A Brief History of Lying
Some level of truthfulness has always been seen as essential to human society.
-SISSELA BOK
The tendency to tell lies is a natural tendency … , spontaneous and universal.
-JEAN PIAGET
Three decades ago, a number of primates were taught to “speak,” using a modified form of human sign language. They included a year-old gorilla named Koko who learned to sign under the tutelage of psychologist Penny Patterson. Soon after she and Koko began to converse, Patterson noted how often Koko used signs to deceive her. After breaking a toy cat, Koko signed that a colleague of her trainer was the actual guilty party. When apprehended eating crayons, she pretended to be using them as lipstick, signing “lip.” Koko later used a chopstick she stole from the silverware drawer to poke holes in a window screen. Caught in the act and asked what she was doing, the gorilla signed “smoke mouth” (for a pretend smoking game she liked to play with sticks). When her ruses were pointed out to her, Koko signed “Bad again. Koko bad again.”
Patterson’s experience mirrored that of colleagues. Others who taught simians to sign soon found them signing deceptively. Although some have questioned whether such episodes demonstrate actual, conscious deception, the trainers themselves had little doubt that their pupils were deliberately putting them on. Furthermore, the more signs these primate Richard Nixons learned, the more “lies” they were able to convey. This suggests that lying comes as easily as truth telling to our evolutionary ancestors. Is the same thing true of Homo sapiens?
As the only species that can actually talk, Homo sapiens is the only one that can lie out loud. This capacity gave early human beings a major evolutionary edge. They’d already demonstrated their mastery of the deceptive arts by hunting prey with artfully hidden traps or by tricking them into running off cliffs. As the human capacity to speak developed, so did our ability not only to trick prey and deceive predators but to lie to other humans. This too could be advantageous. Those who could persuade members of a rival tribe that a westward-moving herd of caribou had migrated east won a battle in the war for survival. Verbal deceitfulness gave early humans such a survival advantage that some evolutionary biologists believe the capacity to speak and the ability to lie developed hand in hand. Words made lying easier, while lying called for ever more words.
At the outset, human speech was probably not much different from the grunts, clicks, and shrieks of a chimpanzee. Early on there was little need for anything more complex. Wanting to tell others about important events (“Lion chased me!”) probably took language to a higher level of complexity. But the real creativity of language only blossomed when—like Koko—we wanted to deceive
others. Once words could be used to depict the world around us, why stick to the facts? This was especially true when we had something to conceal. As philosopher Karl Popper observed, “the moment when language became human was very closely related to the moment when a man invented a story, a myth in order to excuse a mistake he had made.”
Imagine an early human who is sent off with three spears to catch some fish for his tribe’s evening meal. While wading in a river he stumbles and drops his spears. They float downstream. What is our poor fisherman to do, not just to feed his flock but to save his face? This dilemma would call for great powers of imagination to come up with a credible-sounding story about the enemy tribesmen who ambushed him on his way to the river but whom he was able to fend off, thank goodness, although they did steal his spears.
Some see in such early falsehoods the birth of human creativity. A capacity to lie allowed us to depict not only what is but what isn’t. To fictionalize, in other words. Our hapless fisherman with his ability to spin a yarn might have been Mark Twain’s earliest ancestor. The need to tell lies required bigger vocabularies and expanded cognitive powers. The demands of inventing and selling falsehoods helped Homo sapien brains develop new synapses.
But that was hardly the end of the story. Once early human beings grasped their capacity to say what isn’t as well as what is, they undoubtedly realized that some form of regulation was necessary. When was it permissible to tell lies and when not?
One of the less appreciated dimensions of Darwin’s revolution was his suggestion that nature didn’t care a fig whether spiders, chimps, or human beings were honest. Her only concern was
whether such a trait was adaptive. Darwin’s own conclusion was a mixed bag. Like most naturalists, he noted that the natural world was full of hustlers, hoaxers, con artists, and swindlers. This was as true of human beings as it was of Venus flytraps. Honesty, Darwin believed, was a learned, not an innate, virtue.
I agree with Darwin that we have no more inherent will to tell the truth than we do to tell lies. It’s a matter of context. All human beings have competing urges to deceive and be truthful. Depending on the circumstances, both tendencies improved our odds of survival. A capacity for deception enhanced one’s ability to hunt prey, evade predators, and thwart enemies. Closer to home, the picture was quite different. Stable human groups can no more incorporate those who routinely hoodwink each other than banks can manage money with an open-vault policy. It doesn’t take much reflection to recognize that the capacity to deceive which gave early Homo sapiens an edge outside the tribe eroded their bonds within. This realization must have been one of the earliest ethical impulses of our distant ancestors.
