpose are irrelevant.
The article on Catholic Culture about the history of the most recent Catechism tells us about an interesting alternative definition of lying that was apparently considered and then abandoned. The first definition below is the one that actually appears in 2483 in the Catechism and it maximalizes the definition. The second is the one that briefly appeared in a first edition and then was dropped.
Mirus does not speculate about why the drafters of the Catechism held back from this and neither will I but I think there is something worth noting.
If we look at the commandment against killing the word used in the original Hebrew means something stronger than murder but less than our English verb "to kill". The specifications the catechism makes about what counts as killing are actually a matter of bringing the church's definition closer into line with what the Decalogue says. For example, capital punishment is lawful in many jurisdictions and is not a matter of taking innocent life. That doesn't mean it's a slam dunk to say capital punishment is okay, and there are all sorts of other Catholic arguments that speak against it but it is not in violation of the decalogue. Abortion, on the other hand, is also lawful in many jurisdictions but it is the taking of innocent life so it is in violation of the decalogue.
Something very different is happening with lying. There is quite simply no commandment forbidding lying. The Decalogue forbids bearing false witness, which has a legal connotation. Our Catechism definition of lying considerably expands on that and expands it to the maximum possible connotation. Read literally, it says all untruths spoken to deceive are sins. It, as I say, maximalizes the definition.
Imagine you have a friend over and she drops one of your favourite figurines that you inherited from a much-loved relative. She feels really bad about it but you think, "Nothing is going to bring the thing back, even if she finds the very same figurine on E-Bay it won't be the one Aunt Anne left me so I will tell her a fib so that she won't feel bad". On the catechism definition that puts you in league with Satan the father of lies. (And note, this is not some extreme case that never arises in real life.)
It is worth noting that the Catholic church does the same with adultery. The definition of adultery as used in the Bible is to have sex with one person while married to another or to have sex with someone you know to be married to someone else. According to the Catholic church it is adultery to have sex with someone when you are not married because that will be adultery against the person you might eventually marry (even if you never actually marry at all).
It's easy to understand how the church gets into this position. It's a legalistic attitude that attempts to define morality entirely in terms of rules. This, combined with a bureaucratic command and control mentality, leads to the creation of rules meant to leave as little decision making as possibly up to individual Catholics. It is that maximalizing instinct that, in my opinion, causes the catechetical failure that Pope John Paul II noted had happened with Humanae Vitae and with many other aspects of Catholic moral teaching.
A final thought, there is a tradition of moral thought in the Catholic church that would help overcome these problems and it is called casuistry. Casuistry is a dirty word these days thanks to unfair attacks by critics such as Pascal but it's actually a quite sensible approach to moral catechism. It is the only approach that will work in my opinion.
The article on Catholic Culture about the history of the most recent Catechism tells us about an interesting alternative definition of lying that was apparently considered and then abandoned. The first definition below is the one that actually appears in 2483 in the Catechism and it maximalizes the definition. The second is the one that briefly appeared in a first edition and then was dropped.
- To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error.
- To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead into error someone who has the right to know the truth.
Mirus does not speculate about why the drafters of the Catechism held back from this and neither will I but I think there is something worth noting.
If we look at the commandment against killing the word used in the original Hebrew means something stronger than murder but less than our English verb "to kill". The specifications the catechism makes about what counts as killing are actually a matter of bringing the church's definition closer into line with what the Decalogue says. For example, capital punishment is lawful in many jurisdictions and is not a matter of taking innocent life. That doesn't mean it's a slam dunk to say capital punishment is okay, and there are all sorts of other Catholic arguments that speak against it but it is not in violation of the decalogue. Abortion, on the other hand, is also lawful in many jurisdictions but it is the taking of innocent life so it is in violation of the decalogue.
Something very different is happening with lying. There is quite simply no commandment forbidding lying. The Decalogue forbids bearing false witness, which has a legal connotation. Our Catechism definition of lying considerably expands on that and expands it to the maximum possible connotation. Read literally, it says all untruths spoken to deceive are sins. It, as I say, maximalizes the definition.
