Born Liars (24 page)

Lee had grown up with a rather different attitude to lying. ‘In China and in the East generally,' he says, ‘it's just much more accepted that there are all sorts of situations in which lying is appropriate.' There is no self-torturing debate over this, he says; legitimate lying is just an unremarkable fact of life. Telling the truth can also be considered wrong – especially if it involves trumpeting one's achievements. This last insight helped Lee to form a hypothesis: that the Western prohibition on lying was based on its elevation of the individual; whereas the Chinese attitude to lying was formed around its reverence for the coherence and harmony of the group.

In 2001 and again in 2007, Lee carried out experiments on the attitudes to lying among children from China and Canada. The North American children had been raised in a society that places great emphasis on individual achievement, self-esteem and ambition, and on individual rights and freedoms: the culture of Descartes, Crusoe, Thomas Jefferson and Michael Jordan. The Chinese children, by contrast, had been raised in a culture that celebrated the superiority of
Da Wo
(the big me – the collective) over
Xiao Wo
(the small me – the self), an outlook that drew not just on communist ideology but on a deep well of religious and cultural tradition.

In Lee's first study, Chinese (and Taiwanese) children, and Canadian children, all aged between seven and eleven, were read four brief stories. Two stories involved a child carrying out a good deed, while the other two showed a child carrying out a bad deed. When the story character is questioned by a teacher, he answers with either a truthful or an untruthful statement. Sometimes the child is shown lying about his bad deed; other times he's shown lying about his good deed. After hearing the stories, the children were asked if what the character told the teacher was a lie, and then they were asked whether what the character had done was good or bad. All the children, regardless of nationality, demonstrated a basic understanding of what it means to tell a lie, and all the children judged lying about the bad deed as wrong. But when the children were asked to evaluate the story in which the child carried out a good deed and lied about it, a significant difference opened up between the two groups.

The Canadian children were overwhelmingly likely to judge the child's lie as a bad thing, simply because it was a lie; that was enough to condemn it in their eyes. The Chinese children were much more likely to deem the child's lie about his good deed as a morally positive act. When they were asked to explain, they commented that the character ‘did not seek praise . . . is not bragging' and is telling a ‘well-intentioned lie'. They also gave a relatively negative assessment of the character who tells the truth about his good deed, criticising him for seeking praise. The Canadians, raised in a culture of self-confidence and self-esteem, rated this character's truth-telling positively.

Lee believes this ‘modesty effect' derives from Confucianism, which encourages self-effacement in the name of the greater good (as do Buddhism and Taoism). In that philosophy, the good life depends on the health of our key social relations, starting with the family and extending outwards. One of the
Analects of Confucius
makes it clear that honesty is never a matter for the individual alone:

The Governor of She declared to Confucius: ‘Among my people, there is a man of unbending integrity: when his father stole a sheep, he denounced him.' Confucius replied, ‘Among my people, men of integrity do things differently: a father covers up for his son, and a son covers up for his father – and there is integrity in what they do.'

According to the scholar Daniel Bell, the key questions with which Confucianism is concerned are about the roles we occupy and the obligations we have in those roles. When it comes to the moral evaluation of a lie, concern for an abstract idea of truth or for individual rights are less important than the effect of the lie on those to whom we're obliged – that's to say on the harmony and integrity of the group. This is rather different from Kant's starting point.

Lee had included Taiwanese children so that he could check for the effects of communist ideology. Communism emphasises the collective over the individual, but it is a relatively recent import, grafted on to a Confucian culture. Chinese children in Taiwan have grown up in a capitalist society with superficially different values. But unlike in China, where Confucianism was officially abandoned following the Cultural Revolution, Confucian ideas and values are openly followed and deeply entrenched in Taiwanese society. The evaluations of the Taiwanese children were broadly the same as those of the Chinese; indeed they showed an even bigger contrast with the Canadian children. This indicated to Lee that values of modesty and self-effacement were not derived from the recent political past, but from the deep structures of Chinese culture, transmitted via many generations of parents and teachers.

