The History and Practice of Lying in Public Life

• In Event: Critical Education and Philosophy in a Post-Truth World

Abstract

This paper provides an introduction to the history and practice of lying in public life. The paper argues that such an approach is required to balance the emphasis on truth and truth-telling. The central thesis is that truth and lies, truth-telling and the practice of lying are concepts of binary opposition that help define one another. The paper reviews Foucault’s work on truth-telling before analysing the “culture of lying” and its relation to public life by focusing on Arendt’s work. The paper doesn’t remain purely at the theoretical level, however, as it reads this theory in conversation with excerpts from mainstream media news clippings.
The pervasive role of lying in modern politics requires an historical analysis. Cathy Caruth (2010: 79) explains that Arendt in her earlier work The Human Condition had elaborated the concept of political action that arose in the Greek polis “when words and deeds replaced the mute force of violence and created a public sphere in which men appeared before each other and created the world anew in unpredictable and unexpected ways.” Caruth (2010: 80) points out “the public realm has become a realm of deception” and in a world where there is such a conflict between factual truth and politics it is a short step to the denial of history and to the systematic political lying that invests itself in the public realm and creeps into the history books and into the culture more generally.
The real danger, Caruth (2010) maintains, is when the lie loses its traditional role within politics as an alternative means for determining true political action to become an all-consuming activity that replaces action and history altogether to deny history and constructing Arendt’s words an “entirely fictional world”, a possibility hugely enhanced and a world based more and more on PR and “image making” (p. 82). How much more forbidding is Arendt’s analysis when it is viewed at the end of the first couple of decades of the twenty-first century when the Internet has become the first truly global medium, the image has become supreme and finance culture has penetrated and percolated to heart of government. There are as far as I can see two saving graces and checks: first, we should be concerned if lying becomes the province of a one-party state and, second, drawing on Arendt, the individual lie or even the tissue of lies is only tolerable in the name of true political action and if it ever becomes the singular philosophical principle then we are lost.

References:

Caruth, C. (2010) Lying and History. Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt On Ethics and Politics, Roger Berkowitz, Jeffrey Katz, and Thomas Keenan (eds.), New York, Fordham University Press, pp. 79-92.
Foucault, M. (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge, Pantheon Books, New York. Translation from the French. L'Archeologie du Savoir, Gallimard, Paris, 1969.
Foucault, M. (1979) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage/Random House, New York .
Foucault, M. (1980) The History of Sexuality (Vol. 1-3), Vintage/Random House, New York.

Author

• Michael A. Peters, The University of Waikato