I have been reflecting lately on two words, truth and honesty, that pervaded my childhood and resonated throughout most of my adulthood. In many ways, for most of you, as we grew up, these words appeared as synonyms that presented themselves in different guises. Every child was told that George Washington, as a youth, after wrongly chopping down a cherry tree ‘fessed up to the act by exclaiming, “I cannot tell a lie.” Was he telling the truth or just being honest? We likely never considered the difference.
Recent events have led me to ponder the growing importance of these words. The political environment, at home and abroad, has shown these two words have metamorphosed over the past few decades. This past week, we saw Britain's Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party sweep to a landslide victory in a national election notwithstanding he broke a promise to get Britain out of Europe by October 31; lied about Turks invading Britain; lied about building 40 new hospitals; and outright lied in statements to the Queen.
In this country Democrats can rightfully fear that the electorate here, as in Britain, no longer places a value on whether our leaders feel a need to be truthful to us. It is certainly amazing that, as detailed by the media, fraudulent Trump, as of October 9, his 993rd day in office, had made 13,435 false or misleading claims, according to the Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered. That’s an average of almost 22 bogus claims a day since our last update 65 days ago.
As we approach the election year of 2020, we face an existential crossroads that will determine whether the concept of truth will remain as it has been framed since the founding of our nation (“We hold these truths to be self-evident“) or if that concept will be fatally undermined by forces that no longer care whether facts really matter. As one historian recently stated, “We’re in a dangerous moment where people come to believe that nobody is giving them the facts and reality, and everybody can make up their own script and their own narrative.”
As a practicing lawyer for the past forty years, I accept my sacred obligation to address issues of truth and honesty to clients, adversaries and the courts. In researching the distinction I came across a quotation (and most of you know how I value quotations) from two writers, Matthew Frederick and Vibeke Norgaard Martin, who in their book, 101 Things I Learned in Law School, offered their version of the difference between truth and honesty in this fashion:
“Lawyers must be honest, but they don’t have to be truthful. Honesty and truthfulness are not the same thing. Being honest means not telling lies. Being truthful means actively making known all the full truth of a matter. Lawyers must be honest, but they do not have to be truthful. A criminal defense lawyer, for example, in zealously defending a client, has no obligation to actively present the truth.”
I am not a criminal lawyer. But I am certain that the distinction these two authors make, however correct in its application, is one reason why the legal profession has fallen into such low regard in our nation. Nevertheless, the entire subject, to use Stephen Colbert’s word of “truthiness,” has become of greater importance with the election of our 45th President, one Donald J. Trump. As a child, I and the entire boomer generation grew up in the years immediately following World War II, where our nation proudly carried the banner of democracy and fought to save the world from tyrants and dictators. We sacrificed our brave soldiers to fight those who cared naught for the concept of democratic rights but only sought the autocratic demands of individuals who cared nothing for “the rule of law.” We were a generation where the promise of a future free of war, of living in a nation ripe with opportunity, meant we would live much better lives than those of our parents and grandparents (many of whom had come to this country as immigrants). Parents were sacred to us; our teachers were held in high esteem and honored for their education; and our civic leaders were beyond reproach. All this, of course, came crashing down in the 1960s which introduced us to assassinations of some of our most heralded leaders, a president (Lyndon Johnson) who led us into a dishonest war in Viet Nam which killed over 50,000 of our young soldiers, his successor (Richard Nixon) who committed outright treason by making a deal with our enemy, before assuming office, to keep the war going a few extra years for political advantage, and a fifty year trend that has led so many to question the integrity and credibility of our nation’s leaders ever after. Honesty is the reputation we earn when, at our best, others see us as trustworthy, i.e., though we may be imperfect, our motives are seen as pure. Truth is the story as we come to view it and use facts to convince others as to what we believe.
“To earn a reputation as one who is honest is not easily acquired. It is one of those virtues that only comes when others have been exposed to us in a variety of situations.”
