On Being Economical with the Truth

From Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw:
Bluntschli to Raina – "You said you'd told only two lies in your whole life. Dear young lady: isn't that rather a short allowance? I'm quite a straightforward man myself; but it wouldn't last me a whole morning."
 
People lie. A recent college study reported in The New York Times concluded that the average person lies twice per day. This is ludicrous. The study relied on self-reporting and many of the participants denied lying at all. They were lying… maybe to themselves, to put the most generous spin on it, but still lying. (The same participants who reported telling zero to two lies per day reported believing they were lied to about six times a day.) Past research (including analysis of recorded conversations) has put the typical number of lies told by an average person daily to be between 10 and 200. The reason for such a wide spread has less to do with the inherent honesty of different individuals and more to do with how much they are interacting with other people. Extroverts, for example, lie more than introverts, but only because they talk more; in percentage terms their truths and untruths are about the same. According to a study by Robert S. Feldman published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 60 percent of people lie at least once in the first 10 minutes of a conversation; they will tell an average of two to three lies in the whole of that 10 minutes. Most lies people tell each other are harmless. They are done in a spirit of kindness, false flattery (“Your poem is wonderful!”), or mild self-aggrandizement. That doesn’t even cover lies of omission, e.g. does the spouse really need to know about the pleasant chat you had with your ex during a random encounter?
 
Only a small percentage of lies are materially harmful, but enough are both to cost the US economy over one trillion dollars per year in fraud, embezzlement, and scams. Clearly, cons and material fraud are big problems and are rightly illegal. They can be personally devastating. However, the vast majority of lies have nothing to do with any of that. Instead, they just smooth out social interactions or gloss over some personal faux pas. Conventional wisdom is that lies in a romantic relationship are particularly harmful, for when lies are discovered (as they so often are) they can undermine trust to a degree that may be irreparable. So, honesty is generally regarded as the best way to go for couples and friendships at least on the important things such as criminal backgrounds, addiction, and money matters. But is it always the best way to go on the less important stuff? If not, how important does something have to be and by what standard?
 
Recent studies give more nuanced answers. As Professor Clancy at the University of Missouri-Kansas City notes, “Relationships last only if we don’t always say exactly what we’re thinking.” Relationship author Jenna McCarthy agrees: “If I tell [my husband] the reason I don’t want to stay at his parents’ is because I’m allergic to their cats – when the reality is I just can’t stand his parents – I’m doing it to spare his feelings.” Fundamentally, it comes down to motive. If a lie is prosocial it may simply be welcome tact. If it is intended to exploit, it is a problem. If a white lie is discovered, most relationship experts advise straightforwardly admitting to it; this reduces feelings of betrayal and you both can move on.

If you are sure you want to know when the people around you are tactfully lying (we all want to know when they are tactically lying) a handy book is Liespotting by Pamela Meyer. It explains the techniques used by interrogators to identify lies. We all have tells, and most people have the same ones. (Psychopaths can be a bit of a problem, one must admit though.) She says that mastering the techniques can give you a more than 90% success rate at identifying lies. How truthful that is, I wouldn’t venture to guess.
 

Brook Benton – Lie to Me

The Pet Set

 
I’ve never regarded myself as a pet person though there have been pets in my home most of my life. As a kid there was always a family dog. Two were great Danes. There was always a cat or two. There was even a pet skunk. As an adult I’ve never owned a dog though there usually have been cats. These were acquired if not accidentally at least incidentally, such as the two kittens given to me by my sister who had rescued a pregnant stray or the two cats I inherited from my parents. (I don’t count the animals including horses during my brief marriage as my pets: they were hers.) I like the critters, of course, and tend to spoil them, but I didn’t seek them out. They just came my way. I’m not looking for more.

The family dog and I, 1969

This makes me increasingly out of step with the times. In part it is a generational thing. In today’s world of declining marriage and birthrates, pets are assuming a greater importance in people’s lives: for GenX more than Boomers, for Millennials more than GenX, and most of all for Zoomers (b. 1997-2012 – yes, many are adults now). According to a OnePoll survey of 2000 pet owners, as reported in The New York Post, a plurality of Zoomers say they get more pleasure out of making their pets happy than their partners happy. 70% of Zoomers say they would rather have a pet than a child, and 57% say they love their pet more than any sibling. 50% say they love their pets more than their mothers.
 
