I know that
something must be written about this, but I don’t know exactly
what.At the time I write this, Mr. Trump appears to have backed away from believing that he had won the election—though he still claims publicly that it was a stolen election. Republicans are beginning to wonder whether it makes sense to believe Mr. Trump, or to believe the election commissions in each of the states that are in question. These commissions are often bi-partisan in make-up, and their leadership is very professional. (I know a little bit about them, because my wife was co-opted into helping the election effort for the county in which she works—in another capacity.) At the moment, this election is being considered one of the most successfully run election in the past couple of decades, despite being conducted during an epidemic.
Now, for several years, I—and many of you—have gotten into the habit of labeling anything that some people say as lies. In actuality, we should not have been doing this, but, hey, these past few years have been so difficult to get through that we had to take logical short cuts, and we could not waste time trying to think why some of our friends were saying things that were untrue. But we cannot simply go on labeling them effectively as habitual liars; the time has come to look behind the lies, and behind the apparent lies.
A statement can be a lie for many, many reasons, and I’m going to try and list some of them. I can do this more or less automatically (to begin with) because I taught basic logic for several years, and there are some mechanical reasons why a statement is false. (A statement someone makes may be false unintentionally. This is the hard thing to deal with. I’m not going to address that problem directly.)
The most common reason we would disbelieve someone’s statement is the most difficult one to address: all our statements are based on a whole set of background statements that we sort of think of as being included with our statements. For instance: The World is Round; The Sky is Blue; People Mostly Tell the Truth; COVID is not like most other Viruses; and so on. We consider these axiomatic; we accept these without question, and we don’t expect to have to prove them, or justify them. They’re “obvious”; this means that when someone makes a statement, those background statements are supposed to be understood. Some people don't know which set of background statements to understand, so they assume they're the ones they use themselves. Now, if individual A says something to individual B, and A's set of axioms is different from B's set of axioms, B is not going to interpret the statement the way that A intended. So, as far as A knew, he or she was telling the truth; but it could seem to B that A is lying.
For example, suppose A thinks the world is round. Most people who do (believe the world is round) use the word “Straight Line” to mean a tiny bit of a circle, when they’re talking about the surface of the Earth. (Not just any old circle; an enormous Great Circle, whose center is at the center of the Earth. Tiny bits of such a huge circle looks very much like a line segment, and most of us think of them as such.) Suppose B, in contrast, believes that the Earth is flat. Suppose A, quite innocently, tells B that, if you set out in any direction, and you go far enough, you come right back to where you started. B, of course, thinks: wow, what a thumping great whopper that is; what has he been smoking?
The second most common reason for a sentence to be labeled False by its intended audience is just as subtle: the meanings we attach to pivotal words are not always universally agreed upon. It may be, for instance, some people might say The Media, and mean the local evening TV news. Some others might include the newspapers, Facebook, YouTube, and Fox News. Others may only mean The New York Times. So any statement about The Media may or may not be true, depending on what The Media is to you. Now, that’s a fairly obvious example. But if you think hard, you can list literally hundreds of words that are being used differently by different people, and if you include phrases, there are thousands more. For instance, Black Lives Matter is understood to mean some very varied things, depending on the person. So do the words Terrorist, Socialist, Racist, The Law, and so on. Even such loaded things as Pro-Choice can mean horrible things to some people, while others think it is perfectly reasonable.
A case in point is: ‘The Election Was Stolen!’ Democrats consider that this means that there was ballot-stuffing, and dead people voting, and all the usual stuff that Republicans talk about, but probably do not do. (Of course there are some marginal people who would do anything, but luckily for everyone, it can’t be easily done on a scale that makes a difference to the election.) Some Republicans probably mean that the Democrats convinced certain Republicans to vote for Biden. Is that stealing? That would be twisting words to have unintended meanings. Trump clearly meant by “stealing” that, because of the large volume of mail-in ballots—which he was not expecting—that many states changed from Red to Blue while he was busy celebrating. Some people would call that situation theft, simply because it was unexpected. Maybe I’m thinking up excuses for Trump simply because it is repugnant to think that we had a president for four years who was an out-and-out liar, and no better than the presidents of certain South American marginal democracies. Furthermore, I firmly believe that some Trumpian jokes have been taken seriously, and labeled lies. Come on, people; learn to take a joke.
Finally:That was then, this is now. This principle is used by people who make careless statements that they don’t really plan to stand behind, at least, not for very long. The meaning of the phrase is that, "Well the conditions under which I said that made it true; but times and conditions have changed." Unfortunately, the ideas in the head of the speaker might also have changed, so that a more accurate description of the problem would be "I have changed my mind about that," or "Now my friends have the White House, not your friends!" It’s a variation on that principle that made Lindsay Graham support the nomination of a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsberg, just a few weeks before the election. And that’s perversely reasonable, because when the Senate and the White House are from the same Party, the whole process moves more expeditiously, and in fact was completed in mere weeks, whereas Obama’s nominee would have had quite a fight getting endorsed by the Senate of that time.
That’s all for now; I can’t think of any other distinct mechanisms that would lead to misunderstanding, except to extend these three principles above to more general situations.
But now I’m going to get personal. Trump keeps saying he wants to Make America Great Again. I don’t really think he invented that phrase, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. What does it mean? (1) America Used to be Great; (2) America Is Not Great Anymore.
One way in which, for me, America has been a lot greater than it seems to be now, is: when I was young, if someone said something, I would believe that he or she meant it. Most of the people I know are still that way: they don’t say something they don’t mean. But doubt has been creeping in; we’ve gotten used to assuming that some people just lie all the time, particularly when they’re on certain subjects.
This is going to have to change, starting right now. As a first step, we should stop attacking those who seem to be lying. (Many liberals and Democrats just hold their heads and walk away, which is better than being belligerent.) Most of all, we ought to model reasonable behavior for the kids, because kids are very quick to imitate their adults. An America where all the kids of conservatives disbelieve and attack all the kids of liberals will not be great. Just as not great for conservatives as it will be not great for liberals.
Arch, wanting America to be Truly Great Again!
