Why We Lie: The Source of our Disasters. Dorothy Rowe

said, full of stifled truth. That was what I thought I was writing – the truth. But it was truth known only to me, but I believed in it more than I believed the facts arrayed against it. I believed that in some sense not factually verifiable I was a straight-A student. In the same sense I believed I was an Eagle Scout, and a powerful swimmer, and a boy of integrity. These were ideas about myself that I had held on to for dear life. Now I gave them voice.’⁹

      Tobias was given a scholarship to Hill School and off he went. Were this a story told by some Hollywood film, Hill School would have been the making of him, but it was real life. Eventually he was expelled from the school, and soon after he joined the army, just in time to spend four years in Vietnam. His account of this war, In Pharaoh’s Army, is one of the best books written about the ugliness and pointlessness of war. When he was discharged he drifted, then went to England to visit friends. There, after four and a half months’ study, he passed the entrance exams for Oxford and took a degree in English Language and Literature. One night he was in the Bodleian library working on a translation from the West Saxon Gospels for his Old English class. The passage to translate concerned the story of the man who built his house upon a rock and the man who built his house on sand. ‘And the rain descended, and the flood came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell; and great was the fall of it.’ He later wrote, ‘The winds that had blown me here could have blown me anywhere, even from the face of the earth. But I was here, in this moment, which all the other moments in my life had conspired to bring me to. And with this moment came these words, served on me like a writ. I copied out my translation in plain English, and thought that, yes, I could do well to build my house upon a rock, whatever that meant.’¹⁰ He returned to America and became a great teacher and writer. He became the person he knew himself to be.

       Chapter Five How We Learn to Lie

      Fragile though it might be, our sense of being a person is the most important part of our life. Newborn babies show very clearly that they are determined to survive physically. If a light tissue is placed over the baby’s mouth and nose, the baby will struggle to remove it. Babies also arrive in the world determined to survive as a person. They search for the one thing they need for survival – the attentive face of another person. Babies arrive in the world ready to feed, and able to single out a face from their surroundings. While it has always been known that babies need sustenance, it was not until the end of World War Two that the importance of a relationship with another mothering person was recognized. Midst the turmoil of the aftermath of the war in Europe there were children who had survived without being in the care of adults. Some were the survivors of places like the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps, some had been separated from their parents as they fled from the enemy, and some were the blond, blue-eyed children conceived as part of Hitler’s plan for the master race and brought up in Nazi institutions, and abandoned as the Russian army advanced on Berlin. Amongst these children were those who had survived physically but, in the absence of anyone to take a personal interest in them, they had not become what we would regard as someone like ourselves. Some of these children distrusted all adults and related only to other children, while some were unable to create a relationship with any human being. To become ourselves we need other people.

      Our physical makeup ensures that we can be aware of something only if that thing stands in contrast to something else. If we lived in a world where nothing ever died, we would have no concept of life because there was no death. If everyone invariably told the truth, we would have no concept of truth because there were no lies. We know our self because there is not-self – the world around us and other people, that is, other selves. It is only recently that this has been understood. Writing in the early twentieth century, William James described the newborn baby as seeing the world as nothing but a ‘booming, buzzing confusion’, while Freud believed that a baby cannot tell where his body ends and the world begins. (These men might have fathered babies but they did not spend much time in the daily care of them.) Studies where newborn babies are shown a number of objects, and the length of time that the baby spends looking at each object is measured, have shown that a baby is born not only knowing how to identify a face from other things but preferring to look at a face, even just a simple cartoon of a face, than at anything else. Dangle some small object about a foot in front of an infant. The baby will look intently at the object, and then reach forward with one or both arms in the attempt, sometimes successful, to touch the object. This is not proof that the baby is aware that the object is not part of his body, but it does suggest that he is beginning to understand that he can use a part of his body to reach something he can see.

      The weight of evidence suggests that the newborn baby sees a world of patterns, and that some of these patterns have considerable significance, that is, meaning for the baby. Moreover, the baby is keen to discover the means whereby he can influence some of those patterns. When babies are given the opportunity to suck on a dummy fixed so that the changing pressure on the dummy switches some music on and off, they will readily learn how to do this. The patterns babies want most to engage with are faces. Moreover, right from birth, babies show a clear preference for faces that look directly at them, rather than faces that are turned away.

      If you are unused to being in the company of young babies you can be quite unnerved by finding yourself the subject of a young baby’s thoughtful gaze. You might even think that the baby is gravely assessing you and finding you wanting. You might hasten to decide, as many psychologists do, that this must be an illusion. How could a baby assess you when he does not yet know that he himself is a person? These psychologists know that, when mothers say that they have little conversations with their baby, the mothers are deluded. Babies might appear to converse, but, according to Michael Tomasello, babies cannot understand that they have intentions to communicate with others, and others have intentions to communicate with them, until they are nine months old.¹ Babies might seem to communicate, but this is a pseudo-communication. However, Tomasello was examining those communications where two people have a common subject that they are discussing. There is another form of communication, often used by mothers and babies younger than nine months, where the mother notices what the baby is feeling and responds to that. The baby then responds to the mother’s response. In a similar way, a baby will notice that his mother is dispirited and try to initiate a conversation. Such attention from her baby can often produce a much happier response from the mother but, if the mother does not respond, the baby will try again once, perhaps twice. If the mother still does not respond, the baby looks elsewhere rather than at the mother’s face. Adults often communicate in the same way. I observed a woman my age looking at a teenage girl whose need to be fashionable had quite overcome her sense of the ridiculous. As the woman shook her head and turned away, she caught my eye. I smiled, and she smiled back. Nothing needed to be said.

      Psychologists will argue that there are good scientific reasons for rejecting the theory that babies are born with some degree of a sense of self and an ability to perceive a sense of self in other people. However, science is concerned with probabilities. Any statement of absolute certainty cannot be scientific. Deciding whether a particular probability is so significant that it can be acted upon is a subjective judgement. For instance, you have about one chance in fourteen million of winning the UK National Lottery. Such a probability has never tempted me to buy a ticket, but millions of people do, many on the grounds that, ‘Someone has got to win it.’ More often than not, whether we see a particular probability as being significant depends on whether it fits with the way we see things. There are many adults, and not only psychologists, who want to see themselves as being superior to children. When you were a child, how many adults did you meet who spoke to you as an equal? Did you try to bear this as best you could, or did you resolve that, when you grew up, you would do to children what had been done to you?

      All the evidence that infants can imitate, converse, feel self-conscious, understand intention, understand humour and how to deceive others has not changed the minds of those psychologists who are devoted to the theory that children have to be about four years old before they acquire a sense of self and an understanding