Half-Truths for Half-Wits

Americans are notorious for wanting the sides in any conflict defined as the good guys and the bad guys, the white hats and the black hats. For that reason we’re overly susceptible to being led astray by those who are clever enough to manipulate us with the appropriate half-truths. We easily forget-or, in our present-day educational system, are never exposed to-Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates deftly punches holes in assumptions that are only half true. His Euthyphro is a good example. A man is headed for the courts to denounce his father for a crime. His case is simple: My father has committed a crime; therefore I must denounce him so that he will be punished. After Socrates gets through with him, though, he is not so sure it is that simple.

Our politicians often lead us astray with half-truths. We have even ended up supporting “freedom fighters” who in fact have been some of the worst terrorists of the twentieth century. The implicit syllogism was: It is good to fight communism. The individuals these people are fighting are communists. Therefore these people are good. The only problem was that the minor premise was often shaky, and combatants whose atrocities are worse than those of the presumed communists don’t do the world much of a favor.

We can pillory individuals with half-truths as well. I can just imagine what might happen if-perish the thought-I were to run for public office. My opponent might make an issue of the fact that I used to correspond with a member of the directorate of the M19 guerrilla movement in Colombia. (”I’d like to see him try to deny it.”)  That much is true. The rest of the story is that I was treasurer of the Association of Colombianists and the individual in question was a member to whom I sent reminders when his dues were to be paid. But the first half of the story makes for far better headlines.

Jesus of Nazareth was hit with the same sort of thing. People said he spent a good deal of his time hanging out with “tax collectors and sinners,” namely crooked politicians, drunks, prostitutes and the like. That part was true. The rest of it was that he was redeeming many of them out of their sordid lives. It would have been signally stupid to walk into the World Trade Center buildings as they were about to collapse-unless you were a fireman or a policeman rescuing people.

We can use half-truths to cover up our failures. I remember the coach of my high school’s junior varsity football team remarking at the year’s-end athletic assembly that his team had outscored their opposition. Then he laughed and said the problem was that they still had a losing record.

When confronted with an especially ugly royal baby, Sir Winston remarked, “My, that is a baby!” That much was true. The rest of it was that he wanted neither to tell the truth about the baby’s appearance nor to tell an outright lie. We do things like that all the time: “That hat is really spectacular!”

How about jokes? We’re told that jumping out of an airplane without a parachute is all right because the fall won’t hurt you. The bad news is that the sudden stop will. In a more serious vein, though, my native Bakersfield, California gets a bad rap from tourists driving through on Highway 99 who tell the world Bakersfield is a place where the temperature remains at a hundred degrees all night long. Yes, it does, once in a while during a hot summer, but the humidity, when I was growing up at least, stayed at around 20 percent. I used to have to wear a denim jacket when I went out to work at 6:00 a.m. on a normal summer day there. And some wag made the generalization that it is impossible to say anything about Southern California that isn’t true. Just try it as an exercise. It works pretty well, but you end up with a handful of half-truths.

A lot of American pilots’ lives were saved in the Pacific because they went beyond the undeniable fact that the Japanese Zero fighter was very fast, highly maneuverable and well armed, and had a great range. Yes, but it was also able to turn effectively in only one direction and it was very lightly armored, so it tended to burst into flames at the slightest provocation. One result: the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot.

My candidate for the most asinine half-truth of all time, though, is one that has been spouted by Ted Turner and appears to be virtually the new slogan of a certain Ivy League university: “Most of the evil throughout history has been brought about by organized religion.” Well, yeah, since up to recent times religion was inseparable from the other aspects of cultural life, it was sort of inevitable that evil would be associated with religion. Furthermore, religion means power, and power not only corrupts but attracts the already corrupt. The atrocities of the Crusades were emphatically not carried out by Christians according to any reasonable definition (Jesus: “By their fruits you will know them”); these were Christians solely in the sociological sense. I mean, I can declare myself a serious candidate for the gold medal in Olympic decathlon, but when I hit the field any belief in my claim will be quickly dispelled.

Those looking for an excuse to vilify Christianity are just a tad too quick to sweep under the carpet the fact that, for example, Jewish religious leaders were the ones who instituted the care of widows and orphans.  Later, humane care for the dispossessed, including mental patients, in England came about as a direct result of the Great Awakening. For that matter, how often do we hear about the indispensable role of the Methodist circuit riders in taming the wild west?

Just remember in all this that to generalize is to be an idiot.

And don’t ever forget either that, whatever else you may say about Oedipus, he did love his mother.