What Has Happened to Truth?

A recent blog by Timothy Egan of the New York Times (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/timothy-egan/) asked serious questions about why so many people in our country are choosing to believe lies about President Obama, particularly that he is a Muslim, and that he is not a citizen. He lays a considerable amount of the blame at the feet of certain media personalities and institutions.

It certainly appears to be true that some media figures regularly engage in deliberate deception, and that many members of the public are believing them. Perhaps more disturbing, however, is that the political figures who stand to benefit from these lies are, for the most part, refusing to repudiate them. They seem quite willing to stand silent or, in some cases, encourage and even repeat the falsehoods. By doing so, they are forfeiting any claim to character and honor that they otherwise may have had.

This lack of truthfulness by politicians is certainly not limited to members of any political party. Just look at virtually any political campaign and watch for all the ways that candidates and their campaigns seek to hide their opinions and positions in vague generalities, and how they bend over backwards to distort the positions and records of their opponents.

Soon after his inauguration, President Obama had a one-on-one interview with Matt Lauer. Matt asked him if he could see his Blackberry, which President Obama had reportedly been loath to give up. The President said he didn’t have it with him, and just then it rang. He grinned and looked embarrassed. What did he have to gain by this falsehood? Was it just habitual?

What has happened to truth in public discourse? Sometimes it seems like we live in a world in which people will say anything that they think will advance their cause or protect them from harm, without any regard for whether it is really true. The most egregious offenders may be people who make their living in politics, but some media figures seem determined to catch up. Deceptiveness by the media is perhaps more disturbing than when it comes from politicians, because the news media is established for the purpose of providing objective information to the public. When the media is deliberately untruthful, it is being destructive of its principal role in society, and therefore being destructive of itself.

Let’s consider that any effort to be deliberately deceptive is a lie. If you speak, or don’t speak, with the purpose of misleading others, that is lying. Probably the great majority of us learned as children that lying is bad. I hope that the great majority of parents are still teaching their children that. But what do children observe in their parents, and what do we observe in the world around us?

Do you remember the world before “spin” meant providing an interpretation of a speech or an event that was intended to mislead the public? If you think about it, the word “spin” is itself a lie, because it is a seemingly benign term for a pernicious activity. Political spin is now an accepted activity, and the media report it faithfully.

I’m not a person who requires answering all questions truthfully, in all times and places. It’s not infrequent that I will tell someone that I am choosing not to answer a question. Often that’s because answering the question would betray an expressed or implied confidence. Saying that we are declining to answer a question is not being deceptive. But I think we need to consider that when we are deliberately untruthful to another person, we are disrupting and destroying our relationship with that person, because that relationship now has dishonesty as part of its basis. Fundamentally, when we are untruthful, we are diminishing ourselves. Our honor has suffered, and we are also separating ourselves from the truth of the world around us.
I don’t believe that there ever was a world where truth-telling was rigorously honored and practiced, but I do think that it has suffered dramatically in my lifetime. Can the world be put on a track toward restoring truthfulness in private and public discourse? I think so, if 1) more of us accept it as important and practice it in our own lives, and 2) more of us call attention to untruthfulness by others, most especially if we would stand to benefit by the lies. Unless we move in this direction, we are all condemned to live in a world where we cannot trust anyone around us, and where we fundamentally cannot respect ourselves. That is a miserable existence, indeed.