Being right vs. telling the truth
Has honesty become obsolete?
Stanley Fish makes an interesting point – often we benefit much more by “being right” than we do by telling the truth. What does he mean? Well, he gives a number of examples, but mostly he’s talking about bureaucratic systems in which one is better off playing along, so to speak, than by standing up for what they know to be true. Especially in law (and most especially in the American, adversarial court system), we’re told to let the pros (lawyers) do the talking for us, or else we might end up telling the judge and jury what actually happened.
Institutionalized stubbornness in the face of “truth” has obvious harmful effects. One of his examples involves a woman with titanium implants in her leg who tried to warn airport security when their metal detectors failed to … well, detect her metal. On more than one occasion, and in more than one airport, she was simply ignored – “We are fully confident in our machines,” they said (or something to that effect).
Well, to begin with, these are different kinds of problems. The first problem, having to do with tight-lipped lawyers and systematized deception, is an accepted part of the way we approach legal, political, and social rules. Many of us may not like it (and choose not to pursue careers in politics or sales), but rarely will anyone have the gall to say “actually, your honor, my client is totally guilty” or “the product I’m selling doesn’t work very well” or “I am completely and totally responsible for the accident.”
The second problem, having to do with people or institutions that simply refuse to accept what they know to be true, is simpler and more clearly wrong. It’s not completely divorced from the first problem, however – imagine a case where an advertisement makes a claim about a product: “Use the Ab-Blaster 9000 and get ripped in no time!” Most parties involved should know not to take this too literally, and generally we tolerate this kind of “truthiness.” But what happens when an angry mob of customers demands to know why the product didn’t work? Its maker should either come clean (if the product just isn’t effective) or explain that ripped abs take more work than they initially let on (if the product IS effective, when used along with a healthy diet and tons of other exercises).
Professor Fish posits this conundrum – giving the accepted answer vs. telling the truth – to cynically suggest that there’s no way of getting around the problem, however frustrating, because we simply can’t prove what we know to be true to the powers that be. But we often can do just that, and it’s important that we do. If the titanium-legged woman provides proof of the metal in her body, we can correct some major flaws in airport security. And if enough dissatisfied customers complain about a product, we can get it taken off shelves.
In other words, while court cases, insurance claims, and deceptive advertisers thrive on conventions of dishonesty, the truth matters. It’s just not as easy to get there as we’d like.
-Colin
Image by daveblog used under CC license
Related posts:
- The naked truth about freedom
- On truth and lying in a political sense
- Freedom in the face of pandemics
- How should we pick judges?
- A laughing matter?
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