Secrecy and Lies: Widely Condemned and Widely Used

Probably the most obvious, direct way in which ignorance is “socially constructed” is when people impose it on one another. As is often the case with ignorance, the idea of imposing it on other people tends to bring up negative images of detrimental acts with sinister motives. This is quite understandable. The world contains innumerable examples of unethical secrecy, lies, and other outrages by which powerful agents keep the less powerful “in the dark.” Withholding information from others who have a right to know is high-handed at the very least, and lying to them is even worse.

My interest in this subject, however, begins with the observation that despite the fact that most of us dislike having information withheld from us and dislike being lied to even more, both secrecy and lying are very widespread practices. So there’s a strong asymmetry here: We dislike it being done to us but we’re quite willing to do it to others. Moreover, information withholders and liars usually believe they have sound moral justifications for their actions. I venture to say that nearly all of us have kept at least temporary secrets or lied for what we believed were good reasons (I certainly have). Given these observations, it shouldn’t be too surprising to find social norms advocating withholding or concealing information and even lying.

Let’s begin with a fairly uncontroversial and benign example of a social norm for temporarily withholding information in the service of a desirable event: Creating pleasant surprises. Receiving gifts, watching movies, and reading novels are activities that can be ruined if some miscreant gives away their hidden contents. A social norm has it that we don’t reveal the contents of a gift-wrapped birthday present to its intended recipient, or the ending of a movie we’ve seen to a friend who hasn’t. So here is an agreement between the knower and the ignoramus; most of us want our birthday presents to be surprises and we don’t want to know how a movie ends before we’ve seen it.

Information-withholding norms often are purpose-built. A fascinating example can be found in experimental research on humans and other animals, in the method called “blinding.” Research participants are “blinded” by not knowing which experimental condition they have been placed in (e.g., are they getting the new wonder drug or a placebo?) Experimenters are “blinded” when they don’t know which experimental condition each participant is assigned to. The idea of blinding the experimenter goes back to Claude Bernard, the great 19th century French physiologist and medical scientist. A “double-blind” experiment is one that fulfills both of these conditions.

Norms and rules for enforcing selective ignorance pervade ordinary social life. Many occupational roles not only require specialized knowledge but also specific ignorance– restrictions on access to information specified by one’s role. A well-known case in point is the military concept of the “need to know,” whereby even personnel with appropriate security clearances must require information for the performance of their official duties in order to be granted access to it.

Organizational norms enforcing restricted access to information can have a downside, even when such restrictions are central to the organization’s purposes. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks revealed difficulties due to the strongly compartmentalized information silos produced by the strict “need to know” culture of American intelligence agencies. The 9/11 Commission recommended a shift in the intelligence community from the “need to know” culture to a “responsibility to provide” approach, later implemented in the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act.

Confidentiality is another social norm for withholding information that is premised on a moral injunction. Being asked and agreeing to treat information confidentially brings a moral responsibility not to reveal it to others. At times, confidentiality can collide with other moral principles. A researcher or journalist interviewing heroin addicts about heroin usage will want to guarantee interviewees anonymity and confidentiality. After all, the interviewees are going to be admitting to illegal acts. But what if an interviewee reveals that they have murdered someone? Duty-of care principles would compel the interviewer to report the crime to the authorities. Ethical principles regarding confidentiality also can come into conflict with the law. Returning to our researcher or journalist, what if the researcher’s data or the journalist’s tapes are subpoenaed by a court of law? The human research ethics committee on which I’ve served at my university forbade researchers to promise research participants absolute confidentiality– They could promise only “confidentiality as far as the law allows.”

Moral injunctions regarding selective ignorance abound in childrearing. Responsible parents have to deal with the question of what children should and should not know, or at least when. This issue is perennial and mundane, but it can be an ethical and moral minefield nevertheless. When should children find out about reproduction? When should they know about illicit drugs? For a more agonizing case, consider children of a parent who has a heritable disease: When should they take a genetic marker test to determine whether they have inherited it, and when should they know the result? A recent news story about Ugandan draft policy recommending that HIV positive children be informed of their illness at age 10 has understandably generated heated debate.