From that insight grew a nearly universal emphasis on honesty. At the outset this emphasis was not based on any need to speak accurately or to do the right thing. All that mattered was a need for trust among those who lived together. Trust is hard to sustain among those who lie to each other. That’s why pressure to be honest has always been more social than spiritual, more outer than inner. The Buddha himself warned that lying not only degraded the liar, but destroyed the atmosphere of trust within society.
Darwin agreed. Even though he believed we have no inherent will to be honest, this did not mean that ethics could be thrown into the dustbin of history. For human survival, fidelity—keeping
faith with our own—was essential, far more important than honesty per se. But fidelity requires honesty. As Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man, “There cannot be fidelity without truth.” If fidelity is what spawns honesty, it stands to reason that truthfulness is a virtue only among those who feel attached to each other.
This perspective can be seen in our very words. Historically, terms signifying truth and truthfulness have had more to do with Charles Darwin’s concept of fidelity to our own than with Immanuel Kant’s conviction that we should never lie, or even with the scientific need for factual accuracy. The Moroccan term haqq signifies not just “truth” or “reality,” but “duty” and “obligation.” In German, wahr refers to that which is factual, while treu refers to a kind of truthfulness that’s based more on loyalty. For English speakers, the word truth does double duty. Just as the word sound can refer both to something we hear and to someone who’s dependable, the word true has multiple meanings: reliable, on the one hand, factually accurate on the other.
Like wahr in German, the Old English word trouthe signified loyalty, fidelity, and reliability. The strong social bond suggested by that term could even include marriage (“I pledge thee my troth”). A person who was “true” was someone who could be counted on, whose word was good. In time the concept of truthfulness came to signify that not just your word but your words could be counted on—that they were “true.” Finally, truth became a synonym for veracity itself. Although we still sometimes use the word “true” in its original sense—as when the Beach Boys exhort us to “be true to your school”—more often today true is synonymous with accurate.
For most people for most of time, however, this term was used more in the Beach Boys sense than in the scientific or ethical version.
This is not merely a matter of semantics. Speech reflects values. As anthropologists routinely discover, among indigenous peoples whose lives resemble those of our early ancestors, the concept of truthfulness emphasizes social cohesion far more than factual accuracy. Among the Tiv of Nigeria, for example, honesty refers primarily to reciprocal obligations. “‘Truth’ in Tivland,” observed anthropologist Paul Bohannan, “is an elusive matter because smooth social relationships are deemed of higher cultural value than mere precision of fact.” Bohannan’s colleague Ethel Albert discovered the same thing in Burundi. To those whom Albert studied in this small central African country, the worst sort of liar was not someone who made things up but one who broke a promise—to do a favor, say, or give a gift. Ethel Albert was also well versed in the ways of the American Navajo. Lying, she found, was condemned among the Navajo less because it was wrong and more because it was likely to disturb group harmony. Traditionally, this tribe had two standards for proper behavior, a less stringent one involving common decency toward everyone, and another involving strict obligations toward fellow Navajo. The Navajo even used different words for lies told outside the tribe (not that big a deal) and those told within (an extremely big deal).
Those who have studied the ethical systems of tribal societies have found common elements. They include an emphasis on honesty among kinfolk combined with an acute awareness that everyone has an impulse to lie; a distinction between playful deception and malevolent lying; and, most important, a sharp distinction between ethical obligations to outsiders and ethical obligations to insiders. “When I read what the white man has written of our customs, I laugh,” commented a member of the Tiv, “for it is the custom of our people to lie as a matter of course to outsiders, especially the white man.”
Social groups historically have had a fundamentally different attitude toward telling the truth to insiders and telling the truth to outsiders. Few moral systems wasted time fretting over lies told outside the primary group. According to philosopher Bernard Williams, most incorporated the thought that “some people deserve more in the way of truth than others.” That could be man’s oldest ethical principle: honesty for insiders, whatever works for everyone else. Because truthfulness was seen primarily as a tool for keeping social bonds in good repair, the need to be truthful did not apply to those outside one’s society. Deceiving an outsider was considered little different from deceiving a hyena, say, or a cheetah. Tricking strangers was considered no more sinful than tricking a bison into running off a cliff, or luring a fox into a trap. Traditional Bantu parents even warned their children not to tell the truth to strangers for fear of subjecting their family to witchcraft.
