The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (39 page)

Not only does he reject the austere advice of moralists, he rejects truth as an absolute good in and of itself. While general and abstract truths are precious, allowing us to reason and conduct ourselves toward our due ends, particular truths can be beneficial, harmful, or simply irrelevant. He clarifies the distinctions between useful, harmful, and indifferent truths through a comparison. Imagine a man, the sort whom most of the world calls truthful, a man who faithfully ensures the accuracy of every trivial little fact he states but who, when it comes to himself and his own interests,
adopts colorful language and, even if he doesn’t lie, is more than happy to mislead others for his own benefit. Now imagine a different sort of man, a man, no doubt, of the sort Rousseau imagines himself to be, a man so perfectly indifferent to all those trivial details that “he will scarcely have scruples about amusing a group of people with contrived facts from which no unjust judgment results.” But, when it comes to truths that matter, when it comes to things pertaining to his own interest or the interests of others, “he is solidly truthful, even against his self-interest.” For Rousseau this is the man who exemplifies what it means to be truthful because he renders what is owed, and only things that matter, things that have value, are things that can be owed. “The truth that is owed is that which interests justice,” Rousseau writes, “and this sacred name of truth is debased if applied to vain things whose existence is indifferent to all and knowledge of which is useless for anything.”
¹²
Scrupulous adherence to justice can even justify certain lies, and Rousseau recalls two episodes from his youth in which he lied to protect friends from what he perceived would have been unjust punishment and then adds, “and a hundred others of the same nature have happened to me in my life.”
¹³

Between Augustine and Rousseau everything seems to have changed. Perhaps this is not surprising, and it may even be obvious, but it is worth pointing out. Augustine had argued, and argued repeatedly, that the very essence of sin and, therefore, the very essence of lying as the prototype of all sin consisted in the belief that we can discriminate between good and evil when we decide that this act, this lie, is no sin at all. “When a man lives according to truth, then he lives not according to self, but according to God; for it is God Who has said, ‘I am the truth,’ ” Augustine writes in
The City of God
. “When he lives according to self—that is, according to man, and not according to God—he then certainly lives according to falsehood.”
¹⁴
In sharp contrast, though within limits, Rousseau seems to make himself the arbiter of what is moral and immoral, true and false. As he puts it near the very end of the “Fourth Walk,” “From all these reflections, it follows that the commitment I made to truthfulness is founded more on
feelings of uprightness and equity than on the reality of things, and that in practice I have more readily followed the moral dictates of my conscience than abstract notions of the true and the false.”
¹⁵
We act with justice when we act in accord with our inner sentiments, when we replace the insincerity that society demands of us with the sincerity that we can, with effort, demand from ourselves.

Rousseau accepts this justification for the occasional lie even as he admits that it displeases him and does not clear him of all guilt. “In weighing so carefully what I owed others,” he asks, “have I sufficiently examined what I owed myself?”
¹⁶
The truthful man, Rousseau will argue, must above all else be “jealous of his self-esteem, this is the good that he can least get along without, and he would feel a real loss in acquiring the esteem of others at its expense.”
¹⁷
But does he pay himself his just due when he spices up sterile conversation with innocent lies, or does he instead sell himself cheaply to a society that asks him to play the liar and hypocrite so that others perceive him as he wishes to be perceived? These lapses are so much the worse given his motto that publicly proclaims his absolute commitment to truth. Rousseau’s response is not to side with the austere moralists but to lower his sights. When he has lied, it has been out of weakness, not a desire to be false. “With a weak soul we can at the most preserve ourselves from vice; but to dare to profess great virtues is to be arrogant and rash.” When we learn who and what we really are, we sometimes learn that we must “presume less” of ourselves, expect less from ourselves.
¹⁸
Rousseau counters the socially sanctioned and instituted hypocrisy that alienates us from ourselves, that renders us insincere, with the ideal of personal integrity and unity, with personal sincerity as a good in and of itself, as an end in itself. We are sincere when we act and speak according to our inner sentiments and nature, even if those inner sentiments cannot live up to the ideals we think we hold.
¹⁹

If there is a before and an after in the history of lying, then Rousseau’s
Discourses
may well mark the moment when the one becomes
the other. Although he was far from the only eighteenth-century thinker to question the notion of original sin, Rousseau’s critique is without doubt the most intense, the most developed, the most devastating.
²⁰
With Rousseau, deception and lying become natural problems, problems with natural causes and, hopefully, natural solutions. While this development was never inevitable, the history of lying certainly suggests how it became possible, in what Rousseau both retains and rejects from that history. On the one hand, he is inescapably beholden to the long-held belief that we have fallen from a state of perfection into a state of corruption. His narrative of that fall may differ markedly from the one that so many had accepted for so long, but the beginning and end of the stories, however told, remained the same. On the other hand, his sense of disgust with our current state seems more profound than it was for many of his immediate predecessors and contemporaries.

