A Critique of the Morality of Secrecy

[b]A Critique of the Morality of Secrecy[/b]

In a small town a secret passes between individuals like a specter from the spirit world; each head is bowed and every brow is furrowed by the silent solemnity of the power contained within the act of sharing a secret, like those who feel the power of the missal at a Mass. This is especially true of the American Midwest, where the triviality and general meaninglessness of day to day existence has rendered gossiping a virtual American pastime. It is as though they have endeavored to make man as predictable as the harvest they so depend upon for sustenance.

Yet there is nothing new in this. Society has always had its methods of laying bare that which was once was concealed. The confession, for instance, that highly refined form of spiritual espionage, originated as a pre-Christian public activity prevalent amongst the Neo-Platonic circle of authors which has only relatively recently been honed into a ‘private’ activity: in this way the confessor feels himself able to share his burden on a personal level with a priest, and the priest in turn assumes the role of the confessor’s ‘inner’ conscience, thereby ensuring to the penitent that his sins will remain ‘private’ despite their being exposed to an audience. Much the same structure is in place amongst psychoanalytic circles, whose express purpose it is to uncover the archeology of the past and pick from amongst the debris the few gleaming treasures hidden like diamonds in the rough. Even the arts are not free from this ‘will to truthfulness’ (they were, indeed, among the first to adopt it; the visual arts have always promoted a ‘priestly’ temperament) - Surrealism, for instance, demands from the practitioner a certain slavish adherence to the ideal of the ‘true thought’, the thought which has been concealed by the body within the manifold nether-realms of the mind but which can be brought to light by the dabbler. This Endorian sorcery, this conjuring forth of occulted knowledge, constitutes the basic activity of interpersonal relationships within Western society.

And yet - Henri Bergson’s envisioned society of schoolgirls notwithstanding - there could never be a civilized society which did not on some level permit for the retaining of secrets: such a society would necessarily be devoid of all power-relations. Implicit in the statement “we shall make politicians truthful,” for instance, is the following statement: “we shall make politicians abolished” - for it is the task of the politician to lie to his constituency; it is the one real activity which justifies his very existence, to keep from them those things the knowledge of which would otherwise drive them to abolish the State and, along with it, he himself. As Bernard de Mandeville - the only English genealogist of morality to ever cut to the heart of the matter - has written in the closing lines of his excellent satire Fable of the Bees:

Bare Vertue can’t make Nations live
In Splendour; they, that would revive
A Golden Age, must be as free,
For Acorns, as for Honesty.

Indeed, the notion of the ‘open society’ itself is nothing more than the most highly refined form of the moral imperative (liberating the individual through an appeal to the truth), which can be traced with accuracy from its inception in Greece and Judea to its apotheosis in the liberal philosophy formulated by John Locke. In all instantiations of this basic belief there is at work a secondary, hidden presupposition: that of the valuability of truthfulness itself, as opposed to deceit.

And yet this faith is false; moreover, it could never be realized. A genuinely honest nation would, for instance, be required to admit to its neighbor its relative military weakness, which would mean inviting invasion from the stronger party. Because a nation cannot admit to this and survive, however, it necessarily dissimulates, fabricates, adopts false airs of romantic bravado (spiritualized in the term ‘patriotism’), and essentially invents ex nihilo an entirely fictitious ‘nation’ out of a synthesized conglomeration of its given parts.

The same holds true of individuals themselves. Man is a weak animal, neither fleet of foot nor strong of arm; and, because he exists in a world of frightful and frightening creatures, he has found it necessary to adapt according to the demands of his environment. But adaptation is not the only use dishonesty has in human civilization - all beauty is basically dissimulation, commanding the attention of the viewer and demanding that he perceive particular qualities (the equation of “the good” with “the beautiful” amongst ancient ruling classes, for instance) within the object of his perception; and the current vogue for it is nothing more than self-deception in the most basic sense, however much it contradicts the equally incredible fashion of “emotional honesty”. The cosmetic industry thrives on the desire for dishonesty; the Puritans instinctively forbade cosmetics out of truthfulness.

And so it is within the shade-ridden “inner”-world itself. For so much of man remains hidden to himself that applying the nomenclature “man” is itself a great folly; it is taken for granted amongst myth-makers that one must never utter one’s true name for fear of granting power to another over himself. The greater part of mental activity is a concealing-from-oneself things the knowledge of which might otherwise cause one to writhe with self-disgust, and the effort to make these things known constitutes the general struggle of power (over truth) within civilization.

The first to articulate this sentiment was Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote thusly of the folk-psychology of secrecy:

"Morality of truthfulness in the herd. “You shall be knowable, express your inner nature by clear and constant signs - otherwise you are dangerous: and if you are evil, your ability to dissimulate is the worst thing for the herd. We despise the secret and unrecognizable, you may not be concealed from yourself, you may not believe that you change.” Thus: the demand for truthfulness presupposes the knowability and stability of the person. In fact, it is the object of education to create in the herd member a definite faith concerning the nature of man: it first invents this faith and then demands “truthfulness.”’
(Nietzsche, Nachlass 277)

But let us inquire - is the truth indeed more valuable than the lie in regards to man’s nature? For whom? For the Christian, who accuses the atheist of lying to himself in regards to his ‘hidden desire’ to remain in a state of libertinage, without the pang of guilt in which the Christian has found lifelong company? For the atheist, who condemns the Christian as secretly wishing to be lorded over, without admitting to himself his own inability to check his urges? Certainly not for the genuinely introspective man, who wanders through his hallways like an invitee to Poe’s masquerade, passing with from room to colored room and seeing all things newly through strangely tinted windows.

