Born Liars (22 page)

Well, I tell you what I think was pain – and to me I think it's a lot of pain. Do you know what a gall bladder attack is? Well, for eight months I took it. I rolled on the floor from this wall to that wall, chewing the carpet. For eight months! Now do you think that's pain?

Although this patient refers to ‘taking' pain, he means something very different from the Irish patients quoted above. Here, the pain is more like a demon or a ferocious animal at the throat of the patient. He doesn't ignore his pain, or manfully soak it up; he wrestles with it, trying to throw it off. There is no morally ennobling contest of wills, just a desperate struggle to escape. In a commentary on Zborowski's study, the writer David Morris points out that a prominent tradition within Judaism regards pain as evil, without any of the redemptive powers assigned to it in Christianity.

Zborowski's study is rarely cited by scholars these days, in part because any assignation of characteristics to ethnic groups can be seen as racist. There is justification for such wariness, but it needn't obscure the truth that our bodies are not just biological machines; they are embedded in social and cultural worlds. The physiology of pain, wrote Zborowski, must be looked at ‘not only in laboratories and clinics but also in the complex maze of society'.

* * *

Days after the Royal Commission's report on Mesmerism was published, Benjamin Franklin (a pronounced sceptic about religion) wrote a letter to his twenty-four-year-old grandson, Temple:

[The report] makes a great deal of talk. Everybody agrees that it is well-written; but many wonder at the force of imagination describ'd in it, as occasioning convulsions, etc, and some fear that consequences may be drawn from it by infidels to weaken our faith in some of the miracles of the New Testament. Some think it will put an end to mesmerism. But there is a wonderful deal of credulity in the world, and deceptions as absurd have supported themselves for ages.

Franklin might have been intrigued by a 1993 study that collected information on the deaths of twenty-eight thousand Chinese-Americans, together with a control group of nearly half a million white Americans.

In Chinese tradition, the five elements of wood, metal, fire, water and earth are thought to shape the relationship between the body and the natural environment, and each year is assigned to one of them. The researchers found that Chinese-Americans were significantly more likely to die earlier than normal if they had a combination of disease with a birth-year which Chinese astrology and medicine consider ill-fated. For example, those born in earth years are deemed more susceptible to diseases involving lumps or tumours, and Chinese-Americans born in those years who died from cancer did so, on average, nearly four years earlier than those who were born in other years and who suffered from the same condition. Chinese medicine considers the lung to be an organ of metal, and Chinese-Americans who were born in metal years and who suffered from lung disease died, on average, five years earlier than lung cancer patients born in other years. The same was true of a range of other conditions. In all cases, the same did not apply to the control group. What's more, within the Chinese-American group, the intensity of the effect was correlated with ‘strength and commitment to traditional Chinese culture'. The more people believed in the story, the more likely they were to succumb to the death foretold by it.

People literally live and die by stories. Numerous other studies have found that religious belief is strongly associated with living longer. Even when you grasp the power of the belief effect, it's still hard to comprehend that metaphors and symbols permeate the flesh as well as the spirit: that they can multiply blood cells, generate protein and disable nerve receptors. But an ability to create and respond to the lies we tell each other seems to be part and parcel of being a creature endowed with imagination, language and culture. Deception is essential to our well-being and, in some form or other, to all of our endeavours. Perhaps there is such a thing as Mesmer's invisible fluid, surrounding and sustaining all of us.

* * *

As the medical anthropologist Daniel Moerman has documented, one of the important determinants of a drug's efficacy is the colour of the pill it comes in. When people suffering the symptoms of depression are given the same drug in different colours, they are most likely to get better when the pill is yellow. Sleeping pills, by contrast, tend to be more effective when they're blue. This last is true of every country it's been tested in, except Italy, where there is a puzzling difference between the genders. For women, blue sleeping pills are highly effective. For men, they're much
less
likely to work than pills of other colours. Although it hasn't been proven, Moerman's explanation is that blue has a particular meaning for Italian men: it's the colour of all Italian sports teams, including the national football team; instead of making them feel sleepy, blue makes Italian men think
Forza Azzuri
!

Other studies have shown that green pills are better at reducing anxiety, and white pills are best for soothing ulcers. Patients who take four sugar pills a day clear their gastric ulcers faster than those who take two sugar pills a day. Large pills work better than medium-sized pills, and very small pills work best of all. Placebos that patients believe to be expensive work better than those they think cost less. Fake surgery involving impressive-looking, excitingly-named machines works extremely well indeed.