To this day, outsiders are considered fair game for prankish lies. This can lead to serious misunderstanding. In his book
The Russian Mind, Ronald Hingley speculated that the tendency of tourists to dismiss Russians as hopelessly dishonest was based in part on the fact that they themselves were such an easy target for blarney. Lie as prank is commonplace throughout the world, each society having its own twists, turns, and terms for this practice. Among some Muslim Lebanese, the word
kizb refers to the common leg pulling engaged in by residents. Afghans call their own capacity for hyperbole
laaf . The Greek term
psemata refers to whoppers that only an outsider would take seriously. Samoans call their version
taufa’ase’e. Taufa’ase’e may be what Samoan maidens were engaged in when they told Margaret Mead about their lusty
love lives. Sixty years after Mead completed her fieldwork for
Coming of Age in Samoa, one of her subjects told an interviewer, “As you know, Samoan girls are terrific liars when it comes to joking, but Margaret accepted our trumped-up stories as though they were true.”
3One reason indigenous peoples welcome anthropologists into their lives is that they provide fresh, gullible targets for put-ons. During her fieldwork among the Saami of Lapland, ethnographer Myrdene Anderson found herself the target of repeated deception. A remarkable number of her hosts introduced themselves to Anderson as “shamans.” Others claimed to own nonexistent reindeer. “Lying, bluff, secrecy, and espionage are all coordinated into their dealings with non-Saami and nonhumans,” wrote Anderson of those she’d come to study. The size of their reindeer herds was a particular source of hyperbole, vastly underestimated for tax collectors, wildly inflated to other outsiders (sometimes by a factor of ten). Being able to pull the reindeer hide over others’ eyes was a source of Saami status, Anderson found. It wasn’t enough just to be an effective trickster, however. No society, least of all that of the Saami, could survive if any and all lie telling was considered acceptable. The challenge, wrote Anderson, lay in ensuring that one’s reputation as “a humorous, clever and sporty deceiver exceeds that as an excessive, trivial, or malicious one.”
Although nearly all cultures condone some form of recreational lying (we call ours “practical jokes”), a clear distinction is usually
made between playful deceptions and ones that are mean-spirited. Russians distinguish between malevolent lies they call lozh and the put-ons they call vranyo. To be caught pulling someone’s leg while engaged in vranyo is no big deal. To be revealed as a liar peddling lozh is. One practice is considered playful and benign; the other, loathsome and despicable.
Every society regulates honesty in its own way. Some are relatively flexible, others more unbending. The Incas put liars in prison. Ancient Greeks put their lying gods on pedestals. After reviewing accounts of visitors to scores of different tribes, philosopher-sociologist Herbert Spencer compiled an extensive list of societies that strongly emphasized truth telling and others that displayed more tolerance of dishonesty. What all shared was a recognition that social systems must take account of the fact that when left to their own devices, human beings are prone to tell lies.
All societies must reconcile the fact that lying is socially toxic with the fact that nearly all their members engage in this practice. Every belief system does its best to regulate dishonesty with taboos, sanctions, and norms. Few such systems claim that every lie is always wrong. This would put them too far out of synch with facts on the ground. Therefore a major task for all belief systems has been to determine when it’s permissible to tell a lie.
Those participating in this search have usually taken three basic approaches: (1) lying is wrong, period (Augustine, Wesley, Kant); (2) it all depends (Montaigne, Voltaire, Bacon); (3) there is something to be said for a good lie well told (Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Wilde).
Greek gods were celebrated for their skill at deceiving humans and each other. In The Odyssey, Odysseus the dissembler is a far
more intriguing character than Achilles the truth teller. When Athena, no slouch herself in the deception arts, approaches Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca in disguise, she is favorably impressed by the persuasive yarns he spins about himself. “Crafty must be he,” Athena tells Odysseus, “and Knavish, who would outdo thee in all manner of guile.”
Even early ethicists who warned against telling lies seldom did so on absolute terms. Plato, who condemned lying on general principles, nonetheless thought it was crucial for the guardians of his ideal republic to propagate “noble lies” so that the masses would accept their place and not disturb social harmony. Across the Adriatic, Cicero’s On Duties emphasized the need for truth telling among free men. In Cicero’s world, lying to a slave was not considered dishonest.
