Browsing in a good library is one of the most unpredictable and enjoyable elements in a life of scholarship. The things you find when you're not looking for them! Oh we can call it serendipity, happenstance, luck, a fortuitous find – but now and again we discover something that we needed to find, and didn't know it till we found it. I want to introduce the word providence into the browsing experience as a way of looking at why and how such discoveries are made just in that moment.
Like so many of us, I have struggled to accept the new reality that is called the rehabilitation of the lie. I don't mean the occasional fib, or even the blatant untruth peddled as an excuse or explanation for a person's moral failure. We have entered a time when lying is an accepted form of political discourse; truth is being trashed in the grinders of deceit, evasion and malfeasance. We are well on the way to the enculturated acceptance of untruth as an alternative reality made to sound more real than the truth that is being obscured
I've been wondering what the hell is going on; yes, I use that word quite deliberately, because there is something hellish about a culture embracing the lie, ignoring the lie, admiring the liar, and thereby corroding the cultural holdfasts of trust, integrity, accountability and justice.
And then yesterday, hiding amongst the academic tomes on the Old testament prophets, a slim and battered volume, the title so faded I had to take it from the shelf and open it. Written by Martin Buber and published in 1952, it is a brief study of several Psalms, the title Right and Wrong. The first chapter, 'The Generation of the Lie' pulled me in and I started reading it standing in the stacks, on floor 7, just before 11 o'clock, and I didn't move till I'd read those six pages. I took it over to the desk, sat down and read the chapter again, and made a few notes. The Generation of the Lie. A meditation on Psalm 12 written by a Jewish philosopher who lived through the years of propaganda, truth silencing, cultural vandalism and the growing malice against all who opposed, resisted, contradicted the Nazi narrative.
Here is the first paragraph of Buber's meditation on Psalm 12, and the words that prompted his thought:
Save, O Lord, for the godly one is gone;
for the faithful have vanished from among the children of man.
2 Everyone utters lies to his neighbour;
with flattering lips and a double heart they speak.
3 May the Lord cut off all flattering lips,
the tongue that makes great boasts,
4 those who say, “With our tongue we will prevail,
our lips are with us; who is master over us?”
"The lie is the specific evil which man has introduced to nature. All our deeds of violence and our misdeeds are only as it were a highly-bred development of what this and that creature of nature is able to achieve in its own way. But the lie is our very own invention, different in kind from every deceit that animals can produce. A lie was possible only after a creature, man, was capable of conceiving the being of truth. It was possible only as directed against the conceived truth. In a lie the spirit practices treason against itself." (Page 12)
That last sentence: "In a lie the spirit practices treason against itself." Culture, society, human co-operation in community – all are threatened when the lie becomes the norm.
Buber goes on to explain why lies release toxins in our personal and social relationships: "The [psalmist] no longer suffers merely from liars, but from a generation of the lie, and the lie in this generation has reached the highest level of perfection as an ingeniously controlled means of supremacy." The Psalmist fears the disintegration of human speech, and prays for God to intervene. How do you pray against the lie? What do you ask of God in a culture where the words of the highest authorities can no longer be trusted and there is no accountability, no reset towards truth?
Here is Buber's take on what we pray for – freedom from the lie:
"God is called upon to 'set free'. What He is to free from, is the present state of affairs which is characterised in what follows. The two basic qualities , on which men's common life rests, well-wishing or the good will – that is, the readiness to fulfil for the other what he may expect of me in our relation with one another – and loyalty and reliability – that is, a responsible accord between my actions and my explicit mind – have gone. They have disappeared so completely that the basis of men's common life has been removed. The lie has taken the place, as a form of life, of human truth, that is, of the undivided seriousness of the human person with himself and all his manifestations." (Page13)
"The basis of men's common life has disappeared…"That's the danger of the lie – the corrosion of the supports that enable the building of robust, durable relationships in community, including the community of nations.
We are now living in the generation of the lie. Much that Buber wrote in this brief essay on Psalm 12 is now visible, audible and becoming clearer and louder. Psalm 12 is a Psalm for our time, and Buber's analysis of evil, and his diagnosis of the lie as a lethal virus resonates powerfully against the backdrop of contemporary politics in the United States. And the consequences are reverberating across the world, amplified by our hyper-connectedness across borders, cultures and nations.
Psalm 12 finishes with a prayer of trust for a time like this. I suspect too for a time when silence is no longer a morally sound option:
You, Lord, will keep the needy safe
and will protect us forever from the wicked,
8 who freely strut about
when what is vile is honoured by the human race.
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