By the time you finish reading The Post-Truth Era, Keyes is likely to have convinced you that dishonesty is now the order of the day, and that deception has now been institutionalized at virtually every level of American culture.
Keyes is an author of keen perception and wide-ranging observation. He has pulled together an enormous body of evidence, all pointing to the pervasive rise of dishonesty in American life. As Jeremy Campbell remarked in The Liars' Tale, "It is a creeping assumption at the start of a new millennium that there are things more important than truth."
Keyes acknowledges that human beings have lied in the past, but he suggests that the current generation of liars has developed a skillfulness and nuance in lying that is virtually unprecedented in the human experience. "Even though there have always been liars, lies have usually been told with hesitation, a dash of anxiety, a bit of guilt, a little shame, at least some sheepishness," Keyes notes. "Now, clever people that we are, we have come up with rationales for tampering with truth so we can dissemble guilt-free."
Keyes has a label for this new age of dishonesty. "I call it post-truth. We live in a post-truth era." Keyes credits the late Steve Tesich with coining this phrase, but Keyes now applies it with vigor to our contemporary culture. "Post-truthfulness exists in an ethical twilight zone," he explains. "It allows us to dissemble without considering ourselves dishonest. When our behavior conflicts with our values, what we're most likely to do is reconceive our values." Since we do not want to think of ourselves as unethical, we simply "devise alternative approaches to morality."
As evidence of this cultural acceptance of lying, Keyes notes the rise of euphemisms for deception. "We no longer tell lies. Instead we 'misspeak.' We 'exaggerate.' We 'exercise poor judgment.' 'Mistakes were made,' we say. The term 'deceive' gives way to the more playful 'spin.' At worst, saying 'I wasn't truthful' sounds better than 'I lied'." Keyes suggests that the use of such euphemisms is a new cultural syndrome he identifies as "euphemasia." This would include everything from terms such as "credibility gap," to Winston Churchill's "terminological inexactitudes."
What are we to do with terms such as "poetic truth," "nuanced truth," "alternative reality," or "strategic misrepresentations?" In our technological age, driven by a digitalized dimension of lying, we are now accustomed to talking about "virtual truth."
In a fascinating section, Keyes traces the history of lying. He suggests that early civilizations depended on honesty, at least within the kinship group, for the establishment of stable order and trust. Once society becomes more complicated and diverse, lying becomes more routine. In some cultures, lying to an enemy or a stranger is not considered immoral at all.
In more modern eras, lying was raised to a higher art form. In the history of Protestant confessionalism, creeds were to be accepted "without hesitation or mental reservation." This language continues among confessional Christians, who may wonder how the term "mental reservation" emerged in the first place.
Keyes supplies this explanation, tracing the use of "mental reservation" back to the Reformation era, when Catholics developed "mental reservation" as a defense for telling an untruth under threat of persecution. "In time, however, it became an easy way to rationalize all manner of prevarication," Keyes explains. The device of "mental reservation" allowed an individual to hold or "reserve" the truth to himself even as he misled an interrogator. Before long, others used this excuse in order to give apparent assent to creedal statements while privately rejecting the very truths articulated in the statement of faith.
Just how important is honesty, after all? "Honesty's market value is too little appreciated in the history of ethics," Keyes argues. "Truth telling underlies not just individual reputations but the health of society as a whole." Without honesty, there can be no confidence in legal contracts, no shared confidence in social arrangements, and no authority for the rule of law. As argued by Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, a healthy society can't remain healthy so long as it accepts lies. "For a lie always harms another," Kant asserted, "if not some other particular man, still it harms mankind generally, for it vitiates the source of law itself."
