The Roots of Today's Lying Epidemic

THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT
VIRUS

By Lynne Cheney

People think that what goes on in college English departments doesn’t matter much to the rest of our country. But in fact, English departments have been a primary source of the epidemic of lying currently upon us. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, student radicals began moving into English departments, cultivating the idea that there is no truth—and therefore no possibility of untruth. As the radicals gained power and their views spread across the university and through society, lying came to be regarded not so much as a transgression that ought to produce guilt, but as an alternative “construction,” a “narrative” with all the legitimacy that the unenlightened attribute to “truth.”

The ’60s radicals, to give them their due, became skeptics for good reason. The U.S. government had not been truthful about the defining event of their generation, the Vietnam War. Watching officials propagate versions of events designed to protect bureaucratic interests was a lesson in how information and power can be dangerously intertwined. From there, it no doubt seemed a small step to conclude that knowledge and power are always intertwined, that there is no objective truth but only—to quote Michel Foucault, one of the favorite philosophers of the ’60s generation—different “regimes of truth.”

It was, of course, an immense leap they were making, one that was too much for most philosophy departments, where demand for a certain rigor of thought meant that “postmodernism,” as this new creed came to be called, was generally held in low regard. But in departments of English, history, sociology, and art history, postmodern thought was exalted, first at elite institutions like Yale and finally almost everywhere. So much intellectual excitement did the new thinking generate that even law schools wanted to partake. Duke English professor Stanley Fish, who attacked truth with all the fervor of an old-time preacher denouncing sin, was invited to teach at Duke’s law school. At Harvard, a law professor auditing a class in the English department explained that lawyers increasingly understood that law was just like literature—a matter of interpretation.

By the 1980s, it was a rare student who went through college without encountering the view that there is no such thing as truth, that the things we think are true are just the “constructs” of dominant groups. Some professors, on the grounds that there is no truth, were unabashedly using the classroom to propagate their political agendas. Some students complained. Others joked, advising, for example, that men enrolled in women’s studies courses should pretend at first to be male chauvinists, then have a conversion: “You’re bound to get an A.” But many students, fearing retaliation, went along. “I’m not here to philosophize my beliefs,” one told me a few years ago, “I’m here to get a decent grade.”

There has lately been a great outcry on college campuses about cheating, but when students feel compelled to represent someone else’s beliefs as their own in order to get a good grade, should it surprise us that they have few qualms about representing someone else’s work as their own? As they move out into the world, where truth-telling can be dull and disadvantageous, is it any wonder they construct personal versions of reality? Having heard time and again that there is no such thing as truth, why should they bother to tell it? Or to condemn others—the President, for example—who do not feel constrained by old-fashioned ideas about honesty?

Ironically, this English-department thinking, now flourishing in our culture, is no longer doing so well in English departments. The Duke English department, once the envy of postmodernists everywhere, has imploded in insult and recrimination, and members of its once-vaunted faculty are escaping for jobs at other institutions.

But in other academic venues, the situation is less hopeful. At colleges of education, for instance, professors faced with research findings they don’t like (say, that phonics is an effective way to teach reading), are increasingly sounding like Michel Foucault. They talk about objective research being no more than a power ploy, “part of the ‘games of truth’ we practice,” in the words of a researcher at the Appalachian Educational Laboratory. An Indiana University education professor writes that people who look for “empirical validation” (otherwise known as evidence) do so only out of self-interest, in hopes of imposing their “regime or politics of truth.”

Postmodernism is now—thankfully—on its way out of English departments. But it is still in our universities, still running its destructive course.

FROM EUPHEMISM
TO BLOODY LIES

By David Lehman

In the eighteenth-century France of painters Fragonard and Watteau, a lady told her confessor that she had “esteem” for a certain courtier. “Et combien de fois a-t-il vous estimé?” (“And how many times has he ‘esteemed’ you?”), the priest responded.

Euphemisms aren’t always as witty, but they all serve the same purpose: concealment, denial, obfuscation. When limited to the traditional areas—sex, the bathroom, and death—euphemisms are white lies, expedient illusions. When they overtake a discourse, they are dangerous—for the language itself and for human freedom.

