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107 4 The Ambivalent Virtues of Mendacity How Europeans Taught (Some of) Us to Learn to Love the Lies of Politics Martin Jay Toute vérité n’est pas bonne à dire. —French proverb “Untruth and Consequences” screamed the headline on the cover of the July 21, 2003, issue of Time magazine, which dealt extensively with the thenburning question “How flawed was the case for going to war against Saddam?” Once again it seemed that an American president was in danger of losing his credibility and being excoriated for the sin of telling lies to the American people . Only a short time after his predecessor had been impeached for perjuring himself about his sex life, leaving, as the title of Christopher Hitchens’s nasty philippic put it,“no one left to lie to,”1 George W. Bush was struggling to parse his way out of the discrepancies between his statements about the imminent threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and what the evidence now seemed to show. Once again outrage against political mendacity coursed, albeit variably depending on whose ox had been caught fibbing, through the American public sphere. Liberals like Al Franken could hit the best-seller lists by calling their polemics Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, in response to conservative rants like Ann Coulter’s Slander: Liberal Lies about the American Right.2 And critics of Bush’s war on Iraq could name their books, with easy cleverness, Weapons of Mass Deception.3 Not surprisingly, a political culture that takes as one of its founding myths the refusal of its chief Founding Father to lie about the felling of a cherry tree and fondly calls its most revered leader “Honest Abe” has been especially keen on rooting out mendacity from the political sphere. In fact, American culture in general, as Michael T. Gilmore has recently reminded us, has been on a dogged quest for perfect legibility, fueled by a yearning for full disclosure that stretches from the Puritans’ antimonastic insistence on “holy watching” and Martin Jay 108 distrust of Catholic casuistry to the widespread acceptance of psychoanalysis as a therapy of unconstrained candor.4 Although Americans admired “the arts of deception” in the popular culture of what has been called the “age of Barnum,”5 when it came to extending them to political discourse, strict limits were set. Not for us, Americans have prided themselves on believing, are the Machiavellian machinations of Old World politics, with their haughty disdain for the transparency of democratic decision making.6 Not for us are the even more dangerous deceptions of totalitarian ideology based on the imposition of an audacious Big Lie on a supine populace no longer able to tell the difference between truth and falsehood.7 We are determined, as the reigning cliché now has it, “to speak truth to power.”8 In the academy, ever since Harvard picked its familiar motto, a comparable assumption has ruled that truth, or at least the quest for it, is an unimpeachable value.9 Interestingly, that motto was originally “Veritas pro Christo et ecclesia” (“Truth for Christ and his Church”), but it was shortened to allow other, more profane purposes to be served by that quest. When the secularization of intellectual life undermined appeals to divinely revealed truth, this often came to mean a surrogate faith in the scientific method, however that might be defined, as a viable alternative. Even when American pragmatists questioned traditional notions of certainty and referential correspondence in favor of a more consequentialist alternative, they did not abandon the search for truth as the telos of inquiry and action. With the growth of departments of political science, which often adopted the approach that came to be called behavioralist, the appeal to honesty in political practice could be reinforced by a comparable attempt to study politics in a neutral way. At times, in fact, some came to believe that technocrats with the tools of political science at their command would be the best leaders of a polity that wanted to avoid the untidiness of ill-informed opinion and untested prejudice. During the Progressive Era in particular, advocates of scientific administration such as Walter Lippmann and L. L. Bernard advocated organization, efficiency, and enlightened management.10 Truth in politics, it was argued, would be achieved by transcending the cacophony of competing voices and allowing those with the skills and knowledge to cut through to the core of problems and deal...

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