The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (38 page)

Whether truthful or false, society coheres so long as it skirts smoothly along a polished surface of diverting pleasures that conceal the possibility of ulterior motives and self-interest, of jealousy and envy. Universal civility, Cephise will claim, is a way of living, a tool we can use to make our way through the world as we see fit. Others can interpret our civility however they wish, and many may interpret our actions “as the beginning of friendship. This being so, wouldn’t it be brutal to disabuse them of their error?”
¹²⁴
Predictably, it is precisely this gap between what appears and what exists, between superficial complaisance and hidden interests, that renders the utility and convenience of civility problematic. Essential for social harmony, complaisance is, at the same time, dangerous, capable of abetting vice as much as virtue. On the one hand, as Clearque states in “On Complaisance,” “It is necessary to the society of all mankind, it promotes all pleasures; maintains friendship and without it we should be ever in a state of war and irritated.” On the other hand, he adds, “As sincerity is of all virtues that which is most peculiar to persons of honor, complaisance is of all
virtues that which the sordid, the self-interested, the treacherous and flatterers most commonly abuse.”
¹²⁵
Behind a mask of complaisance, we can flatter and goad and harm others for our own benefit.

Amilcar, a little later in “On Complaisance,” attempts to limit its domain and potential for abuse. “In proper speech,” he asserts, “we can say that complaisance is the queen of trifles, and it is appropriate when the question is whether to stroll in one direction or the other, to dance or not to dance, to sing or not sing.”
¹²⁶
But it is clear that complaisance’s kingdom extends much further than the realm of mere social niceties, that it extends into every aspect of our dealings with others. Clearque will point out that there are “self-interested complaisances, habitual complaisances, complaisances of love, esteem and friendship, ambition, sordid and counterfeit complaisances, complaisances of the court and the city, serious complaisances, jocund and eloquent complaisances, true and false ones and thousands of other sorts.”
¹²⁷
Ideally, complaisance has no “particular interest,” aiming instead at “the world’s convenience” even as it strives to avoid dissimulation, lying, and flattery. But these are less rules than mere suggestions, for complaisance has no rules, and its proper performance requires judgment and virtue.
¹²⁸
Sadly, our inability to know either ourselves or others renders these moral decisions suspect, a situation made all the more problematic because flattery is simply complaisance misused. “The civility and gallantry of the world,” Scudéry writes, “at first conceals flattery, then custom admits it, and we are so used to it we are no longer capable of recognizing it.”
¹²⁹
Behind every act of complaisance lurks the possibility of flattery, deceit, and deception.

There was nothing Scudéry could have done about this, nothing anyone could have done to erase the always threatening difference between what we say and what we mean. With those hidden depths of self-interest forever imperceptible, Scudéry opts for what we can perceive, reducing civil society to a seamless flow of words always leading to more words, each sentence expressly designed to delight even as it conceals the intentions that motivate the speaker. Complaisance is the price she pays to purchase a place free from
the contest and troubles and misogyny of the public world of male-dominated competitive discourse. Ultimately, the challenge Scudéry confronts is no different from the problem Moderata Fonte confronted in
The Worth of Women
. But whereas Fonte saw nothing for it but to dream of a utopian world of women freed from the impenetrable and ensnaring lies of men, Scudéry converts that world of women into the idyllic dream of a civil society rooted in nothing but false pleasantries, uniting both men and women in the private refuge of the salon.