Understanding that pills are not just pharmaceutical capsules, but symbols embedded in a shifting universe of stories helps to explain the mystery of the strengthening placebo effect. During the 1980s and 1990s the global pharmaceutical companies did very well out of the massive popularity of new mood-enhancing drugs. Taking a pill to make you feel happier went from being a science fiction fantasy to an unremarkable fact of life. At the same time, and aided by the loosening of advertising restrictions, the drug companies got much better at marketing their pills. The most powerful brands became instantly recognisable symbols of psychological uplift. As a result of the industry's success at marketing itself, volunteers taking part in twenty-first century trials are more willing to believe that the pill they are taking will make them feel happier – and so, for increasing numbers, that is what happens. The ingredients of a placebo pill exert no effect; that hasn't changed. What has changed is the cultural meaning of the act of taking a pill.

Is there any such thing as a white lie?

Perfection is one thing, and obligation another.

Henry Garnet,
Treatise on Equivocation

The Hiding Place
, by Corrie ten Boom, is a gripping account of life in a Dutch town under Nazi occupation. The ten Boom family of Haarlem were devout Christians, active in the local community, whose home had for years been known as an open house for those in need. When the Germans invaded in 1942 Corrie was living with her sister Betsie, her eighty-four-year-old father Casper and various other family members. One day a woman with a suitcase knocked on the door. Anxiously, she told Corrie's father that she was a Jew whose husband had been arrested and whose son had gone into hiding. She had just been visited by hostile German soldiers issuing threats, and did not want to return home for fear of worse. She had heard that the Boom family was friendly to Jews and wondered if she might take refuge in their home. Corrie's father welcomed her in. Within weeks, the family was harbouring a group of Jewish refugees in the cellar of their home, accessible only via a concealed trapdoor. From then on, their home became known as a safe house for Jews and members of the Dutch resistance.

One evening, two years later, there was another knock on the front door. This was the visit everyone in the house had been dreading. The SS had been tipped off about the Boom family's illicit hospitality by a neighbour, and now they were demanding to know if there were Jews hiding in the house.

Versions of this scenario have been a recurring theme in the debates over lying for hundreds of years. It appears in various guises but is usually called ‘the murderer at the door', and often takes the form of a simple question: is it right to lie to the murderer who asks you to tell them the whereabouts of your friend? It's an important dilemma, not because people are constantly being confronted with it, but because it frames a fundamental question about the morality of lying in the most stark and dramatic terms possible. Is a lie an inherently bad thing – or is it what you do with it that counts?

Corrie had no hesitation; she lied. The SS searched the house anyway, though they didn't find what, or who, they were looking for. Two Jewish men, two Jewish women and two members of the Dutch underground remained undiscovered, hidden behind a false wall in Corrie's bedroom. Corrie was arrested that day, and she and her family were imprisoned. Corrie and Betsie were sent to concentration camps. Betsie died in captivity, as did Casper. It is estimated that 800 Jews were saved by the actions of Corrie's family and their friends

The Hiding Place
also contains an example of somebody taking a very different attitude to telling lies. Corrie's younger sister Nollie, a pious girl, rarely without her Bible, and known for her rigid honesty. Nollie believed strongly that the Bible condemned lying, and that God brooked no exceptions. One day, previous to the incident described above, Nollie was in the house when members of the SS charged in. She was in the living room with a refugee called Annaliese, whose blonde hair and flawlessly forged papers meant that the German authorities hadn't discovered she was Jewish. The SS pointed at Annaliese and asked Nollie, ‘Is she a Jew?' Nollie, unable to break with her principles, said yes. Both girls were arrested, and Annaliese was taken to an old theatre in Amsterdam where Jews were held before being transported to the concentration camps.
²⁸

* * *

The Bible isn't as clear on the subject of lying as Nollie believed. It's often assumed that the Ten Commandments include an injunction not to lie. This isn't quite so. The closest to one is the ninth commandment (the eighth for Catholics and Lutherans): ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.' This is clearly a prohibition of perjury, but it doesn't expressly forbid any form of lying (the commandment's wider, metaphorical resonance is a question of interpretation). The New Testament isn't much help either. Jesus doesn't explicitly address the question of whether or not it's ever right to lie, which perhaps suggests it wasn't a very important issue to him or his first followers.