Imagine you have a friend over and she drops one of your favourite figurines that you inherited from a much-loved relative. She feels really bad about it but you think, "Nothing is going to bring the thing back, even if she finds the very same figurine on E-Bay it won't be the one Aunt Anne left me so I will tell her a fib so that she won't feel bad". On the catechism definition that puts you in league with Satan the father of lies. (And note, this is not some extreme case that never arises in real life.)
It is worth noting that the Catholic church does the same with adultery. The definition of adultery as used in the Bible is to have sex with one person while married to another or to have sex with someone you know to be married to someone else. According to the Catholic church it is adultery to have sex with someone when you are not married because that will be adultery against the person you might eventually marry (even if you never actually marry at all).
It's easy to understand how the church gets into this position. It's a legalistic attitude that attempts to define morality entirely in terms of rules. This, combined with a bureaucratic command and control mentality, leads to the creation of rules meant to leave as little decision making as possibly up to individual Catholics. It is that maximalizing instinct that, in my opinion, causes the catechetical failure that Pope John Paul II noted had happened with Humanae Vitae and with many other aspects of Catholic moral teaching.
A final thought, there is a tradition of moral thought in the Catholic church that would help overcome these problems and it is called casuistry. Casuistry is a dirty word these days thanks to unfair attacks by critics such as Pascal but it's actually a quite sensible approach to moral catechism. It is the only approach that will work in my opinion.
Metaphysical definitions of lying
Before moving on, there is a metaphysical understanding of lying that can be drawn from the Catechism (and elsewhere) and some commenters on the Elizabeth Scalia thread did indeed draw it. Let's have a look at this remark from someone who signed themselves "Bender":
On the basis of this argument, you might lie to save someone's life but you should still go to confession the next day to get absolution for telling the lie.
Suppose an armed gunman came in and said he was looking for Cecilia and you knew the woman sitting on the park bench was in fact Cecilia but told the gunman, "I don't know Cecilia but that is my friend Nancy." On the metaphysical definition you might be able to justify the lie but it would still be an evil. So you would go to the confessional, get down on your knees and say, yesterday I told a lie.
What should we do about such an argument?
That's easy. Ignore it. You couldn't possibly reason with a person who believes such a thing.
It's not that they are irrational. Go read the rest of Bender's argument and you will see that it is quite rational and there are even some good lessons to draw from it. But the notion that something might be an objective evil is not one of them. This isn't an argument but a move to shut down argument and it deserves to be ignored.
In what other circumstances is it, not merely OK, but obligatory, to do what we think is a little evil (or not wrong at all, even though centuries of moral theology says it is an objective evil) to advance what we believe to be the greater good?If you look at the bit I have emphasized you'll see the issue. If something is an objective evil it raises the bar quite a bit about what circumstances it is acceptable to lie. For no matter how good your reasons for not telling the truth, you will be doing some evil.
On the basis of this argument, you might lie to save someone's life but you should still go to confession the next day to get absolution for telling the lie.
Suppose an armed gunman came in and said he was looking for Cecilia and you knew the woman sitting on the park bench was in fact Cecilia but told the gunman, "I don't know Cecilia but that is my friend Nancy." On the metaphysical definition you might be able to justify the lie but it would still be an evil. So you would go to the confessional, get down on your knees and say, yesterday I told a lie.
What should we do about such an argument?
That's easy. Ignore it. You couldn't possibly reason with a person who believes such a thing.
It's not that they are irrational. Go read the rest of Bender's argument and you will see that it is quite rational and there are even some good lessons to draw from it. But the notion that something might be an objective evil is not one of them. This isn't an argument but a move to shut down argument and it deserves to be ignored.
Hypocrisy
I was exposed to two flagrant cases of it yesterday. The real thing tends to drain your energy rather than anger you. The most common use of the word, failing to live up to the standards you profess, is not hypocrisy. More on that later.
