Part 14 (2/2)

It is only mildly hyperbolic to characterize lying as a crime against reality. Lying goes to the heart of the never-ending questions, what is the world really like? what is in fact happening? Accepting something as true is not the same as agreeing that it is. To witness the role of lying and its consequences, we need look no further than to Iraq and to the death and destruction made possible by misrepresentations. Lying and its variants of deception and misrepresentation are no more simple aberrations than the unprovoked war itself. Lying and irrational decisions are connected, as are lying and unreasoning popular support for the decision-makers.

In a preliminary way lying can be defined as the deliberate misrepresentation of actuality and the subst.i.tution of a constructed ”reality.” The problem today is that lying is not an isolated phenomenon but characteristic of a culture where exaggeration and inflated claims are commonplace occurrences. For more than a century the public has been shaped by a relentless culture of advertising and its exaggerations, false claims, and fantasies-all aimed at influencing and directing behavior in the premeditated ways chosen by the advertiser. The techniques developed for the marketplace have been adapted by political consultants and their media experts. The result has been the pollution of the ecology of politics by the inauthentic politics of misrepresentative government, claiming to be what it is not, compa.s.sionate and conservative, G.o.d-fearing and moral.

While the principle of popular partic.i.p.ation in decision making is fundamental to democracy-and we shall return to it-thoughtful partic.i.p.ation is dependent upon certain commonplaces: first, the availability of knowledge in the form of reliable factual information and, second, a political culture that values and supports the honest effort to reach judgments aimed at promoting as far as possible the best interests of the whole society. There is a third principle, intellectual integrity. One aspect of it is the responsibility of those who, as teachers, publicists, researchers, and scientists, practice truth telling as their vocation. It is not a vocation to which many pundits, talk show hosts, for-sale journalists, and think tank residents are committed.2 The public vocation of truth telling cannot be consistently practiced without public and private respect for, and defense of, intellectual integrity.

Totalitarian regimes viewed intellectual integrity as subversive and imposed ideological or political orthodoxy upon all intellectual pursuits and professions. Under the Bush administration there have been repeated instances of governmental or corporate attempts to distort or suppress unwelcome expert reports and scientific findings. As President Bush testified, ”One of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq with the war on terror.”3 A common thread connects false claims about WMDs with denials of global warming. The one insists that there was evidence; the other denies that there is evidence. Both are denials of actuality; both are irrational decisions of huge consequence; and both are aided by the lack of intellectual and public integrity among our scandal-ridden corporate and governmental leaders.h.i.+p.4 III.

I know what the president thinks. I know what I think.

And we're not looking for an exit strategy [from Iraq].

We are looking for victory.

-Vice President d.i.c.k Cheney.

Lying is more than deception; the liar wants the unreal to be accepted as actuality, so he sets about to establish as true what is not actually the case, not really real. A lie by a public authority is meant to be accepted by the public as an ”official” truth concerning the ”real world.” At bottom, lying is the expression of a will to power. My power is increased if you accept ”a picture of the world which is a product of my will.”6 Of course the skilled liar should not be taken in by his own lies; that would be self-deception. Yet the skilled liar might also become a habitual liar, the success of one lie encouraging another with the result that a leader is tempted to try to make untruth into a reality-as with, for example, the vice president's feverish efforts to press the CIA to dredge up evidence of WMDs where there was little or none.

It is a virtual cliche that in unusual circ.u.mstances, and especially in extraordinary ones, it may be necessary for leaders to lie to or mislead or conceal facts from the public when lying serves the broad interests of the nation. Throughout Western history questions of when to lie, what form a lie should take, and whether it is or was justified usually presumed that lying was a dispensation allowed only to elites who, theoretically, are more politically knowledgeable and experienced than ordinary citizens.7 It seems, however, paradoxical to say that democracy should deliberately deceive itself. Supposing, nonetheless, that elites, instead of simply enjoying access to greater or more reliable information, claimed for themselves a special order of rationality that allowed them access to a higher, extra-ordinary Reality and enabled them to see deeper, beyond the actuality experienced by the average citizen. Would that result in a conception in which lying was not a minor deviation but a reconst.i.tution of ”reality”? If, for example, the initial reason for invading Iraq (WMDs) was exposed as a lie but the ruling elites then claimed that a higher purpose was to promote democracy in the Middle East, would that justification amount to a claim that elites possessed the substantively superior form of reasoning required by those who contend with problems whose complexity and possible consequences far exceed the experience of the ordinary citizen?