The Bible's ambiguity meant that during the first few hundred years of Christianity its major thinkers were vague and contradictory on the question of lying. Some noted that the scriptures contain episodes that appear to endorse deception: God deceives Abraham into thinking he must kill his son Isaac, as a means of testing his faith; Jacob, in collusion with his mother Rebekah, deceives his father into thinking that he is Esau, his brother; in the book of Exodus, the Egyptian midwives lie to the Pharoah, with God's approval, in order to save the Hebrew children. In the New Testament, Jesus appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus, following his death and resurrection, and pretends to be someone else. Some Christian scholars interpreted such instances as evidence that the Bible considered lying to be legitimate when it was in the service of a righteous cause.

This changed in the fifth century, when Augustine entered the debate. In two magisterial surveys of the subject,
On Lying
and
Against Lying
, Christianity's greatest philosopher transformed the church's thinking on the matter, and exerted a profound influence on future generations, including our own; it's not much of an exaggeration to say that Augustine invented the modern concept of lying. He laid down two fundamental precepts: first, he defined a lie, with greater clarity than ever before, as a ‘false statement made with the intention to deceive'. This is the imperfect but workable definition that most discussions of lying still use as a starting point. Second, he unequivocally pronounced lying as morally wrong, regardless of context and without exception.

Augustine argued that God had given speech to men so that they could make their thoughts known to each other. Using it to deceive is therefore a sin, because this is the opposite of what God intended. He also identified lying as a threat to the authority of the church. If Christians allowed for the possibility of a white lie (the ‘helpful lie') then the whole edifice of Christian belief and practice risked corruption and, ultimately, collapse, because ‘whenever someone finds something difficult to practise or hard to believe, he will follow this same dangerous precedent and explain it as the idea or practice of a lying author.' He concluded that
every
lie must be defined as a sin, even a lie told to preserve someone's life. To the person asked to betray the whereabouts of an innocent person to a murderer, Augustine's advice was to answer ‘I know where he is but will never disclose it,' regardless of consequences.

Even Augustine didn't argue, though, that all lies are sins of equal gravity. He put together a hierarchy of lies, depending on how difficult it was to pardon them. Here's the list, with the least forgivable at the top:

1. Lies in teaching religion

2. Lies which hurt someone and help nobody

3. Lies which hurt someone but benefit someone else

4. Lies told for the pleasure of deceiving someone

5. Lies told to please others in conversation

6. Lies which hurt nobody and benefit someone

7. Lies which hurt nobody and benefit someone by keeping open the possibility of their repentance

8. Lies which hurt nobody and protect a person from physical defilement.

The next major treatise on the subject was written by the Italian scholar Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Aquinas accepted Augustine's basic framework – that lying involved intent to deceive and that it was always sinful – but added further distinctions and qualifications. Aquinas didn't mind a joke: lies told in jest were not mortal sins in his book. Nor did he consider unpardonable the kind of helpful lie that Augustine railed against. Only malicious lies – ‘lies told to do harm' – were impossible to forgive.

For the first fifteen hundred years of Christianity's existence, the morality of lying was largely a matter of rarefied debate amongst scholars. After Martin Luther made his incendiary declaration at Wittenberg, and the church split asunder, lying became a question of survival.

If ever there was an Age of Deceit, it was in Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century. Relatively tolerant attitudes to religious diversity had given way to widespread persecution, inquisitions, and thought control. Thousands of religious leaders – Catholics, Protestants and Jews – were forced to choose between staying true to their faith, and exile or death; many chose to pretend to be something, or someone, they were not. At the same time, governments were extending control over their subjects (the murderer at the door was often a civil servant), and the practice of politics was beginning in earnest. Royal courts were growing in size and sophistication, drawing more and more ambitious, career-minded young men towards the luminous centre of power. Ordinary people became used to the idea of politicians (or courtiers, in those days) as ruthless liars who would say anything to advance their own interests.