The first example was a man who led a meeting I attended yesterday. He was speaking about being a lay volunteer in the Catholic church. He began by stressing the importance of humility, of emptying yourself to let the Holy Spirit take over, and then he spoke about himself and his achievements for one and half hours.
The second case was a man I have known for decades and has, for his entire life up until now, proclaimed a certain set of values. And then abandoned them all in less than a year and a half.
Both cases were depressing and i came home unable to work up any enthusiasm for anything for a long time afterward.
But it got me thinking (again) about hypocrisy. Because Jesus told us that the Pharisees were hypocrites and that they said one thing and did another, we have tended to think of a hypocrite as someone whose actions are at odds with their professed beliefs. But that is only s symptom. The real source of hypocrisy is not believing in anything at all.
That was what was is so depressing about the two cases I mention above. Neither man is aware of himself as a hypocrite because neither is acting against beliefs that actually mean anything to them. Our classic notion of a hypocrite—Mr. Burns running for office on The Simpsons—knows he is lying and consequently makes some effort to hide it. Real hypocrites have no notion. There is no point in even trying to explain it to them.
The word hypocrite derives from the Greek word for actor. We recognize the hypocrite because he says one thing but behaves differently but there is a difference between a hypocrite and an impostor. An impostor is merely something other than what he says he is but strip away the fake role and there is a real role the person genuinely believes in. A real hypocrite is just an actor; there is nothing but the fake role.
(And yes, I do think that is what the Gospel of Matthew is accusing certain Jewish authorities of his time of doing. Matthew, whoever he was, looked at the Pharisees after the destruction of the temple and concluded that these people were just trying to keep a system of religious practice alive even though its very core, the temple, had been destroyed. What Matthew wants us to conclude is that the practices were no longer tied to any real beliefs but are just people acting as if they still had beliefs. No one has to agree with him, although I do, but that is his point.)
The first example was a man who led a meeting I attended yesterday. He was speaking about being a lay volunteer in the Catholic church. He began by stressing the importance of humility, of emptying yourself to let the Holy Spirit take over, and then he spoke about himself and his achievements for one and half hours.
The second case was a man I have known for decades and has, for his entire life up until now, proclaimed a certain set of values. And then abandoned them all in less than a year and a half.
Both cases were depressing and i came home unable to work up any enthusiasm for anything for a long time afterward.
But it got me thinking (again) about hypocrisy. Because Jesus told us that the Pharisees were hypocrites and that they said one thing and did another, we have tended to think of a hypocrite as someone whose actions are at odds with their professed beliefs. But that is only s symptom. The real source of hypocrisy is not believing in anything at all.
That was what was is so depressing about the two cases I mention above. Neither man is aware of himself as a hypocrite because neither is acting against beliefs that actually mean anything to them. Our classic notion of a hypocrite—Mr. Burns running for office on The Simpsons—knows he is lying and consequently makes some effort to hide it. Real hypocrites have no notion. There is no point in even trying to explain it to them.
The word hypocrite derives from the Greek word for actor. We recognize the hypocrite because he says one thing but behaves differently but there is a difference between a hypocrite and an impostor. An impostor is merely something other than what he says he is but strip away the fake role and there is a real role the person genuinely believes in. A real hypocrite is just an actor; there is nothing but the fake role.
(And yes, I do think that is what the Gospel of Matthew is accusing certain Jewish authorities of his time of doing. Matthew, whoever he was, looked at the Pharisees after the destruction of the temple and concluded that these people were just trying to keep a system of religious practice alive even though its very core, the temple, had been destroyed. What Matthew wants us to conclude is that the practices were no longer tied to any real beliefs but are just people acting as if they still had beliefs. No one has to agree with him, although I do, but that is his point.)
A Catholic defintion of lying
There are two statements in the Catechism defining what it is to lie.
There is a surface contradiction worth noting here. 2482 ties lying to what logicians call statements. Presumably it includes written as well as spoken statements although only speaking is mentioned here. This ties lying to strict issues of truth in a logical sense.
Somewhere along the line it must have occurred to the moral theologians behind the catechism that that would not do. So 2483 tells us that lying can mean either speaking or acting against the truth.
