Anyone that has been a child -- that's all of us – or anyone
that forgot what it was like to be a child but has seen one lately knows that
lying is written into our DNA. In fact, anyone that has studied the behavior of
animals (from the mother bird that feigns being lame to lure a predator away
from the nest where her young lay helpless, to the monkey that sneaks away from
the dominant aging male to have sex with a younger male then returns to the
troupe where she enjoys the protection of the aging male) realizes that to lie
is to practice an essential component in the strategy for survival.
Which is why it is kinda funny – if I'm not lying – to read
Victor Davis Hanson's essay on lying. He gave it the title: “The Poison of
Postmodern Lying” and the subtitle: “When truth is relative, political
expediency becomes the truth.” It was published on January 30, 2014 in National
Review Online. As can be seen already, even if the title suggests this is a
discussion on lying in general, the subtitle limits it to the political arena
which is a lie in itself because it pretends that only politicians tell lies.
And so, we can draw the early conclusion that to tell half the truth is to tell
a lie. Call it a half-lie if you wish but it is a lie nevertheless.
To go from here to the examples he has in mind and discusses
in detail, Hanson gets into a kind of intellectual gymnastics that would tax
any mind. He makes it clear in the first paragraph that political lying is the
result of the “relativism that infects our entire culture.” And this is
happening, he says, because the current cultural fad is to attack the idea of
having rules, a posture that regards the “truth” as being a fiction. And this
is a bad idea, says he, because it can poison an entire society which is what
is happening now.
This done, he picks on three women of the Left: Wendy Davis,
Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, and tells about their lies. He also picks
on one man, James Clapper, who lied to protect the Muslims. And he picks on
another male, President Barack Obama, the one he will never stop attacking even
if he – by some magic – could prove he has the ability to turn water into wine.
And so you wonder if Hanson knew of people, be they women or men, from the
Right who might have lied to enhance their image, not to protect someone like
the Muslims.
Of Wendy Davis, he says that she is promoting a feminist
agenda. Of Elizabeth Warren, he says that she is promoting a progressive
agenda. In both cases, the women took liberty with the truth, he says, because
they view their causes as serving the greater truth of social change. The same
goes for the President of the United States whose good intention of having a
universal health care trumped all other considerations, including telling the
truth that his plan will alter the existing plans.
As to Hillary Clinton, he says that she did not believe the
surge in Iraq
was working because the war itself was unpopular therefore to say that the
surge was working was reduced to a narrative that was competed against by an
opposing narrative. She also dismissed the circumstances surrounding the Benghazi events – lie or
no lie – because her good intention was to oppose religious bias and help
re-elect a progressive president.
And when it comes to James Clapper, he not only lied to the
American people about snooping on them, he lied under oath to the Congress
which is supposed to be a greater sin. Yes, this may be the case, but not if
you consider, as he did, that he was silencing Obama's right-wing critics.
Also, when he said the Muslim Brotherhood was largely secular, he was showing
tolerance for Islamists. How can that be a bad thing?
This done, Victor Hanson contrasts the difficulty of judging
the validity of a work of art which would be a subjective exercise against the
certainty of math and science whose theories can be proved or disproved by
experiments.
Which leaves us with the question: How to judge the validity
of the Hanson essay? Can we call it a work of art because it depends a great
deal on subjective arguments? Or can we call it a science experiment that
failed because the math does not add up in the sense that he attacks many
considered to be on the Left, but none considered to be on the Right?