England in particular was seized by what the literary critic Lionel Trilling termed ‘cultural paranoia'. Its writers and thinkers were simultaneously gripped and appalled by the phenomenon of deceit. Francis Bacon, a reader of Machiavelli, analysed the art of self-concealment, concluding that it was best ‘to have openness in fame and opinion; secrecy in habit; dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign, if there be no remedy'. Shakespeare's Hamlet, revolted by the courtly fashion for dissembling, says, ‘Nay, I know not “seems”, and I have that within which passes show.' The plays of Shakespeare are peopled with brilliant liars, elaborate disguises and ingenious forms of deception, as are those of Marlowe, Chapman and Webster. All of these dramatists took as one of their primary themes the difference between what
seems
and what is, between what a character says and what he or she thinks.

Their audiences were deeply invested in such questions; it wasn't only priests who faced terrible choices between truth and deceit. Many commoners were forced either to besmirch their deepest beliefs, or to live a lie. Even when only outward conformity was required, an inner hell might be created; in the 1550s Richard Wever of Bristol, a Protestant, drowned himself in a mill-race rather than pollute himself by appearing at Catholic mass. Those unwilling to take such drastic action resorted to various forms of deception, either by attending and then secretly not participating in services, or by sending a proxy to sit in their place with the aim of deceiving the congregation into thinking they had attended.

In royal courts and religious colleges across Europe, learned men were reading and constructing sophisticated defences of dishonesty. The doctrinal rationalisation of deceit was, in the phrase of the historian Perez Zagorin, like ‘a submerged continent' in the political, religious and intellectual life of the era. To deceive in order to survive or advance was one thing; to deceive while remaining true to God might be allowable. Casuistry, a method of moral reasoning that took each case as it came rather than relying on unbending rules, grew popular among Jesuit scholars in particular.

Casuists searched for loopholes in Augustine's condemnation of lying. As early as the thirteenth century, Raymund of Pennafort had pondered the question of what to tell the murderer at the door. He proposed that a man might deceive the murderer whose intended victim he has given refuge to by saying
non est hic
, which can mean
either
‘he is not here' or ‘he is not eating here'. This technique – employing double meanings of words to tell the literal truth while concealing a deeper meaning – became known as ‘verbal equivocation'. The casuist St Alfonso de Liguori suggested it was permissible to reply ‘I say no' to a question to which one knew the answer was yes, simply because the speaker doesn't in fact say ‘no'.
²⁹
As priests and commoners across Europe opened doors to find potential murderers interrogating them, casuists pushed the boundaries of equivocation ever further. Eventually they took the momentous step of arguing that a false statement can be made true by the addition of a ‘mental reservation'. That's to say, you can say something you know to be false if you add words,
in your head
, that make it true.

The most influential advocate of what became known as ‘the doctrine of mental reservation' was the Spanish theologian Dr Navarrus, who wrote that there are some truths ‘expressed partly in speech and partly in the mind'. According to Navarrus, the Christian's overriding moral duty is to tell the truth to God; ‘reserving' some of that truth from the ears of human hearers is moral if it serves the greater good. For example, the user of mental reservation could reply ‘I know not' aloud to a human interlocutor but silently add ‘to tell
you
', and still be telling the truth. The doctrine's adherents claimed that Christ himself practised it: he told his disciples that he did not know the Day of Judgement, even though his omniscience meant that he must have known.

In 1606, the English Catholic priest John Ward was asked by his Protestant captors whether he was a priest and whether he had ever been across the seas – that's to say, studied Catholicism in France or Italy. He replied no to both questions. In fact, both were true. Later, when presented with evidence that his answers were false, he claimed not to have lied, explaining that he had mentally added
of Apollo
after his first answer, and reserved
Indian
before ‘seas' in his second answer.
³⁰
By the time Ward was tried, the doctrine of mental reservation was already notorious in England, following the trials of two priests called Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet.

* * *

In 1586, when he was twenty-five, Southwell journeyed to England from France in the company of his older friend Garnet, on a clandestine mission that he knew might result in his death. He was returning to his native country after an absence of ten years. The youngest of eight children, Southwell was raised in a family of Catholic gentry in the Norfolk town of Horsham St Faith. He had been sent to France when he was fifteen to study at a Catholic college in Douai in the north of the country. After attending schools in Paris, and in Tournai in Belgium, he was admitted to the Jesuit college in Rome. He became familiar with the arguments of the casuists and with the doctrine of mental reservation. A gifted student, who also wrote exquisite poetry (Ben Jonson remarked that he would happily destroy most of his own poems in exchange for Southwell's
The Burning Babe
), he was ordained to the priesthood in 1584 and within two years had embarked on his mission to England.