In a second study, Lee presented Canadian and Chinese children with four different scenarios, based on events with which they would be familiar. In each one, the child protagonist of the story faces a dilemma over whether to tell the truth that helps a friend but harms the group, or harms a friend and helps the group. For instance:

Here is Susan. Susan's class had to choose some of their classmates to represent the class in a spelling competition at their school. Susan's friend Mike couldn't spell very well, but he really wanted to be in the competition, so he asked Susan to pick him. Susan thought to herself ‘If I pick Mike, our class will not do as well at the spelling competition, but Mike is my friend, and if I don't pick him, he will be very upset.' When Susan's teacher asked her who she was going to pick . . .

Children were then asked, ‘If you were Susan, what would you do?' In another example, Kelly's friend Jimmy, the best runner in the class, tells her, on school track and field day, that he doesn't feel like running today, and that he's off to the library to read a book. He asks her not to tell anyone. But Kelly knows that if Jimmy isn't on the team then her class don't stand a chance of winning. When the teacher asks Kelly if she knows where Jimmy is, should she tell the truth to help her class or lie to help her friend?

As with Lee's earlier study, the way that the children reacted to these questions was influenced by the culture in which they'd been raised. A Canadian child would be more likely to tell the teacher he was picking Mike because he was good at spelling and that he didn't have a clue where Jimmy had gone. A Chinese child would be more likely to leave Mike out of the spelling team and have Jimmy dragooned into the track and field team. The divergence grew more pronounced as the children grew older, which Lee takes as evidence of the children becoming more attuned to the norms of their respective cultures.

* * *

Nobody has yet discovered a culture in which all lying is acceptable, or in which no lying is allowed. Some types of lie are always regarded as acceptable, others as reprehensible. Where cultures differ is over what constitutes
acceptable
lying. It's here that cross-cultural misunderstandings can occur. In 1960, anthropologists who spent time with the islanders of Manam in Papua New Guinea noted that European visitors tended to think of the Manam as liars who said one thing and did another, whilst the islanders thought the same of their white visitors. As the researchers put it, ‘The difficulty is that the situations which call for a conventional hypocrisy among Manam islanders are not those which call for precisely the same technique in any one kind of European.' Both sides thought they were lying appropriately, neither understood the other's lying etiquette.

In 1991 the British anthropologist Frederick Bailey noted that when he first carried out research in India he was puzzled and annoyed by the number of times polite young Indians responded to his requests for assistance by assuring him that they would ‘do the necessary', without, it later turned out, having had any intention of doing anything of the kind. Eventually he came to see that their idea of what constituted an acceptable lie was different from his own. Janet Suskind, who studied the Sharanahua people of Peru, reported that the meat of wild animals was highly valued as food, and people liked to display generosity with it. It was also scarce, however, and more often than not there wasn't enough to share. Direct refusals were perceived as insulting, but it was not an insult to be called a liar. People openly lied about their supplies of meat – indeed such lying was considered ‘an essential social grace'. For the Sharanahua, lying solved a conflict between the small amount of game and their social obligations. White lies are the sticking plaster we put over everyday social problems. This suggests a fruitful line of anthropological enquiry: if you want a shortcut to understanding the tensions within a particular social system, find out what kinds of lies it deems legitimate.

The economist Timur Kuran argues that minor private deceptions can have larger public implications. Most of us have, at some point, perhaps in the back of a cab or around the office canteen table, found ourselves faced with a choice between pretending to agree to a political statement in which we don't believe or risking an unpleasant argument or, worse, inviting social ostracism. In Kuran's terms, we all have to deal with conflicts between our ‘expressive utility' – our desire to be truthful – and our ‘reputational utility' – our standing in the community. We often choose to do so by lying.

If everyone was completely honest about their beliefs all the time millions more arguments and fights would start and society would splinter. But a seemingly harmless lie can have ramifications beyond your own conscience. The lie you tell to maintain your reputation might have a knock-on effect if it reaffirms the belief of others in the room – who may privately think the same thing as you – that the ‘correct' social behaviour is to say otherwise. An accumulation of these small lies can lead to large public lies, enabling the perpetuation of outmoded traditions or social practices long after people cease believing in them. Kuran uses communism in Eastern Europe as an example of when the majority thought differently than their public personas led others to believe; as soon as the regimes started to crumble, public support for them abruptly collapsed. ‘Not a few men who cherish lofty and noble ideas hide them under a bushel for fear of being called different,' said Martin Luther King.