53% of all respondents (across generations) say their pets are more a part of the family than their childhood pets were. This is reflected in their spending. Jonathan Wainberg, senior vice president of Synchrony Pets said, “We’ve found that the total cost of care for a dog over a lifetime ranges from $20,000-$55,000. The estimated cost of care for a cat over a lifetime was between $15,000-$46,000.” Well, if one judges strictly by expenses, I suppose that is a bargain compared to raising a child to age 18, which according to the USDA is close to $300,000.
 
It is reflected in real estate, too, according to Zillow, whether rental or sales. 55% of Zoomers say a pet-friendly house is more important than a child-friendly one. 48% say a fenced back yard is crucial when it comes time to purchase. 24% say they will look for a new home if the current one is unsuitable for the pet; only 12% say they would do the same for a spouse.
 
While I think the rise in the status of pets in modern society is real and has multiple causes, I chalk up many of the extreme responses from Zoomers to youth. The oldest of them are 26. Some no doubt have experienced serious loss in their lives (by the odds, some must) but I’d venture to say that most have not yet done so. In my decades on this planet I’ve buried pets and I’ve buried family members. I’m sentimental about the former to be sure, but the two do not compare. The experience prompts us to make any number of revaluations of the important things in life. In pet matters, at least, in a few decades Zoomers’ survey answers may look more like those of Boomers today. How scary is that? 
 

The Stooges – I Wanna Be Your Dog 

In Crowd

I wasn’t one of the In Crowd either in primary or secondary school. On the other hand I wasn’t an outcast either, so I experienced some of the typical childhood cruelty from social higher-ups but by no means caught the worst of it. (Status in school is not a matter of economic class, by the way, though that factor creeps in as teens age toward graduation; it’s more about looks, bravado, sports, charisma, and a few dozen other things.) So, my status was middling overall, but within my sub-clique I held my own. Why does any of that matter even a day past graduation? How can it possibly matter decades later? It shouldn’t, but it apparently does in ways we don’t always recognize.
 
For three decades after the World War 2 extensive research was conducted for the military on what contributes to making a good soldier and officer. Among the more curious results of studies on veterans of WW2, Korea, and Vietnam were the noted effects of their places in the social hierarchies of primary schools and high schools. Against expectation, the successful functioning of soldiers, both practically and psychologically, was strongly correlated to their popularity in school. Later studies on civilians show similar results. The effects go far beyond things of military interest. Says Mitch Prinstein in his article in The Guardian, “A worldwide study conducted in my own lab revealed that adults who have memories of being popular in childhood are the most likely to report that their marriages are happier, their work relationships are stronger, and they believe they are flourishing as members of society.”
 
People play status games as kids and as adults. They can’t help it and they never stop. But apparently we judge our success in them by the standard to which we became accustomed in school. This is not an inescapable trap. It is just a habitual pattern. The habit and pattern can be changed, but it may take some conscious effort.

An interesting and clearly written book on the subject is Status Games: Why We Play and How to Stop by Loretta Graziano Breuning. I met Dr. Breuning years ago when she was in NJ doing research at Rutgers where the papers of Robert Ardrey (The Territorial Imperative) are stored. She is founder of the Inner Mammal Institute, professor emerita, and former docent at the Oakland Zoo. I found her to be thoughtful and not much influenced by groupthink. She has written several other books on mammal behavior and neurochemicals. The title of this book is a little misleading: status-seeking is unavoidable as she makes clear in the text. Humans (like all mammals) are hardwired to play status games, but some games are toxic (such as undermining those who are doing better than us rather than improving ourselves) and others not. Humans at least can learn to recognize the harmful ones (even if we usually don’t) and consciously modify or end those practices. A lot of the book is about animal behavior though she always relates it back to people. It’s an unsentimental but interesting explanation of human and animal gamesmanship.
 
At present I’m satisfied enough with a middling status. But then again, that might just be a habit lingering from primary school.
 

The Mamas and the Papas – In Crowd

Taking a Chance on Herbert

It is notoriously chancy to meet one’s heroes. In person they might be impressive and even pleasant, but they just as easily could be disappointing and rude. The only way to “meet” non-contemporary heroes is through biographies but the same risk applies. Biases of biographers, of course, must also be taken into account, not least when they are autobiographers.
 