The problem of lying and hypocrisy, present yet veiled in every preceding chapter of
Conversations on Diverse Subjects
, finally surfaces in first volume’s last dialogue, “On Dissimulation and Sincerity.” The speakers wonder if it is possible to distinguish complaisance from flattery, sincerity from hypocrisy, truth from lies. “But as for sincerity,” Lucinda announces, “all the world boasts of it and wants to have it; and those who are the greatest dissimulators cover themselves no less in sincerity, for without it their dissimulation would be ineffectual.”
¹³⁰
Mathilda wishfully suggests that sincerity and hypocrisy can be distinguished, for “sincerity must of necessity carry along with it all the beauty of truth, all the charms of freedom, all the sweetness of confidence.” Sincerity reveals itself not in words but in an open heart, in guileless eyes and agreeable expressions. “In a word,” she concludes, “it is like beauty without paint, which fears neither to be seen in the truest light nor closely examined.”
¹³¹
But everyone else present at the conversation realizes, as had the women in Moderata Fonte’s
Worth of Women
and, indeed, as Bernard Mandeville would assert some forty years later, that this is little more than a dream. The success of civil society depends on concealing intentions and interests behind white lies, false pleasantries, and insincere gestures. Women cannot help but perceive each other as rivals, and men are too competitive to ever really open themselves to one another.
¹³²
“When I examine myself,” Padilla states, “I am all too aware that sincerity often quits me. I have said a hundred times to women of my acquaintance that I thought them beautiful and well dressed, well made, that they danced admirably, yet I believed nothing of all this. We
conceal love, hatred, ambition, and we only show what we believe may please or be useful. The world has ever took this course and ever will.”
¹³³

And saying this, the conversation continues. Indeed it must continue. Deftly diverted to less pessimistic topics, the artful banter of the salon will proceed through another volume of conversations, skimming along on a beautiful pleasant surface, where lies no longer matter so long as they add to the conversation.

C
ONCLUSION

The Lie Becomes Modern

In the
Discourse on the Origins of Inequality
, Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers his own account of the origin of lies and deception. Invoking no sacred garden, neither God nor serpent, Rousseau tells the story of wild men and women, once solitary but contented wanderers, now coming together to form the first families and, soon, the first societies. Settled in gatherings of primitive huts, they slowly develop language and tools, the first farms, and the art of metallurgy. With agriculture, they discover the need to divide land, to assign each lot to the man who tills it and, over time, from years of repeated use, these lots become that man’s personal property. Property, in its turn, requires a system of justice, for “as men began to look to the future and as they all saw themselves with some goods to lose, there was not one of them who did not have to fear reprisals against himself for wrongs he might do to another.”
¹

Had all men been naturally equal, Rousseau suggests, equally strong and clever, industrious, and thrifty, none of these changes would have been so problematic. Unfortunately, men are far from equal and, as a result, they began to perceive themselves and each other in new and troublesome ways. Differences in wealth, prestige, and status, in mind, beauty, strength, and skill, stirred the envy of the less well-off, while it goaded the pride of the successful. “And these qualities being the only ones which could attract consideration,” Rousseau ominously notes, “it was soon necessary to have them or affect them; for one’s own advantage, it was necessary to appear to be other than what one in fact was. To be and to seem to be became two altogether different things; and from this
distinction came conspicuous ostentation, deceptive cunning, and all the vices that follow from them.”
²

Rousseau narrates a secular fall from the state of nature in which men present themselves to one another just as they are, hiding nothing because they have nothing to hide, to the state of civil society in which “suspicion, offenses, fears, coldness, reserve, hate, and betrayal constantly hide under that uniform and false veil of politeness, under that much vaunted urbanity we owe to the enlightenment of our century.”
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Extending a line of thought already present in Augustine’s meditations on Adam and Eve’s disobedience, and revived in both Jacobus Acontius’s
Satans Strategems
and John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
, Rousseau asks what it was about the first couple, about any of us, that makes it possible for us to sin. “You say we are sinners because of our first father’s sin,” Rousseau writes to the bishop Beaumont of Paris in 1763, “but why was our first father himself a sinner? Why wouldn’t the same reason by which you explain his sin apply to his descendants without original sin?”
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This question troubled Augustine, who saw nothing for it but to suspect a hidden and always present and percolating pride in the first couple, already tilting them toward evil even before the serpent arrived on the scene. Every subsequent medieval and Reformation theologian rejected Augustine’s solution because it suggested that God had created mankind with an innate propensity toward evil. Whatever hidden steps led to that initial disobedience, Augustine and the theologians all agreed that the consequence of that fateful action was the hereditary stain of original sin, the continuing source of human perversity.