The human capacity for deception was born from the need of our ancestors to navigate relationships with others in the African savannah. To put it mildly, things haven't got any simpler since then. Our intensely social nature is at once the best reason to tell the truth and the reason we can't do without lying.

Lying resists moral rule-making and rule-following because, of all the sins, it's the one we need most in order to get along with each other. At every turn, life undermines any strict adherence to truth-telling because life, if it's any good at least, involves other people, and as Henry Garnet suggested, our obligations to other people will inevitably come into conflict with our desire to be perfectly truthful. Kant argued that lying was always wrong because it fatally undermined our relationships with others. That is surely true, and Browne's Law reminds us that truth-telling is the only possible default in a functioning society. But it's also true that those same relationships require us to lie from time to time. A theologian or a philosopher of metaphysics can propose universal moral imperatives; the rest of us want to maintain good relations with our mother-in-law – or save a friend from harm.

Even Kant may not have been quite as unyielding on the subject as he claimed. In the
Metaphysics of Morals
, the same writer who would – in theory – give his friend away to a murderer rather than lie, ponders more quotidian questions, like whether it's acceptable to write ‘your obedient servant' at the close of a letter, or what to say to an author who asks you whether you like his work, when the true answer is no. One might choose to laugh off such questions with a quip, muses Kant, but ‘who always has his wits about him?' Never has the great man sounded more human. ‘The slightest hesitation,' he writes, ‘is already a mortification for the author. May one flatter him, then?' In these frowning, shrugging sentences we can hear Kant struggling with the moral muddiness of everyday life, and coming close to an admission that equivocation has its uses.

Three Principles of Living Honestly

Realising how central lies are to our existence forces us to think harder about what being honest really means. Honesty is not effortless, but something at which we have to work.

Kant famously expressed his awe at ‘the starry sky above us, and the moral law within'. Darwin and his successors, however, have portrayed the human species as being in possession of a rather erratic internal moral compass. Although we are by no means a purely selfish animal, we are what the contemporary philosopher Peter Railton terms ‘us-ish': naturally inclined to look after our own kith and kin first. We are also, as we've seen, wrapped in useful illusions. Our brains aren't designed to seek the truth, about either ourselves or the world around us. The anthropologist Robin Fox put it to me like this: ‘The brain's business is not to give us an accurate or objective view of the world, but to give us a useful view – one we can act on.' Its primary job is to help the packet of tissue, bone and muscle in which it's encased to survive and thrive; reporting on reality is an important but secondary consideration. So is telling the truth to others.

That's not to say Kant's admiration was misplaced. We have somehow managed to straighten the crooked timber of our own nature; to overcome our natural partiality and bias and get closer to the truth. How? By acting in concert. First, we've developed social norms of truth-telling; an understanding, expressed in written or unwritten ethical codes, that telling the truth is usually preferable to lying. Second, we've developed habits of shared enquiry; the procedures of logic and rigorous scientific procedure of the kind bequeathed to us by Voltaire, Bacon, Lavoisier and Franklin. Third, we've evolved institutions of law, democracy and the right to free expression, so that every claim to truth is challenged, every partial viewpoint opposed or contrasted with another.

None of these is a perfect guard against dishonesty or corruption, of course – far from it – and they don't change our fundamental nature. But that was Benjamin Constant's point: man is a flawed creature, but it's his social obligations rather than abstract moral rules that keep him honest, which is why we must engage in a constant struggle to maintain and improve the institutions of an enlightened, liberal society. It's also why we should take care to design and sustain social environments – at school, at work – that reward truth-telling more often than not. Honesty is something we do together.

The idea of trusting yourself runs deep in modern culture, we're all taught to follow our hearts and believe in our instincts. But our instincts can be misleading. The research of Timothy Wilson, for instance, suggests that we can't even predict our own behaviour very well – that our friends, or even informed strangers, have a much clearer idea of how we're going to act than we do. Yes, we have privileged access to our own thoughts and motivations, but often this results in a case of too much information. Unable to see the behavioural wood for the mental trees, we make flaky predictions about what we're going to do, based on flawed analyses of our own characters. We over-estimate the likelihood that we'll stick to a diet or an exercise regime, and under-estimate our propensity to fall for entirely unsuitable partners. We profess to motivations and intentions that don't exist and deny the existence of real ones.

