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Nothing but the Truth
Sydney Harris, U.S.A.
When is a lie not a lie? What does telling the truth consist of? These simple questions have no simple answers. That is why parents and teachers have such a hard time attempting to explain lies and truth to children.
In introducing her autobiography, novelist Storm Jameson writes: "I am an accomplished professional novelist and nothing would have been easier for me than to draw a self-portrait which, without telling a single lie, would be dishonest from beginning to end, intelligent, charming, interesting--and a lie"
On the surface a lie is a statement that does not correspond to fact. But "facts" and "truth" are by no means the same thing; as Miss Jameson reminds, a book of memoirs can be absolutely truthful in its facts and yet be a total lie.
Truth is the inner spirit of a statement, not just its outer shell of facts. Of course, if the facts are falsified, the inner spirit is injured; but the opposite does not hold--a report consisting of nothing but facts can be totally dishonest in its intent and effect.
In one of Bonhoeffer's last unfinished essays (written in a Nazi prison), he takes up the subject of the "always truthful" man, and reminds us that there are evil truths as well as necessary and healing truths. The man who always says what he thinks, under the guise of candor, is not living in the spirit of truth, but in the spirit of hate.
He tells of a teacher who asked a pupil in front of the class whether his father usually came home drunk in the evening. The father did, but the boy was in his rights in lying about it, since the teacher was absolutely outside his rights in asking the question--and the boy was not mature enough to give an answer that disguised a rebuke to the teacher for his impertinence.
The hardest metaphysical thing to grasp about the truth is that it is both absolute and relative at the same time: in one sense the truth is always the same for all men everywhere; in another sense, it is relative, the time, the place, the situation. Wisdom consists in being able to distinguish between these two, and to know when the spirit of universal truth is being served, and when not.
Both the absolutists and the relativists are dishonest in this--the absolutists when they insist that circumstances do not alter cases; the relativists when they insist that truth is wholly subjective. No wonder our children are confused, conflicted and cynical about it.
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