Now let us venture onto thinner ice: Social norms that promote lying. There is a large philosophical literature on lying, perhaps the most well-known sourcebook being Bok’s (1978) masterwork. Bok takes a rather severe position about lying and liars, concluding that lies seldom can be justified. Even a pragmatist who disregards ethical and moral arguments against lying still would have to admit that lying is risky—One’s reputation can suffer irreparably damage. On balance, evidence points to a widespread belief that omitting to disclose information is not as bad (or at least, not as risky) as lying. For instance, Burgoon, Callister, and Hunsaker’s (1994) investigation of equivocation or omission versus falsification in doctor-patient interactions found that about 85% of the participants admitted to omission but only 34% admitted to falsification. Likewise, Brown and Levinson’s (1987) pioneering anthropological work on politeness suggests that people intending to be polite to one another will resort to what they consider to be ambiguity or vagueness more than outright distortion or deception.

Nevertheless, lying is common enough to suggest that many of us are willing to take the risks. As social psychologist W. P. Robinson (1996: 207) puts it, “The more competitive the situation and the more serious the consequences of winning or losing, the more likely it is that deception will be normative or required.” Examples in the social order where deception is normative or required abound: Competitive games, political and military conflict are the most obvious examples, with business not far behind. And so liars can be romantic heroes. Lionized liars include spies, military commanders who outwit their foes, superheroes with secret identities, detectives who not only uncover deceit but deceive criminals, and even successful con artists.

However, competition is far from being the only justification for lying. Perhaps the most common norms encouraging deception are those guiding polite conversation, in particular, tact. Much tactfulness amounts to omission (avoiding saying impolite things), but it can readily extend to distortion as well. Tactful dissembling ranges from “softening” utterances that might offend their recipient to outright lies. To soften a phrase, we replace it with a less potent alternative (e.g., “not terribly good” instead of “really bad”). In one of my many failed attempts at phrase-softening, the colleague who had received my gentle critique remarked “I must remember from now on, Mike, that when you say something is ‘not quite true’ you actually mean it’s utter rubbish.”

Parents frequently have to deal with the question of whether to lie to their children. Should children be led to believe in Santa Claus, and if so, when and how should they find out he doesn’t exist? Even just permitting a child to believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy requires tacit complicity with falsehoods. But plenty of responsible, well-intentioned parents who love their children go further by actively sustaining these illusions. In fact, parental lying is widespread and it goes far beyond Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. In the third episode of the recent Politically Incorrect Parenting Show, a TV series aired in Australia and New Zealand, Dr. Nigel Latta discusses parental lying with the aim of openly discussing its pros and cons. Interestingly, this practice has received hardly any attention from researchers studying childrearing practices. Here’s a recent news story about University of Toronto studies investigating how and why parents lie to their children. The most common reasons parents gave were to influence children’s behavior and emotional states.

And finally, information concealment and lying play roles in many kinds of humor. For instance, one version of “taking the Mickey” requires the jokester to lie initially and only eventually let the victim in on the joke. I’d just arrived in the department where I now work when I was approached by one of my new colleagues. Our conversation started off like this:

Colleague: I understand your name is ‘Michael.’
Michael: Yes, it is.
C: Well, my name also is ‘Michael.’ Both of us can’t be called ‘Michael,’ it will cause confusion.
M: What, really?
C: Yes… I was here first. You’ll simply have to be called something else.
M: I often go by ‘Mike,’ would that do?
C: Yes, perhaps. But you’ll have to insist on being called that, you know…

I didn’t realize my leg was being pulled until a couple of remarks further along. My colleague’s dry wit and deadpan delivery had me completely fooled. We became good friends, although I did tell him that he was such an effective liar that I’d have to keep an eye on him.