My first thought is that this outlaws a while lot of games. Bluffing at poker, for example, would be right out as it is very much a case of speaking and acting to deceive others. So would halfbacks faking left when they mean to go right as that is clearly a case of acting so as to lead someone into error. Gambling is okay according to 2413 so long as we don't cheat or deprive others of what they really need by doing so. But you can't play these games at all according to 2482 and 2483.
Now I know some people will say, your just playing games yourself here but I'm not. There are a lot of human activities where deceiving someone is quite acceptable (defense attorneys in a court of law are not obliged to call attention to possible errors in the testimony of their witnesses) and this definition is far too broad.
2482 A lie consists in speaking a falsehood with the the intention of deceiving. The Lord denounces lying as the work of the devil: 'You are of your father the devil ... there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies." [Ellipsis is in the original.]
2483 Lying is the most direct offence against the truth. To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error. By injuring man's relation to truth and to his neighbour, a lie offends against the fundamental relation of man and of his word to the Lord.
There is a surface contradiction worth noting here. 2482 ties lying to what logicians call statements. Presumably it includes written as well as spoken statements although only speaking is mentioned here. This ties lying to strict issues of truth in a logical sense.
Somewhere along the line it must have occurred to the moral theologians behind the catechism that that would not do. So 2483 tells us that lying can mean either speaking or acting against the truth.
My first thought is that this outlaws a while lot of games. Bluffing at poker, for example, would be right out as it is very much a case of speaking and acting to deceive others. So would halfbacks faking left when they mean to go right as that is clearly a case of acting so as to lead someone into error. Gambling is okay according to 2413 so long as we don't cheat or deprive others of what they really need by doing so. But you can't play these games at all according to 2482 and 2483.
Now I know some people will say, your just playing games yourself here but I'm not. There are a lot of human activities where deceiving someone is quite acceptable (defense attorneys in a court of law are not obliged to call attention to possible errors in the testimony of their witnesses) and this definition is far too broad.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Truth and lying, again
I had some time to explore the Sissela Bok arguments about lying. Hers is a neat argument but I didn't find it convincing. [Update: There is a nice, concise presentation of Bok's views here that I wish I had read instead of going to the source.]
Here's a really short (and necessarily over-simplified) version of her argument:
We then get the harm principle (#2). This narrows down our options because the only moral reason available to us is real or potential harm to others. All other options such as that it might be better to tell the truth because it builds character are closed from the beginning.
What if everyone did it (#3) is John Stuart Mill's argument. It takes moral concern away from the individual and makes it a societal question. This further shuts the door on the notion that there might be any reasons of personal moral growth involved.
Worse though is that Bok's answer (#4) is just wrong. Everyone does lie and yet language and meaning is no problem at all. Carpentry is only possible because wood is relatively stable and language is only possible because most people tell the truth most of the time but lying is built right into the foundation of our language. There would be no use for the word "lie" if we always told the truth nor would there be any use for related expressions such as "I swear to tell the truth." The very existence of this sort of option in our language tells us that lying is always an option.
It does take the existence of large numbers of people (#5) who tell the truth in order for the system to work but this is too simple. Truth telling and lying are learned skills and they have to be learned in different contexts.
Let me give you an example of this. Imagine you have never been in business and now you are going into business. You've never signed a contract or made a verbal agreement. All you are bringing to this new activity is the distinction between lying and telling the truth you learned in grade school. Could you do it? Not without learning a whole lot more. There are standards for what counts as truth telling and lying in business.
There are different standards again for what counts as truth telling in court of law.
Bok's argument is not so much wrong as entirely inadequate.
Here's a really short (and necessarily over-simplified) version of her argument:
- Why is it wrong to lie? It seems obvious that it must be but why?
- Many lies cause little or no harm and some lies can even do good.
- But what if everyone did it?
- Well, if everyone did it then trust would break down and nothing would work.
- Therefore it requires that large numbers of people tell the truth in order for human interaction to work.
- The minority who insist on lying are, therefore, free riders.
