The Hard Realities of Honesty

…for the first time it occurred to her that science was honesty, and that honesty was a great liberator. It cut away romance and sentiment and a great deal of nonsense, but it left clean wounds which would heal quickly without scars, leaving life whole and sane and cured. It could make people less miserable because it dealt with hard realities, instead of the unwholesome putrescence of dead moralities, and the high sentimental purities which had ruined so many lives.

Louis Bromfield – Twenty-Four Hours (1930)


Suppose we divide the political spectrum between two extremes of honest and dishonest rather than Left and Right - which is a dishonest spectrum to begin with. 

The trouble is, and this immediately pops up, is that the honest end of an imaginary political spectrum would be apolitical and the spectrum would become –

Political >>>> Apolitical

Okay - suppose we move on and change the Louis Bromfield quote to –

…for the first time it occurred to her that honesty was a great liberator. It cut away romance and sentiment and a great deal of nonsense, but it left clean wounds which would heal quickly without scars, leaving life whole and sane and cured. It could make people less miserable because it dealt with hard realities, instead of the unwholesome putrescence of dead moralities, and the high sentimental purities which had ruined so many lives.

Indeed – honesty is a great liberator. You know it and I know it, especially in these troubled times. Science and numerous other pursuits can be great liberators if they are based on honesty and they cut away romance and sentiment and a great deal of nonsense.

Therein lies the problem of course, our culture has been based around a certain level of honesty in certain areas, but the hard realities of honesty have not been applied to politics or social status. We do not cut away romance and sentiment and a great deal of nonsense even when we know or merely suspect that we should.

Unfortunately honesty is not some kind of panacea. Obviously it is common enough to be honestly mistaken and honestly uncertain, but honesty can at least be an ideal against which we assess narratives, ideas and assumptions. This is probably why we have political ideologies of course, to evade the hard realities of honesty. 

Ideology allows politicians to stand up and tell the most egregious lies, spin the most shamefully misleading narratives and foster the unwholesome putrescence of concocted moralities.

And we know it.