For his part, Rousseau simply rejects the entire notion of original sin because it explains nothing. As he argues in his letter to Beaumont, to invoke original sin as the reason for our evil actions is to do little more than to argue that mankind is corrupt because it is corrupt. Rousseau, by contrast, claims to have an account of how mankind, born naturally good, becomes corrupt.
⁵
As men and women formed the first families and groups, they became aware of one another, learned to speak and began the long, slow, ever-constricting and enslaving process of human socialization. “Each
one began to look at the others and wanted to be looked at himself, and public esteem had value,” Rousseau explains in the
Discourse on Inequality
, “and that was the first step towards inequality and, at the same time, towards vice. From these first preferences were born on the one hand vanity and contempt, on the other shame and envy; and the fermentation caused by these new leavens produced compounds fatal to happiness and innocence.”
⁶

We lie, Rousseau argues, because we are social, have become social, valuing more what people think about us than what we really are, and as society develops, as the arts and sciences develop, our lies become ever more refined and inescapable. “Before Art had molded our manners,” Rousseau writes, “and taught our passions to speak an affected language, our morals were rustic but natural.” But now we worry so much about public opinion that no one “dares to appear as he is,” and “a base and deceptive uniformity prevails in our morals” as we restrain our impulses and carefully compose our every word and deed, rendering us unknown to everyone else and everyone else unknown to us. “Even to know our friends,” Rousseau writes, “we must await some critical and pressing occasion; that is, until it is too late; for it is on those very occasions that such knowledge is of use to us.”
⁷
Many writers from the prior century—Marquise de Sablé, François La Rochefoucauld, and Madeleine de Scudéry among them—had made precisely these sorts of observations, noticing that in the courts and salons of Europe, the facade of virtue had replaced any concern with real virtue. We compliment others whom we have no desire to compliment and exchange courtesies with people we despise because that will make things easier for us. Social cohesion and the public good require that we tell such lies, and what is good for society is good for us. Rousseau suggests something very different. Society divides us against ourselves: it opposes our natural inclinations and sentiments with its own standards. Confused, we become lost to ourselves, inauthentic and insincere. As Rousseau writes in
Emile
, “Always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, he will never be either man or citizen. He will be good neither to himself or others.”
⁸
No inherent
perversity of will, no original sin, just human beings grown prideful and deceptive through historical circumstance, alienated from themselves, tricked into believing that hypocrisy provides the surest route to happiness.

All of which means the problem of lying, of whether it is ever acceptable to lie, takes quite a different shape in Rousseau’s writings. He explicitly discusses lying in the fourth of his
Reveries of the Solitary Walker
. Long pained by the memory of a youthful lie, Rousseau believes he has ever since assiduously cultivated a life devoted to truth, going so far as to claim for his personal motto a variation on a line from the Roman writer Juvenal’s
Satires
, “To consecrate one’s life to truth.”
⁹
A mere moment’s reflection, however, brings to mind all the occasions he has lied and prevaricated without any remorse, neither at the time nor later when reflecting on his actions. He begins with a definition of lying, one he claims to have read “in a Philosophy Book that to lie is to conceal a truth we ought to make manifest.”
¹⁰
This definition frames the question of lying in the language of debt. When do we owe someone else the truth? When do we owe ourselves the truth? What are the sorts of things we can owe to others and to ourselves? These are complicated questions that grow only more complex as the essay continues, but it is a complexity Rousseau refuses to evade. Repeatedly stressing that what matters most is what can be put into practice, he simply rejects all those many austere moralists who steer clear of these problems by arguing we must never lie, no matter what the consequence. Such men, Rousseau dismissively notes, offer little more than “idle chatter impossible to put into practice.”
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