An important and under-estimated facet of being honest with yourself, then, is not trusting your own sense of certainty. Most of us have been in situations where even if we know we don't have all the facts to hand, we
just know
we're right about something. We have a natural tendency to think that the more passionately convinced we are of something, the more likely it is that we're correct. But this just isn't so. The neurologist Robert Burton argues that the correlation we discern between the strength of a conviction and the likelihood of it being right is a self-deceiving illusion spun by the brain – what he calls the ‘feeling of knowing'. The warm rush of certainty we experience when arriving at a definite point of view or reiterating a long-held belief is not to be trusted. It's something we are biologically programmed to feel but the programme, although intended to help us come to a decision – to act – has little to do with whether or not we're actually right.

The feeling of knowing can lead us astray in all sorts of ways, because it encourages us to shut our minds off to discussion or contradictory opinion, thus allowing in-built, irrational biases and prejudices to rule our mental roost.
³⁴
(Our over-confidence about being able to tell whether someone is lying to us being just one example.) We have to be on our guard against the many ruses of the self-deceptive mind. ‘The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool,' said the physicist Richard Feynman.

Of course, it's nigh on impossible to live without certainty – it's probably best to be certain that stepping in front of a moving car will kill you, that you will need to eat again at some point, or that
Seinfeld
is the best sitcom ever made. As much as is reasonable, however, we might experiment with replacing the words
I know
with
I believe
, even if that means we admit to not being so certain about whether God exists or if man-made climate-change is real. The economist Tyler Cowen has remarked that whereas most people seem to work with a model of nearly a hundred per cent probability that their political beliefs are correct, it would be more sensible to work with something like a sixty per cent probability. Such an internal admission of fallibility is easier said than done – try it now, with whatever you consider your core beliefs, and you'll see what I mean. But the world might be a better place if we all listened a little less to our feeling of knowing and a little more to each other.

Between Vancouver Island and the Pacific coast of North America is a slender strip of water, home to fjord-like inlets, sounds, and hundreds of densely forested, rocky, almost impenetrable islands. For thousands of years a fishing people known as the Kwakiutl populated this archipelago, as well as the northern part of Vancouver Island and the adjoining mainland. The Kwakiutl were famed for their beautiful art and pottery and for idiosyncratic customs like the potlatch, in which the chiefs of different bands competed to give away the most wealth. They were also known for their shamans: healers who could cure people of sickness by communicating with the spirits. In 1887 the anthropologist Franz Boas made a primitive recording of a Kwakiutl shaman singing a healing song. The shaman's name was Quesalid (pronounced
Kesalid
). After recording his voice, Boas transcribed Quesalid's account of how, many years before, he became a shaman.

In his youth, Quesalid was an angry young man. Shamans in Native American tribes were something like a cross between priests, doctors and rock stars; highly respected, even feared, and paid highly for their services. Almost alone amongst his family and friends Quesalid was resentful of the shamans, their riches and their prestige; in his eyes they were frauds who preyed on the needy, the vulnerable and the foolish. So he concocted a plan to expose them. First, he would win their trust so that they would share their secrets with him. Then he would tell the world, and break their power for ever.

He started hanging around with the local shamans until, eventually, one of them offered him an apprenticeship. Sure enough, Quesalid's first lessons were an education in deception: he was taught how to simulate fainting and nervous fits (sometimes shamans would appear to be in a battle with the spirits) and about the practice of ‘dreamers': spies employed by the shamans to eavesdrop on private conversations around the village and report back to them, so that later they could seem to intuit the symptoms and origin of the patient's condition.

He even learnt the greatest secret of all – the truth behind the signature move of Kwakiutl shamans. When a member of the tribe fell sick the shaman would be called for a consultation and, if he deemed it worthwhile, an elaborate ritual would be enacted. At a fire-lit ceremony filled with music, singing and chanting, the shaman would lean over the body of the sick person, place his mouth to the affected part – the patient's chest, for example – and appear to suck out a physical manifestation of the evil spirit. Now Quesalid learned how it worked: the shaman hides a little tuft of eagle down in his mouth and bites his tongue to make it bleed. He bends over the patient. As the drums beat faster and the music comes to a crescendo, he lifts up his head and spits out the blood-soaked tuft.