Virtuous Ignorance

In his by now famous review of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue,” Jonathan Raban described her book as a “four-hundred-page paean to virtuous ignorance.” Raban was referring to the kind of homespun philosophy that is exemplified by expressions such as “I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” He characterizes it as a “commonsense conservatism” whereby morally upright laypeople are better able than experts to judge the merits of, say, American foreign policy, because too much expertise clouds judgment.  Some commentators opined that “virtuous ignorance” is another way of saying “anti-intellectual.” Be that as it may, I would like to focus on the concept of virtuous ignorance itself. I’ve mentioned this concept elsewhere (Smithson 2008), and I think it holds plenty of riches for anyone who cares to dig into it. Once we know what to look for, virtuous ignorance turns up in lots of places, and not just among right-wing politicians or, for that matter, laypeople.

I’ll begin by drawing a distinction between ignorance as a virtue and ignorance as a preferred state. An old friend of mine was involved in early selection tests administered to men applying to the Australian Air Force. He used to claim credit for having selected two airmen in particular: One who dropped a dud bomb on a bicyclist during a practice run and another who retracted the landing gear on a Mirage fighter-jet when it was on the ground. My friend also told me that one of the admission test questions asked applicants for the name of the artist who painted “Blue Boy.” If they correctly responded “Thomas Gainsborough,” that was sufficient to reject them. There was no place in the Australian Air Force for men who knew that Gainsborough painted “Blue Boy.”

Is this an example of virtuous ignorance? Not quite. While it displays a preference for Air Force men who do not know their Gainsborough, it stops short of claiming this as a virtue. In other words, the selectors may not have believed that knowing about Gainsborough diminished a man’s worth. Instead, they may have been merely pragmatic: Perhaps they believed that men with interests in and education about the arts would not fit in well to the Australian Air Force of the time.

Here’s an example closer to virtuous ignorance, and one that isn’t attributable to conservative politicians or anti-intellectuals. In fact, it involves highly educated people. Back in the 70’s I took a PhD in sociology. My then fellow sociology graduate students and I hadn’t read any psychology beyond a few selected works by Freud, but we all knew we hated psychology, with the possible exception of Freud. More than that, some of us also knew that psychology was full of reductionist, positivist, medical-model-following reactionaries who were blind instruments of the capitalist order.

Eventually, nevertheless, my curiosity was piqued. What was so dastardly about psychology? I decided to find out. When I revealed to my peers that I had started taking a class in psychology, my status immediately plummeted. For them, not studying psychology indicated superiority of intellect. True cognoscenti would know better than to waste their time reading up on such an obviously misguided discipline.

Years later, I ran across anecdotal evidence that this view was not confined to students. A psychologist colleague attended a seminar by a very prominent sociologist, and was inspired by the sociologist’s portrayal of a revolutionary future for the social sciences. However, he was puzzled that no mention was made of psychology or psychologists. Afterward, he approached the professor and asked him how psychology would fit into his vision of the future. The sociologist replied that he had once, long ago, taken a class in psychology but tried not to think about that unfortunate lapse in judgment. These days, I work in a psychology department. Clearly, I have gone over to the Dark Side.

I’m not picking on sociologists. Plenty of examples are available in other disciplines. Another psychologist friend of mine, very well educated and highly intelligent, once confessed to me that she was proud that she knew nothing about economics. In these examples, ignorance is made virtuous by converting it into a kind of status marker. Professing ignorance of the “right” things can be an indicator of high status. In many societies, class and/or caste distinctions have been partly based on this.  Not so long ago in English society, knowledge of a mere craft or trade (versus an art or discipline) was considered beneath nobility.

So the issue isn’t in the decision or preference not to know X, it’s the moral judgments about those who do or don’t know X. This is the key to the fascinating realm of virtuous ignorance. At first, the very phrase may seem almost oxymoronic, or at the very least, something to make fun of. However, it isn’t too difficult to find cases of virtuous ignorance with serious moral purposes underpinning them. More on this shortly.

But first, can people think that ignorance is virtuous in other ways than conferring status on the ignoramus? In the first words to his book, “Strange Weather” (Ross 1991), on the Acknowledgements page, the self-appointed critic of science Andrew Ross declared “This book is dedicated to all the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them.” Taken literally, the second sentence seems unexceptional. I think we would all grant that had he even a bare-bones scientific education, Ross could not have written the book that he did. But some of those rebutting Ross’ work, such as biologist Paul Gross and mathematician Norman Levitt, interpreted his declaration as a hubristic “boast” (Gross and Levitt 1994: 91).