Herbert George Wells was one of my early heroes. He is as responsible for having turned me into a lifelong recreational reader as any other single author. What was he like in person? It depends on whom you ask. H.G. Wells the man has been described by some as personable and charming but by others (including one of his sons) as a jerk. As a reader I never worried about it: charmers and jerks are both capable of being good writers, and it was always enough for me that he was one of those. Nonetheless, when I noticed the bio The Young H.G. Wells by Claire Tomalin on Hamilton Books’ New Arrivals list, I was curious enough to send for a copy.

From Tomalin’s account it is hard not to be sympathetic to the fellow on his against-the-odds path to recognition, and to put any personality quirks in that context. Born in 1866, he was the son of a failed shopkeeper (who drank) and a domestic servant. His mother, more concerned to keep him out of poverty than to nurture his mind, apprenticed him to a draper. He found this soul-crushing, but managed to find ways to pursue his own schooling. Despite adversity and some serious health problems, he eventually became a science school teacher himself at a private school. His first marriage to his cousin Isabel proved a disaster that ended in divorce; in those no-sex-before-marriage days she discovered too late that she hated physical intimacy, which in turn justified philandering in his mind. It was a habit he never broke, even in his much more successful marriage to the freethinking Amy Catherine, who went by the name Jane for some reason. Recognition and money finally came in 1895 with the publication and success of The Time Machine. The apprentice draper suddenly found himself in heady company with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and George Bernard Shaw.
 
I’m not sure how large H.G. Wells looms anymore in the lives of young scifi aficionados, but he used to be huge beyond comparison. Today there are shelves – warehouses – full of so many other major names serving every scifi niche and preference that he is more likely just one voice in the crowd. Even in the misty days of yore when I was a kid many of the golden and silver age scifi authors were writing at the top of their games so there was much other good stuff on offer – and I did encounter their material in my boyhood and (especially) teens. Yet, I read them because I long since had run out of Wells – out of his scifi anyway, since at the time didn’t have much interest in his other writings. Those authors themselves surely grew up on his books. George Orwell, who read Wells starting at age 10 in 1913, regarded Wells as the most influential contemporary writer on him: “I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much.” Decades later he influenced me, too. Kid-literature aside, the first two legit novels I ever read were scifi. The first was not Wells, but The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle. The second, however, was Wells’ The War of the Worlds: a hardback edition with a collection of short stories as well. I was hooked.
 
There is a distinct difference between pre-WW1 Wells and post-WW1 Wells. Social commentary is present in all of his work and is not always subtle. For example, in The Food of the Gods, the metaphor regarding masses of petty little people trying to cut down the few who literally have outgrown them is hard to miss, though every major film adaptation to date does. The case is similar in the film adaptations of The Island of Dr. Moreau: only the first (Island of Lost Souls [1932], released when Wells was still alive) clearly gets and makes his point (echoing Freud) that humans, like the vivisected creatures on the island, maintain the veneer of civilization only through violence to their animal natures and the ritual imposition of arbitrary codes of ethics. Yet, this prewar commentary is (for the most part) embedded in the storytelling. It thereby enhances the tales, not detracts from them. Postwar he became more blatant. He wrote less fiction and what he did write comes off as preachy. He opted to write more nonfiction in which commentary is pretty much the whole point. While his nonfiction from this era lacks the charm of his earlier books (perhaps why Tomalin deals only with young Wells) it is not without interest. Wells was an atheist and avowed socialist (though he had nothing nice to say about Bolsheviks) who did his bit to nudge the world step by step in his favored direction. He wasn’t reticent about saying so.
 
There is a belief among some conspiracy theorists that at least since the time of Cecil Rhodes there has been a conspiracy of international elites to create a New World Order: an elite-guided social welfare world-state run by technocrats that is globalized, bureaucratized, centralized, and (despite meaningless elections as distractions and window dressing for the public), fundamentally undemocratic. Today one hears this concern more often from the right, but it always has been present on the populist left, too. Two of Wells’ books have something to do with that: The Open Conspiracy (1928) and The New World Order (1939). No, Wells is not scaremongering against these threats. Quite the opposite. He is all in favor of a conspiracy to effect a New World Order precisely as described and tells the reader how to become a part of it – all for humanity’s own good, of course.
 
I can’t say I’m on board with Wells late-life vision. I give him credit for openly advocating for it though. It is refreshing.
 

 

Clip from 1953 adaptation of The War of the Worlds