Lies, why you can't trust the Catholic Clergy and Sam Harris is still keeping me honest

Born Liars: Why we can't live without deceit, by Ian Leslie, was really good.

As well as going into the cognitive development that's needed to lie (autistic people make very poor liars), how people give away their deceit, and how to spot lying, it also used the premise to discuss how the brain works - for example, touch your nose with your finger.

Go on.

It felt (or it should have done) as if your finger felt your nose, and your nose felt your finger, at the same time. However, it takes longer for the signal from your finger to reach your brain than it does for the signal from your nose. Your brain fudges in, to make it seem that these things are happening instantaneously, but they are not. The audio and visual output from your tv can be a tenth of a second out, or less, and our brain automatically makes us see them in synch. There are lots of other short cuts our brain takes that we cannot escape - we have them because they were good enough to let us survive.

It also goes into such things as the placebo effect, cognitive dissonance, and self deception (most people rate themselves as being above average over a range of factors).

I'd thoroughly recommend reading it, but, it did not shake my notion that it is better not to lie.

By lying, I mean to intentionally deceive someone when they expect honest communication - I'm still free to bluff at poker.

It's true that deception is all around us, but that is no excuse. Ian Leslie also says that "Honesty is not effortless, but something at which we have to work". True, to an extent, but lying is harder - you need to keep in your head all that is not true, and make sure that the statements you disseminate do not contradict what other's know. Being honest only means you have to stick to your own memory.

As Sam Harris says:

"When asked “How are you?” most of us reflexively say that we are well, understanding the question to be merely a greet- ing, rather than an invitation to discuss our career disappointments, our marital troubles, or the condition of our bowels. Elisions of this kind can be forms of deception, but they are not quite lies. We may skirt the truth at such moments, but we do not deliberately manufacture falsehood."

Effort with honesty only seems to crop up around social norms - "Do I look fat in this dress?". But, it's still the better course of action.

Even if there are Nazis at the door, one needed lie to save Anne Frank - "I wouldn't tell you even if I did know" is not a lie, and should suffice for all instances.

So yes, do go out and read Born Liars, and, if you haven't. Sam Harris' Lying. (Which I can email you for free, though if I do, Sam Harris asks in his book that if you do receive it for free, you buy a copy).

One thing I did learn about was the notion of mental reservation:

"The most influential advocate of what became known as 'the doctrine of mental reservation' was the Spanish theologian Dr Navarrus, who wrote that there are some truths 'expressed partly in speech and partly in the mind'. According to Navarrus, the Christian's overriding moral duty is to tell the truth to God; 'reserving' some of that truth from the ears of human hearers is moral if it serves the greater good. For example, the user of mental reservation could reply 'I know not' aloud to a human interlocutor but silently add 'to tell you', and still be telling the truth. The doctrine's adherents claimed that Christ himself practised it; he told his disciples that he did not know the Day of Judgement, even though his omniscience meant that he must have known".

What surprised me is that this piece of 16th century theology is alive today. This came to light in the 2009 report on the widespread allegations of clerical child abuse in Ireland. Here are two examples from the book:

"Marie Collins, who was abused by a Dublin priest, testified that when the archdiocese said in a 1997 press statement that it had co-operated with the police over her complaint of abuse she was upset because she had good reason to know this wasn't true. When a priest made inquiries on her behalf he was told by the archdiocese 'we never said we co-operated fully".

and

"Cardinal Connell felt compelled to emphasise that he did not lie to the media about the use of diocesan funds for the compensation of clerical child sexual abuse victims. According to the report, this is how the Cardinal explained away his misleading statements to the press:

...that diocesan funds ARE [reporter's emphasis] not used for such a purpose; that he had not said that diocesan funds WERE not used for such a purpose. By using the present tense he had not excluded the possibility that diocesan funds had been used for such purpose in the past... Cardinal Connell considered that there was an enormous difference between the two."

I don't know if mental reservation is one of the examples of sophisticated theology that Richard Dawkins et al have been accused of not addressing...

I resolved to never lie again. But today I lied. To children. Let me explain...

When magnesium burns in oxygen, magnesium oxide is formed. The magnesium oxide is heavier than the magnesium you started with. You can burn the magnesium in a crucible, and see this for yourself. One of the problems with this though, is that for the magnesium to burn, it needs oxygen, and this doesn't take long to get used up in the crucible. The lid needs to be removed periodically to let more oxygen in. Magnesium oxide is a solid, but it's quite powdery, and in opening the lid, you risk magnesium oxide escaping.

Such an occurrence happened to day. So I faked the results that I gave to the children.

It is true that I could have gone into why the end result was lighter, but there wasn't the time left in the lesson to do this, and the key point the children had to learn today was that chemical reactions can result in a change of mass.

They had seen how copper (II) sulphate pentahydrate crystals, when heated, lose water, and get lighter (and in so doing go from a lovely blue, to a white powder). The magnesium was a demo to show that things can get heavier, and thus, they will (hopefully) see that the mass can change (and ultimately realise that the mass of reactants and products is the same, but that the gas that escapes, or air that reacts, isn't getting way).

Now, I fudged the result on the spot. Had I been cleverer, I could have used the relative atomic mass to make up a plausible result. As it is, I didn't, so my deceit can be easily worked out. In retrospect, I should have been prepared for this, so that, even if I did have to fudge the result, a realistic figure could have been given. Currently it looks like there's twice as much oxygen there as there should be.

In future, I may well have to fake results again - this is because equipment isn't always accurate, errors can creep in, and I could just have poor technique on my part. If I am to make up results so the children can learn, then they should at least have a bearing on reality. In addition, doing so in this fashion doesn't seem like a lie to me - I am not trying to get children to form beliefs that are not true, quite the opposite.

I doubt any of the children in the class are thinking about the quantities of oxygen and magnesium involved, but if they are, they would be getting a misleading impression about how the universe actually works.

It's always best not to lie.

I resolve never to lie again, a thought on Sam Harris' Lying and a possible freebie

I've just finished reading Lying by Sam Harris, and would strongly advise you to do the same.

In it he (successfully to me at least) argues that lying, even white lies, are things to be avoided.

It only costs £2, well worth the investment* and you need only set aside 45 minutes reading time (and probably a bit of thinking time after).

I generally think of myself as a very honest person. However, following reading this, I going to take up Sam Harris and resolve to not lie again. I hope that I don't find this too much of a challenge!

The only caveat I can think of with white lies is when using them to surprise someone. I once lied about going for a run, so that I could pay a surprise visit to my (not at the time) ex. The deceit allowed me the time to drive and not reply to texts etc. which I would otherwise do. However, I think this falls into a category not mentioned by Harris - telling a lie, but with the ultimate aim of revealing the deceit later. Of course Walter Scott is right when he says "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!" - would these kind of lies make it easier to tell lies in general? Are these the only lies worth telling? I don't know. It's easy to think of how the potential negatives from this deceit (imagine that there had been a car crash and I had died - my last communication would have been a lie. This may be an extreme, but it's well within the realms of possibility) could out weigh any positives

*If you email me, I can send it to you for free. Sam Harris says he's happy for digital/physical copies to be shared with others, but does ask that if you received your copy for free, that you buy your own copy before passing yours on. You might also like to read "The future of the book" from Sam Harris' blog.