To earn a reputation as one who is honest is not easily acquired. It is one of those virtues that only comes when others have been exposed to us in a variety of situations. We may say that “she acted honestly” when she returned the purse she found on the street to its owner. But that single act does not a reputation of honesty make. Perhaps the woman only returned the purse after removing the cash found within.
To be known as one who “tells the truth” requires that those in our orbit agree that the argument one makes to support a position that is based on facts. We accept the fact of global warming and the scientific underpinnings supporting this belief while recognizing there are a handful of scientists and others who seriously challenge those same facts and the premise that our environment has not been experiencing the impact from identifiable climate change.
This culture of dishonesty and lack of shame for an almost daily series of falsehoods makes him a terrible role model for today’s children who no longer have a George Washington, two George Bushes, or Barack Obama after which to pattern their behavior. But Trump is not the only reason why the public so distrusts our leaders and our institutions.
We can also thank the internet, that technological wonder of our digital age, for playing a major role in our questioning of what constitutes a fact we can rely upon. Who can believe there was a time, only thirty years ago, at the dawn of the internet, when the mission statement of Google was to “do no evil"? Yet, our digital media, including Facebook, Google, Amazon et al, blithely spews out features designed to rivet attentions to screens of all sizes while lack of privacy, disinformation, hate speech and abuse of children online have become all too common.
Anyone who has yet to realize the truly insidious nature of our national tech addiction need only turn to two sources. The clinical psychologist, Sherry Turkel, has written “Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in the Digital Age” a well-informed study that attacks our rapturous adoration and submission to the digital world and how it is slowly atrophying human capacities such as empathy, self-reflection, and conversation itself. Her interviews and research shockingly reveal how our youngest generations are actually afraid of face-to-face conversations.
“It is also critical to recognize that the internet has hijacked every detail of our lives.”
Without embracing the benefits of solitude – too many Americans turn to a digital screen for hours each day as their prime social interaction – we are unable to form our own independent fact-based thoughts. And, without such independence of thought we eventually lose our humanity and the ability to separate truth from the lies that will hurt us.
It is also critical to recognize that the internet has hijacked every detail of our lives. Companies and websites track everything we do online. Click here for a series of articles from the New York Times entitled "The Privacy Project" to read about how pervasive these intrusions have become and what you can do to protect yourself and your family.
It is essential to know that there are multiple databases hidden around the world that can identify the products you use, your financial status, how much money you owe on your house and car and what medical concerns you have. It is all there and, most frightening, available to be used by those we don’t know to harm us and our families.
Moreover, we have lost the ability to discern what is truth and what is absolute falsehood on the internet. Millions of seemingly “truthful” news articles were disseminated by Russian agents of Vladimir Putin in the 2016 election and if they only affected a critical 100,000 votes in certain states then they accomplished the impossible feat of having one presidential candidate, who received three million less votes than the other one, slide into the most powerful position in the world.
Whether your politics leans one way or another, as a parent you need to figure out how best to teach your children the values of honesty and truth-telling. Just this week we learned that our nation spent 18 years in a war in Afghanistan only to find out that our generals admitted to lying and hiding evidence from senior government officials that the war was unwinnable. This was exactly what happened fifty years ago with Viet Nam and the ultimate publication of the Pentagon Papers. Have we learned nothing about what it costs to lie over these decades?
Also, this past week, a Monmouth University poll disclosed that 44% of Republicans selected Donald Trump as a better president than George Washington. No kidding! What we are seeing is the origins of fealty to a president whose lies are now the norm, who paid $25 million to settle a class action brought by those who signed up for a phony Trump University education, and last month was ordered by a judge to pay $2 million to charities in recompense for using a debunked Trump Foundation “charity” to pay for seven foot cardboard images of himself.
We deserve better. Yes, we have serious problems with climate change. The nation has yet to address how to improve life for millions of homeless people. We are still a nation rife with unseemly racism. We must assist those in cities and towns addicted to opioids because our pharmaceutical companies paid doctors tens of millions of dollars to overmedicate their patients with painkillers. But we should not be confronting these serious problems while having to deal with those who would carry on their own political and money-grubbing activities at the expense of the truth, while minimizing the real value to our nation of being honest with us.