Truth Telling & Multiculturalism

We have been assuming that moralists who may debate our conclusions at least start from an afterglow of Judeo-Christian ethics where lying (however defined) is bad and truth telling is good.

Now lets step into the real world! Our Western culture is increasingly being invaded by other world views. In some of these views truth telling is not valued, and lying is considered normal, even admirable .

In this post and the next I will talk about two of these invading influences. Multiculturalism today and the trickle-down effect of Nietzsche next time.

Multiculturalism has been the buzz-word in Australia for the last few decades. Now we are facing some serious unintended consequences.

1. “Multiculturalism” involved lies

Fault on both sides. On our side we have acted like over indulgent parents who never correct or discipline their children. The children grow up spoilt brats.

Our programs of “Multiculturalism” did not tell the truth. Not all the truth. We promoted acceptance and tolerance – which was good. We applauded diversity in minor cultural traits – dress codes, food and so forth – which was good. BUT we failed to say: “We have written and unwritten codes of conduct, and we have expectations of loyalty to your adopted nation – and these are not negotiable!” …. in short we lied to them!

We should have acted like good parents: our message should have been: “You are one of us now – and this is how we behave!” and enforced our social and moral values from the start.

On the other side some migrant groups have fully acted out the part of spoilt children. You might say they have lied to themselves, denying the inevitable social consequences of their behaviour.

The Bible says of us and God: “Or do you think lightly of his wealth of kindness, tolerance and patience, without recognizing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to a change of heart...” (Romans 2:4 NEB translation). Some communities of immigrants have – to their shame – failed to recognize that the wealth of tolerance and goodwill they have been shown was meant to win them over to the “Australian” way of behaving. The Moslem community and the recent outbreak of Islamist terror threats is a good example. Rather than Muslims being the most zealous to weed out terrorists from their midst, they complain publicly of discrimination whenever the police arrest a terror suspect or raid properties and seize weapons and terrorist propaganda.

I have no wish to see discrimination, let alone persecution anywhere! I am like a doctor trying to convince a diabetic patient that if they don't change their diet they will die. The doctor doesn't want the patient to die – I don't want racism to rear its ugly head. But I know human nature and I have been to countries where there is racial strife.

The text from Romans 2 continues “In the rigid obstinacy of your heart you are laying up for yourself a store of retribution for the day of retribution...” Like it not not, we do reap what we sow! We have been silly about multiculturalism and it is going to bite us. Moslem communities (for example) are acting like spoilt children and it will come back to bit them if they keep doing that. We need to acknowledge this fact ourselves and reflect the truth of it to others – it may just save them.

2. Other cultures view lying and truth telling differently.

Some cultures do not promote truth telling to everyone.

The recent calls by Islamic State fanatics for war against the world have opened our eyes to many things. One is that these people confine the duty of truth telling to their own group. For these Muslims to lie to an “unbeliever” is not considered wrong. This is a very sharp contrast to the Biblical ideal, where truth telling is an attempt as humans to be imitators of God – who is God of all the world, does not play favorites among nations and even "sends the rain on the just and the unjust alike". So it is wrong to make two groups: one to whom you must tell the truth (whether that be family, or comrades, or co-religionists) and another (the outsiders) to whom you may tell lies.

For the Christian, the obligation to tell the truth may not rule all situations (see last blog) but where it does it applies to all people.

I keep getting phone calls aimed at defrauding me. A very common one is this: “Hello, I am (insert Australian sounding name). I am from the technical department of Microsoft. There is a problem with your computer ...” I hang up about then, but more gullible people have given the caller their computer access codes and been robbed! The real Microsoft does not ring people! Always these would be thieves have foreign and I think “Indian sub-continent” accents. Of course there are many, many Australians who are lying thieves – but experiences such as these phone calls do suggest that in another culture the problem is even more endemic.

How do we deal with this? Jesus said: “be wise as serpents; but as innocent as doves.”

We must be alert to the fact that there are cultures where they believe there is nothing at all wrong about lying to us. Be cautious about believing what they say!

But we must still tell the truth to them – because that is who we are. More importantly that is like God, who we are trying to imitate!

Thirdly: we have to teach our standards of truth telling: because those standards are right!

