Truth and Lies

Truthfulness is a central virtue in traditional Quaker practice. Early Friends went to great lengths to uphold a collective testimony to plain and truthful speech at all times and on all occasions. Truthfulness, honesty and integrity were testimonies to the renewed lives of convinced Friends, who felt themselves to be freed from the self-serving motives that required dishonesty and deception. Through their experience of inward liberation, they became able to commit themselves to a fearless singleness of purpose, rejecting any desire for concealment or equivocation.

Our current Quaker discipline also contains an assumption that Friends are committed to truthfulness, with a high standard being set particularly by Advices & Queries 37:

"Are you honest and truthful in all you say and do?"

This is a remarkably challenging query, given that the goal of complete truthfulness is generally seen as both unrealistic and undesirable in contemporary culture, including among Quakers. For most people, including most modern Friends, ‘white lies’ are thought to be both inevitable and completely morally acceptable. Lying is usually considered essential to avoid giving offence and to smooth over potential embarrassments or social awkwardness.

Truthfulness is certainly very difficult to practice in everyday social and work situations. It is important to avoid giving unnecessary offence, and there are sometimes strong incentives to lie in order to avoid significant personal inconvenience. But the habit of reaching for the easy ‘social lie’ as a first resort evades the challenge to find a way of speaking honestly that is also tactful and considerate of others. A more truthful response will often require greater openness and vulnerability. It may mean exposing more of our real feelings, needs and values, instead of hiding behind conventional excuses.

Habits of truthfulness are important, not just for our own integrity, but principally for the building and maintenance of trust. Truthful speech and honest behaviour are essential conditions of relationships in which we can trust that someone will say what they mean, and do as they say. Without this background of social trust, we are condemned to live in a ‘post-truth’ world, in which we don’t even expect people to speak honestly, or to take our own statements seriously. Instead, speech is regarded simply as an instrument for manipulating each other in the service of our own interests.

I am sure that lying is sometimes necessary to prevent greater harm, especially by those in positions of political power or great responsibility. There is almost certainly an unavoidable clash between the demands of personal integrity and public responsibility. But the fact that deception is sometimes necessary does not mean that it is not in itself an evil, to be avoided wherever possible. The existence of some ‘hard cases’, where it is unclear how lying can be avoided without causing greater harm, does not make truthfulness irrelevant. On the contrary, it should emphasise the importance of cultivating habitual truthfulness in our daily life, in order to develop the capacity to discern those occasions when lying is actually unavoidable.

By raising this subject, I am not trying to make false claims about my own truthfulness. I find truth-telling difficult, especially in social and work situations where I am often unsure how to avoid lying without creating unnecessary difficulties. I am also sometimes unclear about where the boundaries of truthfulness are. Is it dishonest to say ‘sorry, I can’t make it’ to a social invitation, or simply a form of speech, and what alternatives might there be? Questions such as this could be useful subjects for discussion, but these conversations only make sense where we have a shared intention to take truthfulness seriously enough to test our own motives and behaviour according to its standard.

What does the Quaker testimony of truthfulness mean to you? How do you deal with the challenges of trying to speak truthfully in daily life?