UU Church of Berks

To Tell the Truth – or Not?

Rev. Sandra Fees

February 5, 2012

I like top 10 lists. So I looked up the 10 biggest lies in history. Among them, I found the story of the Trojan Horse, the forgeries of Vermeer’s art, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi Scheme, the Clinton-Lewinsky Affair, and Watergate. Nazi propaganda was listed as the biggest lie. Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels built on the history of anti-Semitism to launch the big lie. Their anti-Jewish campaign was based on racial ideology. It systematically sought to convince Germans that Jews were the enemy and the cause of all of Germany’s problems. (http://history.howstuffworks.com/american-history/10-biggest-lies-in-history10.htm, www.holocaustresearchproject.org/holoprelude/nazprop.html)

In his Mein Kampf, Hitler described how his big lie worked. He wasn’t actually intending to describe himself. He was writing about the Jews. He was describing how their existence was founded on one great lie. But Hitler’s words have come to be seen in the context of his own big lies. His lies were so colossal and so unbelievable, and he just kept on repeating them, that they gained the “force of credibility.” Here’s what he wrote:

in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. (qtd in www.historiography-project.org/misc/biglie.html)

There’s some good insight here into contemporary public life. It offers some clues as to why the public believes some rather unbelievable stuff.

Hitler was right about lies. Most everyday lies are small ones – nothing on the scale of what made it to the top ten list. Nothing that comes close to Hitler’s own devastating deceptions. Though most people’s lies are small, it’s universally accepted that everyone does lie. And most people lie several times a day. That really gave me pause when I read it. I started to think about the everyday lies we tell and why we tell them.

The most obvious reasons we lie are to avoid punishment or disfavor with someone, to make ourselves look better than we are, just because it’s easier than telling the truth, or to avoid dealing with conflict. When I was a child, my older sister and I would fight on occasion. It could have been about anything. You know how it goes if you have siblings or have children. But if it got serious, like maybe we hit each other, my mother would ask who started it. My sister was usually to blame, but not always. When I started it, I wouldn’t lie and say “it wasn’t me” or point the finger at my sister, pretending she was guilty. I just cried. My sister had a little bit of a temper so she always looked guilty. So she naturally got the blame. So she pretty much got blamed even when she wasn’t the culprit. I guess that’s part of the penalty of being the older sibling. Not owning up is typical kid stuff. But allowing someone else to take the blame is still dishonest. It’s not very nice either. Eventually that kind of behavior will ruin trust in a relationship.

No one likes to get punished or to be seen as the bad guy. So people try to avoid getting in trouble with their spouses and supervisors too. They also like to avoid getting in trouble with the minister. Sometimes people like to try to look a little better than they are with their minister. That seems to be ethically convoluted, I know. But it does happen from time to time. There’s a joke about this. A minister tells his congregation, “Next week I plan to preach about the sin of lying. To help you understand my sermon, I want you all to read Mark 17.” Mark only has 16 chapters. The following Sunday, he asks for a show of hands. “How many of you read Mark 17?” he asks. Every hand goes up. The minister smiles and says, “Mark only has 16 chapters. I will now proceed with my sermon on the sin of lying.” I’m not sure about the entrapment aspect of this joke, but it makes the point.

People also lie when it involves money. I was in two car accidents in the last several years. Both times it was the other driver’s fault, but both were accidents without negligence. In the first situation, the driver apologized, genuinely felt bad, and took responsibility. He was apologetic even before he realized he knew me. He’s now a member of the church. In the second incident, the other person contested the insurance claim, and the insurance company took him to court.

In a court of law, when testifying, we are asked “to swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” Well, he made up a story about how I tried to merge onto the highway by going around him on the right. I tried to imagine if he could possibly have believed his own story. But it was all pretty obvious from the damages and the location of the accident, and the insurance company won the case. My claim had already been paid.

It really bothered me that he lied. I kept thinking that even the penalty of perjury and the pledge to tell the truth doesn’t always compel people. I’ve wondered what caused the first person to tell the truth and the second to lie. Was the first person just an upstanding Unitarian Universalist? The second person didn’t have insurance, and he was driving his girlfriend’s car so unfortunately he had more incentive to lie than tell the truth. I just can’t help wondering, though, wouldn’t it be great if everyone simply told the truth?