We live in an age of euphemisms. In America it’s O.K. to think bad thoughts or do bad deeds. But it is not O.K. to say them out loud or call them by their right name. You aren’t lying, you’re “telling your own personal truth.” You’re not promiscuous but “sexually expressive.” You’re not a plagiarist, you just practice “voice-merging.”

Political correctness is the euphemism made instinctive. It is the systematic substitution of wish-fulfillment for reality. The U.S. Postal Service issues a commemorative stamp honoring the painter Jackson Pollock but airbrushes out the cigarette in the famous photo of him. The aim is to stamp out cigarettes, and perhaps it is a worthy aim, but the erasure not only bullies the populace but dishonors the truth, Pollock’s truth, which is that he was not only a great painter but also a highly volatile, hard-drinking chain-smoker hell-bent on self-destruction.

The Postal Service wants to clean up Pollock’s image. But that is not so desirable as it may appear. A citizen defending the erasure says the stamp properly focuses our attention on the painter’s art rather than on his addictions. But isn’t it possible—more than possible—that the two cannot be sundered so easily?

Many public lies are benign at the beginning. The sexless “flight attendant” is adopted, and “stewardess” retired, toward the elimination of sexual discrimination. But what is the actual effect of eliminating the sex of the subject? Does it not imply that the suffix, “ess,” connotes inferiority and therefore expresses condescension? Whatever effect the change may have on sexual harassment or sexist attitudes, it has the definite effect of weakening the language by making it less specific, less vigorous, more verbose, and in the instance of “flight attendant” or “waitperson” more nearly neutered.

What accounts for today’s universality of euphemism? T. S. Eliot understated the short answer in his “Four Quartets”: “Human kind cannot bear very much reality.” Our century is supposedly rife with disillusionment: the lost generation following World War I, the existential angst following the liberation of the death camps, the supposed cynicism of Gen Xers. In fact, however, the general appetite for illusion has grown to gargantuan limits. The movies are the definitive art of our time precisely because they are the most efficient means of bringing illusion and wish-fulfillment to the greatest number of people.

The longer answer explaining today’s euphemism boom originates in some disturbing linguistic claims promoted over the last generation by certain academics in Europe and America. These claims can be summarized in the notion that we are not responsible for our words, because the language we speak is itself a factory of lies.

Modern linguistics is built on the principle that the means of communication are neither reliable nor politically neutral but that, on the contrary, language itself deceives. Because there is said to be a chasm between rhetoric and reality “deconstructionists” bend the text (never a poem or novel, always a “text”) to their will. Each work examined is deconstructed to demonstrate the impossibility of creating a coherent statement, let alone a truthful one, out of words. Thus the shocking discovery that language can be used to lie, distort, conceal, and fabricate (and it is a shocking discovery at whatever age one makes it) grew into the suspicion that what sometimes happens (usually with a deliberate motive) must always happen, with a kind of inevitability independent of human will. Lying is claimed to be a universal practice. Of course, “everyone does it all the time” is all the defense any liar needs.

Deconstruction and the broader field of “critical theory” are said to have crested as forces within American universities. I am not altogether convinced. I believe the tools of deconstruction and its mood of radical suspicion are everywhere present in the study of the humanities. Deconstructionism’s favorite technique of flipping the order of any two elements where one is held inferior to another may be interesting exercise when applied to opposing pairs like man/woman or white/black. But when the procedure is done with truth/falsehood and virtue/vice, the results can be calamitous. Many theorists, as the Alan Sokal physics hoax proved, are now even willing to throw out science and scientific method, as if, say, gravity were merely one more concept to be debunked.

I wonder if deconstructionism’s denigration of the importance of authorship—especially Michel Foucault’s insinuation that authorship and copyright law may be capitalist tools—made plagiarism more acceptable? I worry that academic Marxism’s reduction of humanity to the social and economic forces acting upon it cannot help but diminish such virtues as honesty, integrity, and honor. I am concerned that today’s dogma that the powerful rewrite history may devalue history itself into a sequence of episodes in which might makes right, and any means of attaining your goal—lies and deceit included—are justified.