IV.

Perhaps the most influential justification for political lying as a higher form of reason, and for lying as the prerogative of a special type of political elites with access to a higher reality unknown to ordinary mortals, was set down by Plato more than two thousand years ago. His justification for lying has contemporary echoes in the systematic lying of the Bush administration, and those echoes have an intellectual genealogy. Plato was awarded canonical status by Leo Strauss, while Straussians and the neocons, who played a decisive role in deceiving the public about the reasons for attacking Iraq, have similarly canonized Strauss. From canon to cannon-fodder . . .

Rulers, according to Plato, ”will have to give subjects a considerable dose of imposition and deception for their good.”8 Plato's ideal political system is founded upon sharply defined and enforced political inequalities designed to ensure that a specially educated cla.s.s of philosophers would monopolize political decision making and the practice of lying. Thus the crucial distinction, one that is cultivated and enforced, is between those whose exceptional mental endowments and subsequent training enable them to glimpse true reality and those who are judged to lack ability and therefore denied ”higher” education.

The ideology that sanctions these inequalities is the so-called n.o.ble lie.9 The inhabitants are to be told that although they are all descended from a common ”mother,” they are a.s.signed, according to a hierarchical principle, to one of three cla.s.ses: the ruling, or golden, cla.s.s of philosopher-guardians, where true knowledge and the ability to rule exclusively reside; the military, or silver, cla.s.s; and the farmer-artisan, or bronze, cla.s.s.10 Political power and authority are reserved to the specially educated golden cla.s.s, and they alone are allowed the prerogative of lying. Plato's justification of elite rule is set out in his famous Allegory of the Cave.11 It contrasts the unreality of the images by which the Many live and the true reality that only the Few can approximate.

Imagine men living in a cave set deep in the ground. From childhood they have been kept immobile by chains; because they can see only what is directly before them, they a.s.sume it is reality. Behind them is a fire with a track built along it. Imagine also some persons carrying artificial objects of wood or stone, some resembling human figures or animals, whose shadow images appear on the wall. The ”prisoners” cannot see themselves or other prisoners; they see only the shadows cast by the fire on the wall facing them. ”Such prisoners would recognize as reality nothing but the shadows of those artificial objects.”

Plato continues: Suppose, however, one of the cave-dwellers is spirited outside the cave and thrust into bright sunlight. Dazzled at first, he believes the ”real” world is illusion but, after becoming accustomed to the light, realizes that now he sees the world in the light of true reality-that is, he has knowledge, and what he had formerly believed to be reality was illusion. The vast majority of mankind remain imprisoned in the cave and incapable of grasping the true nature of things. Their best hope is to accept the power of those versed in the true philosophy. Plato darkly concludes: by nature the ma.s.ses prefer an illusory reality, and so they may turn on the philosopher, making him a martyr to the truth. Thus the ma.s.ses fear the truth, and their instinct is to cling to the unreal.12 But what is real? For Plato it was not the world of tangible objects, of everyday experience, things we touch, sense, and experience: these are too ephemeral or subjective to be true or real. Or perhaps too accessible, for they const.i.tute the everyday world shared by those who are looked down upon as common. The truly real is immaterial idea, intangible, unchanging, and belongs to a different and higher order of being. Knowledge of it gives privileged access to the meaning of the world and the nature of the Good. The Few alone are capable of grasping reality but only after they have undergone a rigorous intellectual discipline presided over by the true philosophers. Since the Many are incapable of knowing reality, the Few make no effort to elevate the level of common political understanding. Instead the Few divulge what is politically expedient and in a vulgarized (i.e., untrue) form, such as a myth, which the ma.s.ses can comprehend.

