The Devil Wins: A History of Lying from the Garden of Eden to the Enlightenment (30 page)

Walker, with at least a pretense of reluctance, highlights society’s dependence on lies, large and small, in the opening pages of
The Refin’d Courtier
. Having ranked the demand for charity above the demand for truth, and thus justifying the occasional lie, he adds, “But this is to be understood warily and practiced with a
great deal of sober caution, according to the comedian’s rule, only when truth produces an insufferable mischief; and in that case it is pardonable, not laudable and noble.”
¹³⁷
Of course, the entire point of his handbook is to demonstrate that crass and “unrefined” behavior is the very essence of insufferable mischief. The only way to avoid being insufferable is to adopt the appearance civil society demands, whether honestly or deceptively. For his part, Guazzo suggests the social necessity for deception when William recommends the courtier employ flattery to make his mark in the world. “The world is full of and subsists by flattery, which is more in fashion than peeked beards and large ruffs,” he explains to Anniball. “You see how all persons for the sake of peace, and to avoid contention, and that they may appear agreeable in company, com-port themselves in the best manner they can to other men’s talk and behavior.”
¹³⁸
And, as one example among others, he describes how parents “flatter their children to encourage them in virtue.” While Anniball refuses to let anything good be said about flattery, he accomplishes this through an arbitrary redefinition of terms that does nothing to undermine its social importance. When good intentions accompany our flattery, we do not flatter so much as feign. When we overly praise our children “for some trifling action that is not worth notice,” we cannot be said to flatter because our praise “is a commendable kind of deceit which has a good end in view and that brings advantage to the party deceived.”
¹³⁹
But the good ends achieved can be our own as well, and so it is, Anniball continues, that we can feign friendship with our enemies and respect for our inferiors. Perhaps feigning can really be distinguished from flattery, but it is deceptive nonetheless, occasionally mendacious and, it would seem, absolutely necessary for the success of human society.

B
ERNARD
M
ANDEVILLE AND THE
W
ORLD
L
IES
B
UILT

Published first to little notice in 1714, the 1723 revised and expanded edition of Bernard Mandeville’s
Fable of the Bees: or
Private Vices, Publick Benefits
met with outraged howls of disgust (and sold copies by the thousands). In a letter that appeared in the
London Journal
on July 27, 1723, addressed to Lord John Carteret, First Earl of Granville, one Theophilus Philo-Brittanus, roiling with impatience and pugilistic brio, writes, “The Jest of it is, my Lord, that these
Scribblers
would still be thought
good moral men
. But, when Men make it their Business to
mislead
and
deceive
their Neighbours, and that in Matters of
Moment
, by
distorting
and
disguising
Truth, by
Misrepresentations
and
false
Insinuations; if such Men are not guilty of
Usurpation
, while they take upon them the Character of
good Moral Men
, then ’tis not Immoral, in any Man to be
false
and
deceitful
.” While it is bad enough that Mandeville has filled his book with lies, what particularly offends Philo-Brittanus’s sensibilities is that Mandeville lies about lying—lies when he claims that society depends for its very existence on all manner of vice, deception, and flattery. What more need be said, Philo-Brittanus contends, for Mandeville convicts himself of such seditious ideas and, as evidence, he quotes directly from
The Fable’s
conclusion: “What we call
Evil
in this World,
Moral
as well as
Natural
, is the
Grand Principle
that makes us sociable Creatures, the
solid Basis
, the
Life
and
Support
of all Trades and Employments without Exception … and that
the Moment Evil ceases, the Society must be spoli’d, if not totally dissolv’d
.”
¹⁴⁰

