Damnable Lying

A Web of Self-Deceit

O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!

Sir Walter Scott

Telling habitual lies is not unusual amongst intellectuals.  So Paul Johnson alleges in his book, Intellectuals.  [Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988.]  He cites Rousseau (a notorious dissembler), Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Russell, Sartre and Gollancz.  Their lying was systemic, infecting their personal relationships (wives, children, friends), their writing and public personae. 

The more a culture removes itself from the constant exfoliation of Scripture upon the epidermis of its conscience, the more it tends to tolerate, accept, and practise mendacity.

Despite this, and despite in many cases the public exposure of their respective mendacities, the public has continued to fawn over them--both whilst alive and long after their deaths.  In a post-Christian culture, this comes as no surprise.  In a Christian culture--or a culture pervasively influenced by Christian ethics--lying is regarded as an egregious evil.  The reason why rests with God, Who is Truth.  He has declared definitively that He hates lies.

There are six things that the Lord hates,
    seven that are an abomination to him:

haughty eyes, a lying tongue,
    and hands that shed innocent blood,
a heart that devises wicked plans,
    feet that make haste to run to evil,
a false witness who breathes out lies,
    and one who sows discord among brothers.
(Proverbs 6: 16-19)

Notice that lying gets a condemnatory double billing.
  Consequently cultures influenced by Christianity place a great store upon truthfulness and truth telling.  But it is naive to project a Christian concern for truthfulness upon mankind in general.  As a result it can come as a great shock to discover that others, not slain by the Spirit of Truth, mould the fabric of their lives around duplicity and lies.  The more a culture removes itself from the constant exfoliation of Scripture upon the epidermis of its conscience, the more it tends to tolerate, accept, and practise mendacity.  The more it canonises its secular prophets, elevating them to the status of patron saints,  despite their notorious and publicly-exposed dissembling.  What's a little lying amongst the gliterati?

One of the more notorious recent examples amongst intellectuals and the celeb-set has been Lillian Hellman, who, in later life was lauded and lionised by the Commentariat.  She was a playright and author and at the end of her career was idolised and canonised.  It turns out her career was forged by theft, plagiarism, and deceit.  The seventies were the decade of her star status:

She found herself with a  completely new reputation as a master of prose style and was asked to take writing seminars at Berkeley and MIT.  The awards and honours came rolling in.  New York University made her Woman of the Year, Brandeis gave her its Theartre Arts Medal . . . . By 1977 she was back at the top of Hollywood soceity, presenting at the the Academy Awards. . . . On the East Coast, she was the queen of radical chic and the most important single power-broker among the progressive intelligensia and the society people who seethed round them.  Indeed in the New York of the 1970's she dispensed the same kind of power which Sartre had wielded in Paris, 1945-55. [Johnson, op cit., p. 301.]

A "celeb" indeed.  Sadly, the glory of her last rising was based substantially upon the testimony of her autobiographies.  She had discovered that the most powerful means of dissembling was to appear to be shockingly frank in admitting short-comings and guilt.  It was a well-worn path.

Thus Tolstoy's diaries, honest though they appear to be, in fact hide far more than they reveal.  Rousseau's Confessions, as Diderot and others who really knew him perceived at the time, are an elaborate exercise in deception, a veneer of candour concealing a bottomless morass of mendacity.  Hellman's memoirs conform to this cunning pattern.  She often admits to vagueness, confusion and lapses of memory, giving readers the impression that she is engaged in making a constant effort to sift the exact truth from the shadowy sands of the past.  Hence when the books first appeared many reviewers, including some of the most perceptive, praised her truthfulness. [Ibid., p. 302.]

In fact, it emerged that Hellman had taken events from the lives of others, and recast them as her own history and experience.  She lied about herself to burnish her celebrity credentials.  Like Sartre, Rousseau, Tolstoy and Hemingway she could not resist making her auto-biography a pastiche of sensationalised fiction.  Despite this, she remains lionised and adored by the Chattering Classes, as witnessed by her biographical entry in Wikipedia. 

Hellman had participated in a long feud with author, Mary McCarthy who alleged on a TV talk-show that "every word she (Hellman) writes is a lie, including, 'and' and 'the'."  Hellman, litigious-terrible, sued.  In time this provoked a reaction and the truth about Hellman's dissembling, plagiarism, and lying emerged.  But to this day the hagiography concerning Hellman remains largely intact.

Despite all the revelations and exposures, the nailing of so many falsehoods, the Lillian Hellman myth industry continued serenely on its course.  In Janurary, eighteen months after her death, the hagiographical play Lillian opened in New York, and was well attended. . . . (T)here is plenty of life, and lies, in the old girl yet. [Ibid., p. 305

To the mendacious, lying is a useful tool to advance one's interests.  Such perversity betrays spiritual and ethical allegiance to the Great Dissembler, the Father of  Lies.  Dependant children rarely stray from their  hearth and home.  Mendacity becomes the social norm--from cheating in exams, to "exaggerating" in one's resume and job applications, to creating fictional events to advance one's political causes (such as anti-racists tacking up racist slurs at Oberlin College to demonstrate the existence of racism on the campus.)  Lying is what Unbelief does.