Pants on Fire: On Lying in Politics - A Conversation with Martin Jay

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781771700672
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is based on an in-depth conversation between Howard Burton and renowned intellectual historian Martin Jay, UC Berkeley. A thought-provoking book in dialogue format examining Martin Jay's extensive research on lying in politics from Plato and St. Augustine to Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss which culminated in his book The Virtues of Mendacity.This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, The Varnished Truth, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: I. A Fruitful Approach - Investigating "the political"II. The Liar's Stage - From Machiavelli to political play-actingIII. Lies, American Style - A central concern?IV. Transcending Kant - The Value of nuanceV. Coming Clean - Appreciating what we knowVI. Monological Dangers - Truth as the enemy of the politicalVII. Democracy - Its porous nature and implicationsVIII. Getting Worse? - In search of a Golden Age of truth-tellingIX. Puritanical Dangers - Fanatical truth-tellingX. Politics vs. Science - Similarities and differencesXI. Summing Up - Admissions and conclusionsAbout Ideas Roadshow Conversations Series: This book is part of a series of 100 Ideas Roadshow Conversations. Presented in an accessible, conversational format, Ideas Roadshow books not only explore frontline academic research featuring world-leading researchers, including 3 Nobel Laureates, but also reveal the inspirations and personal journeys behind the research.

The Conversation

I. A Fruitful Approach

Investigating “the political”

HB: I’d like to discuss aspects of intellectual history and your other academic interests, and we will hopefully move in that direction during the course of this conversation. But for the moment let’s begin with your book, The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics, and discuss the motivations and inclinations that you had in writing it.

You start off the book by talking about Christopher Hitchens and his book on Bill Clinton, No One Left to Lie To. In that book, Hitchens alludes to lying and perjuring as the sine qua non of disreputability, along with why it is that no one should take the Clintons seriously. This piqued your interest not simply with respect to general attitudes towards lying, but to the entire issue of lying in the public realm.

Years later, when Hitchens became an advocate for the war in Iraq, the matter of whether the authorities had publicly lied concerning the existence of certain weapons of mass destruction, and other matters did not seem to matter to him so much anymore, as the justification for the war focused much more narrowly on the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. He tacked quite wildly himself.

But I’m guessing that you had been thinking about these sorts of ideas well before then. How much did Hitchens and his discussion of lying in the public sphere trigger things that were already there, and how much of that caused you to think afresh about these ideas?

MJ: Well, I doubt I would have written the book if I hadn’t been asked by the London Review of Books to write a review of Hitchens’ book. That was the immediate cause. But you’re absolutely right, there must have been something prior to that; and it was probably my reading of Hannah Arendt, specifically her essays on truth and politics and lying in politics.

These essays were in a way typically Arendtian—which is to say, against the conventional wisdom, provocative, and not fully clear on the implications. She was always subtle enough to understand the ambiguities of positions. The notion that there is something special about the political realm—something that sets it apart—was something that she was a great advocate of.

Reading her essays started me thinking about whether or not one of the things that did set the political realm apart is precisely the “pass” given, under many circumstances, to the fudging, or twisting, or shading, of the truth—and perhaps even outright lying. At the very same time, the very accusation of lying—the accusation hurled at one’s enemies—is itself such a staple of politics.

That paradox—that people often accept the fact that politics is a realm in which certain moral conventions about lying are, if not suspended, at least qualified, while at the same time accepting that within politics the accusation of lying could be used as a tool against enemies—was probably lurking in the background when I was asked to review the books by Hitchens and George Stephanopoulos by the London Review.

HB: It seems to me that, as an intellectual historian, this is a perfect sort of subject to wrap your head around, because you can look at not only lying but at the conjunction of lying and politics. You can explore that combination from Plato’s time up to the present day, which of course you do in the book.

Am I wrong in saying that this is a paradigmatically meaty topic, one that as an intellectual historian you say to yourself, “This is a good one. I can really sink my teeth into this”?

MJ: Intellectual history gives you certain tools to relativize absolute contemporary positions. It gives you a sense of the sedimented and often contradictory legacy of other people’s thoughts on these issues. So instead of thinking that you can ever get it right in the kind of transcendental way in which history is suspended, it makes you sensitive to the fact that other people, over many centuries and in many different contexts, have also thought about the same issues.

Lying itself, and the issue of what constitutes politics, are not questions that have self-evident answers. One has to do the spadework to figure out what other people have said.

I’ve always been interested in what I call “cultural semantics”—ways in which words mean different things over long periods of time, etymologies, and how different discursive contexts shade them in ways that we sometimes forget, but which, nonetheless, may still be palpable beneath the surface, still have an efficacy.

There’s an enormous tradition of people pondering the implications of lying, the justifications—or lack thereof—for lying. And then, when I really got into this subject, questions about “the political”—what we mean by “politics”, how we are to understand its boundaries, whether or not we can talk about it having an essence, whether or not we can make a distinction between “the political” as an ontological phenomenon on the one hand versus banal, mundane politics on the other—all of that became available for intellectual historical exploration.

HB: From my perspective, it looks like you used lying as a tool—as a scalpel, say—to look at what the political realm really is and how it differs from other areas. You talk about “leakage” from one realm to the other, while other political philosophers have sometimes spoken about “sealing off” a political realm. The question of lying seemed to me like a probe that you could use to explore these issues. Is that right?

MJ: I think that one could get into the political in many different ways. You can examine specific institutions, asking whether or not there are particularly political institutions as opposed to economic, social, or religious institutions, trying to determine when these political institutions became relatively autonomous (they’re never fully autonomous).

One can ask about activities: what constitutes being political? Is the personal political, as we thought in the 1970s? If so, is there no distinction between a man deciding to wash the dishes or going on strike and starting a revolution, since everything is political?

You could also ask about the political in terms of its, as it is sometimes referred to, “oppositions in a semantic field”: the public versus the private, the political versus the economic, or the political versus the moral.

Politics—and this is true of all terms—needs to be situated in a dynamic force field of competitive and sometimes synonymous terms. And the crucial thing to note is that this is historically variable: the political in our society at this moment is not the same as the political in the European Middle Ages, or in, say, a society that existed prior to Columbus’ discovery of America.

These terms have their histories and they have their shifting terrains. As you say, one way to deal with that is to look at a particular theme. And for me, lying proved to be particularly fruitful in that respect.

Questions for Discussion:

1. Do you think that the political realm is a fundamentally different one than other areas of human activity? Are some people “naturally cut out for politics”?
2. What do you think Martin means, exactly, when he refers to “getting it right in the kind of transcendental way in which history is suspended”? Does this imply that there is no such thing as “objective truth”?

II. The Liar’s Stage

From Machiavelli to political play-acting

HB: Another notion that you discuss is not only how different socie...

Table of contents

• A Note on the Text
• Introduction
• The Conversation
• Continuing the Conversation