As always, the Devil is in the details, and if Mandeville’s readers too quickly honed in on words like “evil,” passing over such qualifiers as “what we call,” Mandeville himself could not deny the privileged place he had granted to all manner of lies in the formation and maintenance of human society. Fallen man, he explains, is a pride-filled creature, so supremely arrogant and vain that it is impossible “he should act with any other view but to please himself while he has the use of his organs, and the greatest extravagance of love or despair can have no other center.” Our desires and caprices are limitless, welling up within us continuously and uncontrollably with such force that “all civil commerce would be lost, if by art and prudent dissimulation we had not learned to hide and stifle them.” If we weren’t such able hypocrites, veiling our
true intentions behind sociable facades and amicable words, we would be “insufferable to each other.” Of course, self-centered egotists that we are, we wouldn’t worry about being insufferable unless our bad manners and overweening self-regard somehow prevented us from satisfying our desires. Fortunately, Mandeville argues, because such blatant bad behavior so often does backfire on us, we learn to regulate our conduct and disguise our base intentions. This is why the undertaker, even as he gleefully thinks about his fee, maintains a grave expression, and why the dance instructor mimics enthusiasm as he stumbles through lesson after lesson with students, each less talented than the one before.
¹⁴¹
Even our most seemingly charitable actions are nothing but shams. “Where is the man,” Mandeville asks, “that has at no time covered his failings, and screened himself with false appearances, or never pretended to act from principles of social virtue and his regards to others, when he knew in his heart that his greatest care had been to oblige himself?”
¹⁴²

As Mandeville famously put it near the beginning of
The Fable of the Bees
, “The nearer we search into human nature, the more we shall be convinced, that the moral virtues are the political offspring which flattery begot upon pride.”
¹⁴³
From earliest childhood we are trained to respond to flattery and soon after to use it on others. In order to teach toddlers manners, Mandeville writes, we praise their simplest fumbling acts of courtesy in terms so extravagant they would be considered “abominable lies” by anyone “above the capacity of an infant.” When, a little older, those same children become annoyed that the praise they once so happily sopped up is now poured willy-nilly on their younger siblings’ malformed efforts, we pull them aside. “It is only to please baby,” we explain, assuring them that since they are now adults, we can let them in on the secret. Their vanity sated, the cycle begins again as the older children now join their parents, leading the lying hordes and “rejoicing in the superiority of [their] understanding” over their younger brothers and sisters. We lie to others to get what we want, but when others falsely praise us, we assume their words are true estimates of our noble nature in order to feed our voracious
hunger for approbation and love. We should know better, Mandeville contends, but we don’t. “There is no man of what capacity or penetration soever that is wholly proof against the witchcraft of flattery, if artfully performed, and suited to his abilities.”
¹⁴⁴
The entire world depends on these endless charades and deceptions. “Thus every Part was full of vice,” Mandeville writes in “The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turn’d Honest,” the poem that prefaced his controversial work, “Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.”
¹⁴⁵
In Mandeville’s story of civilization, when the whole mass turned honest, paradise was undone.

Shocking though his ideas may have been, no one would have denied the ubiquity of flattery and lies in a fallen world. In his mid-seventeenth-century collection of worldly-wise aphorisms,
The Pocket Oracle and Art of Prudence
, the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián may have lamented his age’s fall from truth and openness into a world of malice, from an Age of Gold into the Age of Iron in which “good men … seem to be the relics of better times,” but John of Salisbury had already groaned that lament more than five centuries earlier.
¹⁴⁶
The entire tradition of court writing had declared, as if with one voice, that the world was full of liars and flatterers, illusions and facades, and that in such a world we might sometimes need to lie to the liars, flatter the flatterers. Mandeville’s promotion of flattery and lies to the status of unadulterated goods draws deeply from this tradition but also, especially, from the early modern emphasis on courtesy, refinement, and civil conversation. Even if writers like Guazzo and Walker stressed the need to be good Christians, they also understood that it was well nigh impossible to distinguish the truly virtuous from those who merely play the part for ulterior motives. It was precisely this fascination with acting appropriately that gave particular weight to the age-old metaphor of world as stage. “I am convinced that in many situations,” writes Antoine Gombaud, the self-appointed Chevalier de Méré, “that it is not without benefit that one looks at what one is doing as theatre, and imagines oneself as a character in a play.”
¹⁴⁷
Madeleine de Souvré, the Marquise de Sablé, whose mid-seventeenth-century Parisian salon would prove an incubator for
the style of maxim for which La Rochefoucauld would become famous, remarked on this phenomenon with a tinge of regret. “If we had as much care to be what we should be as we have to deceive others by disguising what we are,” she writes, “we would be able to show ourselves just as we are, without having the trouble of disguising ourselves.”
¹⁴⁸
Gracián would make a similar observation when he noted, “Things don’t pass for what they are, but for how they appear. Few look within and many are content with appearances.”
¹⁴⁹