Democracy was, of course, anathema to Plato, not least because it stands for the regime where those who rule tend to be guided by experience of the tangibles of everyday existence, by ”common” sense.13 Although there are no contests for political power in Plato's scheme, in another sense his republic is all about politics, the politics of who defines and controls access to ”reality,” and what the role of truth and lying is in that politics. Plato a.s.sumed that the small scale of his imagined state would make it easier for his elite to control the extent to which, and in what form, the Many would benefit from a reality they could never understand, much less truly know.

To press the point: supposing the elite found themselves in a democracy instead of Plato's Republic. Further, supposing they had been sufficiently influenced by modernity to be somewhat skeptical of the existence of ”Reality,” might they not go down to the cave and seek control of the images cast on the screen, especially if they could ally with those who were in the business of manufacturing images and determining their content?

V.

A politics that aims at commonality places a high premium on trust among the partic.i.p.ants or between representatives and the people they represent. Trust, in turn, requires not only that the partic.i.p.ants and representatives convey the considered views of the citizenry, but that they accurately represent the actualities of the political world to the citizenry. Trust is the precondition of an authentic politics. An authentic politics is not univocal; there will always be contested views about actuality, and how it is to be understood and acted upon. But it makes a great deal of difference if the parties concerned can a.s.sume that each has made a good-faith effort to speak truthfully.

Although it would be naive to suggest that democracy eliminates lying, arguably its politics tends to encourage authenticity. A smaller political context is more congenial to nurturing democratic values, such as popular partic.i.p.ation, public discussion, and accountability through close scrutiny of officeholders. A smaller scale brings with it modest stakes and a consequent scaling down of power, of expectations, and of ambitions. Precisely because public discussion, debate, and deliberation are fundamental to democracy, deliberate misrepresentation is more easily exposed.

Democratic deliberations deepen the political experience of citizens, but they are time-consuming: time is needed for the expression of diverse viewpoints, extended questioning, and considered judgments. When the pace of life is slower, there is ”plenty of time” and a greater possibility of considered judgments and the likelihood of durability, of more lasting decisions, of a public memory.

VI.

Attuned to slower rhythms once dictated by long distances and slow communications, democracy now struggles against a context where scale is defined and dominated by Superpower, globalizing capital, and empire; by aggrandizing forms of power that are equipped with the means of annihilating the barriers created by distance. And because distance serves to consume time, those powers have succeeded in annihilating conventional time as well, a precious resource of democracy. Decisions, like weapons, are rapid-fire, with the crucial result that while there may be a transcript, there is less likely to be a memory.

Another result, whose political implications will be explored later, is that the nature, indeed the very notion, of actuality-what the public world is really like, what its inhabitants are really experiencing, and what the effects are of response-time measured in instants-becomes virtual at worst, abstract at best. These unprecedented powers and the scales they can command appear as especially favorable to elitism, to the quick-witted and manipulative, but uncongenial to democratic values and deliberative practices.

These new tempos make for strange bedfellows. Thus modern technology and communications represent the means of ”hurrying time” in the sense that less time is required to achieve a desired end-for instance, a Wall Street speculator can communicate instantly with a Shanghai banker. But the believer in a Last Days eschatology is also in a hurry, convinced that the world is hurtling toward a Last Judgment. Oddly, neither the speculator nor the apocalypse-lover is much given to reflection: he hasn't the time to waste or ”tarry” if he is to attain his end in time.

The powers that subvert reality-especially everyday reality, the tangibleness vital to democratic deliberations-can also be the nemesis corrupting the judgment of power-holders (”we make our own reality,” as the Bushman boasted). Unreality is related to the dominant tendency toward abstraction and the belief that statistical measures can be a shorthand for reality rather than an obfuscation. For example, today there is general agreement that inequality is on the increase in our society.14 In today's media-speak growing inequality is frequently described by being measured in economic terms, as differences in income or as what percentage of the population owns what percentage of the national wealth. While these measures reveal sharp economic differences between the wealthy and the poor, as well as a decline in the percentage of national income going to the middle and lower-middle cla.s.ses, there is a crucial sense in which the abstract terms (e.g., ”below the poverty line”) are the expression of a mentality that ”doesn't get it.” Its ”methodology” is unable to convey the ”feel” of the grinding impact of poverty on the daily lives of ”the millions who lack health insurance.”