Most societies leave the question of determining which lies are justified to their clergy. Over the millennia theologians of all stripes have occupied themselves with explaining why some lies are worse than others. Even though the fourth of Buddhism’s five precepts admonishes the faithful to abstain from lying, Buddhists distinguish between major lies (such as feigning enlightenment), minor lies (making things up), and lies told to benefit others (as when a doctor conceals the truth from a patient who is dying). The latter in particular are not considered much of a problem.
Like Buddhism’s fourth precept, Hindu ethics proscribe lying. The seminal text Laws of Manu admonishes Hindi never to “swear an oath falsely, even in a trifling matter.” That seems clear enough. In its next passage, however, Manu’s laws advise that “there is no crime in a [false] oath about women whom one desires, marriages, fodder for cows, fuel, and helping a priest.”
This is how it goes in most theology. Admonitions not to lie are followed by a list of circumstances in which lying is permissible.
Muhammad said his followers should always be truthful, except when a lie was necessary to preserve domestic harmony, save their life, or keep the peace. The Talmud also notes a need to keep peace as justifying falsehood. According to Judaism’s civil and religious laws, a pious scholar is always to tell the truth except when asked about his marital relations, or to avoid sounding boastful, or when telling others how well he has been hosted might burden his host with too many other guests.
Both Testaments of the Bible, and the Old Testament especially, combine condemnations of dishonesty with admiring accounts of successful deception: Abraham claiming that Sarah was his sister, not his wife; Jacob passing as his brother Esau to win his father’s blessing (and inheritance); Egyptian midwives rescuing Hebrew children by telling Pharaoh that their mothers were so vigorous that—unlike Egyptian women—they gave birth before the midwives arrived. The most admired biblical liar of all was Solomon, who pretended he would dismember the baby two women claimed was theirs. In
The Concise Book of Lying, Evelin Sullivan characterizes the Old Testament attitude toward deception as “a pragmatic acceptance of lies as part and parcel of life in the world, necessary or even commendable at times, understandable always.”
4Even though the circumstances in which lies were permitted varied with each religion, on one point most agreed: lies told to believers were far worse than ones told to nonbelievers. Although strictures against lying were clearly part of Judeo-Christian ethics, even there the insider-outsider dichotomy kept rearing its head. Truthfulness was reserved for one’s dealings with God, and his chosen
people. When God told Moses that members of his flock should not steal, deal falsely, or “lie to one another,” it wasn’t clear that this extended beyond the Israelites themselves. Believers were admonished not to bear false witness “against thy neighbor.” Presumably this did not include the Canaanites.
Admonitions not to lie grew more frequent and more direct in the New Testament. There, Satan was portrayed as “the father of lies.” Liars now were worse than tribal norm breakers; they were disciples of the devil himself. Since Jesus said to always tell the truth, oaths no longer needed to be sworn. These proscriptions get closer to the concept of conscience, the notion that lying is wrong because it is sinful, not just because it breaks the rules.
It took Saint Augustine to establish this ethic without equivocation. A promiscuous liar as a young man, Augustine laid down the law on lying with the clarity and zeal of a convert. In many tracts written during the late fourth and early fifth centuries, Augustine assessed this issue in terms we have no problem understanding even today. One of the dilemmas he posed—whether it was right to tell a perilously sick father that his son just died—is still used in contemporary considerations of honesty. Augustine rebuked contemporaries who felt that telling lies was not sinful so long as one kept the truth firmly in one’s heart. He took special pains to refute the notion that it was acceptable to deceive strangers as if such people were “not our neighbors in the community of truth.” That community was the only one to which we owed our allegiance. This denoted an important shift away from loyalty to one’s kin and toward loyalty to a principle. Augustine considered lying to anyone—not just to one’s own kind—wrong.
This was an awfully strict standard to meet. Should those suffering religious persecution tell the truth to their persecutors? That
dilemma confronted the devout of many faiths. Shia Muslims being persecuted by Sunnis found justification for hiding their true beliefs in the Islamic doctrine of takiya. According to a verse in the Koran, “Whether ye conceal what is in your hearts or reveal it, Allah knows it.” A medieval Koranic commentator took this to mean that “if anyone is compelled and professes unbelief with his tongue, while his heart contradicts him, to escape his enemies, no blame falls on him, because God takes his servants as their hearts believe.”
