It is alarming to observe the rapid decline of the notion of truth. What started with Foucault has become a perverse tragedy in the era of Donald Trump. The emerging perspective is that truth is always a construct, never reliable, never objective. While I agree there is no such thing as objective truth (Quantum Theory’s Observer Effect) it does not mean we cannot, through rigorous intersubjective discipline, get somewhere close to objective truth.

Unfortunately, we are way beyond that. Donald Trump has taught us if you repeat a lie often enough, people believe it. We could lose our nation over that awful reality. But here’s another question I have been mulling over. What is the relationship between honesty and truth?

My mentor, the late philosophy professor Byron Lambert, said, “It is hard to tell the truth and it is hard to tell the truth.” In other words, it is difficult to discern the truth, and difficult to speak it. That is where honesty comes in.

David Whyte, in his book Consolations – The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words writes beautifully and unsettlingly about honesty:

Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, with the world, or with our self.

The fear of loss, in one form or another, is the motivator behind all conscious and unconscious dishonesties: all of us are afraid of loss, in all its forms, all of us, at times, are haunted or overwhelmed by the possibility of a disappearance, and all of us therefore, are one short step away from dishonesty.

Every human being dwells intimately close to a door of revelation they are afraid to pass through. Honesty lies in understanding our close and necessary relationship with not wanting to hear the truth. Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are.

The ability to speak the truth is as much the ability to describe what it is like to stand in trepidation at this door, as it is to actually go through it and become that beautifully honest spiritual warrior, equal to all circumstances, we would like to become.

Honesty allows us to live with not knowing. We do not know the full story, we do not know where we are in the story; we do not know who is at fault or who will carry the blame in the end.

Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.

 Whyte’s words remind me of Ernest Becker’s book, The Denial of Death, in which he referenced the psychoanalyst Otto Rank. Becker said our greatest fear is that we lose ourselves before we ever really find ourselves. The great human task therefore becomes fashioning some kind of heroism in the face of that greatest of losses. (I finished Becker’s book while I was watching the 1986 World Series in which my beloved New York Mets fashioned their own heroism in the face of what appeared to be certain death. A pleasant memory.)

I heard an NPR report recently in which researchers said if two people observed the same event, for the remainder of that day their descriptions match in most ways. By the next day, however, their descriptions differ significantly. Encoding, storage, and retrieval differ from person to person. Add to that our own fears and wants, and no wonder truth is so elusive and honesty so slippery.

I know of no way through this dilemma but to humbly accept how self-deceptive we all can be. That is the first step. The next is to find the courage and heroism to lean into stringent self-examination and be open to challenge from the outside, while holding onto your human dignity. No small task.

We spend much of our lives avoiding the truth. Therapists say one of the problems with people experiencing depression is that they are too aware of the true nature of things and therefore unable to build the defense mechanisms most folks use to avoid painful truth. Ironic, yes?

I have been puzzling over truth and honesty for a long time. Fraternal twins, they are both too often banished to the bell tower of the cathedral, too painful to look at for more than a few seconds at a time. Which is a shame, because truth will set you free, and honesty will set you right. But first you have to bring them down from the bell tower and invite them into the rectory, where their influence can find its way into the warp and woof of your being.