For whom, then, and how is the possession of the “truth” of man advantageous? It seems a strange thing, that one should regard his own nature, above even he himself, his most valued and valuable possession. And yet it is just so: for he who commands or who can obscure the “truth” of his inner-nature liberates himself from the scrutiny of those who would seek to render him predictable, to ascribe to him a regulatory aspect upon which the inquirer might ground a prediction in regards to his actions in the future. In this sense the endless debate between those who assign to man a docile and malleable nature and those who conceive of him as an unrepentant egoist is simply one over the right to make predictions, and nothing more - but making a prediction means publishing an as-yet unwritten future, a total history and a teleology of the individual. Thus it is that the question of “human nature”, and an individual’s nature in particular, stands as one of the highest and most important questions asked by man of his fellow men.

In general, the logic of the morality of secrecy is that of the warning, a sharing of the truth of one’s past actions in the hope of warding off any possible victimization on the part of the object of the secret in the future. In this the gossip-teller presupposes an orderly structure to man’s actions, and a linear agent which progresses forward through time and accrues to himself particular traits which today are called “character”. This mode of thought has been extended under the watch of certain philosophies to include a generalized tendency “innate” within humanity to behave one way or the other (but always according to a dualistic conception of things) - Christianity and the doctrines of “original sin” and depravity stand as an antithetical mode of thought to Rousseau’s noble sauvage. Both parties admit, of course, for the possibility that man can occasionally behave in the manner opposite to their basic “nature”, but understand this to require a great deal of effort and pain - either as “salvation” or “alienation” - and to be atypical of most men. In both instances these respective parties have used this initial assumption to justify their actions in the political and philosophical spheres.

Hitherto, very few have thought to call into question these premises, because very few have desired to abdicate the right to making predictions, to possessing power over one’s self and over another (for dissimulation in the opposite sense of that I’ve presented above is also useful - a confirmation of one’s basic traits, for the better or for the worse, instead of willfully-imposed ambiguity). Those of us who have no power, however, and who have the patience to wait to acquire it, are quite free to see the issue clearly and to investigate it with alacrity.

And what we have found is quite astonishing. For we have observed and have understood the profitability of making man believe himself to be a thing that he is not; we have seen this particular bit of non-logic at work. And what is it? Why, nothing more than this - the desire to make man consistent, non-contradictory; and stalwart in his ways; a belief that “he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed”. The “will to truth” in this sense serves in the mind of he who believes in it as a moral treacle: all the woes of the world are to be cured by means of mere and meager honesty. So long as man is made predictable, he becomes likewise controllable. And he is rendered predictable by a gnosis, an apocalupsis of what is human in man.

For the belief in an essential nature serves in the mind of he who believes it as a moral treacle: all the woes of the world are to be done away with by mere and meager honesty. Forgiveness is readily available to him who shares the basic character of his being with another, be it God or man. No ambiguity, no uncertainty, no multiplicity may be spared in determining the nature of a man’s motivational state (God has the appetite of an American girl). In such a fashion man is disarmed; he loses the one weapon available to him in the incessant strife for dominance over his past. And so it is that man is cut off from his past, and estranged from his future; for the man who is subjected to the scrutiny of the public stare there can be only an endless present, a woeful state of affairs. The camera’s lens becomes a gorgon’s gaze, capturing in an instant, in the twinkling of an infernal eye, what otherwise requires a lifetime - and more! - to come into fruition. Under the flash of the flare man withers.

One must not condemn this belief too harshly: it is entirely possible that our entire modern scientific method - which demands repeatability as a verification of validity - was the result of a long and torturous introspection on the part of earlier men. It is even conceivable that the whole of man’s organization of nature originated through his attribution of inner motivational forces to the events of nature, after the manner of Schopenhauer. For this we owe them a great deal – and yet must nevertheless acknowledge the impossibility of their efforts in applying this search for stability to the human entity. For man is not himself natural, but is instead a conglomeration of instincts and of passions; deviancy is the norm and not the exception within his inner-existence, and hardly a moment goes by when one feeling or drive has not itself capitulated to the encroach of another. Man is very much like a wave, and much more like an ocean of them. And the conservative in this sea who, like de Maistre, requires the reassurance of some connection to his past is a – puffer fish.

Nothing is the nature of man, and man’s nature is nothing: Whichever passion has taken hold of him at the moment is his “nature”. Augustine said that to defeat the Devil, one must unmask him, and I have done just this – only to reveal yet another mask.

To humble the “will to truth”: such is my task.

I find the position troubling, that since an action is common, it is acceptable, or rationalized as necessary.

My favorite argument for truth is a comment I overheard; ‘‘I never signal, people will know where I’m going.’’

The basis for morality is to minimize harm to others, and to society.

Causing others to act in a false reality is cruel, wasteful, and dangerous.

There is a diference between beauty and glamour.

Nice piece, thanks for sharing.