The impossibility of telling the whole truth. The importance of lies in teaching.
The eighteenth century believed. The nineteenth century doubted. By the twentieth century, the impulse to doubt was so strong that it strangled belief. Uncertainty was the new god.
The major belief in the eighteenth century was belief in the existence of truth. Truth was believed to be knowable, graspable, utterable. It was pre-eminent in the pantheon of worship. It was the goal of every honest-hearted, right-reasoning inquirer. Dr Samuel Johnson, (lexicographer, essayist, moralist) a walking Ten Commandments of how to live, insisted on it.
Boswell, his biographer, tells us, “He inculcated upon all his friends the importance of perpetual vigilance against the slightest degree of falsehood.” In Boswell’s words, Johnson was “known to be so rigidly attentive to…strict and scrupulous veracity…that even in his common conversation the slightest circumstance was mentioned with exact precision.”
According to Johnson, “Truth should never be violated, because it is of the utmost importance to the comfort of life.” Johnson, in tune with his century, believed in Truth.
In the nineteenth century, doubt crept in and cracked the great cathedral of belief. By the end of the century, belief, and even the possibility of belief, lay in ruins. One turns to John Keats, who in his public utterances (his poetry) argued that “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty,” but privately (in his letters) derided that very assurance and championed “Negative Capability,” the capacity to be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” In the same letter [Dec. 21-27, 1817] he criticized Coleridge whom he described as being “incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.”
The twentieth century was attracted by ideas like Keats’s. In literature, for example, doubt was especially seductive. Triumphantly-uncertain and mysterious poetry proliferated and was lauded. World events reinforced skepticism, which hardened into cynicism.
The Great War shook whatever traditional ideas were left. Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms wondered whether the words honor, loyalty, or beauty had even any meaning left. Werner Heisenberg’s discovery of the
“uncertainty principle” provided empirical proof for the idea that man no longer lived in a world of absolutes, that certainty was as dead as Nietzsche’s idea of God.
The physical world was uncertain; how much more so was consciousness? Psychology took up this theme and caught the gladiators of human motivation in a net of suspicion and doubt, a net woven from the subconscious. A humble relativism in all the disciplines began to replace the arrogance of absolute assurance. It became harder and harder to find something, anything, to believe in absolutely. Disillusionment, following defeat after defeat, finally succumbed to despair.
Let me suggest that, while my summary of the course of the last three centuries may be very pretty, it is just not true. It is a good story, but it is not exactly a true story.
It is not quite true that the eighteenth century was a time of belief. The eighteenth century was also the time of David Hume, of Voltaire, of Denis Diderot.
In the nineteenth century, there certainly were many doubters and celebrants of uncertainty. There were also Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Cardinal John Henry Newman.
A case can be made for the twentieth century as a century of relativism leading to despair. But what of Faulkner in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech asserting that mankind will not just “endure” but will “prevail”? Against existentialist angst and the belief that the world is without meaning, there are Victor Frankl’s “logotherapy” and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
I am a teacher, but all teachers are, in a very real sense, to the extent that they try to say anything about anything, liars. Teachers try to tell the truth, but the truth of the matter is, the truth, even the smallest and the most local of truths, is now too complex to be told, complicated beyond belief by connection upon connection, by context within context. Jack Nicholson In a Few Good Men was righter than even he knew: “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” No one can. The truth is too large. Whatever teachers say, since it’s never the whole truth, is, of necessity, a lie.
But teachers have to say something, so they do, all the while knowing they can’t with any real conviction say anything really true. Thus teaching becomes a form of cheating (teach and cheat are anagrams of each other), lecturing a form of deception. Every time teachers stand in front of their classes, they deceive the students in their charge into believing that what they are saying is the truth. To complete the deceit, they even test them on it.
Perhaps teachers should stop lying. Why not teach their students there is no such thing as Truth? Why not explain how complicated their subjects really are? Why not, in their addresses to students, lay on fact upon fact, connection upon connection, context upon context, the “thick description” Clifford Geertz (quoting Gilbert Ryle) calls for in ethnography?
Perhaps the best thing teachers can do for students is to teach them how untrue everything is, leave them questioning everything, abandon them in a state of positive bewilderment and virtuous uncertainty. There are many teachers who believe this. I recently attended a conference where
the keynote speaker suggested exactly this “complicating” in the classroom.
The speaker was after “thick description” in literary history-working vertically rather than horizontally, to really capture “the whole truth,” by unearthing fact after fact, every piece of coal from one thin vein. She suggested at the end of her lecture that the best thing she could do for her students was to leave them in a state of confusion. That confusion was, in her view, a healthy state, not just conducive to but also equivalent to education.
Teachers do students no service to confuse them, even in the name of what is true. Teachers need to leave students in a state of certainty, not in a state of confusion, but not arrogant certainty. Rather, confidence. Confidence that they are on the road to more certain truths, that they know something, that there is something to know. Teachers do their students no service if teachers deprive students of a belief in truth. I choose a spurious certainty over the accuracy of disillusionment.