The idea, so common in American college English departments today, that Marxism still has intellectual integrity seems to me one more instance of stubborn illusion, the triumph of the “theoretical” over the bloody truth. I asked a self-described Marxist how he managed to keep the faith despite the wretched history of the Soviet experiment. Oh, Russia didn’t count, he answered, “they didn’t really try it there.” In this man’s view, the Russian Revolution was not genuine Marxism, and therefore the Gulag, the show trials, and Stalinism were irrelevant. This refusal to surrender the abstraction in the face of the disastrously real is true sentimentality. It would be poignant if it weren’t implicated in the general assault on truth that we now find in the highest offices of the land, as well as in the low.

A LYING TONGUE LASTS
ONLY A MOMENT

By Gene Edward Veith

Listening to President Clinton’s explanation of how he didn’t really lie in his grand jury testimony brought back fond memories of my grad school days. What Clinton did was take the words sex, alone, and is and proceed to “deconstruct” them. That is, he took ordinary terms whose meaning seems perfectly clear and dissected them so closely that they dissolved into contradictions, uncertainties, and conundrums. He was not lying because, in his rendering of the words, he was never alone with Miss Lewinsky (since other people were in the White House), and they never had sex (since he did not consider oral sex to be sex). If the Independent Counsel and the grand jury had other definitions in mind, these would simply be their reading of the words. In a tour de force that would have won him an A in any literary criticism seminar, the President presented meaning as inherently problematic, hinging completely on each individual’s interpretation.

The President’s performance was complemented by the “White House spokesmen,” who also must have taken their share of English lit. seminars. According to contemporary critical theory, interpretation itself is a matter of constructing paradigms—also known as “plausibility structures” or “interpretive models”—to account for data. White House spinmasters proved adept at accounting for even the most incriminating evidence, by offering a succession of possible scenarios in which they depicted Miss Lewinsky at various times as a stalker, a tool of the right-wing conspiracy, and a troubled youth whom the President was counseling.

In the nation’s colleges and universities, students are taught that truth is not discovered, but built. If there is no objective truth, of course, it is impossible to lie. Or, put another way, if there is no objective truth, everything is a lie.

Thinkers in pre-modern times believed in a vast array of truths—rational, empirical, moral, and theological. “Modern” thinkers restricted truth to what can be known through the scientific method. The “postmodernists” have taken the next step, rejecting even scientific certainty and dismantling the category of objective truth altogether.

Having allowed these redefinitions to take place, it should not be shocking to us to discover that some of our most contemporary political leaders are fluent liars. Nor should we be surprised at the “promising young journalists” who get caught making up news stories, the TV producers who mix fact and fiction, the deceptive advertisers, the new profession of “spin doctors.” These and other cadres of new liars are simply acting out what they were taught in school.

Postmodern relativism has become a commonplace not only in the academic world but on nearly every level of the culture. Grade-school children are being taught according to “constructivist” educational theory—which encourages them to construct their own histories, word-spellings, and math rules. Television takes seriously the literary critic’s canard that, since truths are all constructions, there is no difference between the real and the fictive. And according to a recent survey, 66 percent of the American people believe “there is no
absolute truth.”

Moral categories such as “lying,” “honesty,” and “hypocrisy” come out of a far different worldview, as do legal categories such as “swearing under oath,” “proof beyond a reasonable doubt,” and “perjury.” The foundation of Western civilization was formed by the classical Greeks and Romans and the biblical Jews and Christians, all of whom believed in transcendent truths and transcendent moral virtues.

By contrast, Jacques Derrida, a key philosopher of postmodernism, argues that because there is no “transcendent logos,” there can be no objective meaning. Logos—Greek for “word,” “speech,” “reason”—is central to Greek philosophy and also to the New Testament’s famous passage, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In other words, Derrida is claiming that, because there is no God and no Word of God, there is no ground for asserting a rational order in the universe or an objective meaning in language.

