telling the truth

perhaps the three most famous statements about truth all occur in the gospel of john. jesus tells his audience: 'you shall know the truth, and the shall make you free.' later jesus claims: 'i am the way, the truth, and the life.' and in his conversation with pilate, jesus explains that his kingdom is not of this world, but that all who are the side of truth are on his side. pilate responds with a rhetorical question: 'what is truth?' (is pilate earnest? mocking? annoyed? -it is hard to be sure in what tone we should hear the question)

one of our strongest associations with the word 'truth' comes from the courtroom: 'do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?' to ask a witness to swear to this oath is in effect to have him promise to follow one of the ten commandments: 'thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.' it strikes me as a little odd that we have people swear to tell the truth -is this, as it seems, an effort to secure their honesty while on the stand? but if a person is willing to lie on the stand, why will he not be willing to break his promise to the court, to lie in taking the oath?

not longer ago, a friend of mine described a mutual friend of ours by saying: "i think that she is especially open to the truth." i took this to be a tremendous complement, and i think the person who said this meant it as such. (i also agreed with her assessment of our mutual friend).

most of us, i think, value truthfulness in other people. wouldn't we all say that 'honesty' is a virtue? and few of us, i think, would be willing to describe ourselves as 'dishonest.' we may be willing to admit lying on certain occasions (almost all of these lies, of course, being of no real consequence). not many of us would say of ourselves: 'i can be quite a liar when it serves my purposes' or 'i can be a deeply dishonest person.'

but what does the virtue of honesty or truthfulness amount? what does it mean for us to be people who are receptive to the truth, and also who speak the truth, to ourselves and to others?

i have been mulling over the phrase, 'the whole truth.' in the context of a trial, what counts as 'the whole truth' is determined by its relevance to the question(s) at hand in the courtroom. it may be true that i am wearing green underwear, but telling this to the jury is not likely to be necessary (or even appropriate) in order to fulfill my commitment to speak the whole truth. in the case of our ordinary lives, however, it is harder to know what counts as 'the whole truth', and it is harder to specify when and why and how we should speak the whole truth. this is particularly hard in the case of ourselves -there is a great deal about us that we could reveal to family, friends, strangers. what does it mean to speak the whole truth about yourself to those around you?

there was a time when i thought that transparency about oneself was a great virtue. i remember discussing this my freshman year of college with a friend who thought otherwise. i insisted that we should be striving for complete openness with others, and that there was something christian about this way of being: fully sharing ourselves with others, self-disclosing with nothing to hide and nothing to fear. i am now much less certain about what transparency ought to look like, or what value it has. however, i have also been troubled lately by the thought that i may be a liar.

perhaps we might say: what it means to speak the whole truth is to speak all the truth that is demanded by the situation or context. formally, this seems right, but materially it leaves the question essentially unanswered. how much truth about oneself is called for by a given friendship? how much truth about oneself is demanded in virtue of being someone's son or daughter? brother or sister? maybe the answer to depends on the kind of relationships we think are best or worth pursuing -if you think a relationship like this is choiceworthy, then you will have to reveal this much truth about yourself to realize such a relationship. even saying this, though, we have not really answered the question of what is choiceworthy. and don't we all feel that our relationships might be very different if we told more of the truth about ourselves? don't we suspect that if we told that person such-and-such about ourselves, the whole relationship would change? don't we hope that it would change for the better, and fear that it would change for the worse? but how could i tell them that?

doubtless one reason we often don't tell others 'the whole truth' about ourselves is that we are afraid of being misunderstood. this, i think, may well be a reasonable fear. there is little that feels as bad as being misunderstood on an important point about oneself. and few things are grosser and unhappier than a scene of deep misunderstanding between two people. we want to tell the truth but we also know not to throw our pearls before swine, and we know that the truth about ourselves is precious indeed.

but we must present something of ourselves to others. and if we don't offer them the deep truths about ourself -if we don't tell them 'the whole truth'- it seems that this can come close to telling a lie.

welcome to the world, william turner lott

i usually do not use this space for reporting on my personal life, but this is a particularly special occasion:

earlier today i got a call from my brother nathan. this morning at 3am, my sister-in-law elizabeth gave birth to a healthy baby boy: william turner lott. he weighed in at 5 lbs, 1 oz.

so, congratulations to nathan and elizabeth. i'm sure that you will be fantastic, loving parents.

and welcome to the world, william turner. if you only knew what you've gotten yourself into...

how strange, wonderful and beautiful life is.

thanks be to god.

gender and beauty

not long ago i was at a concert where the opening act was a gay white rapper. during his performance, i heard a person in the audience call out something like "down with all gender!" it struck me that for this person, and perhaps many others, their experience of being a gendered being was bound up with pain and strife to such a degree that a gender-less world seemed to represent a kind of liberation. that someone should feel like that is very sad, and our first reaction to someone calling out like this should probably be one of compassion.

at the same time, i find myself quite unsympathetic to the idea that a gender-less world might be a kind of liberation or advance for humanity. it seems to me that such a world would be comparatively boring to our own. in imagining a gender-less human experience, it seems to me flat, untextured. that is, something would be lost in such a world. now, perhaps this is just a failure of imagination on my part. whether or not it is, i think what lies behind my aversion to the prospect of a gender-less world is the sense that even if gender has been a source of pain or even oppression, gender nevertheless adds a richness and complexity to our experience as humans.

and i wonder if the kind of richness that is at issue here is not best thought of in aesthetic terms. that is, perhaps what i sense is that human life without gender would be somehow less beautiful, or that our experience of beauty would be impoverished in a gender-less world

with all this in mind, i have been trying to think a bit more about the relationship between gender and beauty. one way in which gender seems to be connected to human beauty is through erotic desire: gender is bound up with our experience of erotic desire, and erotic desire is closely connected to our experience of human beauty. to be drawn erotically toward another human being is characteristically (always?) to see him or her as beautiful in some way.

it is possible, of course, to see human beings as beautiful without being drawn to them erotically -think of the way we find children or the elderly to be beautiful. but it is hard to imagine being erotically moved toward another person without finding that person beautiful or attractive. moreover, erotic desire is characteristically structured around gender. that is, it is typical of humans that in being erotically attracted to another human being we are attracted to them as male or as female. the obvious fact here is that the majority of humans are erotically drawn to members of the other gender. but the point works the same, i think, for homo-erotic attraction: here as well erotic desire is someone keyed in on the gender of the other person. erotic attraction is different in this regard from other ways we might be attracted to or delight in someone -for example, being attracted to someone as an excellent conversationalist, or delighting in them as a good tennis partner.

in addition to this, it seems that there is something about gender that contributes to human beauty in a way that doesn't have this same connection to erotic desire. i am not sure what to say about this, except that the reality of gender contributes to a diversity and complexity in human life that is beautiful. that is, gender is bound up with the diverse ways that humans express themselves -the way they work and play and carry themselves. especially in areas of creativity and artistic expression, it seems that human activities -dancing, singing, telling jokes, etc.- are fuller, more elaborate, more intricate and more lovely because of the way that gender figures into those activities.