When I was a child and went to visit relatives with my parents, I thought how fortunate I was to be a child because I could go off to play in my room of my relative’s child and use his toys as well as the ones I had brought with me while the adults spent their time in the living room just talking. That had to wait until I was slightly older when I would sit on the stoop outside my apartment building and go over with friends what we had seen on television or what we knew about girls. It is worth pondering conversation as being an essential human activity, something we very much recognize during the pandemic in that people crave to be with people to flirt and drink and talk with one another, even if doing so can incur fatal risks. We have to be free to talk. There are many explanations for this. Talking allows people to convey information and to also hector and intimidate one another and also to display relative social prestige. Putting these and other functional advantages of talk aside, one of the most miraculous and existential qualities of talk is that it is unalienated, which means that people are likely to tell the truth of what they are when they converse with one another. It isn’t just that people will unload when in stress and so unload the truth. Rather, it is that in the ordinary course of events that we say what is the truth and that we have only with great difficulty do we manage to confide the truth or avoid blaring out what is in our mind. Yes, there are turns of phrases that distract and there are exaggerations and circumlocutions. But people are, in general, like dogs in that they are also not inclined to lie. A dog gives over that he is trying to lie. He will act submissively when the bad thing he has done, such as poop on the rug, will soon be revealed. No dog is an accomplished liar, and the same is with people.
People, like dogs, try to lie. People have deep down secrets they will suppress; people will excuse “white lies” so as to ease social interaction by saying, for example, that you can’t meet an appointment; people will hype a product so as to get a sale, though the practice may become so customary that it doesn’t seem as if it were a lie, but just normal haggling or the customs of commerce. But it is an ordeal to lie. There is a cost to a person’s lying in that people think themselves demeaned for having done so and will avoid or minimize a lie as best they can. In fact, people who are schooled or practiced at lying are people in professions where they are required to feign belief and feeling. These include actors and actresses, prostitutes, barristers and litigators. Even a doctor tries not to lie to a patient who is soon to die. Doctors will just avoid the issue of death or talk about the next procedure to deal with until the patient asks a direct answer, some of the doctors required to give the bad news however embarrassing and upsetting it may be.
In fact, the normal course of conversation requires people to offer up what they have to say about themselves, to let things off of their chests, just about all the time. You tell a friend you hate someone else even if you don't tell that to their faces. You declare your beliefs about politics, maybe by polishing a presentation to a sheen, even if it is useful to keep your mind. That is because your conversational habits cannot be easily altered, whether you are reticent or expository, and so people can see what you are doing. My mother knew if I was lying because I remained silent. Our conversations are our signatures and we tell what we want to say just so as to declare it, to stand with you and to assert what is manifestly true. That is quite aside from having a poker hand in the very rarefied atmosphere of a diplomatic negotiation. We tell truths to our buddies and with our wives and failing to do so with people in either category is very painful, even if the interlocutors have been pained and reduced to doing so, whether by telling a friend that they lost a job or didn’t reveal to having cheated on a spouse.
Consider Shaw’s “Pygmalion” as an extended study of the nature of conversation rather than the play as treating enunciation as a superficial matter even if the way people speak does label a person as a member of a social class. Shaw is exploring what was the infant and important science of linguistics. Henry Higgins’ mother and her friends are first introduced to Eliza, who may have laboriously learned enunciation but which inevitably reveals what she tells truthfully about what preoccupies her. Eliza is at ease talking about what she suspects to be the murder of a relative rather than her having died from too much gin. Eliza brings to the table her superior knowledge about sizing up people and their circumstances and so draws her conclusion. She takes pride in her deduction and so trots it out to show that she is capable and confident and so a considerable person even if these people do not know her to be one. Freddy, the young man smitten with her, prefers another interpretation. Freddy treats her conversation in a less coarse light. He says that Eliza engages in “the new small talk” which is presumably a fad whereby people deliberately sound as if they are from a less well mannered class than they actually are. (In fact, ten years after the Shaw play, the English upper class engaged in the affectation of invoking “ain’t”). Eliza asks if Freddy is offering a slight and so she wants to know if she had said something wrong and Freddy reassures her that she has in fact been delightful. So conversation is treated by the ignorant rich as a form of expression rather than a matter of substance. Shaw’s point is that the cultured classes have very little to talk about while the poor are eloquent in their observations of life, that class represented by Eliza and her father, Henry Higgins regarding her father as having the makings of a great public speaker.
