A Critique of the Morality of Secrecy

[Scam of God]

   In a small town a secret passes between individuals like a specter from the spirit world; each head is bowed and every brow is furrowed in silent solemnity by the power contained within the act of sharing a secret, like those who feel the power of the missal at a Mass. This is especially true of the American Midwest, where the triviality and general meaninglessness of day to day existence has rendered gossiping a virtual American pastime. It is as though they have endeavored to make man as predictable as the harvest they so depend upon for sustenance. 
   There is nothing new in this. Society has always had its methods of laying bare that which was once was concealed. The confession, for instance, that highly refined form of spiritual espionage, originated as a pre-Christian public activity prevalent amongst the Neo-Platonic circle of authors which has only relatively recently been refined into a 'private' activity: in this way the confessor feels himself able to share his burden on a personal level with a priest, and the priest in turn assumes the role of the confessor's 'inner' conscience, thereby ensuring to the penitent that his sins will remain 'private' despite their being exposed to an audience. Much the same structure is in place amongst psychoanalytic circles, whose express purpose it is to uncover the archeology of the past and pick from amongst the debris the few gleaming treasures hidden like diamonds in the rough. Even the arts are not free from this 'will to truthfulness' (they were, indeed, among the first to adopt it; the visual arts have always promoted a 'priestly' temperament) - Surrealism, for instance, demands from the practitioner a certain slavish adherence to the ideal of the 'true thought', the thought which has been concealed by the body within the manifold nether-realms of the mind but which can be brought to light by the dabbler through the application of arcane techniques. This Endorian sorcery, this conjuring forth of occulted knowledge, constitutes the basic activity of interpersonal relationships within Western society.
   And yet - Henri Bergson's envisioned society of schoolgirls notwithstanding - there could never be a civilized society which did not on some level permit for the retaining of secrets: such a society would necessarily be devoid of all power-relations. Implicit in the statement "we shall make politicians truthful," for instance, is the following statement: "we shall make politicians abolished" - for it is the task of the politician to lie to his constituency; it is the one real activity which justifies his very existence, to keep from them those things the knowledge of which would otherwise drive them to abolish the State, and, along with it, he himself. As Bernard de Mandeville, the great English psychologist of morality, wrote in the closing lines of his excellent satire Fable of the Bees:
 
 
Bare Vertue can't make Nations live 
In Splendour; they, that would revive
A Golden Age, must be as free,
For Acorns, as for Honesty.
 
 
     Indeed, the notion of the 'open society' itself is nothing more than the most highly developed form of the moral imperative (liberating the individual through an appeal to the truth), which can be traced with accuracy from its inception in Greece and Judea to its apotheosis in the liberal philosophy formulated by John Locke. In all instantiations of this basic belief there is at work a secondary, hidden presupposition: that of the valuability of truthfulness itself, as opposed to deceit. 
     And yet this faith is false; moreover, it could never be realized. A genuinely honest nation would, for instance, be required to admit to its neighbor its relative military weakness, which would mean inviting invasion from the stronger party. Because a nation cannot admit to this and survive, however, it necessarily dissimulates, fabricates, adopts false airs of romantic bravado (spiritualized in the term 'patriotism'), and essentially invents ex nihilo an entirely fictitious 'nation' out of a synthesized conglomeration of its given parts. Any nation which admits for a moment the discordant factions which comprise the greater bulk of its society would turn inwards against itself.
     The same holds true of individuals themselves. Man is a weak animal, neither fleet of foot nor strong of arm, and, because he exists in a world of frightful and frightening creatures, he has found it necessary to adapt according to the demands of his environment. But adaptation is not the only use dishonesty has in human civilization - all beauty is basically dissimulation, commanding the attention of the viewer and demanding that he perceive particular qualities (the equation of ‘the good’ with ‘the beautiful’ amongst ancient ruling classes, for instance) within the object of his perception; and the current vogue for it is nothing more than self-deception in the most basic sense, however much it contradicts the equally incredible fashion of ‘emotional honesty‘. The cosmetic industry thrives on the desire for dishonesty; the Puritans forbade cosmetics out of instinctive truthfulness. Thus our instincts war amongst themselves.
     And so it is within the shade-ridden ‘inner’-world itself. For so much of man remains hidden to himself that applying the nomenclature ‘man‘ is itself a great folly; it is taken for granted amongst myth-makers that one must never utter one‘s true name for fear of granting power to another over oneself. The greater part of mental activity is a concealing-from-oneself things the knowledge of which might otherwise cause one to writhe with self-disgust, and the effort to make these things known constitutes the general struggle of power (over truth) within civilization.
     The first to intimate this sentiment was Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote thusly of the folk-psychology of secrecy:
 
 
‘"Morality of truthfulness in the herd. "You shall be knowable, express your inner nature by clear and constant signs - otherwise you are dangerous: and if you are evil, your ability to dissimulate is the worst thing for the herd. We despise the secret and unrecognizable, you may not be concealed from yourself, you may not believe that you change." Thus: the demand for truthfulness presupposes the knowability and stability of the person. In fact, it is the object of education to create in the herd member a definite faith concerning the nature of man: it first invents this faith and then demands "truthfulness."’
(Nietzsche, Nachlass 277)
 