This is remarkably close to the concept of mental reservation developed by Reformation-era Catholics who were being persecuted by Protestants. According to this concept, one might mislead persecutors with half-truths, retaining the more important half in one’s heart. Thus, if a priest incognito was asked if he was a priest, he might reply, “No, I am not,” while thinking to himself “to such as you.” If asked whether he’d performed Mass, he could say, “I swear I didn’t,” then murmur to himself “today.” This is the theological counterpart of a child’s crossed fingers. To those facing hot irons and fingernail removal, the moral relief of the mental reservation is understandable. In time, however, it became an easy way to rationalize all manner of prevarication. Ultimately this dispensation morphed into a form of license, permitting a chicken thief, for example, to say, “I didn’t steal a chicken,” while thinking, “today,” so God would know that he might be a thief but at least he wasn’t a liar.
Upright Protestants saw such sophistry as one more example of Catholic venality. A key grievance of the Reformation was that the church had gone overboard with its many dispensations for liars who invoked the mental reservation. An echo of this concern can be heard when elected officials and new citizens of the United
States take their oaths “without any mental reservation.”
In response to what they saw as flaccid morality among Catholics, many Protestant reformers took a doctrinaire stand against dishonesty. John Wesley considered lying “an abomination,” and endorsed what he called “that saying of the ancient Father, ‘I would not tell a wilful lie to save the souls of the whole world.’” The concurrent rise of science during the Enlightenment placed new emphasis on truthfulness. Scientific inquiry depended on an ethic of accurate testimony. So did the emerging rule of law. This ethic also contributed to the rise of capitalism, with its need for reliable data and personal trust. Max Weber thought that was why Protestants, with their stern emphasis on probity, did so well in free-market economies. “Honest as a Huguenot”—a term in common use during the seventeenth century—had both religious and economic overtones. The unusual success of Quaker merchants was due in part to their reputation for integrity. Even Benjamin Franklin’s puritanical creed of “Honesty is the best policy” had economic significance. Without such a policy the extension of credit would have been impossible.
Honesty’s market value is too little appreciated in the history of ethics. Truth telling underlies not just individual reputations but the health of society as a whole. Immanuel Kant’s case for absolute honesty was based in part on the fact that legal contracts assume truthfulness. The rule of law could be established only among those whose basic honesty could be counted on. That was why Kant felt so strongly that members of a healthy society couldn’t pick and choose which truths to tell. Like Augustine before him, Kant challenged the notion that truth was reserved for those who deserved it. “For a lie always harms another,” wrote the German philosopher; “if not some other particular man, still
it harms mankind generally, for it vitiates the source of law itself.”
The larger and more complex society grew, the greater was the need for ethics that shifted the moral locus from outer norms to inner conviction. Tribal mores could no more build the trust among strangers required by civil societies, scientific inquiry, and free-market economies than donkey carts could ship their goods. “Under modern conditions,” wrote sociologist Georg Simmel, “the lie, therefore, becomes something much more devastating than it was earlier, something which questions the very foundations of our life. If among ourselves today, the lie were as negligible a sin as it was among the Greek gods, the Jewish patriarchs, or the South Sea islanders ; and if we were not deterred from it by the utmost severity of moral law; then the organization of modern life would be simply impossible; for, modern life is a ‘credit economy’ in a much broader than a strictly economic sense.”
Victorian Englishmen put their own spin on this issue. Using Cicero’s On Duties as a handbook, and tapping their own heritage of chivalry, upper-class Englishmen were expected never to lie to one another. (Lying to a French peasant, or even a cockney fishmonger, was not considered any big deal, any more than lying to Indians or slaves was thought to be a problem among colonial English gentlemen such as George Washington.) During Darwin’s time, “scrupulous adherence to truth” (in the words of one) was taken for granted among gentlemen of good character. Presumably the security they felt in their social position obviated any need to embellish the truth. “Christian gentlemen” were thought to be too self-assured to have to lie. In fact, an upper-class Englishman was
considered so immune from any tacky urge to dissemble that his word alone was taken as proof in a court of law. This commitment to scrupulous honesty did not occur in a vacuum, however. As Robert Wright points out in The Moral Animal, most residents of Victorian-era England lived in the equivalent of small towns. They kept an eye on each other. Even if their sense of class and Christian duty did not promote honesty among English gentlemen, the fact that they might get caught did.