Postmodernism, by its own admission, is the logical consequence of the rejection of God. When we “turn our backs on God,” says the Hebrew prophet Isaiah, we start “uttering lies our hearts have conceived” and soon discover that “truth has stumbled in the streets, honesty cannot enter. Truth is nowhere to be found, and whoever shuns evil becomes a prey” (Isaiah 59:13-15).

Postmodernism cannot last long, for it is an intellectual, moral, and cultural dead end. Without truth there can be no education, no moral consensus, no laws or norms that are essential for culture. “Truthful lips endure forever, but a lying tongue lasts only a moment” says Proverbs 12:19.

On the other hand, those who do believe in a transcendent logos—namely, God and His Word—have a foundation for truth of every kind, and a reason to seek it. It is on those who believe there is such a thing as truth that the job of rebuilding our intellectual and cultural infrastructure will fall.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE
STOP TEACHING TRUTH?

By Christina Hoff Sommers

In the fall of 1996, I took part in a PBS program billed as a “Socratic dialogue.” For an hour, I discussed moral questions with another ethics professor, a high school history teacher, and seven high school students. The program, “Ethical Choices: Individual Voices,” is now circulated to high schools for use in classroom discussions about right and wrong. Its message still troubles me.

In a typical exchange, the moderator posed this question to the students: Unexpectedly your teacher has assigned you a five-page paper. You have only a few days to do it, and you are already overwhelmed with work. Would it be wrong to hand in someone else’s paper?

Two of the students found the suggestion unthinkable and spoke about responsibility, honor, and principle. “I wouldn’t do it. It is a matter of integrity,” said Elizabeth. “It’s dishonest,” said Erin. But several others saw nothing wrong with such cheating. Eleventh-grader Joseph flatly said, “If you have the opportunity, you should use it.” Eric concurred, “I would use the paper and offer it to my friends.”

Having taught moral philosophy to college freshmen for more than 15 years, I was not surprised to find students defending cheating. There are always a few in every class who play devil’s advocate with an open admiration for the devil’s position. I am also aware of ethics surveys indicating that large numbers of students have few qualms about stealing and cheating. The Josephson Institute’s 1998 “Report Card on Ethics of American Youth” surveyed more than 10,000 high schools students. Thirty-five percent of students were willing to cheat on a test “if it would help them get into college”; 47 percent had stolen something from a store in the past year.

But at least here, in this PBS Socratic discussion, I expected to have a professional ally in the other philosophy teacher, professor William Puka of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Surely he would join me in making the case for being honest. Instead, Puka defected. He told the students that in this situation, the teacher was immoral for giving the students such a burdensome assignment. “What disturbs me is how accepting you all seem to be of this assignment. To me it’s outrageous from the point of view of learning to force you to write a paper in this short a time.”

Through most of the session professor Puka focused on the hypocrisy of parents, teachers, and corporations, but had little to say about the moral obligations of the students. He spoke disdainfully of “principled behavior” that ignores social or economic “context.” When we discussed the morality of shoplifting, Puka pointed out that we must also consider such things as the “corporations’ deciding on a 12 percent profit margin…and perhaps sweatshops.” The professor was genially advising high school students to question moral teachings and rules of behavior that are critical to their own well-being.

Unfortunately, Puka’s philosophy of education and its unconcern for personal integrity has been the vogue in schools of education for several decades. It has gone under various names: values clarification, situation ethics, self-esteem building. These so-called “value-free” approaches to ethics have flourished at the same time that many parents are failing to give children basic guidance in right and wrong.

In addition to being unimpressed with traditional truisms about honesty and personal responsibility, today’s students are often egregiously clueless about religious and moral history. This was recently demonstrated in some “man-on-the street” interviews by “Tonight Show” host Jay Leno. One night he collared some young people to ask them questions on the Bible. “Can you name one of the Ten Commandments?” Mr. Leno asked two college-aged women. One ventured a reply: “Freedom of speech?” Mr. Leno, to another young woman: “Complete this sentence: ‘Let he who is without sin….’” Her response, “…have a good time?” Mr. Leno turned to a young man and asked, “Who in the Bible was eaten by a whale?” To this, he received the confident answer, “Pinocchio.”

