My grandfather's walking stick, or the pink lie - Truth-Telling, Lying and Self-Deception

Social Research, Fall, 1996 by Lore Segal

WHEN Pandora had upended her box of calamities over the earth, there fell out, so says the story, a last straggler: hope.

Hope pities us and lies. It pities our terrors and invites us to tell ourselves that the things we fear happen to other people. We are a special case. When it comes to us, says hope, calamity will turn aside, may yet turn to our advantage.

Hope pities our dowdiness. It promises that we will find the treasure, marry the prince, and inherit the kingdom. Hope says that it is our birthright to win the lottery(1)) and write a classic. If we are American it will be a best seller. We will make the NBA, be the next Michael Jackson, become president.

And hope pities our disappointment with the world. It tells us to look forward to the time of the messiah to come, or backward to the paradise that must surely have been. The heart rebels at the truth that what is is it. Somewhere, says hope, in our past or in our future there has just got to be a golden age.

Friends to whom I argue my contention that hoping contains an inherent lie disagree violently. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) explains their reaction: it defines the lie as "a false statement made with intent to deceive; a criminal falsehood," and goes on to say, "In mod. use, the word is normally a violent expression of moral disapprobation, which in polite conversation tends to be avoided, the synonym falsehood or un-truth being often substituted as relatively euphemistic."

The OED lists only one other category, our old friend the white lie, and defines it as "a consciously untrue statement which is not considered criminal; a falsehood rendered venial or praiseworthy by its motive."

I wish to advance the pink or rose-colored lie and define it as an unconsciously untrue statement never considered blameworthy because it is not considered to be a falsehood.

I want to look at the pink lie in terms of the three aspects of the OED's definition of the lie and the white lie: function, intentionality, and moral reputation.

To take the last first. Hope has a universally favorable press. The 23rd Psalm ranks it with faith, hope, and charity, which is to say, with love.

And it is true that hope's gentle falsehoods are essential to our progress. It is the dream of an improbably prosperous outcome that initiates, and lets us persevere in, our best and worst ambitions. We need hope to power any action not of the instinctive kind. What personal, civic, or criminal act would we undertake--who would marry, run for office, plan a heist or an essay, start a polar expedition or a war--without the hope of better success than we have reason and experience to believe to be plausible?

Doctors tell us that hope assists the process of healing. Perhaps our very instincts lose courage where we stop hoping: I remember the evening, at supper, when my grandmother stopped lifting her fork up to her mouth.

Hope's necessary falsehoods are the tools in our survival kit and blessedly preserve us from intellectual despair, the sin accounted as the seventh and deadliest because it demonstrates an absence of Faith.

Hope's rose-colored falsehoods function to deceive ourselves and to participate in the deceptions practiced by our community. Hope ignores the evidence of history and experience; it lies in face of its better knowledge in order to con us out of knowing what we know and into thinking what we wish.

In the Sixties we held hands and sang "We shall overcome," adding "some day," which used to make my eyes itch. "Some day" means "obviously not today nor probably tomorrow either, but surely on some future day," where the word "surely" gives the lie to its definition. "Surely" means to mean "I am certain this is so" but functions to put certainty in question. If I say, "I will surely finish writing this essay today," you understand me to mean that I wish that I would finish it, as well as my uncertainty as to my ability to do so. I do not say, "I will surely die," for that would mean I think my death admits of a question requiring denial.

When we sang of "some day" on which the world would have overcome our mutual prejudice and hatreds, we were singing of the day the messiah is going to come, and he is always going to come if you are a Jew, or come for the second time if you are Christian, on "some day" for which we want to weep with desire.

But some day, before he comes, alternately returns, we are going die, and that is something we lie about privately, to ourselves, and holding hands, communally.

My late husband used to tell the story of a Martian chief who summons his head astronaut and orders an expedition to the earth. The chief is puzzled by an anomally he has been observing over the eons: Earthlings appear to be born to live for a period of time after which they die. Now a race, he argues, that knows it is going to die would be incapable of doing what Earthlings can be observed to do day in and day out: get out of bed, dress, go to their jobs, come home, eat their suppers, drink, laugh; on occasion they clap their hands.