Thought for the day: Clarke, Lying and Culture

Filed Under Politics

I just caught up with this James Bowman entry on the whole Clarke imbroglio. It is, as is usual with Bowman, elegant and insightful. Here is his conclusion:

Actually, we know why he thinks this, and how it is that he thinks he can make us think it. It is because of the therapeutic assumption that honesty is a matter of psychology rather than loyalty. If you assume, as our therapeutic culture tends to do, that truth is always and everywhere psychological truth — what you really think as opposed to what, under the various pressures of public utterance, you only say you think — then it is natural also to assume that you can negate a lie by revealing what you really thought at the time you told it. But a lie is an existential act, a permanent and an irrevocable decision to be disloyal either to oneself (as Clarke now says he was in 2002) or to those to whom one has bound oneself in trust for the performance of some collective enterprise (as Clarke now is). It is a decision to commit treachery and falsehood which becomes defining of who one is.
But that’s all right too when you’re appealing, as Clarke is, to the celebrity as well as the therapeutic culture. The media lionize him as they would any apostate government official who could be portrayed, in terms of their self-mythologization as the uncoverers of the truths behind government falsehoods, as a “whistle-blower.” In doing so, however, they create a powerful incentive for such whistle-blowers to come forward, particularly when they have books to sell, and be made into instant celebrities. This is another thing which, like their political biases, the media can never acknowledge, namely that they are pursuing their own self-interest in providing a forum for the likes of Clarke to make accusations against the former colleagues who trusted him. That he is a liar and a traitor to those who trusted him only makes him more attractive as a celebrity � like Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair who are likewise using the notoriety gained by their bad behavior to sell books, though with rather less success I believe. But then, without honor, what is left to us except celebrity?

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