Honesty

When I've had students read Nancy Maris' "On Being a Cripple" in past semesters, one thing that's frequently commented on is the honesty with which she writers. The first time a student pointed that out, I was impressed; I'd always liked Mairs' essay, and I found her language engaging, but it hadn't occurred to me that part of the appeal is the simple fact that she's telling the truth.

This especially shows up in her discussion of what she calls herself. I especially like her pointing out that to say someone is "handicapped" suggests that person has been handicapped by someone, presumably God. It's possible to overdo this sort of linguistic analysis--at some point an idiom stops meaning what it literally means--but I think in this case her attention to language is important because we seem to have a need to explain things. A word like "handicapped" at least suggests agency, which I suppose is comforting to those who aren't handicapped: if this hasn't been done to me, then it must mean God likes me better. And that's just absurd.

I read something else this week that emphasizes the importance of honesty: Plato's Phaedrus, a dialog he wrote between Socrates and a young man (named Phaedrus) in which they begin by comparing speeches. The point of the first to speeches are to convince someone that it's better to "be with" someone who doesn't love you romantically than with someone who does. And they're fine speeches, except that, as Socrates realizes afterwards, they're absolute lies. In the dialog, Socrates goes on to explain that the most important quality of any rhetoric is that it leads people to Truth. That doesn't sound like such a shocking idea, I suppose, but think about how most people use rhetoric to lead people in other directions: to ignore uncomfortable realities like MS, or to buy this certain brand of aspirin, or to get other people to like them.

What if everything we said and wrote were directed toward the honest truth? I bet, in an English class, for instance, it would lead to better essays.