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4 THE BEAUTy OF ARENDT’S LIES: MENCHÚ’S pOLITICAL STRATEGy Therefore there is no absurdity, however strange it may sound, in the saying of the ancient Father, “I would not tell a willful lie to save the souls of the whole world.” —John Wesley, Sermon 90 Now I feel that a lie that is told for the good of others is not a lie—it is bigger than the truth. —Garima, quoted in Sangtin Writers and Richa Nagar, Playing with Fire I sit reading Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Written on a fellowship at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, this book responds to the lies of the right, exemplified by Ann Coulter’s Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right. As I read, the radio news is discussing lies about health care reform: Will Obama pull the plug on granny? Perhaps I should check that claim on the “Truth-O-Meter” of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize–winning website PolitiFact (a project of the Tampa Bay Times) or the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s FactCheck.org. We live in a political culture of lies and media manipulation, one that has the best minds struggling to understand how citizens can make judgments about political actions, but this is not the first culture to struggle with the relationships among truth, opinion, lies, hopes, rhetoric, and politics, nor will it be the last. Lies in politics are a commonplace because just as humans imagine and hope, humans lie and intend to deceive, and just as political discourse speaks pragmatically, it also speaks counterfactually, creating alternatives through lies, opinions, and truths. To be deceitful or imaginative is to change the discourse and unbalance the scales of the status quo. Symbols, so malleable, facilitate our lies to others and ourselves. When Plato promises remembered truth as an ideal external to human actions and when Confucius promises truth as remembered in rituals from 128 DELIBERATIVE ACTS a better culture preserved in the right actions, they respond to the unstable politics of their times, and they wish for the stable politics of the elite, an imagined nation where cultural consistency creates the shared vision. Habermas , too, argues that deliberation, carefully modulated, comes to consensus , potentially a new and vital truth. In doing so, he reimagines the ancient commonplace of truth in politics, basing it in argument that truth conquers falsehood through open and free speech. Like the truthsayers Plato and Confucius, Habermas’s sense of political culture ends with a single vision. In situated and particular politics, however, speech is not about coming to consensus and a tautological peace, but rather about worldly action, finding in-betweens, shared inter-ests, and new discursive regimes. Consequently, when Habermas, for example, argues that utterances should have validity in one of three respects (truth, rightness, or intended truthfulness) (Moral 136–37), he is not listing valid criteria for rhetorical or political utterances, strategic utterances that announce position, inter-est, or identity. Indeed, he is creating the dangerous and godlike certainty that Arendt abhors. Although many may wish the criteria of rhetoric and politics to include truth, rhetorical and political utterances are conceived and spoken in the complexity of contingencies where truth is not to be nailed. Within deliberation, correspondence (constative) truth rarely trumps participatory or constructivist truths, the truths constructed as they impact a community’s inter-ests. Truth may not be a realistic criterion for effective political speech, as speech’s performativity itself makes truth. Whatever the need for fact checking, or perhaps because of the need for fact checking, truth is not an innate quality or requirement of political discourse in and of itself. To describe political practices accurately, one well might need a theory of the lie.1 Or, if not a theory of lies, then a sense of why the criterion of truth is not adequate to deliberations across difference. If truth is understood as contained within the frame of available facts or as tautologically defined within cultural norms, then utterance validity, its truthfulness, varies within and between cultures and situations. For instance, the truths of a geocentric universe and the natural weakness of women were cultural facts that stood without contestation for millennia, but they have increasingly become falsehoods through scientific and political deliberation. Given that the current domestic deliberations of the United States are riddled with accusations of lies (just consider health care rights...

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