Well, yes and no. In a straightforward legal case, yes. But it’s rarely that simple, is it? Sometimes it isn’t clear that telling the truth is the best course of action. The virtue of telling the truth can clash with another virtue, such as compassion.

Suppose your friend just got fired from her job. She tells you all about it, and then asks you about yours. This isn’t the best time to gush about how much you love your job or share the news that you just got promoted. You don’t have to say you’re miserable if you aren’t. But you can certainly temper your response with something that suits the occasion. And you can share your own good news another time. Honesty can be cruel. William Willimon, a bishop in the United Methodist Church, preached that: “Honesty and cruelty bed together quite well…. I have known people who pride themselves on being, ‘honest, totally honest.’ Many times this simply meant that they were always offering to other people their opinions and judgments, even when they were unsolicited. I suspected that they told all of the ‘truth’ because it was their way of keeping people at a distance from them.” (sermon at Duke Chapel, 11/15/98)

Sometimes holding back is a virtue too. Sometimes it even saves lives. Animals, for example, regularly use deception for survival. It’s one of the most effective and widespread tools they’ve got. Camouflage is one example. There’s the Sepiola squid. It inserts a cloud of ink between itself and a predator. The cloud is the exact shape and color of the squid. Meanwhile, the squid changes color and high tails it out of there. The confused predator is left behind. (www.rand.org/natsec_area/products/animal.html)

 Deception has been a survival mechanism for humans as well. Just as Hitler used deception to kill the Jews, Jews were aided from Nazi persecution by individuals who were willing to use deception for a higher cause. Deception enabled Jews to hide and escape out of the country.

And then there’s interacting with people with dementia. It’s important to learn to live in their world, to try to find a way into their reality. This can mean practicing some very artful deception. The point isn’t to deceive them, but to help them. You’ve heard me talk about my father. Well, every few months he asks me about his finances. It’s painful and pointless to try to explain the details to him. He’ll tell me he needs to go to the bank to get his statement. Then he’ll ask if I have his checkbook. And I tell him I have his check book at home and that going to the bank sounds like a good idea. “Why don’t we do that the next time I’m here,” I’ll say. The next week never comes. Trust me, I learned this the hard way. My early attempts at explanations did not go well and created a lot of confusion and anxiety.

Such deceptions are a way of engaging a different kind of truth or elevating a different ethical value. It’s a way of telling the truth slant. This is Emily Dickinson’s term. She writes, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” She suggests that in order to be successful in sharing the truth we need to come at it from an angle. Dickinson writes:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth's superb surprise;

As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.

Some truths are too painful to hear all at once or even at a particular time. To tell all the truth means taking into account the bigger ethical picture. The truth ought not blind us but instead enlighten us. It ought to strive to improve the world, not ruin it. The truth well told can open up new worlds of understanding and discovery.

The truth may still be challenging and difficult. Hearing the news that your child just flunked out of college or that someone you love is in the hospital isn’t ever going to be easy. But I have watched people be told such news with compassion and I have also watched people be told with little regard for how the news might be received.

Saint Paul’s advice is to speak the truth in love. Like speaking the truth slant, to speak the truth in love requires examining our own motives and being honest with ourselves. To speak the truth in love requires knowing something of the other person. What are her feelings? What are his needs and values? To balance love and truth may mean giving more weight to love than truth.

The social fabric of our everyday lives depends on telling the truth. Without a basic level of truthfulness, there won’t be any way for us to count on other people. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The highest compact we can make with our fellow is, ‘Let there be truth between us two forevermore.’” But the truth needs to be shared in ways that build up relationships, not tear them down. We need people in our lives who will tell us the truth but who will do it with kind intentions and in a way we can hear it. Strong family relationships, strong working relationships, and strong relationships in religious community depend on speaking the truth with compassion.

So let us endeavor to speak the truth. Let us speak the truth in love. Let us speak the truth, but do it slant.

Amen. Blessed be.