- Free riders here being an economic concept to designate those who rely on everybody else to be honest while they cheat. (Think of the person who never refills the ice tray confident that since the rest of the family all do their share it won't matter.)
- To be a free rider is to exploit the rest of society and therefore wrong.
We then get the harm principle (#2). This narrows down our options because the only moral reason available to us is real or potential harm to others. All other options such as that it might be better to tell the truth because it builds character are closed from the beginning.
What if everyone did it (#3) is John Stuart Mill's argument. It takes moral concern away from the individual and makes it a societal question. This further shuts the door on the notion that there might be any reasons of personal moral growth involved.
Worse though is that Bok's answer (#4) is just wrong. Everyone does lie and yet language and meaning is no problem at all. Carpentry is only possible because wood is relatively stable and language is only possible because most people tell the truth most of the time but lying is built right into the foundation of our language. There would be no use for the word "lie" if we always told the truth nor would there be any use for related expressions such as "I swear to tell the truth." The very existence of this sort of option in our language tells us that lying is always an option.
It does take the existence of large numbers of people (#5) who tell the truth in order for the system to work but this is too simple. Truth telling and lying are learned skills and they have to be learned in different contexts.
Let me give you an example of this. Imagine you have never been in business and now you are going into business. You've never signed a contract or made a verbal agreement. All you are bringing to this new activity is the distinction between lying and telling the truth you learned in grade school. Could you do it? Not without learning a whole lot more. There are standards for what counts as truth telling and lying in business.
There are different standards again for what counts as truth telling in court of law.
Bok's argument is not so much wrong as entirely inadequate.
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
"Simple" truth telling not so simple [updated]
There is a retort attributed to various people that goes like this, "Only a very intelligent person could convince themselves of something that stupid." It makes a good point. There are some beliefs that really ought to collapse under the weight of their stupidity that very smart people will sometimes work very hard to prop up.
I should say, before I begin, that I have paid some price for defending Elizabeth Scalia (AKA "The Anchoress") in the past. One of my siblings refused to speak to me for several weeks after I defended one of Scalia's positions. But this time I think she has engaged in a lot of intellectual effort to prop up something that should not be propped up. And that something is the notion that it is a sin to tell a lie. That bearing false witness and lying are the same thing.
Worse than the defence, however, are the reasons she gives for the position. You can read the whole thing here but the issue that concerns me is Scalia's praise of a young woman who said she would not lie if Nazis asked her if she were hiding a Jew in the attic. And Scalia cites approvingly the example of a child [corrected from an earlier version] who did tell "the truth" in such a situation.
That is our first clue that Scalia has gone deeply wrong here. Her answer is clever and fatuous. It is casuistry in the bad sense of the word.
But there is an even deeper problem and that is that Scalia has got herself on exactly the wrong side of the issue. She is not on the Catholic side of the question but the Enlightenment side. Here is how she defends simple truth telling.
Kant, I hope you grasp, did not make a simple mistake. Kant was defending an idea with incredible tenacity when he arrived at his stupid position. That idea was deontolgy, which means the belief that morality consists in identifying and following rules. Kant took rules and tried to make them do everything. He believed that there was a set of straightforward rules that could be applied to every situation.
As a consequence, he was like the mad scientist who pushes a rational idea to the point that it becomes a nightmare. He concluded that if lying was wrong and therefore if a maniac with a knife shows up at your door asking to know if Bill is there and Bill is there because he asked you if he could hide in your attic, you should say, "yes, he is hiding in my attic."
Bearing false witness means you should tell legitimate authorities the truth in a court of law. The idea was obviously meant for broader application. I should, for example, tell the truth if Trudy's mother asks me if I saw Trudy, who is under age, drinking at the bar last Saturday. There is no reason in the world, however, why I should tell Lisa who hates Trudy and would love to use this information to hurt her this.
The Nazis were not legitimate authourities.
Jesus does indeed tells us to be like children in our faith just as he tells us to be innocent like doves. He also tells us to be wise like snakes.