While many writers mourned this alleged loss of interest in real virtue, a few couldn’t help but note that it hardly mattered to society itself. Whatever the reasons that motivated people to behave courteously, the effect was the same. The Jansenist theologian Pierre Nicole latched onto this curious phenomenon in his essay from the 1670s,
Of Charity, and Self-Love
. “Although there is nothing so opposite to charity,” he writes, “which relates all to God, as self-love, which relates all to self, yet there is nothing so resembling the effects of charity, as those of self-love.” Self-love, the consequence of original sin, makes men incapable of caring for anyone but themselves, rendering them tyrannical, “violent, unjust, cruel, ambitious, flatterers, envious, insolent and querulous.”
¹⁵⁰
However much we love these passions in ourselves, we despise them in others, and if it were possible we would make everyone submit to our most passing egotistical whims. But this is simply not possible, and as much as we love dominating others, Nicole contends, so much the more do we love ourselves and want others to love and respect us, to flatter and admire us.
¹⁵¹
So begins the slow process of adapting our prideful selves to other prideful selves as we conceal our rapacity and will to dominate behind acceptable and useful actions. We perform acts of kindness and courage, are courteous and solicitous to others, not because we care about them, but simply because such actions will bring us praise, adulation, and honors. “There is hardly any action,” Nicole explains, “whereto we are carried by charity that would please God, where-unto self-love cannot engage us to please men.”
¹⁵²
And this, Nicole contends, is the sum total of human civility.
¹⁵³

Not only is it impossible for others to discern the true motivation of our actions, our motivations are often, perhaps always, invisible even to ourselves. La Rochefoucauld stressed this problem throughout his volume of maxims, observing that “we are so used to disguising ourselves from others that we end up disguising ourselves from ourselves.”
¹⁵⁴
Nicole suggests something similar, arguing that we often act out of sheer habit, without really attending to our motivations at all.
¹⁵⁵
Significantly, Nicole suggests that God himself makes it impossible even for the virtuous to know whether their actions are just. Human nature is so corrupt that such knowledge would overwhelm us. If we knew we were virtuous or, at the very least, that some of our actions were virtuous, we would all too easily become self-satisfied, vain, and proud, with what little virtue we did possess soon destroyed. “This obscurity does not take away virtues from him,” Nicole explains, “but hinders him from losing them, by keeping him always in humility and fear, and making him mistrust all his works, and to rely on God’s mercy.”
¹⁵⁶
If our lack of self-knowledge keeps us humble, it also renders charity completely irrelevant, at least here and now, in this world, in this society. From John of Salisbury to Nathaniel Walker, it was charity that had justified our lies, deceptions, and hypocritical civilities. In this tradition, intentions mattered in the difficult prudential calculations that each and every one of us needed to make to navigate our way through a world full of lies. The early modern conception of refinement, courtesy, and civil conversation, with its emphasis on decorum and amiability, may have trivialized the significance of these judgments, but these writers still framed their discussions in terms of charity and virtue. Even Gracián, whose
Pocket Oracle
ranks among the most cynical accounts of how to survive in “civil society,” concluded with a lengthy aphorism, “
In a word, a saint
,” in which he stressed that “virtue links all perfections and is the center of all happiness.”
¹⁵⁷

Certainly Nicole cared about the difference between true charity and self-love. It was for him the difference between those whose futures rested with God and those whose futures promised to be much less pleasant. Important in principle, as Nicole works through
what he takes to be the implications of his ideas, it is a distinction that proves meaningless in our lives. Self-love’s deceptions are so subtle, so perfectly suited to resemble virtue, that love of self can even drive us to imitate the devoutly religious, saints and holy men, and it can motivate us to live lives of brutal asceticism, penance, and more. “In fine,” he writes, “self-love is also capable to make us suffer even death with joy and to the end there may be no certain way to distinguish it from charity by martyrdoms, the saints do teach us after St Paul, that there are martyrs of vanity as well as of charity.” Even if such religious exertion were not almost always undone through pride, Nicole recognizes that few are capable or even motivated “to embrace this kind of life so contrary to nature.”
¹⁵⁸