Put starkly, the crucial political issue of our times concerns the incompatibility between the culture of everyday reality to which political democracy should be attuned and the culture of virtual reality on which corporate capitalism thrives. Despite claims that the opportunity to be stakeholders, or to form start-ups, to revel in consumer choices, or just to get rich demonstrates the democratic possibilities of capitalism, there is no political affinity, only a disjunction between democracy and a system that a.s.sumes inequality among investors and reproduces inequality as a matter of course, depends upon individual self-interest as an incentive, practices a politics of misrepresentation, and hence is inconsistent with such democratic values as sharing, caring, and preserving.

The fate of democracy is to have entered the modern world at the same moment as capitalism, roughly during the seventeenth century. As a consequence the course of each became intertwined with the other. This meant, among other things, that the attempts to establish a democratic culture were an uphill struggle. At first democracy and capital were occasional political allies pitted against the stratified order of monarchy, aristocracy, and established church. Then, as each became more politically self-conscious, more aware of divergent concerns, each began to define an ident.i.ty and pursue strategies that reflected the reality of opposed interests, contrasting conceptions of power, and disagreement as to what degree of equality or inequality each could tolerate without compromising their respective systems.

The persisting conflict between democratic egalitarianism and an economic system that has rapidly evolved into another inegalitarian regime is a reminder that capitalism is not solely a matter of production, exchange, and reward. It is a regime in which culture, politics, and economy tend toward a seamless whole, a totality. Like the regimes it had displaced, the corporate regime manifests inequalities in every aspect of social life and defends them as essential. And like the old regimes, the structure of corporate organization follows the hierarchical principle of gradations of authority, prerogative, and reward. It is undemocratic in its structure and modus operandi and antidemocratic in its persistent efforts to destroy or weaken unions, discourage minimum wage legislation, resist environmental protections, and dominate the creation and dissemination of culture (media, foundations, education).

VII.

The tendencies toward inverted totalitarianism do not stem solely from the ”Right,” and that is one reason why a reversal presents a formidable challenge. Twentieth-century liberalism, or neoliberalism as it was later called, was instrumental in promoting a strong, controlling state, a conception essential to Superpower; it gave limited, even lukewarm allegiance to democracy, except as a demand for equal rights. To be sure, among liberals in the first half of the twentieth century one of the main justifications had been that only a strong, centralized government could effectively control corporate monopolies, punish corporate misbehavior, and promote social welfare. Significantly, that progressive thrust virtually disappeared once the United States prepared for World War II, but not before liberal reformers had discovered that social programs and, later, the war effort were deeply dependent upon a new type of elite of skilled managers.15 These tendencies continued after 1945. The Cold War and the Marshall Plan for Western European reconstruction both required the expansion of state power and managerial expertise. However, from the end of the Truman administration in 1953 to the end of the Clinton administration in 2001, and with the exception of LBJ's presidency, liberal administrations were unable to sustain much enthusiasm for using state power to promote new social programs or even for promoting civil rights.16 In place of President Kennedy's stern rebuke, ”Ask not what your country can do for you-ask what you can do for your country,” the new mantra would be ”liberal on social issues” (gay rights and women's equality) but ”fiscally conservative,” except for defense spending. By the end of the century the Democratic president, who had failed to enact health care reform but did succeed in promoting a tough welfare reform, could boast that his administration had achieved the conservative goal of a budget surplus. Shortly thereafter, deficit spending, which had been a prominent element in financing New Deal social programs, was adapted to a Republican strategy for promoting tax relief for the rich while discouraging social spending.

Significantly, the liberal administration that embarked upon the disastrous unprovoked war in Vietnam and would engage in extensive government lying, as The Pentagon Papers would reveal, was also unabashed in advertising its elitism, especially during the Kennedy years, when the country was rea.s.sured that ”the best and the brightest” and the ”wise men” were in power.17 In the footsteps of Alcibiades, this persuasive elite brought us the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Gulf of Tonkin lie.

