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What the current hubbub over political lying ignores or drowns out is the fact that there are disabling truths, messy realities that positively stymie adequate response unless their particulars are reduced to deceptive simplicities. Every sentient human being knows this from daily experience. What has shattered in the public sphere, as epitomized by the Bush-Clinton campaign, is the once agreed-upon etiquette of lying.
The injunction against bearing false witness, branded in stone and brought down by Moses from the mountaintop, has always provoked ambivalent, conflicting emotions. On the one hand, nearly everyone condemns lying. On the other, nearly everyone does it every day. How many of the Ten Commandments can be broken so easily and with so little risk of detection over the telephone?
Hence the never-ending paradox: some bedrock of honesty is fundamental to society; people cannot live together if no one is able to believe what anyone else is saying. But there also seems to be an honesty threshold, a point beyond which a virtue turns mean and nasty. Constantly hearing the truth, the cold, hard, brutal unsparing truth, from spouses, relatives, friends and colleagues is not a pleasant prospect. "Human kind," as T.S. Eliot wrote, "cannot bear very much reality." Truth telling makes it possible for people to coexist; a little lying makes such society tolerable.
At what point does "a little" become "too much"? The nervous boy who cried "Wolf!" in the admonitory tale told one lie too many and was eaten alive. The irony of this denouement, of course, is that when the boy met his fate, he was, at last, hollering the truth.
This story demonstrates the creation of what is sometimes, and euphemistically, called "a climate of mistrust." (Translation: Everybody's lying.) It also reveals how difficult it is for those in the vicinity of a lie to distinguish it from the truth.
That task would be easy if humans resembled Pinocchio (as Clinton claims Bush does), with their noses growing longer each time they told a lie. People, unfortunately, can fib without suffering physiognomic changes. It would be helpful, then, if there were some hidden manifestation of lying, invisible to most people but clear to psychics or visionaries. The closest that real life has managed to come to this fictional power is the polygraph machine, which has a few serious drawbacks. It can be stumped by accomplished actors or those delusional enough to believe their own statements, and even experts disagree on the machine's level of reliability. And lie detectors, of course, are impractical to haul out on nearly all the occasions -- including first dates, tax audits, political rallies -- when they might prove handy.
Public perceptions to the contrary, it is impossible to prove that more people are lying than did in the past. There is no central clearinghouse of lies, no impartial scorekeeper deciding on the truth or falsity of public statements. Further complicating matters, successful lies, by definition, go undetected. If this truly is a time of unprecedented public lying, then it is also a time of remarkably inept liars, or of liars who don't seem to care if they are caught.