Children who are morally illiterate, children who are not adequately warned about the hazards of lying, cheating, stealing, and cutting corners are harmed in very direct ways. Their characters are weakened. Their prospects for a successful life are diminished.

And small violations grow into large ones. In 1994, hoping to find out why some cops go wrong, the Chicago police  looked back on the early records of corrupt officers. They noticed a striking pattern. In every case, there was from the very beginning a record of small infractions. Though none of the dishonesties and misbehaviors was sufficient to draw much attention, the Department concluded these recruits might have been salvageable had there been strict interventions from the beginning.

Just as this “failure of character” reflects on the laxness of the Chicago Police Department, so the moral drift of many of today’s children reflects on the permissive ways of their parents and teachers. Many baby boomer parents and instructors are in the grip of romanticism. Anxious to encourage their children’s freedom and creativity, they look the other way when confronted with small infractions of virtue, not realizing that in their failure to give a clear lesson in right and wrong they are withholding something essential to the child’s well-being.

Two years ago I delivered a commencement address at a prep school in Princeton, New Jersey, that had banned a small group of senior boys from attending their own graduation for violating school rules. One furious mother took her son’s side and verbally attacked the headmaster, threatening to create a scene at the graduation if her son was excluded. The headmaster stuck to his guns, but the lesson the mother imparted to her son in the process was ruinous.

In the early ’90s many parents began encouraging schools to enforce standards of moral behavior that had fallen into disuse, and we now see character education programs slowly finding their ways back into the curriculum. But, you may depend on it, the move back to older standards will continue to be resisted by many educators.

Amherst professor Benjamin DeMott wrote a scathing article for Harper’s Magazine a few years ago jeering at the new character education movement. How you can teach ethics in a society where “in the space of three years, the total compensation of the average CEO…rises from 40 times to 93 times that of the average factory worker?” he asked. Journalist Alfie Kohn wrote a long and critical piece in the education magazine Phi Delta Kappan accusing those who promote moral education of seeking to indoctrinate children into being obedient workers in an unjust society. Kohn complained that “children in America are even expected to begin each day by reciting a loyalty oath to the Fatherland, although we call it by a different name.” Putting our Pledge of Allegiance on the same plane with Nazi slogans is a fair example of the reaction of many educators to any attempt to teach traditional ethics today.

What do the DeMotts, the Kohns, and the Pukas think of students like Eric and Joseph, the 16-year-old boys who defended lying in our PBS dialogue? What do these fashionably progressive mentors make of all the kids who cheated in school? Do they recognize their moral offspring?

Despite several decades of laissez-faire morality and bad philosophy entering classrooms from schools of education into classrooms, most kids still turn out all right. Even in the Josephson Institute survey, 64 percent of American youngsters said they would not be willing to cheat to get into college. The reservoir of decency in American children is far from exhausted, but they need guidance, direction, and training. They need to be introduced to their cultural and moral heritage. They need to be taught that truth and honesty are cardinal values.

 

LYING THREAT TO THE LEFT

By Joel Kotkin

For much of his career, Bob Fitch has been the prototypical man of the Left. Labor organizer, activist, Marxist intellectual, he draws from a long tradition of American radicalism that combines complex theory with an in-the-streets commitment.

Yet in recent years this professor of urban economics at New York University has witnessed the rise of a threat to his cherished ideals, a danger he finds more alarming than opposition by conservatives, corporate executives, or corrupt union officials: The rise of “postmodernism.” With its basic contempt for science, facts, and even reason, Fitch says, postmodernism strikes at the very heart of traditional leftism, namely, the fundamental Enlightenment belief in rationalism.

Radical activists increasingly rely on “junk science,” such as the Alar pesticide scare, to rouse their troops. Left-wing academics and intellectuals featured in magazines like The Nation have rallied behind truth-breakers like Mike Davis and Rigoberta Menchu even after their writing has been revealed to be fraudulent. With so many leftists not caring whether or not something is true, observes the curly-haired New Yorker, why should anyone believe anything they say?

