Buddhistdoor View: The
Morality of Lies and Falsehoods
Buddhistdoor Global |
2016-08-12 |
Hogeweyk, a Dutch care home
for people with dementia, is an entire village that provides a
façade of normal life for its residents.
Some weeks ago Buddhistdoor published a report
about Hogewey Care Centre, a Dutch care home for people with
dementia that in 2009 built an entire village that provides a
façade of normal life for its residents. The village, “Hogeweyk,”
comes complete with a restaurant, gardens, and health workers who
assume fictional personas such as that of neighbors or shopkeepers,
to help the residents function as if they were still living in
conventional society. Dementia care centers elsewhere are also
adopting a similar methodology of simulated normality, such as
Grove Care in the British city of Bristol.
The Hogeweyk model raises an interesting
question about what it means to tell lies or to create falsehoods,
ostensibly for the benefit of others. From the perspective of care
homes like Hogeweyk, it’s unproductive to remind patients of the
“normal” world that they can no longer enjoy and which would only
intensify their distress. It truly seems more helpful to provide a
therapeutic outlet that might enable dementia sufferers to tell
their attendants (who are trained specialists) about the buses they
used to catch, or the streets down which they used to walk, even if
that outlet is based on fabrication.
In this sense, the falsehood of Hogeweyk differs
from the typical deceptions we encounter in everyday life because
it has an ethical purpose based on compassion and care. Yet even
well-intentioned lies can be morally ambiguous and have unintended
adverse outcomes—a white lie is sometimes not even told for the
benefit of the person being lied to, but for the liar’s own peace
of mind. Telling an emotionally fragile person that their recently
deceased loved one is still alive to avoid giving them the
potentially devastating truth could have catastrophic consequences.
A child questioning the existence of Santa Claus might justifiably
ridicule the adult who persists in defending the myth.
Conversely, more misanthropically inclined
people might adhere to a somewhat mean-spirited and disingenuous
commitment to “telling it as it is” by delivering superficially
truthful statements in a callous or hurtful way, without regard for
the feelings of others or the context. This is the opposite of a
white lie, and can be just as counterproductive and harmful. “Life
is characterized by suffering,” the Buddha stated honestly, and
since then his teachings have often been misunderstood as being
pessimistic. But not only did the Buddha offer a real, practical
solution to this truth, he was also infinitely compassionate; he
was never an insensitive or hurtful person even when communicating
great truths.
In everyday life, it’s usually advisable to
tread a middle ground between lying for convenience and unskillful
truth-telling. For the Buddhist, this middle ground is known as
“skillful means.” In the Lotus Sutra skillful means are famously a
concept indicating the Buddha’s ability to teach according to the
inclinations and capacities of each being. The well-known 84,000
Dharma gates described in the Pali Canon (later adopted by the
Mahayana) was intended to illustrate how many methods of teaching
the Buddha had at his disposal, perhaps implying that anything in
life can serve as an entryway into spiritual practice.
The concept of skillful means has since been
expanded upon in popular Buddhist culture to mean something that is
“handled well.” This is an incredibly broad category since the
situations in which a Buddhist must necessarily apply compassion
and wisdom are endless, and include relatively common contexts such
as comforting a child over the death of a loved one or defusing a
heated confrontation between friends, as well as more sensitive
situations such as handling an emotionally distressed person
spewing verbal abuse, or comforting someone who has just accepted
that she is extremely disliked. Dealing with these situations
requires not merely the blunt instrument of the truth, but the
deftness of knowing when and how to wield it.
Skillful means are flexible because human life
and relations are messy, subject to chance and circumstance, and
riddled with hypocrisies and contingencies that can’t be
anticipated by neatly laid out doctrines and philosophies.
Therefore, while we should seek to tell the truth whenever
possible, what happens when we are confronted by shades of grey?
When telling the unvarnished truth is not always the most skillful
or ethical thing to do?
Another good example of skillful means (perhaps
less dramatic than that of Hogeweyk) is the case of a child in
hospital who was unresponsive to a counseling pastor. The counselor
decided to use a plush toy, which he imbued with a name and
personality, inviting the child to interact with it rather than
directly with himself. It helped to give the little girl enough
emotional and mental space that she felt comfortable relating her
pain and anxieties to the toy, although it was obvious even to her
that the pastor was creating a “fiction.”
For a situation as serious as coping with
dementia, it becomes clear that extraordinary circumstances call
for extraordinary skills—skills that many of us might not possess.
More often in our everyday lives we encounter a muddled morass of
human vulnerabilities that need to be treated sensitively, and this
will sometimes mean the need to employ fictions or, put more
bluntly, lies. The question is how skillfully and ethically such
fictions are deployed.