Teachers know a lot. The knowledge that they have allows them also to
know what is not true. Even more importantly, the knowledge that they have allows them to ask questions. The more teachers know, the better questions teachers ask.
The progress of scholarship is the process of questioning, asking (and answering) better and better questions. Scholarship begins in dialogue and ends in conversation. As scholars, teachers are part of an ongoing educated conversation that spans centuries, extends over continents, and includes their students as well as their colleagues. One can see this “conversation” in the letters to the editor and the author’s responses to those letters in both popular and academic journals. See the New York Review of Books or the Publications of the Modern Language Association, for lively examples. The conversation lives on in scholarly chat rooms and in serial e-mail.
If there is less of this conversation between instructor and student, it is primarily because students are in the position of The Man Who Knew Too Little: they do not yet know enough to ask the questions that deepen understanding. To be educated is to know not too little (the beginning
student) or too much (the professor) but enough. The paradox, as Blake saw two centuries ago, is, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” But before one can know enough, one has to know something. And that is a teacher’s job: to say something, to teach something.
Teachers know so much! That’s a position of privilege and paralysis. The more teachers know, the harder it is for them to say something that is true. Knowledge puts that burden on them. Their knowledge makes them want to qualify and requalify all they hear and all they say. It is possible to be so overcome by what one knows that one finds oneself unable to say or write anything at all. If teachers are not terrified into muteness, they are so afraid of saying what is untrue that they feel compelled to throw in everything they know in the hope that they are telling “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” The question educators in the twenty-first century have to ask themselves is not whether it is possible to tell the “whole” truth about anything (it is not), but how they can justify telling anything less.
My justification is that knowledge builds on knowledge. I owe my
students a foundation to build on. Because of this, I am under no obligation to tell the “whole” truth; the truth will come out, as Johnson promised Boswell, “by degrees.” Our students’ subsequent acquaintance, instruction, study, and experience will modify the “half-knowledge” I’ve imparted. However, professional educators and scholars are under the obligation “to tell the truth” and “nothing but the truth”-the truth of their subject as they understand it, as they’ve been taught, and as they’ve kept abreast of developments in their fields.
There is a difference between the obligation of scholars and the obligation of teachers. The obligation of scholars is to learn as widely and as deeply as they can about their subjects. The obligation of teachers is to resist the impulse to impart all that they know. A teacher may be and often is a scholar. But teacher scholars, if they are not careful, can overwhelm students in a sea of detail in which the pupils can and do drown.
A good example of this drowning in an overabundance of detail is Sir Lewis Namier. Francisco Cordasco and Gustave Simonson tell his story in their 1986 book on Junius: Junius and His Works: A History of the Letters and the Authorship Controversy:
“In politics, the orthodox interpretation until the 1920’s was that of the great Whig historians, such as Lord Macaulay, Thomas Erskine May, W.E.H. Lecky, and both G.O. and G.M. Trevelyan, who tended to see the revolution of 1688 as a Whig triumph …threatened after 1760 by the sinister determination of George III to turn back the political clock… .
“In 1929 and 1930 the late Sir Lewis Namier published The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III and England in the Age of the American Revolution, which challenged virtually every aspect of the Whig interpretation, but at the same time so atomized the politics of the eighteenth century that they became almost incomprehensible….”
The Whig historians were, in an absolute sense, wrong, but they told a coherent story. Namier was accurate, but in his avalanche of facts the story was buried and, in Bob Dylan’s words, “nothing was delivered.”
A parallel fault can be found in novice short story writers who try to put
everything into their first sentence. So much detail is crowded in that the reader loses the picture. Consider the opening of The Stranger: “Mother died today.” Camus doesn’t tell us how old Mersault’s mother was, what she died of, where she was, what she was doing when she died, or even when “today” was,–just “Mother died today.” Simplicity, even when it falsifies, is truer than an insistent, over-elaborated, technical accuracy.
There’s a wonderful explanation of this in an 1899 letter of Chekhov’s to Maxim Gorky. Chekhov writes:
“More advice: when reading the proofs, cross out a host of concrete nouns and other words. You have so many such nouns that the reader’s mind finds it a task to concentrate on them, and he soon grows tired. You understand it at once when I say, “The man sat on the grass;” you understand it because it is clear and makes no demands on the attention. On the other hand, it is not easily understood, and it is difficult for the mind, if I write, “A tall, narrow-chested, middle-sized man, with a red beard, sat on the green grass, already trampled by pedestrians, sat silently, shyly, and timidly looked about him.” That is not immediately grasped by the mind, whereas good writing should be grasped at once–in a second.”
This is as true of good teaching as it is of good writing. It should be able to be grasped at once, as is the case with effective aphorism, like this of Kierkegaard: “Life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards.”