Davis, for instance, has filled his books with untruths that would shame the author of a junior high school term paper. His transgressions go far beyond research errors. He even took a section from a novel called Pomona Queen and inserted it, as fact, in his book Ecology of Fear in order to bolster his theory about dying downtowns.

The really damaging discovery is that Davis and his defenders don’t care about his pattern of misrepresentations and lies. Even one of his most cloying defenders, environmental activist Lewis MacAdams, writes in the L.A. Weekly that Davis “is the first to admit that he won’t let a fact get in the way.... ‘I was stunned,’ I’ve heard him say twice lately, ‘to find out something I said turned out to be true.’”

Menchu is even more outrageous in her manipulations of reality, claiming to have had a brother who was burned alive by the military as her family watched, when it is now known this never happened. She also painted herself as an illiterate pauper when in fact she was sent to Catholic schools by her landowning family. The central portions of her account turned out to be a fraud re-arranged to suit the needs of the revolutionary organization she had joined.

Though Menchu was exposed by a traditional leftist (David Stoll), and Davis debunked mostly by non-conservative writers like Denise Hamilton, Greg Critser, D. J. Waldie, and Veronique de Turenne writing in generally left-of-center magazines, nonetheless many left-wing defenders of postmodernism have struck back at the truth-tellers. Menchu called Stoll a racist, and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn blasted him for demolishing an important icon of radicalism. Davis’s admirers have likewise attacked his critics as either hired mercenaries of the business elite or intellectual midgets fixated on piddling questions of fact and historical accuracy.

To Fitch, these apologias for untruth are a slap in the face to the radical tradition. Marx’s nineteenth-century scientism may be outdated, he admits, but its use of facts and rational analysis provided penetrating alternative views of the world. “There’s a sense” among the postmodernists “that objective conditions don’t matter at all,” notes Fitch. They “don’t believe in facts.” This divorce from reason, Fitch suggests, stems from the fact that postmodernism springs out of nihilistic, narcissistic thinking by philosophers like Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Nietzsche (philosophies that also inspired the development of fascist and national socialist thought).

With its emphasis on the power of the intellectual super-man who creates his own reality, postmodernism is instinctively hostile to the masses that traditional leftism sought to liberate, Fitch argues. Rejecting the past, religion, the family, and the individuality of common people, postmodern philosophy is by nature unsympathetic to the surrounding community. Like its hero, French philosopher Michel Foucault (who infected scores of other men with AIDS before dying of it himself), postmodernism is utterly self-absorbed, without moral grounding, and leads to a nihilistic cul-de-sac.

Given the impractical and often impenetrable nature of postmodernist thinking, it may be easy to write it off as an academic irrelevance. But as New York University psychologist Paul Vitz notes, postmodernism is dangerous despite its uselessness, for it has undermined the whole process of evidence-collecting, intellectual case-building, and rational discourse. After rooting on campuses, its extreme relativism and disdain for hard truths have trickled down into many other places—the Clinton administration, local schools, even corporations—where unwanted realities are denied, speech is circumscribed, and those who fail to live up to politically correct standards are prosecuted.

Ultimately, the biggest threat is not to postmodernism’s conservative enemies, or to capitalism, or to mainstream politics, but rather to leftism itself. Postmodernism’s emphasis on words rather than deeds, on “narrative” rather than fact, brings an unhealthy fixation on cultural issues such as feminism, racism, and sexual orientation, Fitch complains. As a result, leftists are being detached from the issues that matter most to real people, notably economics.

The postmodern ethic may also have the effect of weakening the activist impulse itself. Goetz Wolff, research director of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, accuses writers such as Davis of providing little in the way of constructive advice. Their views are often so bleak they have a chilling effect on readers. Postmodernism is a call to inaction, says Wolff, leaving no truths, no hope, and thus no projects.

By embracing lying and deception, the Left is now endangering its ability to engage the American people. And that, in the long run, will do the most harm to the Left itself.