 
     

[Scam of God]

But let us inquire - is the truth indeed more valuable than the lie in regards to man‘s nature? For whom? For the Christian, who accuses the atheist of lying to himself in regards to his 'hidden desire' to remain in a state of libertinage, without the pang of guilt in which the Christian has found lifelong company? For the atheist, who condemns the Christian as secretly wishing to be lorded over, without admitting to himself his own inability to check his urges? Certainly not for the authentically introspective man, who wanders through his hallways like an invitee to Poe’s masquerade, passing with from room to colored room and seeing all things newly through strangely tinted windows.
     For whom, then, and how is the possession of the ‘truth’ of man advantageous? It seems a strange thing, that one should regard his own nature, above even he himself, his most valued and valuable possession. And yet it is just so: for he who commands or who can obscure the ‘truth’ of his inner-nature liberates himself from the scrutiny of those who would seek to render him predictable, to ascribe to him a regulatory aspect upon which the inquirer might ground a prediction in regards to his actions in the future. In this sense the endless debate between those who assign to man a docile and malleable nature and those who conceive of him as an unrepentant egoist is simply one over the right to make predictions, and nothing more - but making a prediction means publishing an as-yet unwritten future, a total history and a teleology of the individual. Thus it is that the question of ’human nature’, and an individual’s nature in particular, stands as one of the highest and most important questions asked of man. The law itself is justified only if it appeals to a need to defend man from himself; without the ability to ground predictions and expectations upon an idea of man‘s ‘natural character‘ it would be mere empty decree. .
     In general, the logic of the morality of secrecy is that of the warning, a sharing of the truth of one's past actions in the hope of warding off any possible victimization on the part of the object of the secret in the future. In this the gossip-teller pretends himself a prophet and presupposes an orderly structure to man's actions, as well as a linear agent which progresses forward through time and accrues to himself particular traits which today are called ‘character’. This mode of thought has been extended under the watch of certain philosophies to include a generalized tendency ‘innate’ within humanity to behave one way or the other (but always according to a dualistic conception of things) - Christianity and the doctrines of ‘original sin’ and depravity stand as an antithetical sort of thought to Rousseau’s noble sauvage. Both parties admit, of course, for the possibility that man can occasionally behave in the manner opposite to their basic ’nature’, but understand this to require a great deal of effort and pain - either as ’salvation’ or ’alienation’ - and to be atypical of most men. In both instances this basic doctrine has been utilized to justify their actions in the political and cultural spheres.
     Hitherto, very few have thought to call into question these premises, because very few have desired to abdicate the right to making predictions, to possessing power over one's self and one‘s fellows (for dissimulation in the opposite sense of that I've presented above is also useful - a confirmation of one's basic traits, for the better or for the worse, instead of willfully-imposed ambiguity). Those of us who have no power, however, and who have the patience to wait to acquire it, are quite free to see the issue clearly and to investigate it with alacrity.
     And what we have found is quite astonishing. For we have observed and have understood the profitability of making man believe himself to be a thing that he is not; we have seen this particular bit of non-logic at work. And what is it? Why, nothing more than this - the desire to make man consistent, non-contradictory; and stalwart in his ways; a belief that ”he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed”. So long as man is made predictable, he likewise becomes controllable. And he is rendered predictable by a gnosis, an apocalupsis of what is human in man. 
     For the belief in an essential nature serves in the mind of he who believes it as a moral treacle: all the woes of the world are to be done away with by mere and meager honesty. Forgiveness is readily available to him who shares the basic character of his being with another, be it God or man. No ambiguity, no uncertainty, no multiplicity may be spared in determining the nature of a man’s motivational character (God has the appetite of an American girl) - “man is born free and everywhere belongs in chains“ is the motto of the minister. In such a fashion man is disarmed; he loses the one weapon available to him in the incessant strife for dominance over his past. And so it is that man is cut off from his past, and estranged from his future; for the man who is subjected to the scrutiny of the public stare there can be only an endless present, a woeful state of affairs. The camera’s lens becomes a gorgon’s gaze, capturing in an instant, in the twinkling of an infernal eye, what otherwise requires a lifetime - and more! - to come into fruition. Under the flash of the flare man withers.
     One should not judge this practice too harshly: it is entirely possible that our entire modern scientific method - which demands repeatability as a verification of validity - was the result of a long and torturous introspection on the part of earlier men. It is even conceivable that the whole of man’s organization of nature originated through his attribution of inner motivational forces to the events of nature, after the manner of Schopenhauer. For this we owe them a great deal -- and yet must nevertheless acknowledge the impossibility of their efforts in applying this search for stability to the human entity. For man is not himself natural, but is instead a conglomeration of instincts and of passions; deviancy is the norm and not the exception within his inner-existence, and hardly a moment goes by when one feeling or drive has not itself capitulated to the encroach of another. Thus one can agree with the author of James that man is very much like a wave, and much more like an ocean of them. And the conservative in this sea who, like the imbecile de Maistre, requires the reassurance of some connection to his past is a -- puffer fish.
     Ultimately, one can say only this of the ‘nature’ of man: that he is fickle, prone to altering his mind, and without any particular goals towards which he strives without first being educated in their importance by those about him. Man does not even seek to reproduce himself ‘naturally‘, having no innate knowledge of the nature of his female counterpart; and, while it is entirely possible for him to experience the pangs of excitement without having been taught their function, it will be absolutely impossible for him to act out upon them in any fashion without instruction. This does not, however, mean that he is born in a state of ‘grace’, or ‘pure’, as Islam teaches; neither does it support Locke’s ingenious-but-insipid arguments in favor of the tabula rassa. What it means is nothing more than the fact that man is born without any innate dispositions towards any behavior (at least any to which an external moral value might be assigned), and that, insofar as one uses the word ‘human nature’ to describe a vague but basic which holds good of men in general, then it can be safely said that no such thing exists, and that all belief in such a function of the organism is the product of certain mythological notions which have been created for a purpose quite other than a disinterested study of the human animal. One who uses such a concept therefore to condemn a party or law or mankind itself - for this is almost exclusively the only area in which such an idea is applied - does nothing more than hearken back to the original purpose of the notion of ‘human nature’, thereby supporting both it and the groups which have made use of it.     This does not mean that man does not have basic needs, or that his body is not very well suited towards fulfilling those needs. To the contrary: it is for this very reason that man has no innate nature. For each of his needs are fulfilled by particular tissues and organs within his body, and each requires its own share of nutrients, resources, and so forth to keep itself functional. Because each of these particular objects has its own utility and teleology and does not possess any ‘knowledge’ of the actions of any other component of the body, we must no longer regard it as but one particularity within a whole, but rather as an entity unto itself, with its own nature which does not correlate to the nature of the whole and which does not necessarily operate in harmony with any other organ. If the reader requires an anthropomorphized metaphor to fully comprehend this statement, one could imagine a fully automated factory operated by sentient or semi-sentient machines which function autonomously but which share the same power source. Each machine requires the other, and yet all of them work towards their own end without the slightest ‘intention’ of keeping the other organs functional.