What Eliza learns between that time of that exchange and the time of the grand ball is that she can maintain her pose and poise by speaking idle chit chat or remaining silent so no one can penetrate her mystery but become the mystery instead, she so much better at speaking than most members of that upper social class. The Shaw play elides the time in the final preparations for the ball by filling the time with more elocution rather than Eliza’s new found grasp of how people learn to fill their substance with more important arguments. Later on, after the ball, Eliza suggests she learned such things by following Col. Pickering in his being a model of politeness and decorum, something Higgins could not convey. Henry also feels his splendid triumph in recognizing that in her conversation between Eliza and Henry in her mother’s home she was an equal to him because he is able to articulate her emotional concerns and counter his wit with her’s. This is a miraculous transformation but the play does not accept that the walls of crass structure will be tumbling down because so few are those of the lower class will learn to have things to say that are of moment rather than either the rubbish of the rich or the eloquent but shortsighted concerns of the poor.
Shaw isn’t the only writer who says what they mean even if they may hesitate and temporarily equivocate or demure or try not to fess up what is on their minds. George Eliot is also upbeat in thinking that people are what they appear to be even if they make mistakes. Harriet, in “Middlemarch'', is drawn to Casaubon despite he is of poor manners and older in age, his infirmities clear to everyone else, partly because Harriet is naive about the sexual side of marriage. That is because Harriet is taken with Casaubon is concerned with lofty religious and scholarly concerns, someone who will go beyond the platitudes used in religious doctrine. Harriet rejects Lydgate, who is younger, and who shares Lydgate’s concerns with the poor and with issues of social justice. Harriet is taken with the romance of Casaubon and she does not know that Casaubon will fall apart as a scholar and a personality. In general, women grow fond of the chatter of their courtiers, and even if the future does not turn out well, it does not mean that people will avoid responding to their chatter. How else should courtiers behave? That makes Harriet's decision tragic rather than a general violation of the ways of conversation. It was plausible to trust what people say.
The proof positive that conversations are substantially truthful is made quite clear in the very recent first Presidential debate in 2020. Some pundits said that the debates should be modified or completely curtailed because Trump ranted rather than issued over policy. But it seems to me that the debate was eminently successful, the debaters saying what they wanted to say in their substance and in their demeanors. Biden wanted to stick to the issues and so said that he did not support Medicare For All, while conveying a tone of contempt, calling Trump a clown. Trump, for his part, said a number of things that were so clearly lies that supposedly neutral commentators go out of their way to fact check what Trump says because they are not unabashed any longer at his being called a liar. So people who support Trump may regard him as rash and badly spoken and a bit not very exact but support him for supporting him otherwise, such as in Justices and in containing what they consider “law and order”, which has been a long term Conservative term for controlling the riff raff even if not being punctilious about following police procedure. Then consider what may be a key Trump component: those Trump supporters who do not believe Trump to be an outright if justified liar. I surmise that they are not so sure of the facts and so will trust him to be truthful or, alternatively, will just play rather loose in finding something to be a fact. A rumor is enough to think that loads of absentee ballots have been dumped or that Antifa is an active movement, even if the authorities say otherwise, the Trump supporters not paying close attention. So, in effect, the Trump supporter is saying Trump is not a liar because the standards of what makes a liar who is not one is very very high, which is to say that Trump is not a liar nor is anyone who supports him. In that case, everybody, both Trump supporters and their opponents, say that the general principle remains: Trump supporters don’t lie all that badly or Biden supporters are scandalized that Trump violates the basic presumption that conversation is self evidently true. That satisfying resolution makes the principle of self evidence as an existential quality of conversation, and so has been the case in Ancient Egypt and with Hitler, who famously engaged in the Big Lie: if you hear it often enough, then you cannot believe that people are not telling the truth except for the malingerers who insist on standards of truth they will not violate. Words, in short, matter, and not because they distract or distort people. It is because people presume words are truth.