Quesalid's worst suspicions were confirmed: the highest magic of the shamans was nothing more than a sleight-of-hand, a shabby deceit. He resolved to publicise his findings. But then something unexpected happened. His apprenticeship amongst the shamans had become common knowledge, and one day he was summoned by the family of a sick boy who had dreamed of Quesalid as his healer. It was known that when this happened, whoever the ailing person had dreamed of would be most likely to cure them. The family, who lived on a nearby island, were desperate for help; Quesalid could hardly say no. As night fell, men from the boy's village came in their canoes to collect him. Having already secreted some eagle down under his upper lip, Quesalid set off to perform his first healing ceremony.

Once ashore, he was welcomed into the house of the boy's grandfather. In the middle of the house was a fire, surrounded by men, women and children from the village. Music was being played. At the rear of the house was the boy, who seemed weak, his breath short. As Quesalid knelt down beside him, the boy opened his eyes and, pointing to his lower ribs, whispered, ‘Welcome. Have mercy on me that I may live.' The apprentice shaman placed his mouth to the boy's body, biting on his own tongue as he did so. After a few seconds he lifted his head and spat the bloody down into the palm of his hand. The musicians played loud and fast as he danced around the fire, singing a sacred song and holding out the boy's disease for everyone to see. Then he buried it in the hot ashes of the fire. The boy sat up. He was better already.

Here is the American anthropologist Alfred Kroeber, writing in 1952:

Next, there is the old question of deception. Probably most shamans or medicine men, the world over, help along with sleight-of-hand in curing and especially in exhibitions of power. This sleight-of-hand is sometimes deliberate; in many cases awareness is perhaps not deeper than the foreconscious. The attitude, whether there has been repression or not, seems to be as towards a pious fraud. Field ethnographers seem quite generally convinced that even shamans who know that they are frauds nevertheless also believe in their powers, and especially in those of other shamans: they consult them when they themselves or their children are ill.

Without willing it, Quesalid had gone from posing as a shaman's apprentice to
being
a shaman, and from being an enemy of deceit to the perpetrator of an illusion. Although his story takes place in a society far removed from our own it raises questions that all of us, at some level, are engaged in every day.

The playwright Alan Bennett remarked that ‘be yourself' is a ‘baffling injunction'. Perhaps what it really means, he said, is ‘pretend to be yourself'. The sociologist Erving Goffman pointed out that the line between stage acting and real life is alarmingly fine. Of course, it takes skill and training to become a good actor, but that needn't obscure the fact that most people, given a script and a simple set of directions, can convey some sense of realness to an audience. This is because, says Goffman, ‘life itself is a dramatically enacted thing'. Ordinary social intercourse consists of improvisation around a repetoire of ready-made lines, expressions and gestures that we draw upon to make our ‘performance' convincing. (It's not insignificant that the word ‘person' derives from the Latin word for a mask worn by an actor.) In Goffman's view, we're all actors who have half-forgotten that we're acting. Most of the time we play a double game, aware that others are performing for us and yet believing in the performance at the same time. In
Penny Lane,
The Beatles sing about a series of characters – the banker, the fireman, the barber – who make up the life of the street. A young nurse selling poppies from a tray gets the feeling that she is in a play. ‘She is anyway,' sings Paul McCartney.

A character in Henrik Ibsen's
The Wild Duck
remarks, ‘Deprive a man of his life-lie and you rob him of his happiness.' Ibsen believed that many of us find reality so unpleasant that we wear a mask of idealism – a mask which is also a shield – and create an alternative life for ourselves. It's a theme that runs through much modern drama and literature, and, particularly in the American tradition, it comes tied up with a bleak vision of bourgeois life. Think of Arthur Miller's salesman, John Cheever's swimmer, the constantly yearning and shrinking characters of Richard Yates or, in film, the slow self-destruction of Lester Burnham in
American Beauty
. In these stories the life-lie is portrayed as a dishonest flight from truth; a mask which it's the artist's job to remove. But perhaps this is competitive jealousy on the part of the artist. There is another way of looking at our capacity for deception and self-deception: as an expression of our defiantly creative nature – our refusal to accept that the world as it is, is all there is. The protagonist of Eugene O'Neil's
The Iceman Cometh
declares ‘the lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober'. Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, remarked that ‘our ability to lie – but not necessarily our ability to tell the truth – belongs among the few obvious, demonstrable data that confirm human freedom.'