[Scam of God]

In the final analysis, all that can be said of man's 'nature' is that it has been so often overlooked in our ongoing cultural debates that no man really knows anything about it. It, like so much else in the realm of ideas, has been staked out by competing groups for their own benefit - conservatives, who have decided without justification to co-opt the notion to preserve their own power; liberals, who sing the praises of man's 'good heart' without having willpower enough to stare at that heart in the first place. But man's heart is the apple in the garden, which we all must bite.


EDIT (A summation, not a part of the above diatribe):

• That 'human nature' is basically a conglomeration of competing urges and instincts, and that it has no basic tendency towards either 'selfishness' or 'selflessness'.
• I further believe that 'individuals' do not exist, and that every human being can be reduced to his or her differing, multiple psychological states.
• As a result, 'individualism' is a ludicrous extrapolation of Christianity's fixation on what Nietzsche called 'soul-atomism', or the belief that an individual's 'true self' is a whole entity, completely divorced from external reality.
• Both conservatives and liberals, when debating this issue, completely fail to define 'human nature' as anything more than a vague, generalized tendency; they refuse to apply a depth-analysis to the issue, perhaps because they'd be frightened to discover just what they really are.

[bigbadgerjohnny]

• Both conservatives and liberals, when debating this issue, completely fail to define 'human nature' as anything more than a vague, generalized tendency; they refuse to apply a depth-analysis to the issue, perhaps because they'd be frightened to discover just what they really are.

I agree.  Self-knowledge in whatever form is a dangerous prospect, whether you're talking about private revelations of daydreaming and thinking about what and who you are and what you want, the Christian confessionals and Freudian confessionals you mentioned are great examples of semi-public form of self-knowledge, or agreed-upon constructed sets of definitions about society and human nature that hold together that "herd" Nietzsche was whining about.

But Nietzsche was right of course:  the unveiling of truth in your fellow man is as simple as a smile, or a look in his eye, and from birth you are imprinted to respond to your fellow man in culturally specific and nonspecific ways.   The best liars are the ones who can lie with their eyes.  But beyond mere 1-on-1 lying behaviors, I think your critique of secrecy is basically the same argument Plato and all subsequent theoretical state-builders faced:  who are we, and who do we want to become?

What behaviors will be legalized, and which prohibited?  How shall we come together and how come apart?

I disagree that all states are liars, though the point that states must dissemble to survive in a number of situations is well-taken.

Is there no room for gentlemen not reading each others' mail any longer?

Is AT&T going to keep monitoring every fricking data packet sent over the Net for the sake of the NSA?[/list]

P.S.  Were you saying humans raised in captivity would have no way to figure out how to have sex with each other?  I think it's safe to assume that's one area where instinct would take over real damned fast.