This piece will be appearing in newspapers in my very red congressional district (VA-06).
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I’m rather passionately devoted to the value of truth and truthfulness. I can reasonably say that the heart of my life’s work has been the effort to form an understanding of things composed of as many true beliefs as possible. (The motto of my campaign for Congress was “Truth. For a Change.”)
One of my deepest hopes is for a world where human affairs are shaped by the truths of knowledge and of honesty.
Which is why I’m disturbed by the way, in our times, the Lie has so often defeated the truth.
It is inevitable that we will have beliefs that are not true. But my moral outrage concerns only those false beliefs that are generated by the Lie.
Of course, I’d like for us to replace with truth those false beliefs that come from our ignorance. But human ignorance is mostly independent of “Evil.” For example, it doesn’t bother me that for millennia, people believed that the Sun and the stars all rotate around the earth, which they believed to be the center of the universe.
Trying to figure things out has been my own life’s work—and I find nothing wrong with the inescapable reality that there is a lot more to understand rightly.
But the Lie is something else again. It is an expression of malevolence.
With very rare exceptions, the lie is something that one person tells to another for the advantage of the liar at the expense of the deceived. It is an exploitation. It is an unkind act of abuse.
Yearning as I do to live in a world where people are reliably kind to each other, and where human civilizations are arranged for justice and not exploitation, I hate the Lie as one of the tools that “Evil” uses to make the human world worse.
As in America now, with a President who has lied to us many thousands of times (who indeed lies more habitually and easily than anyone I’ve ever seen or heard of). Many of these lies really matter. For example -- to take just a few quite recent consequential lies he’s been caught out in – Trump has lied about:
why he committed an act of war that -- without the legally required participation of Congress -- put the nation in considerable danger; whether his telephone call to the Ukraine was “perfect,” not cheating in an election and imperiling American national security; his “innocence,” which he declares while demonstrating that he knows he has plenty to hide by continually obstructing investigations into his conduct;And he manages to get a rather big proportion of the American people to buy his lies and adopt and image of reality— false beliefs that lead them to act in a way that fortifies the power of Evil in the world.
(I would argue that the constant deception of the American people through thousands of lies -- hundreds of them consequential -- is in itself a “high crime” sufficient to warrant a President’s removal from office. Such constant lying strikes at a basic foundation of the system America’s founders gave us—that the people be enabled to act politically on the basis of truthful information.)
And we can see the Lie, too, in the Trump Party. The centrality of the Lie in the current Republican political culture is illustrated in the impeachment process – not just in the Republicans rolling out one false argument and misrepresentation after another in defense of Trump, but also in the evident gap between what the Republican leaders know about Trump and what they tell their followers.
So many witnesses have reported it, it must be true: a great many Republicans see Trump as unfit, and a threat to the nation – but they express their concerns only in private. Publicly, addressing a Republican base that, believing the lies, supports President Trump, a great many Republicans in Congress pretend to share their voters’ enthusiasm for this con-man President.
With all these lies, the Republican world keeps power in the hands of this lawless, bully, dishonest, President, who shows a contempt for the Constitution (well beyond what any president, even Nixon, ever approached).
This is but one illustration of two demonstrable truths: that the Republican world is now permeated by the Lie; and the impact of these Republican lies on America’s political world, and on the society generally, is quite consistently to make things more broken.
(In the toolbox of that “force of brokenness” (which is how “Evil” should be seen) the Lie is joined by such colleagues as Greed, the Lust for Power, Fear, Hatred, Cruelty, Rage, Hypocrisy. And not coincidentally, all these can be found in unusually high concentrations in today’s Republican world.)
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Some offerings:
Having spent the previous forty years investigating the forces that have shaped the human world over the millennia, I have felt compelled since 2004 to turn my full-time attention to understanding and calling out the destructive force that has taken over the political right in America over the past generation.
Here are a few articles, written in the past several years, that expressed something important to me about how our situation is to be understood and about the experience of living in times of such darkness and danger as the downward slide of American democracy and the rising power of a political force that consistently works to make our world more broken.
“Cry the Benighted Country” – on the way the balance of power between the forces of “good” and “evil” (or life-serving vs. life-degrading, or constructive vs. destructive, or wholeness vs. brokenness) can shift in a society, and how over the past generation we have witnessed an adverse shift in America.
“When Evil Rises Among a People” – on the painful and frightening experience of watching people who had seemed good and decent get transformed into something that serves “Evil.” (It starts with a stunning scene from Cabaret.)
(And one piece to which I’m quite attached, representing a much-needed break from dealing with all the darkness of these times, is “The Sacred Space of Lovers.”)
A compendium of op/eds that I’ve written weekly to challenge the conservatives, among whom I live, can be found here. And a compendium of op/eds I’ve written to challenge Liberal America to see this battle for what it is -- and to fight it as it needs to be fought -- can be found here.
In 2019, in an effort to convey the Big Picture of the dynamics driving the story of our species -- generally, and that also illuminates specifically the meaning of the current American “Trump Crisis” -- I published a series of three op/eds under the banner “WHAT SHAPES OUR WORLD.” The three pieces – each dedicated to one big idea – were:
Evolution: A Most Elegant and Illuminating IdeaHow the Rise of Civilization Brought the Reign of PowerGood Battling Evil