Why might this dedication have been a boast, and if so, what could Ross have been boasting about? A clear hint comes in the Introduction on pg. 8: “As I lacked the training of a scientific intellectual and the accompanying faith, however vestigial or self-critical, in the certainties of the scientific method… My position, then, became that of a cultural critic…” There we have it: Ross is claiming not only that scientists are indoctrinated into a faith, but also anyone undergoing scientific “training” becomes contaminated by this faith and, worse still, cannot be rid of it even through self-criticism. It’s like the stain of Original Sin. Therefore, contamination can be avoided only by not studying science.

It isn’t a big leap from the idea that knowledge might be a contaminant to the notion of taboos against knowledge. Where do knowledge taboos come from? What creates and sustains them? The anthropologist Mary Douglas wrote a classic book “Purity and Danger” (Douglas 1967), with an intriguing first approximation to a general theory of taboos. She claimed that there are two kinds of proscription in taboos: One against threats or dangers, and another against pollution or contamination.

So, let’s try this out on knowledge. First, some information could be declared off-limits because knowing it would pose a danger (to oneself or to others). Or perhaps the process of acquiring the information would incur dangers. What kinds of danger lurk here? In the first case, perhaps the most obvious example is knowledge that can be used against other people. In the second case, the dangers could range from physical (e.g., experimenting with explosives) to social (e.g., committing illegal acts in the pursuit of knowledge).

Now, consider the second kind of taboo, pollution or contamination. “Innocence,” when it refers to a kind of saintly naivety, is a familiar but interesting kind of virtuous ignorance. In Christian traditions it is associated with the tree of knowledge, forbidden fruit, and the events that got humanity kicked out of Eden. Those who have lost their innocence or known sin are “tainted.” Mary Douglas defined pollution as dirt in the wrong place. Translated into the realm of knowledge and ignorance, the crucial idea is that information can be in a “wrong place.” For instance, some kinds of knowledge may be considered appropriate for adults but not for children. One of the most intriguing aspects of innocence is the notion that its maintenance often requires the protection of innocents by more knowledgeable (and therefore unclean) guardians.

At first glance, proscriptions against knowledge raise familiar images of oppression and domination—Book burning, bans against certain teachings. This is fair enough; examples abound of ignorance imposed by one group on another. Nevertheless, virtuous ignorance also can be found at the base of benign or even benevolent arrangements agreed to by society as a whole.

Privacy, for instance, amounts to a multilateral ignorance arrangement, whereby we agree that certain kinds of information about ourselves will not be available to others without our consent. Respecting others’ privacy is virtuous behavior, thus, virtuous ignorance. People who violate privacy norms pose a threat to the person(s) about whom they have obtained private information. A right to privacy amounts to a right to at least some control over who knows what about you. Secrecy is unilateral; privacy is multilateral and therefore privacy invokes social norms for good conduct. Virtuous people do not poke their noses into matters that are none of their business.

Social relations based on trust operate in a similar manner. Trust is not about concealing information, but trust relationships do require observance of an interesting kind of privacy. If one person is monitoring another or insisting that they fully account for their actions, the person under surveillance will conclude that the monitor does not trust them. Trust entails running the risk of being exploited but increases opportunities by rendering the truster more mobile and able to establish cooperative relations more quickly than someone who insists on surveillance and binding contractual relations. Trust, therefore, is both an example of a social relation that requires tolerance of undesired uncertainty (the risk of being exploited) in favor of desired uncertainty (freedom to seize opportunities for new relations) and, of course, virtuous behavior. Good friends don’t place one another under 24-7 surveillance.

And so, we have arrived at examples of virtuous ignorance that are socially mandated and underpin some important forms of social capital: Privacy, trust, and friendship. Well and good, one might say, but these are examples of self-imposed, voluntary ignorance. What about the virtues of imposing ignorance on others? I’ll take a tour through some of that territory next time.