Morals Blog: Truth telling in Hard Cases

What About Hard Cases?

The other enrichment of “truth” in the Bible is that in God it is acting accordance with the highest conceivable morality. So for us humans “telling the truth” requires trying to imitate this characteristic of God also. However, unlike God we are not infinitely powerful. So for us to act in accordance with the highest conceivable morality may involve compromises.

We live in an imperfect world, we are and are among imperfect people. We can find ourselves by chance, or be manoeuvred by people, into situations where we simply do not possess the power to achieve a perfect outcome.

Take an innocent engineering example: I learned in my university engineering days that the perfect propeller for a warship would have the best in these three things: speed; efficiency, and quietness. In this world it is simply not possible to maximise all three simultaneously. They are mutually incompatible. One can of course develop overall better propellers – the first steam turbine ship “Turbinia” experienced a 3 knot increase in speed when a large portion of her primitive screw broke off during trials! But it is still true that none of the three desirable traits can be maximised without sacrificing one or more of the others.

It should not surprise us that in this world we can sometimes face a situation where we can only chose between “the lesser of two evils”

PS when people confront one with the horns of a dilemma of any kind, the best move is often to refuse both the alternatives they put up. Go straight between the horns! Even so, this may still involve choosing “the lesser of (several) evils”.

Bonhoeffer, in his treatise on telling the truth which he wrote while the Gestapo were trying to get him to divulge the names of his co-conspirators against Hitler gave this example: A young girl is confronted by her teacher in front of the class with; “Is it not true your father is a drunkard”. She has been taught the importance of truth telling. She also knows that to tell it now would betray family loyalty. Bonhoeffer writes that when she lies: “No” the problem is just that she lacked the experience to satisfy these competing moral requirements. I think he is only partly right.

Experience can certainly help. I illustrate this from observation.

I was once talking with another clergyman. He explained how he was a late entrant into holy orders and had been an officer in a British tank regiment before ordination. I had been reading some “How it Works” type books with my sons and one of the chapters dealt with army tanks and mentioned reactive armour. Stupidly I blurted out “Oh, so does this new reactive armour really work?” Momentarily his face froze. Then he calmly said: “It may do” and moved on to another topic. Bonhoeffer would have been proud!

However I believe there are situations where not all the proverbial wisdom of Solomon would provide a way out.

In these cases I believe that a well trained moral conscience will pick the best course of action. I said in an early post that the human brain is incredibly adept at analysing complex social situations. This capability extends to moral judgements if we have been well socialised in moral choices.

Aristotle in Book II of his “Ethics” makes the important point that we study ethics not to intellectually describe morals, but to become people who act ethically!

Aristotle goes on to say that (he was writing in Greek) the word “ethics” comes from the word “habit”. The whole point of ethics is of oneself developing habitual norms of acting ethically!

If we have trained ourselves to tell the truth, particularly when we are tempted not to, we will not readily lie. If we have simultaneously trained ourselves to act justly, to love our neighbour as ourselves, and in our daily lives to imitate to complete moral character of God, we will not readily do other evils. Being human we will battle and occasionally fall to temptation. But we will grow stronger and more exercised in acting morally..

Such a trained conscience, I believe will provide us with the moral course of action in the split second which may be all the time we have.

So the person who by persistent action has trained their conscience, when merely insulted or wounded in their pride, will curb their temper and turn the other cheek. But should an armed assailant threaten the lives of her children she will be instantly prepared to kill the assailant, or die herself in the attempt.

Morals Blogs: Truth Telling

White lies or the plain truth?

Human language is rarely just made up of plain mathematical type propositions. We utilise poetic expressions, sarcasm, hyperbole, idiomatic phrases, customary ways of saying things and so forth to get our message across. This means I need to revise my initial premise of truth being mathematical as in “1+1=2” being true. This is OK as far as it goes, but it does not in fact cover the whole complexity of human communication. People who think it does then find themselves doing mental gymnastics to explain “lies” by otherwise honest people, and end up with the fiction of a “white lie”. I think we can do better.

First we need to tease out a few of the complexities of human communication.