Other faults of writing are analogous to teaching. The critic William Lyon Phelps in his Essays on Modern Novelists (1915) complained about the “superfluous and clogging detail” of some German novels, how they can be “positively choked by trivial detail.”
“One dominant fault in most German novels is a lack of true proportion. The principle of selection, which differentiates a paining from a photograph and makes an artist an Interpreter instead of a Recorder, has been forgotten or overlooked. The high and holy virtue of Omission should be cultivated more sedulously. The art of leaving out is the art that produces the real illusion…”
This “art of leaving out” is what is so often missing in those teachers who
want to tell the whole story. The art of teaching, as well as fiction, is selectivity, and not just what is tangentially relevant but what is relevant essentially. A teacher must strive to be an artist and be an interpreter of data, not merely a conscientious recorder of unsifted information.
Lytton Strachey in his introduction to Eminent Victorians argues similarly. “Ignorance, he writes memorably, “is the first requisite of the historian–ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits.” Out of the “great ocean of material” the ideal biographer will “lower down” “a little bucket” to bring up “some characteristic specimen” “to be examined with a careful curiosity.” Teachers, of necessity, must work in the same way. The “characteristic specimen” stands in place of the “whole truth.” Strachey pushes a becoming brevity-a brevity which excludes everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant. “That,” he argues, “is the first duty of the biographer.” I would add the teacher.
But to be a teacher is to be someone who can recognize (and reject) the redundant and identify (and accept) the significant. Teachers are story
tellers; they tell the story of their subjects. That is to say, they make a story of their subject.
To make a story out of something is to choose a beginning, a middle, and an end. It is to select a setting and players and events and ideas. It is, in a word, to falsify, to be untrue to the seamlessness of time, to the continuous complexity of human actions.
Samuel Johnson said of memorable speech, “In all pointed sentences, some degree of accuracy must be sacrificed to concision.” This is the same Samuel Johnson who insisted on telling the truth at all times.
Stories, like pointed sentences, must necessarily sacrifice accuracy. The story, any story, can never be the “whole” story. To elevate someone to observation is to cast all the other someones into oblivion and neglect. There is an arrogance in this, but there is an arrogance in any artistry. Teaching is an art, and teachers are called on every day to exercise the artistry of successful instruction.
Clifford Geertz believes “there is no general story to be told, no synoptic
picture to be had,” and perhaps all teachers can do is to focus on what he calls “complex specifics,” to collect “very densely textured facts,” but those specifics and those facts must exist within a story or else they can never, in Hippolyta’s words from A Midsummer Night’s Dream “grow to something of great constancy,” that is to say, be understood.
Teachers must be story tellers even though they know their stories are not “the whole story” and not quite true. Still, truth (whatever shards of truth people in the twenty-first century can salvage of the great Truth that the eighteenth century believed in) is essential. To the best of their abilities, teachers need to tell true stories, even as all stories are of necessity false.
Samuel Johnson, again, is our guide.
“The value of every story depends upon its being true. A story is a picture either of an individual or of human nature is general: if it false, it is a picture of nothing . . . . [Langton] used to think a story, a story till I showed him that truth was essential to it.”
Johnson, for all his celebration of generalization (he staunchly believed
in what he called “the grandeur of generality”) saw the importance of adhering to truth even in, or especially in, the small specifics of life.
“Accustom your children,” he said to Mrs. Thrale, “constantly to this [“a strict attention to truth, even in the most minute particulars”]; if a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.”
Mrs. Thrale objected: “but little variations in narrative must happen a thousand times a day, if one is not perpetually watching.”
Johnson: “Well, madam, and you ought to be perpetually watching. It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentional lying, that there is so much falsehood in the world.”
Teachers should heed Johnson’s warning and be scrupulous, even as they inculcate scrupulosity in their students.
Consecrated Lies
This leads to a paradox.
Telling the whole truth is impossible. All generalities are lies. It is essential for minute particulars to be true. Truths are only expressible through story. The value of story lies in its truth. Stories are necessarily false. Something must be taught, even if it is a life.
The way out of this paradox? Samuel Johnson, as reported by Boswell in his Life of Johnson.
“There are (said he) inexcusable lies and consecrated lies. For instance, we are told that on the arrival of the news of the unfortunate battle of Fontenoy, every heart beat, and every eye was in tears. Now we know, that no man eat [sic] his dinner the worse, but there should have been all this concern; and to say there was (smiling) may be reckoned a consecrated lie.”
In the teaching that teachers do, in the stories that teachers tell, in the half-knowledge that teachers impart, teachers may be reckoned not guilty of unvirtuous conduct. Teachers do the best they can. They wrestle with the truth. Yes, in some absolute sense, in telling their stories, they tell lies. But they tell, in Johnson’s wonderful phrase, consecrated lies.
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