When Politics Is Awash in Lies – The American Spectator

On Aug 13, 2023

Back in the mid-sixties, people told of a White House reporter telling other guys on the beat how to know when LBJ was lying. He would give it away, said the veteran reporter, by his body language. How so? asked one of the others. Well, said the veteran, it isn’t when he scratches his chin, or when he pulls his ear, or when he rubs his nose. Nope, the sure sign that he’s going to tell a lie is when he opens his mouth.

In defense of the dead, we might say that politics deals at best with secondary, provisional truths.

Politics is at its worst is when it pretends to hold absolute truths, codified in an infallible and undebatable party program. Politics as religion.

Religion is how we address the most fundamental issues in our life. Some of us do that informed by a tradition and a culture that we receive; some try to go it alone. In either case, we are facing the universal problem of how to live in the face of the very many things the truth of which we do not know and cannot control. All of us, regularly, must make significant choices when we have incomplete knowledge, choices that will alter our lives. Even if we are rigorous and meticulous, we face an ultimate inescapable dilemma: we cannot prove why our proofs work. We cannot prove even that reality exists! And yet somehow, it continues to exist, and we must live within it.

That which gets us to do so is our actual religion at work, for the atheist and the conventional believer alike.

Politics comes into the picture the moment we move from being isolated individuals dealing with this problem to a group of people living together. In order to interact well with each other, we need to find a common reality. Within a shared sense of reality, a civilization can develop, small-scale or large.

The monotheisms that spread from the Middle East to the West defined a shared reality that has been the foundation of our culture, whether we recognize it or not. All aspects of life, matters spiritual and mundane, were addressed by the great religions, ordering them by the shared vision. On that shared vision, political life found a firm foundation.

The politics didn’t supply the underlying coherence. Rather, it flowed from it. When it worked the other way around, the result was militant intolerance.

The religions all could be interpreted tolerantly and sometimes were. A medieval example was Spain in the time called La Convivencia (the convivial time) by the historian Américo Castro, when for long periods of time, Jews, Christians, and Muslims lived in peace within an open culture.

But Spain itself supplies the example of what happens when a darker side of human religiosity triumphs — the Spain that built its sense of self on enforced religious uniformity. That urge to translate religious faith into an enforced uniformity embroiled Europe in a series of bloody wars over religion until another religious idea came forth to the rescue embodied in the series of treaties known as the Peace of Westphalia. Led by the Dutch scholar and legal philosopher Hugo Grotius, the treaty authors founded a structure of international law, based on an ancient paradigm of divine political and legal order called the Noahide Laws.

The Noahide Laws are seven basic laws that in ancient times were all the conformity that was required to dwell in the Holy Land. The people of Israel did not force those who were not a member of their specific divine covenant to observe the many laws that ordered their lives, such as not eating pork, refraining from work on the Seventh Day, and joining the worship in the synagogue or in the Temple. While the national life of Israel required those things, the international life that orders peaceful and constructive relations between one group and another is ordered by a much smaller group of requirements.

A modern scholar characterizes these seven laws in an understandable way:

Embrace the Relevance of Oneness
Do Not Deny That Oneness
Guard the Sanctity of Human Life
Honor the Sanctity of Measured Consumption (meaning, do not be cruel or wantonly destructive in obtaining our livelihood from the world)
Respect the Sanctity of Private Property
Harness and Sublimate the Human Libido
Create Mechanisms to Ensure Justice

These laws form the shared divine legal heritage of all humanity. No further international uniformity is required by God. Within this order, each nation is free to determine its own path.

This ancient and liberating idea not only brought Europe peace from religious wars but also, in Holland and in Britain, became a core concept in constructing modern constitutional democracy. When there is a coherent world outlook shared in the widest possible way, politics is free to do what it can competently do — help the people find their ways towards an ever more abundant and fulfilling life together. Individual differences, instead of threatening the basic order, are now included as part of the broad, coordinated intelligence of a vibrant national order, which in turn provides a basis for a similar peaceful world. Holland and Britain went on to prosper, even as those states that clung to the totalitarian concept declined.

It is a fact that the intolerance, like a virus, continues to morph. Jacobinism, Communism, Fascism, and Nazism all proclaimed themselves beyond religion, but all are religions of the most atavistic and intolerant sort. Totalitarianism, as George Orwell wrote, “probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.” Yet they incessantly insist that they have exclusive control over absolute truth in their doctrines and in their state and will enforce a uniformity beyond the dreams of a Torquemada or a Cotton Mather.

An example of the lies of the classic heyday of totalitarianism is given by historian Piers Brendon, writing about Stalin’s party congress held in 1934, after his extermination by starvation of the prosperous farmers of the Ukraine and the subsequent collapse of wages across the Soviet economy.

Its very title, the “Congress of Victory,” mocked the fate of a people who had become lean while the State had grown gross. The fact that real wages had fallen by half since 1928 did not stop Stalin saying that living standards had risen.

There are many differences between Stalinomics and Bidenomics. The lying, however, is pretty much the same.

The temptation to untruth is universal. In politics, however, it is particularly dangerous, and we who expended rivers of blood and mountains of treasure to defeat totalitarianism should know that most of all.

And yet, our politics is awash in lies.

A 19th century Chassidic rabbi called to account some people who were doing what we now call virtue signaling:

Whom are you fooling? You are not fooling me, you are not fooling your fellows; you are only fooling yourself. Is it a great feat to fool a fool?

Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman was another, more contemporary devotee of truth. He translated the rabbi’s idea into practical advice that is good for both scientists in pursuit of the truth and for all of us who want our society to escape the systematic lies of totalitarianism:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Amidst the avalanche of lies, it’s good to keep this constantly in mind.