If someone is being silly and ends up spilling their drink everywhere we could say: “well that was clever!” They and everyone else knows we are being sarcastic: we mean they were emphatically not being clever. If you ignore the fact we were using a familiar figure of speech and look at our words literally, then we told a lie. Of course we did not really tell a lie, but I use this simple illustration to highlight that we have to judge what the normal person speaking those words in that context would have intended to communicate and what the reasonable hearer would have understood their meaning to have been. If that shared meaning is true then we did not lie.

If most of our companions at work are off sick with the 'flu we might say: “everyone is off sick!”. This is called hyperbole. It is a figure of speech we all use and comprehend. We would not respond “Liar!” just because we knew of one person at that workplace who was not off sick.

The weather announcer says “the sun will rise at 6.35 am tomorrow” …. No! Really it won't. The sun is just going to stay put while the earth rotates. As a scientific explanation of the universe, the announcer’s statement is a lie. But provided you and she are interested in when, given a clear sky, the sun will become visible over the horizon, then the weather girl may be telling the plain truth.

So there are a set of statements which if considered in isolation as literal logical propositions are false, but which, in context, to the average person in the street will convey the truth.

Conversely there are a set of statements which are literally true propositions which if believed would lead to false, potentially ruinous conclusions. Shakespeare's “Macbeth” provides a classic example. The witches “lie like truth” to lead the main character onto an evil path and eventually to his doom. In the final duel he taunts his adversary with the witches' prophesy that: “I can be killed by no man born of woman”. To which the hero replies: No man born of woman am I for I was from my mother's womb untimely plucked” and he proceeds to kill Macbeth.

So mere literal truth of a statement is not sufficient for it to constitute “telling the truth” One must add the Old Testament requirement of faithfulness and reliability. Is the information it would convey to "the reasonable man or woman in the street" something reliable that they can safely put their faith in?

Taking these concepts of figures of speech and faithfulness in giving reliable information together helps solve the following cases.

Start with the easy one. Two strangers fishing on a pier. One says to the other: “Nice day” the other replies “sure is” and they begin to converse. Step back …. on that pier it is cold, windy and starting to rain. So they both told lies, right? ... Wrong. They were not primarily talking about the weather they were following a social convention. The first was actually sending the message: “We don't know each other but I'd like to talk to you” the other was sending the message back: “OK I'll talk”.

So you meet a stranger. “How are you.” they say. “Fine” you reply. In fact you have a slight cold. Did you just tell a lie? ... That depends. ... If the stranger was a medical examiner at the airport screening passengers because there has been a deadly 'flu outbreak in the country you just flew out of then yes! You just told a really bad lie! On the other hand if this was an ordinary meeting of strangers then no. He was offering a polite greeting not enquiring after the exact state of your health. You gave the customary reply. In the absence if felonious intent on your part towards the stranger, you were telling the truth.

Take this case: A man greets his wife who is all dressed up for a party. “You look lovely tonight darling” says he. But she is 70 years old and was always rather plain. Some moralists jump in and claim that therefore he told a lie. They soften it but saying it is only a “white lie'”

No! I call it telling the truth!

To him she is still the girl he fell in love with all those years ago: She is beautiful to him. She always will be. In terms of expressing his feelings it is both true and reliable. Second the appraisal is reliable in that context: Her attire and make-up is as good as she can make it – his statement that she looks lovely accurately conveys that she has not miss-applied her eye shadow or has a tear in her dress but rather has clearly made the socially requisite preparations for attending a party. His compliment completes her preparations by making her feel appreciated, as she indeed is, and with his affirmation, properly confident to face the world.

However I can turn that scenario into a real lie. Suppose he sees straight away that she is still wearing her house slippers. If he fails to warn her, then by commission or omission he is telling a lie. The information he is conveying is not true, is not faithful not reliable. If she trust him she will be set up for major embarrassment.

OK do you see the big divide between telling the truth and lying here.

So by broadening out our definition a little we solve the problem. We first acknowledge that language has shared meaning. That meaning then becomes the determinant of truth or falsehood. We next see that language is part of relationship. (Bonhoeffer was big on this – see his essay from prison “telling the truth”) here the tests of appropriateness, faithfulness and reliability come to the fore. Once we do this we see the term “white lies” as an artificial and quite unnecessary device. It was just honest people telling the plain truth.

NEXT: Thin Ice: when is it right ti deceive?