Even before the eighteenth century, writers had gradually been coming to terms with what they understood to be our inherent penchant for deception and lying. Jacobus Acontius had recognized that our inability to interpret God’s Word with total clarity, with total accuracy, while unfortunate, simultaneously provided a basis for harmonious coexistence among the many varied Protestant sects. While the theologians never gave up their contention that every lie is a sin, they ceaselessly worked to mitigate the culpability of beneficial lies and to expand the range of deceptive and misleading (though never mendacious) behavior. In the tradition of courtly writing, the value and function of lies had steadily expanded, from a means of countering the deceits and evil intentions of others to providing the very foundation of social harmony and, to hear Mandeville tell it, prosperity as well. Something similar occurs with female writers responding to charges of their inherent deceitfulness. From Christine de Pizan to Madeleine de Scudéry, women writers made a concerted effort to demonstrate why women can engage in prudential deceptions and lies, while rehabilitating the role of coverings, appearances, and deceptive pretenses. A cynical reading of Scudéry’s
Conversations on Diverse Subjects
suggests that the seventeenth century’s most popular author believed
the only society in which men and women could coexist in peace would be a society of mere appearances, innocent fabrications, and carefully structured lies.

Everywhere, it seems, lying and deception had already become normalized, not so much secularized and stripped of their roots in Genesis, as unquestionably fitted into the successful and harmonious operation of a fallen world. If this book’s central question,
Is it ever acceptable to lie?
was always really a question about how we should live in a corrupted world, whether we should accommodate ourselves to it or reject it, a number of writers leading up to and during the eighteenth century had increasing difficulty imagining a world in which we did not lie, a world that did not need our lies. Unable to return to paradise, this world, the world in which the fallen Adam and Eve found themselves, in which all their descendants had and would continue to find themselves, had always been corrupt and full of liars. In a very real sense, the history of the human race was the history of an always already-corrupted species and, as a result, the only options were to accept or reject the ways of this world. Rousseau discovers a third option: recovery. For him, the fall from honesty and innocence into mendacity and corruption is a historical event, an event that occurred and continues to occur in this world, in the complicated interplay between individual and society. The recovery of what has been lost, Rousseau admits, will never be total. We live in the aftermath of society, forever in its wake, and whatever innocence we regain will be rooted less in honesty than in a state of personal integrity and sincerity, in remaining true to our deepest and most personal sentiments—and sentiments can conflict with principles. We might lie and feel justified in our hearts, even as we recognize that it goes against our ideals, and this is fine.

While the late eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant would hardly take so tolerant an attitude concerning lies, his work reveals how fully the problem of lying after Rousseau had become a new problem, our problem. Kant conducts his entire investigation in entirely human terms, examines it as a strictly human phenomenon. “The greatest violation of a
human being’s duty to himself regarded merely as a moral being (the humanity of his own person),” Kant writes in the second part of
The Metaphysics of Morals
, first published in 1798, “is the contrary of truthfulness,
lying
.” When we lie, whether for charitable or evil reasons, we violate the purpose of human communication, which consists in the honest revelation of our thoughts to another. As a result, when the liar lies, he renounces his personality and becomes “a mere deceptive appearance of a human being, not a human being himself.”
²¹
Kant prohibits lies because falsehood contradicts and debases our very essence as rational beings. “To be truthful (honest) in all declarations,” Kant writes in
On a Supposed Right to Lie from Philanthropy
, a brief essay he published in 1797, “is therefore a sacred command of reason prescribing unconditionally, one not to be restricted by conveniences.”
²²

Although Kant alludes to scripture, noting that the Bible dates the first crime not to Cain’s murder of his brother Abel but to the first lie, and that “it calls the author of all evil a liar from the beginning and the father of lies,” he does this solely to make a philosophical point. The ground and possibility of the human propensity toward hypocrisy is inaccessible to reason, impossible to deduce from any actual lie itself.
²³
But for Kant, biblical revelation no longer picks up where human reason fails, offering answers to questions unanswerable to us on our own. In
Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History
, Kant turns to Genesis to think, not so much about the origin of human mendacity, but about the origin of human freedom. Before proceeding with this biblically inspired thought experiment, Kant carefully qualifies its usefulness. Such speculations, he notes, “should not present themselves as a serious activity but merely as an exercise in which the imagination, supported by reason, may be allowed to indulge as a healthy mental recreation.” Removed from its earlier role as a historical account of the source and origin of all human misery, the tragedy in the Garden now offers the exhausted philosopher a vacation from the hard work of rational inquiry, a “pleasure trip,” as Kant refers to it at one point.
²⁴

The ground shifts, and the question of lying finds itself irrevocably separated from God and the Devil. Even as we continue to ask
Is it ever acceptable to lie?
and even as the answers we come up with appear unaltered (yes, no, sometimes, never), the framework is new. Beneath a settled and seemingly unchanged facade, everything has changed, as if, having lived too long in exile, we one day realized paradise had never existed in the first place.

Notes