The Reagan era marked the beginning of a new conception of the presidency, one that reinforced the twentieth-century tendency toward presidential domination of the political system. It was symbolic that Reagan attained the presidency by defeating the one president who had promised the American people that he would never lie to them. In 1985 Reagan's administration proceeded to violate the law by covertly supplying weapons to Iran and, in further violation, diverted some of the profits derived from the arms sale to the Nicaraguan ”contras,” despite a congressional restriction on such a.s.sistance. Then the administration proceeded to lie about the transactions.18 Reagan would come to symbolize the emergence of a political culture in which lying was merely one component in a larger pattern wherein untruthfulness, make-believe, and actuality were seamlessly woven.

The Reagan formula featured a president with little comprehension of, indeed little interest in, most of the major issues of the day but with an actor's skill in a.s.suming a symbolic role, that of quasi-monarch. That same formula also aimed at replacing the idea of an engaged and informed citizenry with that of an audience which, fearful of nuclear war and Soviet aggression, welcomed a leader who could be trusted to protect and rea.s.sure them of their virtue by retelling familiar myths about national greatness, piety, and generosity. It was demagoguery adapted to the cinematic age: he played the leader while ”we the people” relapsed into a predemotic state.

Ronald Reagan converted a life of inauthenticity into a political art form by which the artist internalizes the inauthentic but expresses it as authenticity, the artful as artless. He had begun his career as a sports broadcaster who, without viewing the actual baseball game, ”re-created” it for an invisible radio audience, embroidering the bare facts with colorful and imagined detail. Next followed a career of ”real” acting. Reagan came not only to identify himself with his various roles but also to imbibe and reuse bits of wisdom from a.s.sorted movie scripts. Then came his stint as paid apologist (”host”) for General Electric, extolling the virtues of capitalism, technological progress, the free market, and a notion of government whose princ.i.p.al-almost sole-responsibility was national defense.19 All that was required of the audience was to suspend disbelief.

Inauthenticity need not imply deceit or insincerity. Rather it could simply mean imagining and believing in the imagined-which is what actors do. Reagan believed in all of the dynamics we have previously a.s.sociated with inverted totalitarianism: unqualified admiration for the marvels of technology, free market corporate capitalism, and even a deep eschatological belief in the coming of Armageddon.20 What was the image of Reagan standing triumphantly beside the ruins of the Berlin Wall but that of a latter-day Joshua tearing down the walls of Jericho before entering the promised land?

The roles Reagan played in his earlier career were an apprentices.h.i.+p for his original contribution to American government, the creation of a ”performance president” who fas.h.i.+oned illusion (a tough leader who had learned to throw a crisp salute) from inauthenticity (almost persuading himself that he had been present when inmates were freed from concentration camps).21 With little or no interest in policy and the details of governance he took on the task of evoking nostalgia, overlaying the present with an idealized past, warmer, believing, guileless, ”a s.h.i.+ning city on the hill” that provided an illusion of national continuity while obscuring the radical changes at work.22 The other element characterizing his administration was a presidential entourage that included hard-nosed, ideological zealots and operatives from the corporate world and the public opinion industry. These agents were intent on expanding the powers of the president, reducing governmental oversight of the economy, overriding environmental safeguards,23 and dismantling welfare programs; simultaneously they expended vast sums in order to build up a military sufficiently intimidating to stare down an ”evil empire,” causing it to collapse, exhausted, unable to compete, its power spent from being outspent.24 The Bush II administration, with its peculiar amalgam of futurism and originalism, would press inauthenticity to extremes. It brought grandiose notions of expanding American power, of creating a new imperium, and, while professing reverence for an original Const.i.tution, systematically undermined const.i.tutional protections for individual rights and const.i.tutional limitations on presidential power. Above all, endless lies and misrepresentations: about Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the number of Iraqi civilian deaths, global warming, ad infinitum.

The culmination of inauthentic politics was The Great Hoax concocted by the Bush team. While rhetorically exploiting democracy in support of imperial ambitions abroad, it undermined at home the process by which the democratic ballot bestows legitimacy. In both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections Bush's minions employed tactics that revealed a chain of corruption extending from local officials to the highest court, all with the intention of thwarting the popular will.25 The long-run consequences may prove more significant than the clouded elections: a popular distrust of the significance of elections themselves.

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