Consider the answer Jesus gives to the chief priests and the scribes in chapter 20 of Luke who wanted him to know "by what authority are you doing these things?" Jesus does not answer their question but tricks them.
I should say, before I begin, that I have paid some price for defending Elizabeth Scalia (AKA "The Anchoress") in the past. One of my siblings refused to speak to me for several weeks after I defended one of Scalia's positions. But this time I think she has engaged in a lot of intellectual effort to prop up something that should not be propped up. And that something is the notion that it is a sin to tell a lie. That bearing false witness and lying are the same thing.
Worse than the defence, however, are the reasons she gives for the position. You can read the whole thing here but the issue that concerns me is Scalia's praise of a young woman who said she would not lie if Nazis asked her if she were hiding a Jew in the attic. And Scalia cites approvingly the example of a child [corrected from an earlier version] who did tell "the truth" in such a situation.
No less then the Jew-hiding heroine Corrie ten Boom might disagree. In her book The Hiding Place, ten Boom recounts an episode where Nazis sought her nephew, Peter, who had been hidden in a root cellar, a rug and table hastily placed over the trapdoor. When soldiers demanded to know Peter’s whereabouts, his young cousin Cocky replied, “Why, he is under the table.”There are so many problems here that it's hard to know where to begin. We might start by imagining if the Nazis had asked what was in the pitcher on the table and young Cocky had replied, "Wine" leaving out that the wine in question was also laced with arsenic? If you believe that all lies are the equivalent of bearing false witness then young Cocky lied because she didn't tell the whole truth.
The soldiers peered under the table while the family suppressed nervous chuckles. Humiliated, the Nazis threatened the family, then left. As others chastised Cocky for putting Peter—and the whole family—at such risk, her mother defended her, saying, “God honors truth-telling with perfect protection!”
That is our first clue that Scalia has gone deeply wrong here. Her answer is clever and fatuous. It is casuistry in the bad sense of the word.
But there is an even deeper problem and that is that Scalia has got herself on exactly the wrong side of the issue. She is not on the Catholic side of the question but the Enlightenment side. Here is how she defends simple truth telling.
Simplistic, right? Some might say “fundamentalist” and “anti-intellectual” to boot. But the story bolsters O’Donnell’s position; it suggests that power resides in a complete abandonment and surrender to the will of God and his laws, a faithful reliance that says, “If God is truth, he will be found only within truth, and not in a lie.”Here is the problem. The kind of truth telling she advocates is not the product of childlike simplicity. No class of grade 2s would make the mistake she advocates as childlike. The person who did make this mistake was Immanuel Kant. Kant wasn't just clever, he was one of the smartest people to ever live. Let em assure you, no matter how smart we might think we are being, we are not as smart as Kant was.
Kant, I hope you grasp, did not make a simple mistake. Kant was defending an idea with incredible tenacity when he arrived at his stupid position. That idea was deontolgy, which means the belief that morality consists in identifying and following rules. Kant took rules and tried to make them do everything. He believed that there was a set of straightforward rules that could be applied to every situation.
As a consequence, he was like the mad scientist who pushes a rational idea to the point that it becomes a nightmare. He concluded that if lying was wrong and therefore if a maniac with a knife shows up at your door asking to know if Bill is there and Bill is there because he asked you if he could hide in your attic, you should say, "yes, he is hiding in my attic."
Bearing false witness means you should tell legitimate authorities the truth in a court of law. The idea was obviously meant for broader application. I should, for example, tell the truth if Trudy's mother asks me if I saw Trudy, who is under age, drinking at the bar last Saturday. There is no reason in the world, however, why I should tell Lisa who hates Trudy and would love to use this information to hurt her this.
The Nazis were not legitimate authourities.
Jesus does indeed tells us to be like children in our faith just as he tells us to be innocent like doves. He also tells us to be wise like snakes.
Consider the answer Jesus gives to the chief priests and the scribes in chapter 20 of Luke who wanted him to know "by what authority are you doing these things?" Jesus does not answer their question but tricks them.
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